Who writes the story matters: Transgender identity through the lens of citizen journalism

The present contribution investigates the discursive representation of transgender people in two citizen journalism platforms, Global Voices and the Digital Journal, setting them against the representation gleaned from British quality and popular newspapers (The Guardian; The Daily Telegraph; The Daily Mirror; The Daily Mail). The aim is to assess whether and to what extent negative stereotypes concerning transgender people that have been previously observed in traditional news media are reproduced, contested or overturned in grassroots journalism. The methodological framework adopted is that of corpus-based discourse analysis, a quantitative and qualitative approach to text analysis aiming to reduce researcher’s bias in the search for meaningful regularities in the discourse under study.