I looked up “Citizen Journalist” in Wikipedia, figuring I’d find something I could trust to be accurate to cite for this post, but to my surprise the article came up short. When I scrolled down to history, I found only passing mention of what the article’s author deemed to be a clarification of the First Amendment: “‘freedom of the press’ referred quite literally to the freedom to publish using a printing press, rather than the freedom of organized entities engaged in the publishing business.” For the most part, the history of citizen journalism in this article began with the advent of the blog.
What disappointed and puzzled me was that I didn’t find the name “Thomas Paine” in the article, for as howstuffworks.com put it, “citizen journalism has been in existence at least since Thomas Paine wrote self-published pamphlets like Common Sense that stoked the fires of independence.”
In this sense, “blogging” has been a part of America’s history of liberalism since before the Revolution, except then the medium was print on paper, not digital on the web. Responsible blogging carries on the historic tradition of citizen journalism.
Liberal Buzz 