my article on the political economy of citizen journalism which looks at a new theory for the process of big media co-optation

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The Appropriation/Amplification Model of Citizen
Journalism
Nikki Usher
To cite this article: Nikki Usher (2016): The Appropriation/Amplification Model of Citizen
Journalism, Journalism Practice
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2016.1223552
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2. THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION
MODEL OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM
An account of structural limitations and the
political economy of participatory content
creation
Nikki Usher
A collaborative relationship between citizen journalists and professional journalists has long been
an aspiration for many media scholars. While tensions surrounding professional control are signifi-
cant, scholars also have to consider the structural dynamics of content online and across social
media networks, particularly in an era of the corporatized and commercialized Web. The rise of
social discovery tools and algorithms is also addressed. This article aims to bring to light these con-
cerns and moves the conversation about citizen journalism forward by proposing a model that
identifies the pathway through which news organizations gather, select, package, and disseminate
citizen journalism content.
KEYWORDS citizen journalism; network architecture; political economy; social media; Web
traffic
Introduction
The combination of new communication technologies and citizen journalism brings
new voices, new experiences, and novel information into the information ecosystem. Scho-
larship on the subject has blossomed (Wall 2015), and the hope for citizen journalism shines
brightly with the promise of “reciprocal journalism” and “engaged journalism,” whereby
journalists and citizens are not just co-creators but are also working to build online and
offline communities (Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Stearns 2015). But being able
to speak does not mean being heard, a reality that needs to be accounted for much
more widely in the conversation about citizen journalism, particularly in light of the increas-
ing corporatization and centralization of the internet (Anderson and Wolff 2010; Fuchs
2013).
What is missing from the scholarship is an updated look at the political economy of
citizen journalism. A consideration of how the power is distributed between professionals
and citizens and how underlying institutional forces, economic imbalances, and access to a
variety of material and cultural resources impact citizen content is needed, especially in
light of the changing nature of the Web. Similarly, now that citizen journalism has
become a routine feature of journalism, we can begin to model how citizen journalism
moves from content creation to distribution. Creating a model helps elucidate these
larger questions about these power dynamics. A political economy approach to
Journalism Practice, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2016.1223552
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

3. understanding citizen journalism offers a way to discuss the relationship between struc-
tures and industry issues in citizen journalism; earlier observations had already noted
that citizens had little direct involvement in news production (Jönsson and Örnebring
2011). Others have attempted to outline the stages of how citizen content travels
through the news production process, but stopped short at looking at the underlying struc-
tural inequalities inherent in the process (Domingo et al. 2008). The extent of the discon-
nect between the promise and reality of citizen journalism has only been amplified.
The Web is a different place for citizen content than it was in 2005, when the BBC first
introduced its user-generated content team; social media is far more sophisticated, the
power laws baked into the internet’s networked architecture are easier to see, and the nor-
malization of citizen content into newsroom routines is all but complete. At this point, the
relationship between news organizations and citizen content is out of balance. The prac-
tices of news organizations are partly to blame, but so are the larger structural dynamics
of how content moves across the Web and through social media. The patterns of distri-
bution of Web traffic, the spread of content across social networks, and new social discov-
ery companies enhance the power of media organizations to control citizen content. There
is increasing evidence that little citizen content is seen without amplification by main-
stream media. Thus, a new model for citizen content distribution is needed to illustrate
structural imbalances between professional and citizen content. This article attempts to
account for how the political economy of the internet impacts the spread of citizen
content and then uses these insights to build the “Appropriation/Amplification Model of
Citizen Journalism”.
What We Think We Know
Overall, much of the literature has positioned the contributions of citizen journalism as
normatively good, enhancing the dialogue between journalists and the “people formerly
known as the audience” (Rosen 2006). The conclusion of much of this research is that more
citizen journalism content is better, particularly when it adds to the kinds of stories that get
tobe told.Whencitizen journalism isviewedwith this optimism,it becomesdifficultto critique.
However, as Waisbord (forthcoming) notes, the “managed uses of participatory news has
neither challenged dominant power hierarchies in news decisions nor blurred the distinction
between reporters and publics” and the democratic goals of citizen journalism have not been
realized. While news organizations are now more aware of audience behavior than ever before
thanks to the rise of Web analytics and the capacity for audiences to “talk back,” their involve-
ment with citizens as news producers has not changed much. We need to understand why this
remains the case, and to do so, we need to bring together two strands of citizen journalism
research: the highly theoretical and normative work, and the empirical case studies.
Much of the theoretical work has talked about a new equality emerging between tra-
ditional journalists and citizen journalists; the general argument is that now citizens have the
ability to contribute and their work is as equally valuable to the news creation process as pro-
fessional journalism. Some have envisioned the relationship between citizen journalists and
professionals as a “pro-am” partnership, with ordinary citizens and journalists working hand-
in-hand. For example, Bruns’ (2008, 2010) theory of produsage hypothesizes that the separ-
ation between producers and consumers has blurred. As Bruns (2010, 135) maintains, “citizen
journalism’s inherent openness is that any participant [is] able to make a meaningful contri-
bution.” Beckett’s (2008) “networked journalism” theorizes that journalists and citizens work
2 NIKKI USHER

4. together to create what he calls “supermedia,” or enhanced journalism that takes advantage
of participatory content creation and digital technology. Incorporating citizen journalism has
become part of the ideology of participation; in fact, Loosen and Schmidt (2012) even created
an “inclusion framework” to evaluate how journalists and audiences work together, the less
inclusive, of course, is a less-desirable outcome.
These citizen journalism efforts create what some argue are new democratic oppor-
tunities (Borger, van Hoof, and Sanders 2016). Gil de Zúñiga (2009) and Kaufhold, Valen-
zuela, and De Zúñiga (2010) argue that citizen journalism expands journalistic watchdog
capacity and even builds democratic participation. This idea of community empowerment
through citizen journalism efforts has guided much of The Knight Foundation’s millions of
dollars of contributions to these efforts (Lewis 2012). Similarly, Papacharissi (2009, viii)
argues, “Finally, web-related innovation enables direct citizen intervention to the media
agenda, reifying citizen journalists, and thus rendering making the democratic space
upon which citizens and journalists interact more porous, pluralistic, and directly represen-
tative.” Overall, the potential for citizen journalism is imagined as robust, as journalists are
“now part of network in which the long-standing hierarchy among contributors to public
discourse has been significantly flattened” (Hermida 2011, 15).
Despite the utopian view academics have about citizen journalism, empirical case
studies suggest most efforts to incorporate citizen journalism into traditional journalism
have failed. Scholars remain convinced, though, that this is the fault of professional journal-
ists who fail to understand the power of citizen contributions. Lewis (2012, 836) argues that
journalists still remain “caught in the professional impulse toward one-way publishing
control,” and that professional journalists have struggled to embrace citizen participation.
News producers have generally resisted audience participation for a variety of reasons—
their perceptions of authority (Hermida and Thurman 2008), concerns over quality and ver-
ifiability (Carlsson and Nilsson 2015), and the tendency to see citizen journalists as sources
rather than creators of news (Hujanen 2016; Williams, Wardle, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2011).
As some scholars have shown, news organizations try to highlight the differences in
their own content versus citizen content in order to retain authority—even when relying on
this content to help report a breaking news event (Örnebring 2013; Pantti and Andén-Papa-
dopoulos 2011). Similarly, there is little evidence, aside from breaking news events or soft
news, that citizens are key actors in news organizations (Karlsson et al. 2015). Overall, as
Wall (2015, 799) observes, “While outlets are increasingly using citizen content, they are
creating new routines to shore up their positions and tamp down any expansion of the citi-
zen’s role in creating news.”
Why might the hope of citizen journalists and professional journalists working on
equal terms as collaborators remain aspiration rather than reality? The answer is in part
what these scholars have found—that professional journalists are reluctant to relinquish
control. However, fundamental principles of the political economy of the Web mean that
citizen journalists need professional journalists. Professional journalists find it all too easy
to use citizen journalism on their own terms because there is little room for citizen journal-
ism content to flourish on its own.
Web Traffic Keeps Control in the Hands of News Organizations
Scholars discussing the potential of citizen contributions to change the tone of news
conversations fail to account for a critically important factor: the dynamics of Web traffic.
THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION MODEL 3

5. Though early scholars of the internet, like Benkler (2006), saw a more equitable distribution
of internet sites, what is increasingly clear is that big sites dominate Web traffic. The com-
mercialization of the Web has meant that the voices of the powerless depend on the voices
of the powerful to be heard (Anderson and Wolff 2010). As a result, news organizations
have tremendous power to amplify citizen content; further, traditional structures of news
gatekeeping are able to remain firmly in place, with the exception of some key case
studies that have received an abundance of attention by scholars.
Web traffic favors big sites and wide audiences over small sites and small audiences.
As Hindman (2008, 2011, 2015) makes clear in his work, big sites—such as major news
organizations—are those sites that are indexed highest in search indices, are linked
more to other sites and, significantly, receive the lion’s share of news traffic. Most citizen
journalism websites that produce original content accounts do not even register enough
Web traffic to be counted by ComScore (Hindman 2011). Without mainstream media,
citizen journalism is unlikely to scale to wider audiences. As Wihbey explains in his analysis
of media industry data from NPR, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal:
Citizens may have more pathways to engage with and produce important content, but
that does not mean they will use them—or that they will be powerful within these path-
ways … a “power law” still characterizes how attention is distributed, despite the capacity
for open networks to distribute it more equitably … there are a few significant winners
and many millions who struggle to garner much attention at all. (Wihbey 2014, 3)
Online networks, like friend networks or niche communities of interest, can have other
types of distributions that look a lot more like the bell curve/normal distribution that
Benkler (2006) proposed. But this has not happened for media organizations—even for pro-
fessional outlets that might be considered smaller—the sheer magnitude of the audiences
who consume their content radically outsizes any citizen efforts that are not promoted by
media outlets.
Consider some of the evidence of this power law distribution at work. A study of 1.2
million internet users across 2.3 million Web pages in 2013 revealed that almost 80 percent
of people get their news directly from media websites; roughly the same amount get their
news from just a single source (Flaxman, Goel, and Rao 2013; Wihbey 2014). There have
been dozens of studies about the power of elites to spread messages across social
media. Lin et al. (2014) studied 290 million tweets from a panel of 193,532 politically
active Twitter users during the 2012 presidential election and found that users are more
likely to be replying and retweeting elite users (such as media organizations). The study
finds that “[while] more people speak … listening is increasingly focused only on elite
speakers” (para 3). Similarly, a study of 42 million Twitter users found that just 20,000
“elites” generated half of all links consumed (Wihbey 2014; Wu et al. 2011). Research
from Pew (Hampton et al. 2012) has shown similar patterns on Facebook in a study
called “Why Most Facebook Users Get More Than They Give.” According to the Pew
study, Facebook influencers stand to have almost 39 times more influence than ordinary
users. Consider, then, just how powerful news organizations’ social media accounts can
be: The New York Times has 27.4 million followers on Twitter; the BBC has 6.65 million
followers.
Certainly, some people will see citizen content through social media without seeing it
promoted on news sites first, but the majority of citizen content people actually see is the
result of the capture and promotion of this content by mainstream news organizations. The
4 NIKKI USHER

6. simple principles of social network analysis show that the more links that users have
throughout a social site the more their content spreads. Also news organizations and jour-
nalists are the key nodes—the key influencers—in the distribution of news across networks.
News sites have low degrees of separation from other users or many direct and indirect
links to other users, and they push out a tremendous amount of content, meaning their
power to amplify content is huge (De Valck, Van Bruggen, and Wierenga 2009).
Citizen journalism efforts generally only scale when big sites and key influencers get
involved. Despite the democratizing potential of digital technologies (Youmans and York
2012), the Arab Spring shows further evidence of the importance of mainstream news
amplification. For example, while Andy Carvin, NPR’s social media editor during the Arab
Spring, elevated more non-elite sources than elite sources on his Twitter account
(Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith 2014), Carvin was nonetheless filtering and amplifying
citizen content for NPR and his hundreds of thousands of followers. After the first three
days of the 2011 Egyptian uprisings, news consumers were most likely to view only
citizen content curated and shared by mainstream news organizations (Nanabhay and
Farmanfarmaian 2011). Similarly, other analysis showed that despite the proliferation of
citizen content, news from large media companies outside the Middle East dominated
the media diets of news consumers during the Arab Spring (Aday et al. 2013).
The literature on the Arab Spring is incredibly vast, and it is just one example, but a
critical approach suggests that while citizen journalists provided ample content to social
media, ultimately the citizen content most people saw came from circulation on main-
stream news organizations. This is likely a global pattern (Wardle, Dubberley, and Brown
2014)—though discussed here in the Western media context. Similarly, while the biggest
news organizations are most able to amplify content, smaller news organizations com-
pound these efforts—further spreading content shared by major outlets and amplifying
other citizen content on their own.
In addition to mere scale, algorithms also disfavor citizen content ever being ampli-
fied by anything other than mainstream influencers. We know little about the “black box” of
most algorithms (Pasquale 2015), but there is data to suggest that Google News’ algorithm
favors bigger, mainstream news sites (Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg 2009). Twitter is
now establishing content into “moments” which curates mainstream media and influen-
cers’ comments on news of the day, another algorithm favoring mainstream content dis-
covery. Though in June 2016, Facebook announced that it would be de-emphasizing
news content shared by news organizations in favor of content posted by people’s
friends, professional news still receives a tremendous boost from the platform. Results
suggest that more than 60 percent of American internet users use social media to get
their news, according to Pew (Anderson and Caumont 2014), and the massive traffic
news organizations generate from social media suggest most audiences are reading pro-
fessional journalism on social media websites (Bell 2016)—as delivered by their friends,
albeit perhaps less so by news organizations. Similarly, Facebook’s instant articles encou-
rage news organizations to post content natively on the platform to receive advantages
in speed and distribution (Marshall 2016).
We can expect these patterns and influences on the selection and amplification to be
seen across many breaking and non-breaking news events. To understand how this ampli-
fication happens, it is important to think about the pathways through which news organ-
izations ultimately identify, select, and distribute citizen content. We can get a better
picture of the political economy of citizen content if we can find a way to model this
THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION MODEL 5

7. information flow. New technological developments, such as the rise of social discovery
tools, impact the pathway citizen content travels.
Further Power Problems: The Rise in Social Discovery
The rise of “social discovery” services that allow journalists to search and sort citizen
content reflects not only the commercialization and concentration of power on the Web
but also the degree to which citizen journalists are positioned as a source for mainstream
news rather than as storytellers in their own right. Citizen content has to be hosted on the
Web somewhere, and more often than not, the home for this content is on social media
sites—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Snapchat, and beyond. These sites are often
called “platforms” because they produce little of their own content and host other’s original
content.1
More than a decade into Web 2.0, news organizations are not simply using just
hashtags or simple Boolean searches on social media platforms to find content. Instead,
they have the ability to use special tools created by social media companies and third
parties that enable this “social discovery” of citizen content.
Journalists with Facebook verified accounts have access to a mobile app that is
specifically for journalists and allows them to search publically posted content with geo-
graphic specificity down to individual zip codes. Facebook developed this tool, “Signal,”
as a special tool for journalists, which aims to help journalists: “surface relevant trends,
photos, videos and posts from Facebook and Instagram for use in their storytelling and
reporting.” News organizations can use Signal to discover what is trending in more detailed
ways and search public posts more easily. If there is anything a news organization wants to
find on Facebook, so long as the content is public, it is open to the news organization to
discover. Often, journalists benefit from the fact that people do not even realize their
content is set to public (Goel 2014).
Similarly, many news organizations have access to proprietary social discovery plat-
forms that are out of reach for ordinary people. For example, top news organizations have
access to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics platform that is the best (and nearly the
only) tool on the market that allows journalists to essentially “Google” Facebook for
content (the author has demoed this platform, which starts at $500 per month). The
power to search Facebook with CrowdTangle’s suite of tools renders Facebook into a trea-
sure trove of data for journalists. CrowdTangle is also a social media analytics tool that pro-
vides news organizations with a better sense of how to amplify their own content. Only
professional journalists have easy access to shortcuts for searching for citizen content.
Other third-party tools also help news organizations search through other social
media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. There are companies whose
exclusive market is “social discovery”—their goal is to surface the best citizen journalism
content for news organizations.
Storyful, Demotix, News Whip, and many other new companies, many funded by
venture capital, have business models promising unique and speedy algorithms to
surface the best content for news organizations from social media. Some, like Storyful, facili-
tate verification and gain permissions from citizens before a news organization then uses
this content.
These third-party services did not exist 11 years ago. The BBC relied on users for cov-
erage of the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and sorted through over “1,000 photo-
graphs, 20 pieces of amateur video, 4,000 text messages, and 20,000 e-mails” in six
6 NIKKI USHER

8. hours (Sambrook 2005), only a fraction of which could be used by the BBC. While the BBC
talked about how they used the content as a partnership with users, the BBC ultimately had
the power to decide which images and other forms of content were shown and used. Now,
organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Al Jazeera (all Storyful
clients) might simply rely on Storyful for content and never even select their own citizen
content to use. The gulf between citizen journalists and professional journalists widens
when news organizations rely on third-party tools to curate content for them.
In relying on another company to verify citizen content, news organizations are
further subjugating citizen content; citizen journalism cannot be trusted, it is too likely to
be false, the quality is poor, and someone must check it before it is used on a news site
(though news organizations make their own reporting mistakes every single day; see
Carlson 2011). When news organizations use third-party “social discovery” services, they
reify citizen journalism and citizen journalists as “sources” rather than partners, providing
further evidence of a potentially insurmountable power dynamic. Though at some point
these tools might be democratized, giving ordinary people the ability to easily search for
relevant content outside their immediate social networks, news organizations will continue
to be the ones that have the power to choose and amplify this citizen content across the
Web. Thus, we need to delve more closely into how journalists ultimately choose citizen
content to share so that we can elucidate the political economy of citizen journalism.
The Appropriation/Amplification Model of Citizen Journalism
Outlining the political economy of citizen journalism online helps clarify how much
power news organizations ultimately have over selecting citizen content. While there are
numerous case studies that depict the way that news organizations deal with citizen
content, there has been less attention to trying to systemize these patterns. If we incorpor-
ate what we know about Web traffic, social networks, and social discovery, and apply it to
the myriad case studies, we can construct a formal model that traces the pathway citizen
content must travel from creation to amplification that reveals the power imbalances. I
outline a multi-dimensional model that aims to clarify these pathways in Figure 1.
Both breaking news events and preplanned stories provide the impetus for news
organizations to use citizen content. There are two pathways for citizen content to be gath-
ered, presented, and amplified by news organizations: through direct calls to users to share
their content (what I call direct appropriation) and through searching for citizen content
when people have not sought publication in news organizations and are not asked for
their permission to use their content (what I call passive appropriation). News organizations
engage in gatekeeping when deciding on this content; three different considerations may
affect selection—an immediate need, professionalism, or norm-breaking. After this gatekeep-
ing process, the content may or may not be verified and users may or may not be asked for
their permission. In the direct appropriation pathway, permission is either explicitly
requested or implicitly assumed when a citizen responds to a specific news organization
with their content or is directly asked whether their content can be used. After the gate-
keeping process for the passive appropriation pathway, permission is never requested
before the news organization uses citizen content. In both pathways, verification may
happen—or it may never happen.
Then, citizen content is presented and contextualized. It may be incorporated into an
existing news story, or it may be specialized/exceptionalized and presented as non-
THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION MODEL 7

9. professional content. After this step, the content is amplified to the larger news audience;
the content may receive native amplification, offered on a news site as one more story or
video to read or see; or the news organization may decide to specifically expand the
reach of the content, sharing it across its social media properties in order to flag attention
from users who might not otherwise stumble upon the content (deliberate amplification).
Each step of the model can be thought of as representing pressure points on citizen
content, and as the model proceeds, we can see that what news organizations select deter-
mines much of what citizen content gets seen.
Pathway 1: Passive Appropriation
This pathway is called “passive appropriation” because citizens do not willingly
consent to their content being used on news media platforms. Instead, news organizations
surface citizen content, either taking advantage of social discovery tools or through their
own searches, and select content to host on their own media properties. The creators of
content are never asked about whether they would like to contribute; some may find
out later that their content has been used, but some may never find out. In this
pathway, the content creator has not sought out publication on a news site. The content
creator has only consented to their content appearing on a news site in a passive
manner—they have posted content to the Web through a public setting, and this per-
mission is regarded as consent enough for a news organization to consider its publication.
The passive appropriation of content happens with some frequency. In a study of 11 differ-
ent international news organizations, Wardle, Dubberley, and Brown (2014) showed that
the vast number of news organizations fail to secure adequate permission from citizen jour-
nalists and rarely give proper credit.
Journalists are not acting nefariously when they take content without permission,
especially during breaking news events. The demand for immediacy in the digital environ-
ment (Usher 2014) means that journalists must provide the latest information from an
unfolding event as quickly as possible, even if they did not gather the content themselves.
A Boston Globe editor reflected on this, noting “When there is a breaking news [event] hap-
pening in another country or state, social media is the quickest way to get the stuff out
there … For example, when a building collapsed … we were on Twitter looking for
FIGURE 1
The Appropriation/Amplification Model of Citizen Journalism
8 NIKKI USHER

10. photos” (Tronci 2015). While journalists would rather use their own content when possible
(Wardle, Dubberley, and Brown 2014), using citizen journalism can help news organizations
retain their authority during a breaking news event.
In sum, the passive appropriation of the content pathway underscores that news
organizations have the capacity to propel to worldwide attention a single piece of
content from a user—so long as it is public—without ever asking the user for permission.
Pathway 2: Direct Appropriation
The second pathway for incorporating citizen content into professional journalism is
an explicit call for content, either on a social media platform or through a news organiz-
ation’s own media properties (e.g. a request on a website). These explicit calls for
content come out of specific editorial needs. News organizations request that content be
specifically directed to that news organization; for example, users are instructed to
tweet, email, or chat at the BBC, rather than share their stories with the rest of the Web.
Similarly, news organizations may try to obtain permission to use specific content they
have seen that has been posted online after they have found the content. This pathway
is different from the passive appropriation pathway because permission can either be expli-
citly granted by a citizen journalist or a citizen responding to a specific request knowingly
assents to that content potentially being used by that news organization.
News organizations’ power in the amplification process is clear from the beginning. A
question will offer some direction to citizens (“share your Instagram pics of fun in the snow”
or “tell us where you were during the bombing”), or it may solicit more general content, like
a local Fox affiliate that asks, “Do you have photos or videos to share with us? You can
upload them using the following form.” Requests for content may be used for specific
feature reporting initiatives or simply to fill existing and reoccurring features on news
sites such as slide shows featuring user-submitted pictures of weather or college game
day. Some of these requests may take advantage of citizen journalists, who may submit
content with some false hope of making it big. The head of CNN’s iReport told the
author, “The number one most common request is ‘is my content going to be on CNN?’
… there are a lot of people who are students and aspiring journalists” (personal communi-
cation, November 4, 2013).
As with passive appropriation, direct requests for content do not always mean that
users are kept in the loop with what happens to their content. For instance, The
New York Times ran nine Instagram photos on the front page depicting a major snowstorm
in 2015. The New York Times did not include the user’s Instagram handles (though it did
include their first names), and more shockingly, did not even inform users that their
photos made the front page (Hawkins-Gaar 2015). As Hawkins-Gaar notes, “most of the
photographers found out thanks to the kindness of friends and strangers.” Both the
power of The New York Times (or any organization) to control the amplification of citizen
content and the inequitable relationship between news organization and citizen journalist
becomes quite clear with this example.
In each pathway, appropriation is a key word because the content—though created
by an ordinary non-journalist, becomes the content of the news organization. Though the
direct appropriation pathway requires permission, people may have never expected or
intended their content to be seen or shared by a news organization—and the passive
appropriation pathway illustrates that news organizations sometimes never even bother
THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION MODEL 9

11. to ask for consent. In each case, the user content becomes part of the larger narrative that
the news organization is telling about an event, and it is given meaning and context. User
content is now the news organization’s to share with the public and the content is explicitly
used to further the news organization’s own ends. News organizations reap the benefits
from the acquisition and surfacing of this content (Usher 2011), from commercial
rewards to audience loyalty. Kperogi (2011), in particular, has devoted considerable atten-
tion to discussing the issues with free labor and consent in these cases, and noted that
citizen journalists are rarely compensated for their work.
Step 1: Appropriation/Amplification Model—Citizens Create News Content
The model is set into motion when citizens create content. Studies have shown that
the potential of participatory content creation has indeed emboldened and enabled
anyone, anywhere at any time to create and share content (Jenkins 2008), and this is
encouraging, even considering the limited reach of most of this content. However, research
has also suggested that much of the content created is related to entertainment rather than
news (Jönsson and Örnebring 2011). In the case of news, citizens create content that either
documents or is in reaction to a major breaking news event or the content they create is in
response to newsroom needs for pre-planned or non-breaking stories.
Step 2: Appropriation/Amplification Model—Routinized Gatekeeping
In the context of both pathways, after journalists solicit or find content citizens have
created, the next step is to decide what content is actually suitable. Not all citizen content is
(or can be) used by mainstream news organizations; instead, only very select citizen
content ever receives amplification from mainstream sites. There are three gates that
news organizations use to evaluate whether they will use citizen content and let citizen
content into mainstream news, and each one reflects a slightly different scenario that news-
rooms encounter when they seek to use citizen content. They include: immediate need, pro-
fessionalism, and norm-breaking.
The immediate need gate opens and shuts when a newsroom must quickly access
content as soon as possible. This is most often the gate opened by passive appropriation.
In this situation, requests for permission and even verification efforts can fall to the wayside.
In some cases, there may only be one existing video or image of an event, in which case the
decision is made easy—availability and access trumps concerns about quality. Consider, for
example, a students’ shaky video recording of the Virginia Tech shootings that was ulti-
mately used by CNN.
A second gate is the professionalism gate. When journalists have more time, they have
the ability to choose what content adheres most closely to professional standards. The pro-
fessionalism gate most often opens and shuts when there are explicit calls for content
because journalists have a particular story idea in mind that they hope to supplement
with the best citizen content submissions.
A third gate is the norm-breaking gate. Citizen journalism can give news organizations
the opportunity to break news norms with new kinds of content (Robinson and DeShano
2011). Citizen journalism often captures images an editor would deem unacceptable to
share with the public if they were generated from his or her own staff: brutal images
such as the beating of an Iranian woman, unconventional images such as a selfie with
10 NIKKI USHER

12. an airplane hijacker, or a human-interest contribution, like the video taken by a seagull with
a stolen Go-Pro off the San Francisco Bay. These citizen submissions allow the journalists to
distinguish their content from citizen content (Pantti and Andén-Papadopoulos 2011), but
nonetheless newsrooms can have content that captures the uncertainty and volatility that
often surrounds the kind of major events that generate citizen coverage.
These gates begin to bring some parsimony to the pathways that citizen journalism
can travel before it ultimately appears on a news site. Journalists always are choosing what
content to include or exclude across all levels of the news creation process. Notably, these
pathways assume that many other gates are also in place such as those that have been
established in previous scholarship (Shoemaker and Vos 2009), but suggest specific
gates through which citizen content may be evaluated.
Step 3: Appropriation/Amplification Model—Verification and Permission
(or Not)
Before content is shared by a news organization, the content may be verified and in
some cases, users may be asked for permission. The process of verification and requesting
permission may happen in either order, or it may not happen at all.
Verification. Verification does not always happen. News organizations may aspire to
verification, but pressures such as immediate news needs, competition, and audiences may
prompt a news organization to use user content without verification. Verification may not
happen even during direct appropriation, particularly during breaking news. For example,
during the 2016 Paris Terror bombings, Sky News was reporting using unsubstantiated
content gathered from social media—and this was not always clear to the viewer. Similarly,
CNN’s iReport, which creates “assignments” for citizen journalists, does not verify user
content before it is posted to the site.
In other cases of both passive appropriation and direct appropriation, verification
does happen. At least in theory at most news organizations, verification of citizen
content is a standardized and routinized organizational process required before any
citizen content appears on a news site; the BBC, for instance, requires its user-generated
content desk to verify content before posting. News organizations also pay third-party
social discovery sites to verify content.
Permission. Only through the direct appropriation pathway do news organizations
request permission. Direct appropriation of content may be no less exploitative than
content that is passively appropriated, though. Requests for permission come after news
organizations have selected the content they want to use, but they do not always make
clear to citizens what they are actually giving permission for the news organization to do
(Rendle and Sargent 2016). Often, news organizations simply request permission in a
tweet, without setting any boundaries for how the content will be used, where it will
appear, or how it will be credited. Other news organizations use legalistic language that
may be outside the vernacular of the citizen journalists whose content they hope to
obtain. Still other organizations may request content from citizens who are witnessing
extreme events and may not be able to think through the consequences of giving news
organizations that permission.
THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION MODEL 11

13. People have varying levels of news literacy and do not always know the full impli-
cations of being on the record; in some cases, direct calls for content also mean that the
citizen content creators might face tremendous pressure from news organizations. In the
aftermath of the Brussels Airport Bombings of 2016, witness David Crunelle (2016)
posted a Twitter status update and then a note on Facebook about his experience. In a
Medium post, he chronicled the dozens of news organizations that then requested per-
mission to use his content/observations from the bombing.
Step 4: Appropriation/Amplification Model—Presentation and
Contextualization
News organizations make specific design and editorial choices that reflect their
power to amplify, contextualize, and ultimately dominate the impact of citizen journalism
efforts. Amateur content is almost always presented through a news organization’s own
media properties; news organizations do not simply re-share citizen content hosted only
on social media platforms (with rare exceptions, see Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith 2014).
As news organizations present content, they also give users context through which to
make sense of the citizen content. This contextualization underscores the power of news
organizations to ultimately shape how most news consumers experience citizen content.
Presentation and contextualization may happen in one of two ways: as incorporated into
an existing news story (incorporation), or set apart through explicit design choices as
specialized and exceptionalized.
Incorporation. Incorporation happens when citizen content becomes part of a news
organization’s efforts to produce a larger professionally reported story. Journalists overlay
this citizen content with reporting that the news organization has generated on its own,
positioning citizen content as supplemental to the narrative the news organization is pro-
viding. Journalists may give citizen content a headline and then provide additional expla-
natory details with staff-produced content, or journalists may embed citizen content within
existing stories. This can be helpful, as readers need to be oriented to what they are looking
at, particularly during breaking news. But the power firmly lies with the traditional journalist
to use citizen content to tell a story.
Specialized and exceptionalized. This type of presentation and contextualization
happens most often when news organizations make explicit calls for citizen content. This
content is often set apart from professional content by specific design cues. Similarly, it
is almost always contextualized as a specific and special effort taken by a news organization
to engage with citizen content. For example, The New York Times project “Transgender
Lives: Your Stories” was presented as a separate interactive project with specific language
designating the content as gathered from users. The introductory text reads, “We are fea-
turing personal stories that reflect the strength, diversity and challenges of the community.
Welcome to this evolving collection.” In other cases, news organizations create a “UGC
[user-generated content] ghetto” (Jönsson and Örnebring 2011) as entirely separate
sites, like The Guardian’s Witness project, which only houses citizen content.
These two pathways elucidate a key contradiction in the political economy of citizen
content. On one hand, citizen content simply becomes just another part of newsgathering,
appropriated as part of normal journalistic news production practices. On the other hand, it
12 NIKKI USHER

14. is an “other,” an exception to the norm that further underscores the separation between
professional content presented by a news organization and citizen content. Either way,
citizen content relies on big media organizations in order for it to reach scale.
Step 5: Amplification/Appropriation Model—Amplification
The end of each pathway is amplification. This can happen in two ways: native ampli-
fication and deliberate amplification. Native amplification means that citizen content reaches
people principally through their direct engagement with a news organization’s properties.
The citizen content is amplified through the site’s existing digital traffic, circulation, or
viewers. The larger the site’s audience, the more reach that content is likely to have.
People see the content simply because it has been selected to appear on a big news site
and, as we have discussed, without this amplification, the citizen content likely would
never be seen.
Deliberate amplification. This occurs when a news organization or a journalist specifi-
cally promotes citizen content. Generally, news organizations and journalists are likely to do
this over social media platforms, sometimes as part of deliberate strategies set forth by
social media editors. This content reaches news consumers who may not be directly visiting
a news organization’s properties, and may provide further attention to citizen content that
may otherwise not be seen. Similarly, deliberate amplification means that news organiz-
ations have posted the content directly to social media sites and to their many followers,
enhancing the possibility of it spreading across social media.
Appropriation/Amplification of Citizen Journalism Model: Application
Two brief case studies help reveal the way that this model works in practice. Let us
begin with the passive appropriation pathway.
Case 1
Take, for example, the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting of Michael
Brown, a black man, by a white police officer. In trying to understand and track the sub-
sequent event, many journalists began using social media to keep tabs on public reactions.
Some of this content was simply taken off social media networks and then posted on news
sites without asking permission. A post on the news site Vox offers one good example: “Did
this Ferguson resident live tweet Michael Brown’s shooting?” (Yglesias 2014) and presents a
timeline of tweets. Vox notes, “We are not at this time able to fully verify the authenticity of
the feed, but the timestamps and images appear to match what we otherwise know about
the shooting.”
Vox is posting images and content without the poster even knowing that his content
is being posted on a site that is one of the top-50 highest trafficked digital media properties
in the United States (ComScore 2016).
Let us consider the passive appropriation pathway as a complete cycle.
Step 1: Citizens create content. Content is created in response to a breaking news
event: Michael Brown’s shooting.
THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION MODEL 13

15. Step 2: Routine gatekeeping. The content meets Vox’s threshold to include as part of
its news report because it fills an immediate need: it provides critical information, including
pictures, that may tell readers what has happened.
Step 3: Verification and permission (or not). Both aspects of this step have been
skipped; this the passive appropriation pathway where users are never asked permission,
but Vox also did not verify the content before posting.
Step 4: Presentation and contextualization. Via the incorporation lens, content is pre-
sented as a typical Vox post, with embedded tweets. Also it is contextualized through an
introductory paragraph that explains the content and clearly links to Vox’s other content.
Step 5: Amplification. Through native amplification, or the Vox’s own presence on the
Web, the post reaches a wider audience than the original poster ever could, but users have
to seek this out while traversing Vox; perhaps in 2014, this post might have also been ampli-
fied through deliberate amplification and shared by Vox’ social media account.
Case 2
A second brief case study helps reveal the direct appropriation pathway in effect.
Consider The New York Times’ “Transgender Today” (2015) project discussed before.
Step 1: Citizen content creation. The New York Times issued an explicit call for transgen-
der individuals to write essays about their personal experiences and citizens, in return,
created this content.
Step 2: Routine gatekeeping. In particular, the professionalism gate was activated.
Stories were evaluated according to tone, content, and coherency (editorial page editor,
personal communication, May 10, 2016). When submitting, contributors were instructed
about how they might achieve more professional-looking videos, up to the standards of
The New York Times:
Submit a video that is up to two minutes long. Try to ensure the sound quality is clear by
avoiding recording in a place with background noise. Make sure you’re facing a light
source so the video is not backlit. If you use your phone, please make sure the phone is
horizontal when you record.
Contributors were also warned that their content would not necessarily be accepted.
Step 3: Verification and permission (or not). The New York Times explicitly asked people
to acknowledge that what they shared could be posted, but was not guaranteed to be.
However, The New York Times did not verify these stories, though it collected name, age,
occupation, and contact information.
Step 4: Presentation and contextualization. These stories were then presented and con-
textualized as a specialized/exceptional interactive project. The New York Times contextua-
lized the collection of essays as part of its larger editorial page efforts to understand the
14 NIKKI USHER

16. challenges transgender individuals face. The project was presented as an interactive and
was given its own designated space and specialized design on The New York Times page.
Step 5: Amplification. The project received both deliberate and native amplification; in
particular, The New York Times promoted “Transgender Today” when it first launched on its
Facebook page.
Conclusion
This article has introduced considerations about how the political economy of the
Web as a whole influences the spread and distribution of content and proposed a model
that explains the various pressure points through which citizen content is subjugated to
the professional news production process. As scholars, it is critical to realize that beyond
conversations about news norms and relationships between citizen and professional jour-
nalists lie structural barriers built into the way that information is distributed online. Even if
citizens and journalists really do operate as partners, the overarching power norms of both
internet and social media distribution reflect that the power to dictate the news agenda
stems from news organizations; they are simply bigger sites with bigger networks con-
nected to more people than any ordinary citizen journalist could ever be.
What this means is that we need to be especially critical about the pathways
through which citizen journalism becomes part of the overall news conversation. Isolat-
ing the points in the professional news production process where citizen content is gath-
ered, selected, evaluated, contextualized, and distributed allows us to show how some
citizen content gets heard while some does not. The creation of a model was intended
to be a starting point for further empirical testing. The model is necessarily more fluid
than what is outlined here; perhaps there needs to be further consideration of where
permission and verification occur, and perhaps there are additional gates or the gates
may be more overlapping than this model presents. Regardless, we need to map the
way that citizen content makes it from a hashtagged tweet, for example, to the home
page of a major news outlet. Without understanding these pathways, we cannot make
sense of citizen journalism as a process, particularly if we continue to explore isolated
case studies. The political economy of citizen journalism is an area rich for exploration,
particularly if the aspiration is a more engaged relationship between professional journal-
ists and ordinary citizens.
NOTE
1. The relationship between citizen content and social media companies is a separate discus-
sion with its own concerns about labor, privacy, and beyond (Silverman 2015).
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
THE APPROPRIATION/AMPLIFICATION MODEL 15

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