From Personal to Professional: Exploring the Influences on Journalists’ Evaluation of Citizen Journalism Credibility

Abstract

The multi-layered participation that has found its way into networked media spaces in recent times have contributed to increased collaboration between mainstream journalists and ordinary citizens as co-creators of media contents. With these progressively blurring boundaries in the news production process, the need to ascertain the evaluation of mainstream media practitioners about the credibility and legitimacy of alternative media platforms have never assumed a more social and professional relevance in the journalism sphere. This study adopts Shoemaker and Reese’s Hierarchy of Influence model as a theoretical template to investigate the extent to which individual, routine, and organisational level influences affect journalists’ perception of citizen journalism credibility. This research is contextualised in Nigeria, an environment with a distinctly dissimilar political, economic, and cultural landscape to the countries of prior research. Findings from a random sample survey (n = 397) revealed, contrary to previous assumption, that journalists’ judgement of citizen journalism as moderately credible, is mostly a consequence of individual-level factors (demographics, career length) and routine level factors (frequency of online media use), rather than by organisational level influences (media affiliation, professional ethics). The peculiarity of Nigerian journalism landscape places professional allegiance and media structures at the lowest level of influences.