Raising Our Game: Effects of Citizen Journalism on Twitter for Professional Identity and Working Practices of British Sport Journalists

This article presents a study that examined what citizen journalism on Twitter has meant for the professional identity and working practices of British sport journalists, using data from a series of in-depth, semistructured interviews. Sport journalists recognized the need to strive for higher professional standards to ensure that their output is of greater cultural significance than that of citizen journalists. Trust—achieved through the ideologies of truth, reliability, and insight—was seen as essential to achieving this distinction. The democratization of breaking news has meant that red-top tabloid and 24-hr rolling news environments must reinvent themselves by making greater use of other journalistic practices including investigative reporting.