Exploring participatory video journalism in the classroom and the community

Abstract

This article describes a journalism education project in which television students worked collaboratively with teenagers in a community media club to make short videos about issues that directly affected the teenagers. An analysis of this project using action research methods draws on debates around media and community participation from several theoretical “moments”. These include current debates on online citizen media and participation, “civic media” and public news agendas from the public journalism movement originating in the nineties in America, and much older debates on participatory video production from the 1960s. The author set out how various theoretical concepts from these debates are manifest practically in the project. A key concept is the difference in the roles that the “professional” journalism students and the amateur teenagers adopt in shaping the story.