A Participatory Journalism Management Platform: Design, Implementation and Evaluation

Abstract

During the last two decades, citizens’ participation in news production process has attracted significant interest from both academia and the media industry. Media production and consumption have been altered considerably and traditional concepts, such as gatekeeping, have been under discussion. Many news organisations include in their websites tools and applications that allow users to be active consumers or even co-producers of journalistic content, by liking, sharing, commenting and submitting material. At the same time, large amounts of user-generated content are uploaded every day on social media platforms. Subsequently, media organisations must deal with continually available information which requires management, classification and evaluation not only to keep high journalistic standards, but also to avoid problems. The latter category can include grammar mistakes, fake or misleading information and hate speech. All the above-mentioned parameters highlight the obvious need for platforms that can support journalism manage practice. Such a platform should utilise semantic technologies, which can support organised collection and moderation of content in an effective way and in short time. This study discusses the design and the implementation of a participatory journalism management platform.

Digital reputation indicator: A webometric approach for a global ranking of digital media

“…The participation of citizens in the process of redistribution and coproduction of news is the object of other studies on digital journalism, as the already mentioned work of Lewis and Westlund (2015) and, more recently, that of Panagiotidis et al (2020). The latter work points out that news companies include tools and applications on their websites that enable users to, in some way, be coproducers of journalistic content through voting, sharing, commenting and even the sending of material, thus affording to the site of each medium the characteristics inherent to a digital platform of participative journalism.…”

ARTICONF Decentralized Social Media Platform for Democratic Crowd Journalism

“…Additionally, [17] debates the need for formalized collaborative platforms to leverage citizen content into professional news production securely. The SEMPRATO open-source semantic platform [18,24] manages a flexible collection of textual participatory citizen content but lacks content prioritization according to journalists' needs [18].…”

“…Several citizen journalism websites foster active citizen-generated content production and collection 1 aiming to close the gap between participatory journalism and content published on social media. Despite the increasing ease of generating content and participating in news production, crowd journalism also entails risks since dark participation can deliberately produce misinformation and offensive content [10,18]. Online newspaper participatory journalism [26] highlights that contributions requiring prior registration have higher content quality than anonymous involvement.…”

MOGPlay: A Decentralized Crowd Journalism Application for Democratic News Production

“…Additionally, [8] debates the need for formalized collaborative proprietary platforms to securely leverage citizen content into professional news production. In particular [4], [9] discuss the implementation of the SEMPRATO open-source semantic platform managing a flexible collection of textual participatory citizen content, but lacking content prioritization according to journalists' needs [4].…”

“…Several citizen journalism websites foster active citizengenerated content production and collection 1 in an attempt to close the gap between participatory journalism and content published on social media platforms. Despite the increasing ease of generating content and participating in news production, crowd journalism also entails some risks since dark participation can deliberately produce misinformation and offensive content [3], [4]. Online newspaper participatory journalism [5] highlights that contributions requiring prior registration have higher content quality than anonymous involvement.…”