Grassroots online journalism: Public intervention in Kuro5hin and Wikinews

Abstract

Grassroots online journalism, as defined by Primo and Träsel (2006), are the practices developed in web news periodicals, or parts thereof, where the boundary between reading and publishing is either blurred or non-existent. The question is no longer whether individuals with no professional license or formal education will publish their own writing and influence, but how and to what extent they will do so. This paper presents results from a study focusing on interventions from various contributors in the journalistic content published in the participatory news websites Wikinews and Kuro5hin. A sample of ten texts was collected over seven weeks to create a corpus of interventions, which was later submitted to content analysis with the goal of verifying whether the interventions had a predominantly pluralizing character or not. The results show that, for Wikinews and Kuro5hin, the interventions are mostly pluralizing, which indicates grassroots online journalism can make important contributions to democracy.