Citizen media
"Citizen media" was coined by Clemencia Rodriguez, who defined it as 'the transformative processes they bring about within participants and their communities.
By 2007, the success of small, independent, private journalists began to rival corporate mass media in terms of audience and distribution.
Citizen produced media has earned higher status and public credibility since the 2004 US presidential elections and has since been widely replicated by corporate marketing and political campaigning.
A different way of understanding Citizen Media emerged from cultural studies and the observations made from within this theoretical frame work about how the circuit of mass communication was never complete and always contested, since the personal, political, and emotional meanings and investments that the audience made in the mass-distributed products of popular culture were frequently at odds with the intended meanings of their producers.
Some argue that ordinary citizens may do more harm than good if they are able to publish their personal thoughts and opinions and pass them off as legitimate journalism.
According to Barnard College, there are various definitions for zines, but they share the following features: "self-published and the publisher does not answer to anyone; small, self-distributed print run; motivated by the desire to express oneself rather than to make money; outside the mainstream; low budget."
Many countries around the world developed legislated means for private citizens to access and use the local cable systems for their own community-initiated purposes.
It recruited professional columnists and celebrity bloggers," reported The Guardian in their "The world's 50 most powerful blogs" article.
Chris Lunch, a preeminent contemporary author on participatory video and executive director of Insight, explains that "The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns, or simply to be creative and tell stories.
These professionals, who are often from relatively privileged backgrounds use their artistic license to design narrative stories and interpret the meaning of the images/actions that they film.
[10] The first experiments in PV were the work of Don Snowden, a Canadian who pioneered the idea of using media to enable a people-centered community development approach.
[13] Since then, most of the development of the participatory video technique has been led by non-academic practitioners in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and Canada.
A year after its creation, YouTube was suddenly being referred to as "the first signs of a post-television age, a focus of serious media industry interest, the site of new and difficult legal issues and moral and ethical concerns.
