Citizen journalism is a public or participatory journalism or democratic journalism, and also is the act of non-professionals "playing an active role in the process of reporting, collecting, analyzing and disseminating information and news".

Citizen Journalism should not be confused with community journalism or civic journalism, which are practiced by professional journalists. Citizen Journalism is a form of citizen media as well as user generated content. Moreover,the idea of citizen journalism is that people without professionals skills can do the same job as professionals. Another important point is that citizen journalism can use the tools of modern technology and distribution all over the world. For example, they might write some important articles on the blog or in the online forum. Or they might snap a digital photo of some event in the city and also they can post it online. Or they might have some newsworthy video and also they can post it online, good example of this is YouTube. 

There are several types of citizen journalism in media: 1. Audience participation ( such users comments add to the news, news stories, personal blogs, videos or photos or local news written by residents of a community. 2. Independent news and websites information. 3. Other kind of "media" (mailing lists, email newsletter). and 4. Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast). New theorist in media Terry Flew argued that there are three main elements " critical to the rise of citizen journalism and citizen media": distributed content, open publishing and collaborative editing.

According to Jay Rosen, Citizen journalism " the people formerly known as the audience ," who "were the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened  in isolation from one another-and who today are not in a situation like that. The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, more able, less predictable. Doing a citizen journalism right means crafting a crew of correspondents who are typically excluded from or misrepresented by local television news: low-income women, minorities and youth- the very demographic and lifestyle groups who have little access to the media and that advertisers don't want "says Robert Huesca, an associate professor of communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Public Journalism is now being explored via new media such as the use of mobile phones. Mobile phones have the transform and places the power of reporting in the hands of the public.