Convergence culture serves both as a mechanism to increase revenue and further the agenda of industry, while at the same time enables people—in terms of their identities as producers and consumers, professionals as well as amateurs—to enact some kind of agency regarding the omnipresent messages and commodities of this industry. Convergence culture-based participatory news sites tend to emerge from institutions and organizations with a strong public service agenda or a strong connection to clearly defined local or interest communities, or are set up by commercial news organizations which see a thorough embrace of participatory journalism models as a clear competitive advantage in a shrinking market for journalistic work. Examples of such sites may include NowPublic, which acts as a platform for the aggregation and discussion of international news reports, the hub of Backfence communities in the United States serving as a DIY (“Do-It-Yourself”) platform of local news, the British BBC Action Network, where local communities are encouraged to submit and discuss information of public interest under the banner—within the brand—of the nation's public broadcaster, or the Dutch site Headlines, sponsored by public broadcast news organization NOS, inviting especially younger people to contribute to the news by uploading their own written, audio or video reports. In each instance a professional media organization (top-down) partners with or deliberately taps into the emerging participatory media culture online (bottom-up) in order to produce some kind of co-creative, commons-based news platform.
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