While it is relatively easy to find examples of citizen journalism and examples of non-citizen journalism, unambiguously defining the term itself is no trivial feat. On a linguistic level, we can understand it as some sort of sub-activity of “journalism,” which of course begs the question: what is journalism?

Here I turn to a well-known phrase of dubious origin: “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” Apart from being pithy and elegant, this phrase is also convenient in that it ties journalism to history, which nearly everyone studies in school. From our studies, we know two things in particular about history. First, that history strives first and foremost to be an objective and exhaustive retelling of events. We can see this same ideological vein run through journalism in the form of “journalistic integrity,” the idea that journalists have an ethical obligation to avoid both proper lies and lies of omission.

The second thing we know about history is that it is invariably doomed to fail in its goal of objectivism. There is always implicit bias, simply as an artifact of the fact that “history is written by the victors.” Journalism, too, suffers from bias. Even something as seemingly objective as a direct video recording can suffer from the bias created by the choices of the journalist holding the camera—what to point at, how far to zoom, the relative volume of the foreground and background audio and the like. This seemingly inconsequential point is actually very important for understanding the limitations of all journalism, including citizen journalism, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now that we have an understanding of journalism as informed by our understanding of history, we may begin to think meaningfully about what might distinguish one form of journalism from another. I posit that what distinguishes citizen journalism from the alternative, professional journalism, is not the means but rather the motivation.

I base this proposition on two edge-case hypotheticals. First, imagine the case of a professional journalist who is on vacation in Hawaii when something “newsworthy” happens. (Perhaps a whale washes up on the beach.) The journalist does what any person might do under the circumstances and records the event on her smartphone. Lacking any better means of immediately communicating the information, the journalist uploads the video to Facebook, where it is shared and enters the online news arena.

And the second hypothetical: imagine a community college student who is unhappy with some policy or procedure of his school. Feeling that it is a matter of some import, he creates a website and posts videos wherein he sits at a desk and reads news, in a manner similar to that of professional news channels.

In the first case, does the fact that the woman gets a paycheck from a news firm change the fact that her actions were fundamentally indistinguishable from a clear-cut case of citizen journalism? And in the second, does the man’s adoption of the techniques of professional journalism do the same? In both cases, I would argue that they do not. What makes both of these actions citizen journalism is that the motivation of each is not a feeling of personal obligation, that “I have, based on my occupation, an ethical obligation to tell this story,” but rather a feeling of necessity, that “This story must be told by someone, and the fact that I must be the one to tell it is not of any great relevance.” In essence, a professional journalist reports the news because they feel they must, while a citizen journalist reports the news because they feel they want to.

Perhaps my favorite example of citizen journalism is SCOTUSblog, a legal blog that provides in-depth coverage of the Supreme Court. It has become very popular and now has a dedicated court reporter, but the vast majority of content is created by law students, lawyers and law professors. This is a textbook case of citizen journalism, because while each of these groups certainly has an intense interest in the Supreme Court, none of them have any ethical obligation to report on its activities to the world. They spend time creating quality content for the blog because they are fascinated by the court and want to share that fascination with the rest of the world. It is because of their desires, not their professional duties that such a source exists.