Citizen journalism can complement - but not replace - its mainstream counterpart.
So says a new study by the Newspaper Research Journal, which analyzed content from 86 citizen blogs, 53 citizen news websites and 63 daily newspaper sites in June and July 2009. Some key findings:
• Citizen journalism sites tend not to be very timely. Only 25 percent of sites studied published on a daily basis.
• Even those that did publish daily had far fewer news items than a typical mainstream news outlet.
Why? Most citizen sites simply don't have the budgets to compete with mainstream outlets head-to-head, the study found.
However, the study said citizen journalism outlets can "provide opinion and hyperlocal news that large dailies do not.
"Dailies have more resources, but they tend to concentrate those resources on issues that affect larger geographic areas in their markets," the study's authors added. "The dailies are less likely to cover details of a neighbourhood than are citizen news and blog sites."
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