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Chapter 3 provides an overview of the entire US media landscape, with an emphasis on the various degradations caused by commercial imperatives, such as the loss of local journalism and the structural collapse of commercial journalism. As media outlets desperately chase increasingly elusive revenues, they further debase journalism. Problems that emerge from journalism’s decline range from the turn to invasive and deceptive forms of advertising to a growing precarity in news labor. After discussing such problems, the chapter systematically goes through potential alternatives to the advertising revenue model and concludes that a public option is the best model going forward.

This chapter focuses on how digital culture is re-making our understanding of citizenship by creating alternative channels of communication, activity, connection, and expression. In particular, it discusses instances of digital resistance around the Olympic Games, arguing that these antagonistic reactions are crucial components that justify the Olympic mission and a crucial means through which the Olympic idea can assert itself as a movement, rather than just a sports event. In this respect, it argues that the Olympic industries must seek to enable such expression, while also ensuring that it does not jeopardize the need for the Olympic Games to remain politically neutral.

This chapter explores the performative politics of the TeleGhetto project as performed by three “princes” in the “port”—Alex Louis, Steevens Simeon, and Romel Jean Pierre. The TeleGhetto project address the precarious lives lived in the streets of Port-au-Prince through the creative production of an improvised “Ghetto TV” that embodies an imaginative and performative politics of race, gender, sexuality, and populace that alters the cityscapes, mediascapes, and citizenscapes of the capital. Contextualizing the art performance piece within poststructuralist, feminist, and queer understandings of performativity, the chapter then argues that TeleGhetto is performance speech-act (doing things in words) as well as performance art and alternative media, or citizen journalism—a synergistic mode of creative production that produces social space in and on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

This chapter deals with recent developments in war reporting, including military media management, technology and the rise of citizen journalism. For pooled journalists, the imposition of a daily routine was vocally resisted, but it seems to have effected a structuration of the perceived role of the reporter. For embedded journalists, there is a similar loss of control over broad scheduling and everyday routines, along with a distinct means of signifying one's integrity as a journalist. An alternative future sees news organisations deploying more war correspondents. It is suggested that the correspondent's experience of war is being inexorably transformed from a material to a virtual one. It then considers Salam Pax, who rose to celebrity status by blogging about the invasion of Iraq on his website and in the UK's Guardian newspaper. The future field of war reporting will be shaped by developments in media management, technology and cultural shifts.

This chapter maps out online micro-practices that favored the inconspicuous entry of the youth into the political arena. Focusing on the immersive use of social media platforms like Facebook, it identifies alternative forms of political action and highlights the emergence of media-induced counter-politics that appealed to a generation of aspiring digital natives who resented the state’s intrusion in their everyday lives. Having mapped out the extent to which social media took hold among a segment of the population, this chapter then shifts the focus to the popular protests that swept Tunisia at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, paying special attention to the way media was used and consumed during the revolution. The chapter also explores the significance of a new communication environment that is defined by the increased interpenetration between social media networks, citizen journalism, and satellite television. Focusing on how Al Jazeera’s antiestablishment inclination and openness to new information and communication technologies connected with cyber-activism, the chapter also demonstrates how hybrid communication practices that involve new and legacy media are redefining the category of the political.

This chapter discusses Perpignan, the world's largest celebration of photojournalism, held in southern France in early autumn. Visa Pour l'Image celebrates artistic and subjective vision simultaneously with the belief in an indisputable visual truth-telling. Importantly, it is also a celebration of mobility, both of images and of photographers. Based on Visa 2003 and 2004, this chapter looks at photojournalism's confrontation with the amateur threat posed by the rise of citizen journalism and the abuse photographs taken by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, which are considered by many to be the definitive images of the war in Iraq. It focuses on the production of ideals of authorship and individual ways of seeing, “personal vision,” alongside the differentiation between local photographers who document specific news events and cosmopolitan photojournalists praised for their masterful storytelling.

Although Japanese media has played an important role in the country’s public policy analysis, it is becoming difficult to do so because of financial difficulty. It is facing tough challenges, especially how to cope with the digital revolution. It is time for Japanese media to fully use the digital technology to meet readers’ needs and cooperate with NPO and universities to keep and enhance the ability of the investigative reporting to check the government’s activities.

This chapter focuses on how online news is generated and presented. It compares the content of online news with that created for the offline media (for example, newspapers, radio and television), and whether the distinction between offline and online news remains a meaningful one. It also examines the extent with which news appearing on the Internet reflects traditional notions of the importance of issues and events, along with the novel ways that online news content can be disseminated to the audience. The role of citizen journalism such as blogs and news feeds in the news environment is considered. The chapter concludes by discussing how the creation and presentation of news online can affect the way citizens understand events, issues, and public policy.

This chapter explores the reasons why people blog. “Blog,” short for “weblog”. There’s the gnawing fear that anyone who blogs is fated to become one of those tub-thumping Alpha Wonks who have given the medium a bad name. The best thing about blogging isn’t that it’s “citizen journalism”; it’s that it’s not journalism. Or if it is, it’s a viral strain of journalism, one that resembles no journalism we know. While blogging-as-grassroots journalism can serve as a corrective to the ideological blind spots and commercial orientation of the corporate media monopoly, bloggers who really want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from lone-wolf warbloggers like Chris Allbritton, who reported the Iraq war on his readers’ PayPal dime, or “backpack journalist” Kevin Sites, who did the same at KevinSitesReports.com.

The book’s concluding chapter discusses post-revolutionary developments in Tunisia’s digital spaces of contention as the country attempted to build a democratic system. It explores the mutations and adaptations the voices of contention have undergone since the revolution and reflects on their significance. More specifically, it looks at the extent to which those who played a role in digital contention prior to the revolution effected and were affected by the changes the country witnessed since 2011 and asks whether they lost their relevance or became embedded; whether they were marginalized or developed the ability to shape the emergent media systems and enhance democratic engagement.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Syrian War documentary has depicted and reflected upon the figure of the activist mother, and the competing concepts of personal and political transgression that cluster around her as she occupies fraught zones of conflict and its witnessing, mortal danger and forced migration. Through two case study films, A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, UK, 2015), a British filmmaker’s account of the family of political prisoner Raghda Hasan as they negotiate living under Bashar al-Assad’s regime and eventually flee it; and For Sama (Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, UK/Syria, 2019), a first person account of a Syrian activist journalist, Waad, who gives birth to and raises her child during the siege of Aleppo, the chapter explores the ethical and representational questions raised in this centring of the activist mother and her potential status as a transgressor of political and social norms. It also situates these activist mother films in the wider array of anti-regime Syrian War documentaries, where the plight of parents and children are foregrounded as part of the call to action to North American and European audiences.

This chapter examines video’s epistemological trio of moving images, audio, and a timeline and their evidentiary affordances. Based on a single court case that blended video clips from a variety of perspectives, the project explores the evidentiary value of video and the way it’s used in testimonial narrative. Fisher’s narrative paradigm serves as the foundation for this chapter, which theorizes video as both an affordance and as a text with its own embedded narrative. In US courts, video cannot stand for itself but must accompany other testimony, and as testimonial affordance, video can explain or illustrate the order of action. Video is especially useful for refuting testimony that does not match what the video depicts. While its timeline affords a natural plot, the narrative that matters most is the discursive one crafted in court, offering what Fisher labeled coherence and fidelity—the moral or legal “point” of the story.

Media and culture in Tibet had already been radically transformed by cheap cassette technology a decade or more before digital equipment spread rapidly there in the early years of the new century. The new technology made it easier for Tibetans to produce home videos of cultural events and religious teachings, civic videos designed to benefit the broader community, and export videos designed to win support from abroad. But it also led to a wave of independent documentaries and fiction films by Tibetans, and in these it made possible the articulation of complex and significant debates about identity and collective meaning. The themes of these discussions include the pain experienced as a result of the modernity-tradition divide, a pervasive sense of loss and absence, the invisibility or erasure of China and the Chinese, and the trope of self-reconstruction or redemption as found in the story of the eleventh-century hermit-poet Milarepa. DV films by Tibetans thus far, particularly those by Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering and Pema Tsedan, suggest a shared politics of recovery and reconstruction rather than one of revenge or militarism, a concern about internal threats to culture and self-belief rather than about an external enemy, and acute anxieties about masculinity and the role of gender.