i’m not sure of the origins of citizen journalist, but if you are creating a timeline of citizen journalism, i would place indymedia, the global grassroots media network (www.indymedia.org), in your chronology before ohmynews. wikipedia includes it as part of their entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism. one important distinction for inclusion in this history is that indymedia was one of the first to take citizen journalism to the movement level. that in and of itself is news. adbusters did a big story in early 2000 about indymedia and everyone being a journalist. be the media! indymedia also brought together the streams of independent media, citizen journalism, open source and open publishing. this convergence preceded blogging and launched a powerful movement and inspiration for other projects to flourish.

thanks for the good work.

sheri

Some people (French) thought the two concepts were pretty much the same, that “citizen journalism” is just “public journalism” in the internet age… I suppose not particularly flatering to Jay:)

Delia

P.S. Here is a translation I did for Jay (and his readers) back in 2006:

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/08/11/na_mrpbl.html#comment28646

P.P.S. his blog was pretty decent in terms of topics, just a bit much to take on the personal level (way to much pointless bickering…) D.

By the way, Google News archive shows an 1851 New York Time citation for “citizen journalist” in the sense of professional journalist who is civic-minded.

But the answer is, fittingly, … Matt Drudge!

There’s lots of 1998 citations like:

“The show will include weekly commentaries by self-described “citizen journalist” Matt Drudge.”

That’s obviously the have-it-both-ways sense.

And it’s clear how the unpaid-freelancer sense evolved out of that , with blog-evangelism, though there’s no obvious source in the news archives.

I’ve tried asking Jay before about drawing a line from the “public journalism” of the 90’s to the “citizen journalism” today. As in the BBC interview (which he links to in his blog post), he’s hesitant to connect these dots directly. Yes, they both are journalism reform movements, but I think that the PJ movement had been about journalist-as-citizen and not the other way around.

And it’s another question whether CJ is any better than PJ at mitigating the “horse race” narrative in political journalism. The highlight of CJ during the primary campaign was Mayhill Fowler’s taping of Obama’s “bitter” remark. Which, when you think about it, was just another gotcha moment– one around a comment asserting that some segment of the citizenry described as a stereotype.

I heard David Remnick defend the cover of The New Yorker on NPR this afternoon. He weakly explained that this was a nod to journalistic “balance” (think of all the anti-Bush covers!) But if he (or the illustrator, Barry Blitt) wanted to knock Obama, they could have tried to make some visual pun about his wiretapping vote and his apparent tone-deafness towards his supporters who opposed said vote. But wait… isn’t that still rather obscure? In 2008, meme of Obama-is-Muslim (fanned by cable news) is vastly more well-known than any CJ-inspired work on FISA.

so it goes.

definition: “unpaid freelancer”

Note the 1988 and 1995 citations are NOT using “citizen journalist” in this “unpaid freelancer” sense of the term, but as “civic-minded professional” (as opposed to “stenographer” or even “muckraker”).

Conflating these meanings would be emotionally manipulative marketing, but then that’s what drives hype

Other definition: “person who wants to have things both ways, by claiming all the privileges which attach to the role of “journalist”, while disclaiming all the responsibilities and rules which constrain that role, saying they are a “citizen”".
[And let's not be stupid - socially, all of those privileges and rules exist]

Citizen-journalism’s rulebook