Participatory media is media where the audience can play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating content.

Citizen / Participatory journalism, citizen media and democratic media are related principles.

Participatory media includes community media, blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking,

music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, participatory video projects and videoblogs.

All together they can be described as "e-services, which involve end-users as active participants in the value creation process".

However, "active [...] uses of media are not exclusive to our times".

"In the history of mediated communication we can find many variations of participatory practices.

For instance, the initial phase of the radio knew many examples of non-professional broadcasters".

Marshall MacLuhan discussed the participatory potential of media already in the 1970s but in the era of digital and social media,

the theory of participatory culture becomes even more acute as the borders between audiences and media producers are blurring.

journalism "as an alternative and activist form of news gathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions,

often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives

and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism"