Participatory Audiences – Chase Keller

The five main types of participatory journalism, as discussed in Chapter 3, are sources, user feedback, user-generated content, crowdsourcing and citizen journalism. The definitions are as followed:

• Sources: people with reliable and legitimate information to help contribute to news writing. Journalists often seek experts or people with an emotional connection to the topic at hand.
• User feedback: websites can help improve engagement and involvement by allowing people to leave comments on their stories. While sometimes commenting can be harmful, it helps readers engage with each other and with the writer.
• User-generated content: any piece contributed by a user to a journalistic website. This could be an opinionated article, a photograph, or even a comment as discussed above.
• Crowdsourcing: users work together to contribute to a story. Typically, the users are dispersed geographically or just given a specific bit to work on. Wikipedia is a large example of this, as experts of a specific topic can work on a piece themselves and divide the work. 
• Citizen Journalism: nonjournalists creating their own journalistic work for websites. It is the next step up from crowdsourcing and user-generated content. Citizen journalism is controversial, with some believing that citizen journalists are not professional journalists.

These types of participatory journalism have different levels of contribution to journalistic pieces. From user feedback, a small critique or comment about a piece, to citizen journalism, where nonjournalists are flat out writing their own pieces to be posted on journalistic websites.

Participatory journalism is seen nationwide, but the Royal Purple has some examples of it. Users can leave comments on any article (user feedback), and there are several sections where people outside of the Royal Purple post their own opinions or statistics to the websites (citizen journalism and user-generated content). Outside of Whitewater, NowPublic is a popular example of participatory journalism, as their website is completely dedicated to participatory news.