Tracing Emergent Structure in Self-Organized Citizen Journalism

In citizen journalism, the citizens that used to form the mass audience utilize IT artifacts such as smart phones and social media to inform each other and the broader public. Previous research has highlighted how citizen journalism published on independent web-based platforms can substitute (or complement) traditional news publishing, and illuminated the challenges of integrating elements of citizen journalism into mainstream news organizations. Still, less is known about how self-organized citizen journalism processes emerge and evolve. The paper draws on complexity theory in a detailed analysis of an online forum thread in which users collaboratively investigated and published detailed information about a local murder case. The paper makes two main contributions to the literature on citizen journalism. Firstly, it demonstrates the efficacy of using a complexity perspective. Secondly, it illustrates and theorizes the ways in which IT-based citizen journalism was self-organized via a specific online forum through sequenced interaction themes.