Posts under ‘Citizen Journalism — General’

Big, big news in journalism today: First, read this press release from Reuters about the launch of its Reuters Africa site. The mission: to cover Africa in detail and from all angles, to give a wider sense of the issues and their contexts, and to explore the individual countries and cultures. Reuters Africa will target […]

The Sunlight Foundation’s Congressional Web Site Investigation Project is under way: Though no law requires them to do so, members of Congress maintain official Web sites at taxpayer expense to provide their constituents and the general public with relevant information about their work in Washington on our behalf. Do these Web sites cut through the […]

(On Saturday, Feb. 24, at the Beyond Broadcast conference in Cambridge, Mass., I’m helping to put together a workshop about the future of public-access television — the channels on local cable systems that carry locally generated programming, generally by non-professionals. Jason Crow, access coordinator at Cambridge Community Television, is co-leader of the workshop. I think […]

Rebecca Dube’s advice to readers who comment on the Toronto Globe & Mail includes: 1. Understand that an online discussion is not a free-for-all. Editors like me moderate online discussions for reasons of space, time and basic human decency. This will be difficult for some folks, unfortunately. (Disclosure: Dube’s husband, Jon, is a member of […]

Lost Remote: AP jumps into citizen journalism with NowPublic deal. In effect, with AP’s broad distribution, this is the biggest development so far in the short history of citizen journalism, although Reuter’s recent citizen journalism deal with Yahoo’s You Witness News is a close second. This will be worth watching closely. A key question, plainly, […]

Over the weekend, I attended a day-long workshop in Santa Barbara, California, where several dozen people got together to discuss what organizers called “Newspaper 2.0” — the next version of a venerable, and valuable, part of the traditional media ecosystem. The gathering’s subtext was the rapid decline of the main local daily newspaper. That reality […]

SF Chronicle: Tonight at 11, news by neighbors / Santa Rosa TV station fires news staff, to ask local folks to provide programming. Spendlove is loath to dub what’s coming next to Channel 50 as “citizen journalism,” the industry buzz term that is journalism’s equivalent of user-generated content online. Broadly defined, citizen journalism means tapping […]

Jan Schaffer and colleagues at J-Lab have produced a terrific study of the citizen-media movement. You can find “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?” on the Knight Foundation’s new Knight Citizen News Network site, which will officially launch soon.

The BBC reports that a patient in Russian hospital has captured chilling images of gagged babies with a camera phone. Quite rightly, the pictures are creating a huge, angry stir around the world. And once again, we’re seeing the power of the citizen journalist to force things into the open that institutions don’t want to […]

Tish Grier notes an intriguing call for citizen-journalism specialists: Orato (which bears the tagline: “True Stories from Real People” put out a call earlier this month for “sex trade workers to help us cover the Pickton trial,” because, according to Orato’s editor-in-chief Paul Sullivan, they wanted “somebody who may have lived the story in some […]