CITIZEN JOURNALISM AND THE TRANSMUTATION OF NEWS FRAMING IN THE DIGITAL AGE: EXPERIMENTING WITH GISTLOVER REPORTAGE FROM 2023 TO 2025

ABSTRACT The study is on Citizen Journalism and the Transmutation of News Framing in the Digital Age: Experimenting with Gistlover Reportage from 2023 to 2025. Gistlover, provides a unique context for analysing the interplay between news framing and social media interference. Against this, the study determined the frequency of social media usage among residents of Abuja metropolis, analysed the extent to which social media influences public perception of news reported by Gistlover as well as examined the dominant framing strategies used by Gistlover news blog in reporting political and entertainment content. Framing and Agenda Setting Theory was adopted for the study. The research work use mixed research design containing both quantitative and qualitative method. The closed ended questionnaire was used for the quantitative while KII was used for the qualitative. A sample size of 384 was used to collect data from the questionnaire while 3 key informants were interviewed. Frequency and percentage table were used to analyzed the quantitative data while the qualitative was analyzed using thematic content analysis. Findings shows that social media use is widespread among respondents in Abuja metropolis, with most being active on at least one platform. Facebook emerged as the main source of news, followed by TikTok and Twitter/X. Findings showed that social media strongly shapes public perception of news reported by Gistlover through sensational and entertainment-driven framing, which attracts attention but sometimes affects credibility. Thus, the study recommended that Gistlober blog should balance entertainment-oriented framing with factual accuracy and ethical standards to build long-term credibility.