This study examined the effects of citizen journalism practices on social capital concerning nonprofit and voluntary organizations (i.e., satisfaction, trust, and engagement). Through a quasi-experimental design, the analyses revealed that students in the treatment group, in which participants engaged in citizen journalism practice, had greater…

For more than 30 years, student journalists' freedom of expression has been in flux. Freedom of expression is central to journalism education. Without this freedom, teaching students the courage and truth telling central to the profession becomes impossible. To reinstate compromised freedoms, North Dakota student journalists created The John Wall…

Technological and economic change within the business and social function of journalism are moving civic literacy practices ever closer to those of citizen journalism. In this article, I survey the changes underway as journalism becomes less a profession and more a practice, a way of reading and writing about society. I draw from journalism…

Ethnicity in Kenya permeates all spheres of life. However, it is in politics that ethnicity is most visible. Election time in Kenya often leads to ethnic competition and hatred, often expressed through various media. Ethnic hate speech characterized the 2007 general elections in party rallies and through text messages, emails, posters and…

This article assesses the potential of online news reporting to create discursive spaces for emphatic engagement--of bearing witness--at a distance, especially where human rights violations are concerned. Taking as its focus the emergent forms and practices of citizen journalism, it examines the spontaneous actions of ordinary people compelled to…

Recent years have seen an explosion of the number of institutions involved in or beginning to think about web archiving. Many National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) members, as well as other universities, historical societies, and state and local governments, have recognized the need for and importance of preserving a variety of web content…

This article is an ethnographic case study of the work of two activist groups in Kansas City, Missouri. It discusses how unhoused activists with the Kansas City Homeless Union, through their 13-month on-and-off occupation of city property, worked to reframe access in ways that moved toward what disability justice activists call collective access,…

An interactive mapping project is revolutionizing the way crises are reported and managed, and is spotlighting the value of citizen journalism. The project, called Ushahidi, which means testimony in Swahili, uses crowdsourcing (gathering information from a large number of people) to map crisis information. This crisis mapping tool has since been…

Journalism programs across the country have rolled out new curricula and courses emphasizing complex social issues, in-depth reporting, and "new media" such as online news sites with streaming audio and video. Journalism education has rightly taken its cue from media outlets that find themselves not relevant enough for a new generation of readers,…

The current study invited a group of adolescent Taiwanese learners to take the role of citizen journalists and make news reports on issues of their interests. Student perceptions of the affordances and constraints of this multimodal writing assignment were gauged through an open-ended questionnaire which students filled out at the end of the…

Values are at the center of culture, the core of intercultural communication, and the chief element affecting communication between nations. Currently, educating students regarding appropriate cognitive attitudes and behaviors in intercultural communication, the basis for the acquisition of intercultural citizenship, has become a challenge for…

Relying on theories of journalistic ideals and critical discourse analysis, a case study was conducted to investigate how journalism students (re)define journalism ideals in the era of social media. Data were gathered from focus group interviews with European and African students participating in a joint journalism program. The results indicate…

The article reviews texts from central children's weeklies during Israel's first decade (1948-1958) and portrays them as a platform for legal and moral principles aimed at the country's youngest citizens. By focusing on the first decade of Israel, which posed Israeli leadership and citizens with many challenges, the article addresses the…

The practice of journalism has long been based on the premise that a receptive audience awaits the content and that citizens--as participants in a democracy--will use the news to make sound decisions. Yet mainstream journalism has lost much of its audience to purveyors of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation, a situation that has…

This study examined instructor and learner experiences in a Journalism for Social Change (JSC) Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed to introduce learners around the world to constructive, solutions-based journalism techniques, as well as engage learners in developing news stories promoting positive change about critical child welfare (CW)…