New Media and the Overlapping Roles of Content Providers and Content Consumers

Abstract

In the new media and communications context audiences are more empowered than ever to make their voices heard. Audiences, consumers are actively influencing the production of media contents. The rise of digitally networked technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones is reshaping journalistic practice across the world. This change is technological with social media platforms enabling new forms of publishing, receiving, and discussing of stories. This article is a contribution to the debate on audience participation in online media with a twofold aim:  making conceptual sense of the phenomenon of participatory journalism in the framework of journalism research, and determining the forms that it is taking in media organizations. This paper   suggests that news organisations are interpreting online user participation mainly as an opportunity for their readers to debate current events, while other stages of the news production process are closed to citizen involvement or controlled by professional journalists when participation is allowed. However, different strategies exist among the studied sample, and contextual factors should be considered in further research.

Keywords: Audience Participation; New Media, Participatory Journalism; User-Generated Content