چشم اندازهای یک گروه ذینفع: دیدگاه های روزنامه نگاران شهروندان از متخصصان روابط عمومی و مواد آنها  Perspectives of an underconsidered stakeholder group: Citizen journalists’ views of public relations practitioners and their materials

1. Introduction The rise of the Internet in the last two decades has provided a new medium through which news can be conveyed and, as such, has allowed journalists not affiliated with professional newsrooms to offer up news accounts. Known as “citizen journalists,” these reporters have borne witness to many dramatically noteworthy news events in recent years, such as the 2014 race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the sinking of a ferry in South Korea in April 2014 that killed hundreds, and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Accordingly, the role of citizen journalists in crisis situations like these and others (e.g., California wildfires, Superstorm Sandy, massive tornadoes in the U.S. Midwest and Southern states) has been receiving more attention in emergency management circles (Novak & Vidoloff, 2011; Watson & Wadhwa, 2013). In each of these instances citizen journalists were present, capturing video, gathering information, and transmitting accounts in real time. As such, citizen journalists are playing an increasingly important role in the news-gathering process, especially at a time when traditional newsrooms continue to cut their staffs (Jurkowitz, 2014; Total employment, 2013). There are now hundreds of citizen journalism sites providing news from non-professionals; according to a Pew Institute study, between January 2011 and March 2012 approximately 40% of the most viewed news videos came directly from citizens placing their videos on the Internet (Jurkowitz & Hitlin, 2013). Still, public relations literature has done little to examine citizen journalists as a rising stakeholder group within the wider news milieu. Certainly, public relations research has, over the last two decades, investigated how the Internet has affected the news ecology within which public relations practitioners attemptto convey news abouttheir clients. Particularly notable is Ye and Ki’s (2012) survey of 27 years of peer-reviewed public relations journal articles concerning the Internet. Signifi- cantly, they found that public relations scholarship was transmission centered: public relations literature focused heavily on how practitioners conceptualize and execute what they consider to be effective communication through the Internet. They pointed out that audience-centered public relations research was lacking. Not surprisingly, their study found no peerreviewed research on citizen journalists as a separate stakeholder group within the news arena that has distinct perceptions of public relations people. This study addresses that gap, inspired by Ye and Ki’s call that public relations scholarship should expand to move beyond “organizations’ or practitioners’ perceptions to also include publics’ experiences” (2012, p. 426). As such, this works reports on a study of the viewpoints of citizen journalists about public relations practitioners and the materials they offer.