Citizen Photojournalists and Their Professionalizing Logics

Abstract

This article presents the findings of an exploratory piece of research focusing on contributors to the participatory news photo agency Citizenside (launched in France in 2006 and based on a business-to-business model, equivalent to iReport, Blottr, or Demotix). The authors have studied the viewpoints of contributors themselves, through an online questionnaire and through in-depth interviews. The responses help to identify the profiles, practices, and motivations of so-called citizen photojournalists. Contrary to bloggers or users regularly commenting on online news articles—which research has often scrutinized since the mid-2000s to understand better online areas of participation—the active audiences or publics producing news images are driven by logics which remain poorly known, if not stereotyped. Several features showing the shift from ordinary to organized practices are discussed in the paper, including the minor use of smartphones as well as the importance of the preparatory fieldwork versus the minority of events captured “by chance.” In this respect, the motivations and profiles of Citizenside’s contributors go further than citizenship aspects, as they behave actually as independent eye-witnesses and photographers/videographers, some of whom are even remunerated. Therefore, in the authors’ view, these publics, considered as “amateurs” from afar, are in fact driven by (semi-)professional logics.