Abstract/Summary

This book explores how the internet and social media have permanently altered the media landscape, enabling new actors to enter the marketplace, and changing the way that news is generated, published, and consumed. It examines the importance of citizen journalists, whose newsgathering and publication activities have made them crucial to public discourse and central actors in the communication revolution. Investigating how the internet and social media have enabled citizen journalism to flourish, and what this means for the traditional institutional press, the public sphere, and media freedom, the book demonstrates how communication and legal theory are applied in practice. It advances a concept of ‘media as a constitutional component’, which distinguishes media from non-media actors based on the functions they perform, rather than institutional status, and uses this to provide a conceptual framework that recognises modern newsgathering and publication methods. This interdisciplinary book analyses the legal challenges created across a range of topical issues, including online anonymity and pseudonymity, defamation, privacy and public interest, contempt of court and press regulation.