Journalism: citizen journalismA B C D E F G H I L M N O P R S T U VXYZWJMcQuail, McQuail’s Mass Communication Th eory
(Sage, 6th edition, 2010); Graham Meike, News
Online (Palgrave, 2010); Steven Barnett, Th e Rise and
Fall of Television Journalism: Just Wires and Lights in
a Box? (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
Journalism: celebrity journalism Th e preoc-
cupation in modern print journalism with
recording the activities, sayings, scandals of
celebrities; described by Peter Hamill in News
is a Verb (Ballentine, 1998) as a virus, and ‘the
most widespread phenomena [sic] of the times’.
Hamill is of the view that ‘true accomplishment
is marginal to the recognition factor. Th ere is
seldom any attention paid to scientists, poets,
educators or archeologists’.
Big names are the constant focus of attention
to the exclusion of other subjects. Th e obsession
with celebrity worries many media watchers,
for coverage of celebrity displaces the reporting
of events, the analysis of issues which are in
the public interest as contrasted with being of
interest to the public; the issue here being the
swamping of important information by populist
entertainment.
▶Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, eds, Stardom and
Celebrity: A Reader (Sage, 2007); Marina Hyde,
Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World
and Why We Need an Exit Strategy (Vintage, 2010);
Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton
University Press, 2010).
Journalism: citizen journalism With the
advent of the multi-purpose mobile phone,
in particular its capacity to transmit instantly
online images, still and moving, newsgathering
has been opened up to the man and woman in
the street. Citizen journalism is about being close
to, or involved in, events as they happen and
transmitting pictures to the mass media, often
ahead of professional news teams. Th e capacity
and potential of citizen-reporting of news as it
breaks was most dramatically illustrated during
the terrorist bombings in London, the fi rst wave
of which occurred on 7 July 2005.
Within minutes of the carnage of 7/7, news-
rooms in and around the capital were swamped
with images and video footage, some of the
material actually transmitted by the victims.
Mobile footage was on national news within 30
minutes, while still pictures were soon to domi-
nate the front pages of the press worldwide.
Commentators have seen in citizen journalism
a shift in power from mass communication,
dominated as it is by corporate ownership,
towards more democratic, more popular
involvement in the news process. At the same
time, concern has been registered at the possibleTh e contrasting model to the Poodle is that of
the Watchdog, where journalism stands guard
over the public interest, tirelessly snapping and
snarling at injustice, corruption and abuse. Since
the birth of the printed word in 1450 (in the
West, that is; the Chinese had developed print-
ing much earlier) there have been ample cases
of conformity and rebellion (if not revolution) in
journalism.
In the nineteenth century the courageous
editors of the radical press, such as William
Cobbett, Richard Carlile and Henry Hether-
ington, spent long years in prison for writing
about and publishing beliefs that ran counter to
those of the ruling elite. In the twentieth century
hundreds of journalists and news photographers
have been killed while reporting events through-
out the world, and the twenty-fi rst century has
seen no diminution in the death-toll of the
bringers-of-news.
In journalism there will always be the biased
and the spurious; there will continue to be
invasion of privacy, nationalist hype, shame-
less and malicious stereotyping, wallowing
in scandal – all examples of contemporary
journalism in action. Th ere will also continue to
be high-quality investigative journalism which,
in the words of John Keane in ‘Th e crisis of the
sovereign state’ (in Raboy and Dagenais), ‘seeks
to counteract the secretive and noisy arrogance
of the democratic Leviathan’; which ‘involves the
patient investigation and exposure of political
corruption and misconduct’; which sets out to
‘sting political power, to tame its arrogance by
extending the limits of public controversy and
widening citizens’ involvement in the public
spheres of civil society’. See democracy;
embedded reporters; journalism: citizen
journalism; journalism: data journalism;
journalism: phone-hacking; journalism:
‘postmodern journalism’; mediasphere;
news management in times of war; patch;
public sphere; watchdogs; yaros’ ‘pick’
model for multimedia news, 2009. See also
topic guides under media ethics; media:
freedom, censorship; media: issues &
debates; news media.
▶Alan McKee, Th e Public Sphere: An Introduction
(Cambridge Uiniversity Press, 2005); Brian Winston,
Messages: Freedom, Media and the West from
Gutenberg to Google (Routledge, 2005); Chris Atton
and James F. Hamilton, Alternative Journalism (Sage,
2008); Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day! A
History of Media and Communication in Britain
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2nd edition, 2009); Dan
Hind, Th e Return of the Public (Verso, 2010); Denis