Dr Peter Coe’s monograph, Media Freedom in the Age of Citizen Journalism, has been published by Edward Elgar.

In this book, Peter interrogates how the internet and social media have enabled citizen journalism to flourish, and what this means for the traditional institutional press, the public sphere, media freedom, and press regulation. He argues that the law’s treatment of media freedom as a concept needs to be modernised, as citizen journalists are operating as media, but are not recognised as such. To facilitate this modernisation, he advances a new functional definition of the media that distinguishes media from non-media actors, and which provides a conceptual framework that recognises twenty-first century methods of newsgathering and publication. In doing so, he deals with some of the legal challenges this creates, including those arising from anonymous and pseudonymous speech, contempt of court, defamation, and how voluntary self-regulatory press regulation might be ‘reimagined’ to attract this new breed of journalist.

Peter’s book has already been the subject of significant critical acclaim from world-leading scholars from the UK, US, Australia, and Europe. More details on the book, including how to order it, can be found following this link.