Spotting Trends: The Eyewitness Becomes the Reporter
Posted August 15th, 2007 by admin
The recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis showed the extent to which citizen journalism has been empowered by social media. The news quickly spread on Twitter, photos were uploaded on Flickr and videos were posted on YouTube and the whole world could Digg them.
News organizations recognize the power of citizen journalism. Sites like CNN’s iReport, MSNBC’s First Person or BBC’s Talking Point call readers to submit their own content. The BBC even offers courses in photography and reporting. Even Yahoo came up with its own version called You Witness News.
A recent trend is citizen journalism sites where anyone can post news stories they find on the web and can also submit their original reporting. Here are a few:
NowPublic is probably the most prominent. The posts are twitted on the home page as they arrive. The site is mostly people re-sending news from news wire services, but every once in a while there is some original reporting by subscribers. The site claims little over 125,450 subscribers in 4095 cities.
Wikinews says it is trying to do for journalism what Wikipedia has done for Encyclopedias. It is up to you how you want to interpret that.
GroundReport.com is a citizen news portal that enables anyone to instantly publish articles, photography and video. A story gets pushed up by voting and a reporter needs to establish trust within the site. The frequency of posting is not great, but it does require original reporting to get published and all contributors earn a share of revenues based on traffic to their stories.
Orato.com is a site where both citizens and journalists contribute.
Another trend is news sites dedicated to specific towns and cities like Bostonist of Boston, Newton’s Garden City, and my personal favorite H2Otown of Watertown. If you want to see if your town has a site, visit the Knight Citizen News Network which has a nice map.
While the debate goes on whether citizen journalism is a good thing or not, the world keeps reporting and it has never been easier to get published. It has only been two years since I got a degree in journalism and I’m already wondering if it will be worth much in the future. Lucky for me I double majored!
