No abstract

The article reflects on contemporary processes of de-professionalisation of journalism, its consequences for democratic processes and challenges to citizen journalism. It is argued that both the dilemmas of mainstream journalism and the emergence of citizen journalism are consequences of an array of evolving factors having to do with complex transformations in the media landscape and its industries, professional and ‘leisured’ content creation, employment and technologies, shifting patterns of media use among citizens, as well as broader permutations in social and cultural patterns. In the first section, we briefly address the long-term historical decline of professional journalism; in the second section, we look at some of the attributes of the current crisis; in the third section, we probe some of the key features of what has come to be called citizen journalism, a development that is contradictorily entwined with both the de-professionalisation and the democratisation of journalism. In the conclusion, we turn our eye to some paths for future research.

The present-day popular advocacy of the 'European public sphere' is not only a normative-theoretical endeavour, but largely also an expression of the general (political) dissatisfaction with a neoliberal domination of economy over other political issues essential for democratic citizenship in the 'New Europe', or a reaction to an imbalance between the intense economic and rather sloppy political integration, and the democratic deficit in the decision-making. The idea of a pan- European post-national political public (sphere) contains an enlightened humanist ideology focused on its emancipatory potential, but it may also denote the fabrication of a fictitious Europe of elites without citizens if not deep-rooted in the concept of the 'strong' public sphere. The genealogy of the 'public (sphere)' demonstrates that the contemporary concept should be considered neither selfevident nor coherent. The article relates the concept to its late-18th-century ancestors and delineates main currents of thought in the subsequent two centuries. The concept of the weak public sphere dominates both in theory and in empirical research, and thus also in many contemporary media-centred studies of the/a 'European public sphere', which tend to reduce its definition to 'the lowest common denominator'.

This article examines the intellectual history of the concept of ‘publicity’, originally defined by Immanuel Kant as the transcendental formula of public justice and the principle of the public use of reason, but later largely subsumed under the concept of ‘freedom of the press’. The notion of the press as the Fourth Estate/Power was a valid concept and legitimate form of the institutionalization of the principle of publicity in the period when newspapers emanated from a new (bourgeois) estate or class: they had a different source of legitimacy than the three classic powers, and developed as a critical impulse against the old ruling estates. Yet the discrimination in favor of the power/control function of the press, which relates to the need of ‘distrustful surveillance’ defended by Bentham, clearly abstracted freedom of the press from the Kantian quest for the public use of reason. In democratic societies where the people rather than different estates legitimize all the powers, the control dimension of publicity embodied in the corporate freedom of the press should be effectively supplemented by actions toward equalizing private citizens in the public use of reason.

This article analyses the position and development patterns of communication science on the periphery and examines the factors that may explain why it lags behind the progress made by intellectual centres in more developed scholarly communities. The analysis is concerned with the differences between the centre and the periphery in the growth of paradigms for disciplinary development, the role of communication theories and empirical research, and particularly with intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions of indigenization and their relationship to the ideologization of science. A citation analysis of Yugoslav articles published in the field of communication science from 1964 to 1986 is presented to demonstrate the typical features of slow disciplinary growth in Yugoslavia, and to illustrate those external and internal influences that account for scientific lag in a typical peripheral community.