Citizen Journalism and Ethical Considerations among University Students: A Case of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Kenya

Abstract

Citizen journalism and ethics is an evolving research area. This study focused on finding out citizen journalism and ethical considerations among university students, a case of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA). This research is an attempt to contribute to research on citizen journalism and ethics. The research was guided by social responsibility theory of the press premised on four ethical ideals: truth, accuracy, objectivity and balance. The ethical ideals of social responsibility theory provides a framework on how the media should operate with considerable measure of ethical obligations to society. The research used a descriptive design with both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The study’s population was CUEA Langata Campus students enrolled during the January 2018 semester. From this population, 258 participants across eight strata of CUEA faculties and institutes who practice citizen journalism were sampled for the study. In addition, 20 Facebook accounts were purposively sampled to provide qualitative evidence of the kind of contents published by citizen journalists studied. The findings revealed that most citizen journalists shared contents related to events, experiences and comments. The findings also confirmed that citizen journalism is participatory. Citizen journalism provides opportunity for the continuity of a story, developing news in a horizontally conversational way. Another key finding of the study was that the tenets of social responsibility theory were still relevant in citizen journalism practice. In view of these findings, the study recommends the drafting of guidelines based on the assumptions of social responsibility theory to guide citizen journalism practice.