From Citizen Journalism to Journalism for Citizens: Impactful Social Journalism

Abstract

As the past year we are facing global health crisis, the need for more social responsive media is growing bigger. Following up a research on media responsibility conducted in 2010 (Tsene, From Media Crisis to Media Responsibility: A New Model of Social Responsibility. Aiora, 2012) where social media culture is related to traditional social responsibility values, we explore whether solutions journalism could suggest a responsibility operational model for contemporary media. We select case studies from both bigger news organisations and uprising media startups, and we analyse them under the scope of Curry and Hammonds (The Power of Solutions Journalism. Center for Media Engagement. https://mediaengagement.org/research/solutions-journalism/, 2014) hypothesis that solutions journalism could be another tool for newsrooms in order to regain trust and at the same time to confront current challenges and concerns. We also examine their business models, the level of engagement with the communities they serve and their long-term impact on them in an attempt to highlight similarities and differences. From our analysis we could conclude that they all put in the heart of journalistic interest the citizens and the most marginalised communities, they all try to be responsive to the needs of those different communities and audiences, and they all focus on narrating stories, which normally would not make it to news headlines and that could actually have an important impact, while at the same time they all try to experiment with different business models that will allow them to be more transparent and independent.