34 - Newspaper Research Journal • Vol. 31, No. 2 • Spring 2010 The migration of media to the Internet and the deep recession that started in 2008 has had an exponential impact on the traditional daily newspaper industry. Although readers appear to be making the slow transition to digital “newspapers,” 1 advertising lineage is not. 2 The result has been the disappear- ance of public newspaper companies such as Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company, the fling for bankruptcy by other newspaper companies and a continuing decline in newsroom personnel. 3 As a result of these two forces, observers in 2009 expressed concerns about the survival of newspapers. 4 But if major players like Knight Ridder and Tri- bune make the biggest business-page headlines, other observers speculate on who will provide the community information needed by citizens of individual communities. Some academics and industry analysts have suggested that online citizen journalism might evolve and develop to the point of compensating for de- Citizen Journalism Web Sites Complement Newspapers by Stephen Lacy, Margaret Duffy, Daniel Riffe, Esther Thorson and Ken Fleming A content analysis of 86 citizen blog sites, 53 citizen news sites and 63 daily newspaper sites indicated that citizen journalism sites, including both news and blog sites, differed significantly from newspaper sites. __________________________________________ Lacy is a professor in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. Riffe is the Richard Cole Eminent Professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Duffy is an associate professor, Thorson is a professor and Fleming is the director of the Center for Advanced Social Research. They are in the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. Funding for this research was provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.