Citizen media

Citizen media is content produced by private citizens who are not professional journalists. Citizen journalism, participatory media and democratic media are related principles.

"Citizen media" was coined by Clemencia Rodriguez, who defined it as 'the transformative processes they bring about within participants and their communities.' Citizen media characterizes the ways in which audiences can become participants in the media using various resources by new media technologies.

Citizen media has bloomed with the advent of technological tools and systems that facilitate production and distribution of media, notably the Internet. With the birth of the Internet and into the 1990s, citizen media has responded ^{[citation needed]} to traditional mass media's neglect of public interest and partisan portrayal of news and world events.

By 2007, the success of small, independent, private journalists began to rival corporate mass media in terms of audience and distribution. Citizen produced media has earned higher status and public credibility since the 2004 US presidential elections and has since been widely replicated by corporate marketing and political campaigning. Citizen media usage and attention also increased in reaction to the 2016 US presidential election. Traditional news outlets and commercial media giants have experienced declines in profit and revenue which can be directly attributed to the wider acceptance of citizen produced media as an official source of information.

Many people prefer the term 'participatory media' to 'citizen media' as citizen has a necessary relation to a concept of the nation-state. The fact that many millions of people are considered stateless and often without citizenship limits the concept to those recognised only by governments. Additionally the very global nature of many participatory media initiatives, such as the Independent Media Center, makes talking of journalism in relation to a particular nation-state largely redundant as its production and dissemination do not recognise national boundaries.

A different way of understanding Citizen Media emerged from cultural studies and the observations made from within this theoretical frame work about how the circuit of mass communication was never complete and always contested, since the personal, political, and emotional meanings and investments that the audience made in the mass-distributed products of popular culture were frequently at odds with the intended meanings of their producers.

Media produced by private citizens may be as factual, satirical, neutral or biased as any other form of media but has no political, social or corporate affiliation. There is often no training or understanding of professional concepts – such as off-record, objectivity, and balance – amongst those who produce their own media. Some argue that ordinary citizens may do more harm than good if they are able to publish their personal thoughts and opinions and pass them off as legitimate journalism.

The following are ways that citizen media negatively differentiates from traditional journalism, according to critics:^{[citation needed]}