Start making sense: a three-tier approach to citizen journalism

Abstract

This commentary considers citizen journalism emerging from the Syrian Civil War and argues that its usefulness is dependent on an “interpreter tier” of user-generated media analysts. In contrast to discourse celebrating more direct forms of citizen journalism, the piece emphasizes the importance of intermediary layers of meaning-making as the means by which complex fields of amateur information can be made intelligible. This “interpreter tier,” although often ignored in popular and scholarly discourse, takes on an increasingly important function as mainstream sources must increasingly rely on citizen materials produced in far off places.