'Random acts of journalism' redux: News and social media

JD Lasica’s 2003 vision of the ‘random acts of journalism’ committed by citizen journalists was highly influential during the heyday of ‘Web 2.0’ in the first years of the new millennium, but in spite of a number of noted successes for citizen and alternative news organisations in breaking and influencing stories, a broader trend of public participation in journalistic activities never materialised. Active participation in citizen journalism remained, for the most part, the domain of what Stephen Coleman has called ‘political junkies’; citizen journalism afforded these participants a louder voice than had been available to them before the advent of online self-publishing functionality, but did not substantially alter the demographics of such quasi-journalistic engagement. However, the second wave of participative Web technologies – represented by modern social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter – has further lowered the barriers to entry into citizen-journalistic activities in online environments. Social media offer an opportunity for a greater range of participants to participate in the distribution and discussion of news stories and political commentary by simplifying the sharing and commenting on issues and events to a few clicks, thereby bridging the gap between everyday talk about news and politics in offline and online social circles and more formal journalistic activities; the ubiquity of mobile devices as points of access to social media further serves to make such participation possible from virtually anywhere, at any time. Further, these truly random, casual acts of engagement with journalistic content are aggregated and curated by a mixture of technological filters and human agency into public streams of news and discussion which provide detailed and up-to-date insights into current events and debates. This chapter will trace the emergence of this new form of citizen journalism and explore its implications for the news industry.