D4.1.2. Final report on citizens' involvement in emergency communication

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In Task 4.1, entitled “Citizens’ Involvement in Emergency Communications”, COSMIC seeks to examine the various roles that citizens may have in communications during emergencies. Also, through this task, the partners aimed to map the relationship between the use of different types of media and communication technologies—including mass media, as well as new media technologies—and citizens’ involvement in emergency communications as 1) potential or actual volunteers (first responders) who may aid emergency response and rescue; 2) as social activists who may utilize online networks to organize, coordinate, collaborate or mobilize during political crises; and 3) as citizens who report on emergencies and political crises. To our knowledge, the content analysis procedures developed for this task constitutes one of the first attempts to systematically quantify the content of citizen journalism coverage of emergencies. Overall, this section of the Task 4.1 provides some important findings: We find evidence supporting the notion that in addition to the ease with which citizens now can create and share content online, one of the key factors that drive the increase in citizen journalistic coverage of emergencies is the dissatisfaction that citizens have about the ways in which mainstream media perform their agenda setting, watchdog, and sense-making duties. Our analysis of the content of citizen journalists’ coverage of recent emergencies/crisis suggest that citizen journalists may have been, partly, successful in terms of challenging the monopoly that established media organizations have over whose voice gets to be heard by the public. That is, at least to some extent, the information sources that citizen journalists utilize underline an approach whereby citizen journalists report for citizens from citizens. While, in our interviews, citizen journalists frequently claimed that the editorial freedom they have enables them to do away with reporting conventions associated with mainstream journalism, our content analysis data suggests that citizen journalists frequently adopt episodic frames that are associated with the detached form of reporting in commercial media. An alarming finding pertains to the measures that citizen journalist (fail to) utilize to verify information while reporting news. Namely, by adopting what has been called as the “publish and then filter” approach; some citizen journalists expect that the readers will filter out false information after it is published by them. This may have important implications for the extent to which citizen journalism can progress as a reliable source of information by the public