Journalistiek zonder infrastructuur: een reële optie?

Dutch media are facing decreasing revenues and size of editorial staff. Inviting ‘ordinary’ citizens to participate in the process of newsgathering is one possibility to cope with these problems. Experiences with citizen journalism and user-generated content, however, are mixed. Journalistic quality is often lacking while moderation proved to be more costly than expected. Possible explanation could be reluctance by incumbent media to accept ‘amateurs’ as co-operators or the insufficient skills of citizen journalists. But also the fact that amateurs are not paid for their efforts, don’t have legal protection or support from colleagues and were not subjected to job socialization, could explain why the results of amateurs’ contributions are disappointing so far.