In country after country, people are trying fascinating experiments in citizen media. One of the pleasures of visiting other places is learning about some of them.
At a conference where I spoke today in El Escorial, a town northwest of Madrid, I learned about Bottup, a citizen journalism site that, from the sound of it, is doing all the right things. The site, which runs on the open-source Joomla content management software, has a clean look and feel. I don’t know nearly enough Spanish to weigh the overall journalistic quality of the articles, but as founder Pau Llop explained things, there’s plenty to recommend it.
He described an editorial process that includes training for citizen journalists and serious work with the contributors and their articles. This is the kind of due diligence that will in the end make for better journalism.
Llop and his colleagues — and their contributors — have been doing this as a labor of love, so far. Site visits haven’t been huge, and revenues essentially nonexistent. (He joked today that he’s lost five kilos in the past few months.)
They want to pay their contributors, but will need to build a business. I hope they succeed. We need more of this kind of thing, everywhere.
I’m also impressed with the Periodismo Ciudadano site that is aggregating all kinds of citizen-media ideas and coverage for the Spanish-speaking world. Some great ideas there, though the tag cloud at the top is almost too big; it tends to obscure the other material more than it probably should.
Separately, Javier Pedreira, co-author of the extremely popular Spanish group blog Microsiervos, was at my talk today Here’s his blog posting about it.
on Jul 10th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
[…] Lo cuenta él mismo en el Center for Citizen Media -que dirige-, referencia universal del nuevo periodismo. Por cierto, que al ver su post la satisfacción ha sido doble al comprobar que también se refiere a los compañeros y amigos de Periodismociudadano.com, de los que dice: “I’m also impressed with the Periodismo Ciudadano site that is aggregating all kinds of citizen-media ideas and coverage for the Spanish-speaking world”. […]
on Jul 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Another interesting Spanish project is Feevy, at http://feevy.com/.
It’s a way to share blog posts between blogs — the software widget displays excerpts from your blogging friends on your own blog.
on Jul 11th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Thanx a lot for your advice. We’re chaging the design of the site so it’s the best moment to pay attention to critics. 😉
on Jul 16th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Materiales en línea del curso de Periodismo social, comunicación y nuevas tecnologías…
Actuando de una forma absolutamente consecuente con la parte del título del curso que habla de nuevas tecnologías Servimedia grabó y ha colgado en Internet todas las sesiones del mismo: Lunes 9 de julio de 2007: Retos de los medios……
on Jul 23rd, 2007 at 3:18 pm
[…] Center for Citizen Media: Citizen Media Development in Spain “He described an editorial process that includes training for citizen journalists and serious work with the contributors and their articles. This is the kind of due diligence that will in the end make for better journalism.” (tags: deltagande_journalistik dan_gillmor spanien bottup periodismo_ciudadano) […]
on Aug 3rd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
[…] Gillmor, que cuenta sus impresiones en Citizen Media Development in Spain; también me parece muy interesante su entrada de ayer Citizen Media: A Progress […]