The words ‘citizen’, ‘journalist’ and ‘journalism’ are unarguably loaded for the current authors and this is likely to be the case among other researchers, journalism practitioners, and the journalism-consuming public. For that reason this article sets out to reduce some of the naturalisation of the terms and make some of that ‘loading’ more visible and explicit. From the interplay between our qualitative analysis of our combined 10 years’ wide-ranging reading and annotation of available public sources about citizen journalism (gathered through library, offline media, and online research, as well as a thorough scholarly database search in June and July 2007 to identity the limited number of—academic sources), plus our several decades’ work in the journalism establishment which also ground our interpretive perspective, we provide a summary ‘snapshot’ of public voices and viewpoints on the topic. Our deconstruction of this material suggests to us that there are patterns in the ongoing hegemonic struggle between those who once considered themselves among the privilege ‘owners’ of the title ‘journalist’, publishers of ‘journalism’, and those who now considered themselves ‘journalists’ and producers of ‘journalism’ but who live and work outside the traditional corporate structures of media production. The purpose of this article is to bring into the public discussion some consideration of the key discursive themes in this debate, and ask what might be the effects of such a struggle upon those media consumers who do not themselves enter the debate. As is usual in reporting qualitative discourse analysis (Silverman, 2004), this article does not attempt to list every source we have read, nor claim objectivity, but gives an overall map, as it were, of the key features we have identified in the terrain of public debate from our particular interpretive position as, ourselves, journalists, journalism educations, journalism researchers, and sometimes also online ‘citizens’.