Journalism’s digital publics: researching the “visual citizen”

Set against a backdrop of wider debates about journalism and democratic cultures, this chapter interweaves diverse, yet complementary strands of research to help discern, first, the ways in which journalism’s digital publics are becoming increasingly image-ready, willing and able, and second, the implications for remediations of authority, objectivity and transparency. It argues there is heuristic value in reversing familiar emphases by adopting bottom-up, citizen-centred perspectives to explore civic modes of seeing, particularly in and through the generation, deployment, and use of digital imagery. To substantiate this claim, this chapter strives to map the broad features of scholarly investigations into the ongoing changes between journalism, citizens, and the politics of digital imagery. Given there is a variety of useful research schematics around citizen witnessing, social movements, audience practices, and internet cultures (among others), which emphasize the growing importance of the visual, bringing them together offers a valuable holistic, interdisciplinary overview and periodization. Moreover, doing so allows us to clarify image-related technological affordances and constraints, news organizations’ interactions with citizens in newsmaking and critique, and the envisioned potentials of news reporting for political engagement