Participatory Journalism

The 5 main types of participatory journalism is sources, user feedback, user generated content, crowdsourcing, and citizen journalism. The sources are the people who journalists reach out to for information regarding the story whether that be from an expert or someone with an emotional attachment to the story.  Some sources come from the audience since there will likely always be someone who knows more about the topic than the journalist. This could be something as small as a witness report on a story. User feedback is the input given directly from the audience. Nowadays every news outlet has some sort of audience feedback system. An example of this could be the comment section on The Guardian. User-generated content is a substantive contribution of media to a given journalistic story. This content could be something such as a comment made by an audience member. Crowdsourcing is when a group of individuals are collected in an organized way to cover a particular story. This means the audience is directly affecting the story. This could be something like journalists collecting patient experiences for a story on medical costs. Finally, Citizen journalism has non-journalists playing the main role in creating stories. An example of this would be a CNN article about a 10 year-old kid writing about what it’s like with autism.