Exploring Participatory Journalism in Mediterranean Countries

Abstract

Digital media have rapidly adopted mechanisms for transforming their audience into active content providers. Various studies have shown that the main motivation for developing audience participation is financial in nature and that journalists are striving to retain their role as gatekeepers. Nevertheless, “participatory journalism” opens up the public arena to citizen debate. The main aim of this article is to examine how 20 media, two from each of 10 countries on both sides of the Mediterranean, have integrated user-generated content, and to identify whether the forms of participation offered by these media are conditioned by national political and media systems. The results show that in democracies the opportunities for participation are greater than in countries with autocratic regimes. However, significant internal differences were identified.

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