Citizen journalism in Africa: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been a significant change in how news is reported and shared due to technological advancements and the popularity of social media platforms. This shift has enabled citizen journalism, which has strongly influenced media systems and public discourses. The purpose of this study is to discover the main themes, research paradigms and trends regarding citizen journalism in Africa. Data was drawn from Taylor & Francis, Google Scholar, Sage Publication and Emerald Insight databases. The researchers applied a systematic literature review method to the dataset, and after applying the protocol and the analysis model, a corpus of 27 articles was obtained in June 2023, covering a decade from 2013. The findings indicate that ethics in journalism, bureaucracy in journalistic reporting, objectivity in news reporting, professionalism in citizen journalism and social media are the main themes in citizen journalism discussed in the selected articles over the research period. The predominant research paradigm of the reviewed articles is qualitative. The review exposes various unexplored areas of citizen journalism in Africa and recommends further studies in the field.