Challenging mainstream media,documenting real life and sharing with the community: An analysis of the motivations for producing citizen journalism in a post-disaster city

1 Sociology of disasters in the era of digital media: A paradigm shift

On 6 April 2009, a devastating earthquake struck L’Aquila, a small Italian city located in the Abruzzo region (approximately 100 km north-east of Rome). It had a magnitude of 6.3 Mw and caused serious damage to L’Aquila and the surrounding villages, destroying many areas of the medieval centre, killing more than 300 people and leaving around 65,000 homeless.

Immediately after the tragedy, there was massive use by ordinary citizens of internet platforms to spread information about the reality of the situation in the post-earthquake phase (Farinosi and Micalizzi, 2012). The city thus witnessed an explosion of citizen journalism on multiple online platforms. Forums, blogs and social media were flooded with posts, comments, videos and pictures regarding everyday life after the catastrophe, the city’s reconstruction process and the need to reconnect online the ties that had been severed by the earthquake.

In the sociology of disasters, focus on this kind of practice represents a significant paradigm shift. Although, for years, sociologists have investigated the patterns of adaptation that take place within communities traumatized by a catastrophic event, research has often left out analysis of the communication dynamics (see Fritz, 1961; Gilbert, 1998a; Kreps, 1998; Porfiriev, 1998; Quarantelli, 1998). In recent times, new light on disaster-related topics and on issues involved in the politics of knowledge has been shed by scholars from STS (Science and Technology Studies), who have extensively studied both Hurricane Katrina (Barrios, 2011; Dowty and Allen, 2011; Frickel and Bess Vincent, 2011; Frickel et al., 2009) and the Fukushima nuclear disaster (Fortun and Frickel, 2011), and their impact on citizens, communities and neighbouring countries. Much of this emerging research on catastrophic events is focused on the social dynamics of techno-science in extraordinary contexts and delves into the questions of public debate and public participation. These studies try to understand how techno-scientific knowledge, experts and authority respond to disaster and investigate the significant relationship between techno-science and disaster. But, just like the majority of the existing communication-oriented research, they tend to adopt a top-down perspective (in particular regarding the warning response process) (important reviews include Anderson, 1969; Bauman, 1983; Carter, 1980; Hiroi et al., 1985; Mileti and Beck, 1975; Mileti and Sorensen, 1990; Nigg, 1987; Quarantelli, 1980), considering catastrophes ‘the affairs of the public authorities rather than the affairs of citizens and, in doing this, the perception of the population as a whole is merely passive and bound to be directed and commanded in cases of disasters’ (Gilbert, 1998b: 97). As highlighted also by Banzato et al. (2010: 1), in the case of disasters, citizens are usually seen as people to be rescued, rather than as active participants. The widespread adoption of digital media and the abundant production of content generated by ordinary people has marked a significant change in the exploration of disaster contexts and allowed analysis of the tragedy from a completely new perspective: that of the victims.

In a context where the Italian mainstream media were too busy sustaining the framework of a supposed ‘miraculous’ reconstruction to pay attention to people’s real needs and everyday struggles, a large number of citizens in L’Aquila started to use blogs, social media and video/photo-sharing platforms in order to produce, upload and share online content related to their post-disaster situation, narrating their everyday lives and casting light on their ‘out of the ordinary’ experiences.

The aim of this article is to explore the motivations that drove these citizens to produce grassroots information. We first provide an analysis of the Italian mainstream media response to the earthquake during the rule of the Berlusconi government (section 2); secondly, we review the current literature on the phenomenon of citizen journalism, focusing in particular on the studies that have explored the motivations for producing this kind of content (section 3). Then we illustrate the aims and methods adopted (Section 4) and describe and discuss the findings of our research (section 5). Finally, we draw some conclusions and sketch future challenges for research in this field (section 6).

2 The L’Aquila earthquake as a media spectacle of catastrophe

The response to the earthquake by the Italian mainstream media was fast and expensive. As highlighted by several media scholars and commentators (among the many, Ardizzoni and Ferrari, 2010; Padovani, 2007, 2010a; Treré and Bazzarin, 2012), the Italian media landscape is particularly defined by the anomaly of a (three times and recently former) Prime Minister and media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, who owns three of the seven television channels broadcasting at a national level, and controlled another three when he was Italy’s Prime Minister. The Berlusconi government deployed a complex media strategy in order to turn the L’Aquila tragedy into an opportunity to strengthen its consensus. Media events are defined by Dayan and Katz (1992) as public ceremonies, deemed historic and broadcast live on television. Liebes (1998) prefers to speak of ‘disaster marathons’, referring to the countless hours that the media spend recycling gory portraits from disaster scenes, focusing on the heroics of rescue workers and speculating on the reasons for the tragedy with experts and authorities. Grounding his theory in Guy Debord’s notion of the society of the spectacle and in Dayan and Katz’s notion of media event, Kellner (2010: 76) has coined the term ‘media spectacle‘ to refer to ‘technologically mediated events, in which media forms such as broadcasting, print media, or the Internet process events in a spectacular form’ (Kellner, 2010: 76). These events are out of the ordinary media constructs that involve an aesthetic dimension and are often dramatic. Kellner distinguishes between spectacles of terror (such as the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City) and spectacles of catastrophe (natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina).

Literature on the media coverage of the L’Aquila earthquake (Dominici, 2010; Farinosi and Treré, 2010a, 2010b; Padovani, 2010b) has pointed out the different ways through which the Berlusconi government was able to build a ‘media spectacle framework’, behind which the many inflated promises of the Italian government about the reconstruction process hid the sad reality of a city left alone once the media attention had disappeared. Furthermore, ample journalistic literature on the topic (among others, Bonaccorsi et al., 2010; Caporale, 2011; Erbani, 2010; Puliafito, 2010) helps to unmask the rhetoric of the L’Aquila earthquake conceived as a ‘spectacle of catastrophe’, where the immediate post-earthquake emergency was framed by Italian mainstream media within the metaphor of the ‘miracle in L’Aquila’. This metaphor is based on the use of several marketing techniques with the aim of conveying the false idea that a fast, efficient and almost ‘miraculous’ post-quake reconstruction was taking place at L’Aquila. Berlusconi appeared everyday on national and international television and, speaking from the ‘red zone’ (the dangerous areas located in the historical city centre), he reassured the citizens that the city was undergoing an effective reconstruction process.

While through the inaugurations of new houses and the construction of several image events culminating in the Group of Eight (G8) Summit (Padovani, 2010b), Berlusconi was able to transmit the image of a city undergoing a ‘miraculous’ process of reconstruction, for several people of L’Aquila, this supposed miracle was nothing more than a media mystification that was in strong contrast with their everyday existence, in which rubble and debris still dominated the centre of the city and many citizens were still living in tent camps (Farinosi and Treré, 2010a, 2010b).

2 Literature review: Motivations for producing citizen journalism

In the last few years, the tools provided by the so-called social web and the spread of digital devices to a great part of the world’s population have helped to change the practices of ‘traditional’ journalism and the press: nowadays, ordinary people play an increasingly important role in the creation and dissemination of news and commentary online. Scholars and professionals have addressed this new phenomenon from multiple points of view and have adopted a wide array of labels to describe it. They refer to this new journalism as ‘participatory’ (Lasica, 2003; Lievrouw, 2011), ‘hyperlocal’ (Schaffer, 2007), ‘networked’ (Jarvis, 2006), ‘open source’ (Bentley et al., 2005; Leonard, 1999), ‘grassroots’ (Gillmor, 2004; Littau, 2007; Schweiger and Quiring, 2005), ‘wiki’ (Outing, 2005), and so the debate continues. Nevertheless, ‘citizen journalism’ is the term that is most generally accepted (Gillmor, 2003).

Labels, terms and definitions vary, but all studies share a common foundation in that they point to the underlying amateurism of these practices: different authors seem to agree that at the core of this phenomenon lies media content generated everyday by unpaid people and published on independent news sites, opinion blogs, Indymedia sites, social networking platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter. In citizen journalism, the readers, writers and editors participate jointly in the ongoing process of news production and circulation via digital media. Thus, citizens play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information.

Additionally, the concept of citizen journalism shares several similarities with the concept of citizens’ media (Rodriguez, 2001) and the more general labels of ‘alternative’ and ‘radical media’ (Atton, 2002; Downing, 2001; Lievrouw, 2011). According to Rodriguez’s perspective, people engaged in the production of citizens’ media become empowered citizens. Rodriguez sees citizens’ media as loci for the enactment of citizenship where ‘the social subjects negotiate and renegotiate social definitions, their identities, cultures and lifestyles, on the personal as well as on the collective level’ (Rodriguez, 2001:54). Chris Atton (2002) stresses the importance of radical media where activist-journalists seek to establish a counter-discourse to those found in mainstream media. Atton focuses on the ‘native reporting’ technique where activist accounts of events are preferred over more detached commentaries. In her analysis of Indymedia, one of the most relevant online alternative media created in the advent of the Seattle protests, Leah Lievrouw argues that the site represents ‘one of the earliest and most successful forms of participatory journalism online’ (2011: 132).

Nowadays, in the Italian context, these hyper-local media act as ‘micro watchdogs’, on the one hand addressing pressing problems at a local level, and on the other hand, thanks to the possibilities offered by social media and blogs, trying to draw national and global attention to important issues such as the failings of the Italian media system, the privileges of Italian politicians, the crisis in neoliberal systems and so on (Treré and Bazzarin, 2011, 2012).

Few studies have explored and examined users’ motivations for producing grassroots content. Papacharissi (2003) analysed the posts of 150 bloggers and concluded that blog posts were intended for friends or family to fulfil a social utility motivation. Other scholars (Trammell et al., 2004), through the content analysis of 358 randomly selected blog pages, explored six major motivations for blogging: self-expression, social interaction, entertainment, passing the time, information, and professional advancement. Nardi et al. (2004) identified five major motivations for blogging: to document lives; to provide commentary and opinions; to express deeply felt emotions; to articulate ideas through writing; and to form and maintain community. The authors concluded that ‘blogging is an unusually versatile medium, employed for everything from spontaneous release of emotion to archivable support of group collaboration and community’ (Nardi et al., 2004: 46).

Leung (2009) examined uses and gratifications for a variety of online activities, including participation in Wikipedia, blogging and YouTube. Leung found that online content creation was driven by recognition needs, cognitive needs, social needs and entertainment needs. Liu et al. (2007) explored 10 motivational factors of 177 bloggers and discovered that the most significant reward of extrinsic motivation was connecting with people, whereas the most important reward of intrinsic motivation was expressing feelings and owning space for file and data storage. Similarly, Ekdale et al. (2010) examined the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of 66 US political bloggers and found that the most important one was offering a point of view missing in the mainstream media. Furthermore, the authors analysed the bloggers’ initial and current motivations and demonstrated that in the first phase of their activity, they were driven by intrinsic motivations (in particular, formulating new ideas and keeping track of their thoughts) and subsequently by extrinsic ones (such as providing a different perspective or critique from that of the mainstream media, helping society, serving as a political watchdog, etc.). Our study investigates the relevant question of why citizens produce grassroots information in a post-catastrophe scenario, adding qualitative data to the existing literature regarding citizen journalism, which is mainly quantitative (Kokenge, 2010; Korgaonkar and Wohlin, 1999; Li, 2007; Sheehan, 2002).

3 Research questions and methodology

In this article, we do not adopt a narrow conception of citizen journalism because we believe that closed boundaries are hard to draw and sometimes useless in this field. We agree with Goode’s (2009) critical analysis of the phenomenon, especially in relation to two points. First of all, even if some authors such as Gillmor (2004) refer to citizen journalism as ‘a movement’, we believe that we should not restrict the analysis to platforms that are explicitly built as alternatives to ‘mainstream’ or ‘traditional’ journalism. As a consequence, we situate citizen journalism within a broader mediation framework that accounts for a wide spectrum of news-making practices, including blog comments, mobile phone reporting, social network tagging and labelling of news stories. The citizen journalism phenomenon appears thus as a ‘complex and layered mix of representation, interpretation (and re-interpretation), translation, and, indeed, remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) whereby news and comment, discourse and information, is reshaped as it traverses a range of sites and varying media platforms’ (Goode, 2009: 1291). We thus conceive of citizen journalism as a complex phenomenon composed of a variety of news-making practices through multiple technologies and platforms (blogs, wikis, social networking sites, micro-blogs, alternative websites, mobile phones and other digital devices). Because we see citizen journalism as a continuum of media practices, the focus of our research does not lie in one particular website or technology, nor does the core of our analysis reside in one specific medium, but in people and their practices across multiple platforms (Barassi and Treré, 2012).

The L’Aquila post-earthquake media landscape is illuminating in this respect: while citizens created their own blogs and websites to give their point of view about the situation in the city, at the same time, they made massive use of commercial online platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to spread the content they produced. Using multiple websites, personal blogs, social network sites and video/photo/audio-sharing platforms, many ordinary citizens of L’Aquila were able to post articles, videos, pictures, commentary and reports that shed light on the post-quake situation in all its aspects, providing their own reflections on the tragedy and narrating their everyday lives from the inside (Farinosi and Micalizzi, 2012; Farinosi and Treré, 2010a, 2013; Micalizzi, 2010; Padovani, 2010b).

Citizens from L’Aquila used the internet to bypass traditional gatekeepers and directly communicate their critical views on their post-quake situation. Moreover, activists, collectives and civic movements (such as, for instance, the movement of the ‘People of the Wheelbarrows’ and the ‘3e32’ citizens’ committee) employed multiple online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Web TV and blogs to organize and report citizens’ protests and to provide their own perspectives on the post-quake events in L’Aquila (Farinosi, 2011; Farinosi and Treré, 2010b; Padovani, 2010b; Treré and Farinosi, 2012). The information spread on blogs, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Facebook groups and on the wiki-TV, L’Aquila99, ¹ aimed at providing independent and reliable views on the local situation from a bottom-up perspective. The number of platforms adopted by citizens in L’Aquila reflected the richness of both the content produced and the digital practices performed. We formulated the following research questions:

To answer these research questions, we deployed a qualitative research method. Our sample criterion was purposive (Patton, 2002): we selected 20 citizens from the most active online creators of grassroots information and carried out 20 in-depth interviews with them in April 2010. In our selection, we took into account the widest array of news-making practices, so we included the most important bloggers, amateur journalists, social media content curators, online group managers, amateur photographers and video-makers, and Web TV content generators from L’Aquila. Among the most important bloggers, we interviewed Federico, a young medical student who created the ‘Stazione MIR’ blog; Anna, the owner of an antique shop in the old town destroyed by the earthquake, who set up the ‘Miskappa blog’; and Giusi, assistant professor at the University of L’Aquila and creator of the blog, ‘Trentotto Secondi’ (in English, ‘Thirty-Eight Seconds’, the time that elapsed from the moment she was awakened by the earthquake to the moment in which she felt the shock had faded). As far as the amateur video-makers were concerned, among others, we interviewed Francesco, a Masters student of Journalism, whose YouTube channel included ironic videos criticizing Italian mainstream media coverage; and Luca, a young engineer with a passion for film-making, who created short films denouncing the dramatic situation in the historical centre. Furthermore, we included in our sample people who, among the growing volume of unfiltered digital data, were able to find, select and organize alternative information on the post-disaster situation, thus creating a collection of news that was neglected by the mainstream media. In this category, we also took into consideration people who acted as curators of pages and groups on social media such as Giovanni, a computer scientist who decided to open a Facebook page called ‘Aggregatore Aquilano Flussi Alternativi’ (in English, ‘Aquilano Aggregator of Alternative Flows’), building a reliable collection of relevant, but often underrated, news that he discovered, gathered and organized from a variety of different sources, funnelling this information to his readers in a mash-up style. Finally, we interviewed the members of the wiki-TV, L’Aquila99, a collaborative online space that aimed at providing independent and reliable views on the local situation from a bottom-up perspective.

Interviews ranged from 45 to 70 minutes in length and aimed at exploring the motivations for producing citizen journalism as well as the obstacles that impeded grassroots production. Each interview was recorded and transcribed verbatim and the resulting texts were thematically analysed following Flick’s (1998) method of thematic coding in order to determine the most relevant categories that depicted the citizens’ perspectives on their grassroots productions. Data analysis was approached without any pre-set list of categories and the findings emerged through the interaction with the data available. This methodological approach allowed us to investigate the phenomenon directly from the perspective of the population under study (Vettehen et al., 1996) and gave us a better grasp of the actors’ points of view, motivations, goals and values.

4 Findings: Motivations for producing grassroots content

In order to facilitate the analysis, the answers to the interviews have been clustered into categories based on underlying topics emerging from the content analysis. We have organized the research findings as follows: in the first sub-section, we present the most relevant motivations that drove citizens of L’Aquila to produce and publish grassroots content on the internet; in the second subsection, we focus our attention on the obstacles that people had to face when creating and uploading information online.

5 Conclusions, limitations and future directions

In this article, we have analysed the motivations that drove citizen journalists from L’Aquila to produce grassroots information in the post-earthquake phase. The overabundant and distorted mainstream media coverage and the need to document their daily lives and share it with their community in order to reconnect their social ties were the main motivations for their grassroots information production. Feeling marginalized by the mainstream press, local citizens used digital media to provide an alternative version to the one presented by Italian mainstream media, and used blogs, YouTube and Facebook accounts to shed light on the city’s situation in all its aspects. In this way, amateur journalists bypassed traditional gatekeepers and communicated their points of view about the post-quake situation directly online, strengthening their community at the same time. Our findings contribute to the literature on disasters, the literature on citizen journalism and alternative media by adding a new point of view to the existing communication-oriented research in the field of sociology of disasters and by providing qualitative data on the motivations for grassroots content production in a post-catastrophe situation.

The analysis of citizens’ information production after the earthquake allows us to explore the context of disaster from a new perspective: that of the population involved in the traumatic experience. This represents a significant paradigm shift in the literature related to the sociology of disasters because, as we have seen in the first section, people are usually considered merely as victims and communication dynamics are analysed from top-down perspectives. Conversely, our research was focused on the analysis of the active participation of citizens and explored their motivations for producing information. Furthermore, our study suggests that in the post-disaster context of L’Aquila, ordinary people were driven by many of the same motivations that inspire online producers in their everyday lives, such as the need to fulfil a social utility motivation (Papacharissi, 2003), the need to spread information and create social interaction (Trammell et al., 2004), the will to provide an alternative perspective to mainstream media (Ekdale et al., 2010) and, above all, the need to document their lives, express deeply-felt emotions and form and maintain community (Nardi et al., 2004; Liu et al., 2007). A similar mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations influenced the citizens of L’Aquila. The main difference from the current literature is constituted by the urgency that drove people to create and document their own narratives motivated by the extraordinary post-catastrophe situation and by distorted mainstream media coverage.

Furthermore, our study provides an exploration of the obstacles that online content production has to face (risks of fragmentation and the lack of professionalism, funding and visibility), an issue which is usually neglected in studies on motivations behind user-generated content. In line with Bart Cammaerts’ (2008) reflections on the participatory potential of blogs, we are convinced that while it is important to critically reflect on the democratic potentials of these platforms, it is also pivotal to acknowledge their limitations, constraints and dangers.

Finally, our findings also reveal some of the opportunities and challenges embedded in the use of blogs, social media and content sharing applications in the production of counter-information and the creation of alternative media. Clemencia Rodriguez (2001) has urged us not to measure the value of alternative media in terms of binary and simplistic distinctions between big and powerful mainstream media and small, ‘inoffensive’ community media. This merely ‘quantitative’ way of thinking often leads commentators to state that alternative media represent nothing more than insignificant experiments when compared with big and resourceful media conglomerates (Gumucio Dagron, 2007). Instead, by using the ‘citizens’ media’ label, Rodriguez wants to stress that, first of all, we must explore the deep meaning that these media have for the people that adopt and use them. As findings from the L’Aquila case clearly illustrate, one of the main values of these media lay precisely in the ways through which they empowered citizens by allowing them to communicate their own narratives to counter the dominant ‘miracle framework’ of Italian mainstream media (in line with Chris Atton’s reflections on the role of journalists in radical media), rebuild their ties within a broken community and regain the public spaces shattered by the catastrophe.

The particular and unique scenario of the disaster, however, is also a serious limitation to the generalizability of the results obtained, especially if we take into account the specific socio-political context of Italy. The Italian media and political scenario, within which we witnessed the explosion of this grassroots phenomenon, presents in fact other anomalies that do not allow for simple comparison with other similar cases (for an in-depth examination of the Italian anomalous media scenario, see Menduni, 2008; Monteleone, 1999; Ortoleva, 2009; Padovani, 2004).

Nonetheless, we think that exploring the motivations behind the production of grassroots information in this particular context can help to shed light on the complex phenomenon of citizen journalism and on the multiple grassroots practices that ordinary citizens employ to tell their stories, share their views and communicate their ‘truths’ in a situation where conventional media do not answer the population’s need for balanced information.

Although we do not argue that power relations inside the Italian media system have been significantly transformed, we have to point out that – as the L’Aquila case clearly shows – digital technologies can provide citizens with powerful tools for the production of independent, alternative and more democratic information (Fenton, 2010). When mainstream coverage fails, citizens can turn into journalists and use online platforms in order to spread news from their point of view. The future consequences of these alterations in the media matrix are yet to be fully appreciated, and this article aims to contribute qualitative data to the ongoing discussion.