The term “citizen journalism” is applied to such a wide variety of media creation – from one moment’s configuration of headlines, ranked by user recommendation, on Digg’s front page, to user weblogs on news organization sites (whose entries may not pass anyone’s standard of news judgment) to videos of police brutality on YouTube, among many other efforts. We focus here, as noted, on the situations in which members of the audience are engaging with the professionals to create more journalism.

Any sane approach to engaging the community surrounding a news organization must begin with the fact that think about using their spare time to become part of the journalism process. This explains why much of the criticism of news sites that have successfully converted a pool of news consumers into participants in an online community have been so brutal.⁴ Nicholas Lemann dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, writing in the New Yorker, says:

“Citizen journalists bear a heavy theoretical load. They ought to be fanning out like a great army, covering not just what professional journalists cover, as well or better, but also much that they ignore. Great citizen journalism is like the imagined Northwest Passage—it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can learn about public life without the mediation of professionals. But when one reads it, after having been exposed to the buildup, it is nearly impossible not to think, "This is what all the fuss is about?”

Lemann asserts that it’s difficult to criticize citizen journalism “because many of the truest believers are very good at making life unpleasant for doubters, through relentless sneering.” Yet it’s difficult not to hear reciprocal sneers as others characterize the contributions of non-journalists as “swapping recipes and posting photos of their dog.”

A strategy for wrapping an online community around the website of a news organization won’t succeed if it starts out with wrongheaded notions (people will flock to cover zoning meetings!) or prejudices (people have nothing to say worth hearing).

The good news is that an examination of what’s working in the online communities fostered by news organizations is also a recipe for détente between the citizen journalists and the journalist citizens. Sometimes the effort is as simple as giving people a place to post their own local information; sometimes it goes considerably deeper.

Broadly speaking, the most successful sites are most effective at translating the lived experience of their community onto the web. But only a tiny fraction of lived experience is news. One way of looking at the process of wrapping an online community around a news organization is that it’s an effort to dramatically broaden the range of lived experience represented by the news organization’s output – output that now includes content supplied by nonjournalists.

In fact, expanding the range of lived experience may be an effective response to some of the challenges to news organizations created by the demographic shifts of the past 50 years. In essence, as America became more prosperous, Americans moved away from news centers into suburbs. This is reflected by the distribution of independent local blogs or “placeblogs,” which are much more likely to appear in suburbs that share a border with a major metropolitan area than they are in those metro areas or in rural areas.

The rise of placeblogs in these communities may be driven by economic factors – the nearby regional daily attracts most of the advertisers, but offers little coverage, while the local weekly may have difficulty competing for advertisers with the larger daily, and as a result has fewer resources to cover the community with. Many of these suburbs, dubbed “First Suburbs” by Robert Puentes and David Warren of the Brookings Institution⁵, exist in a kind of “news shadow” – with a much lower level of service from the local paper than they had decades ago, and intermittent service from the regional daily. Add free tools to this environment and placeblogs spring up.

(For a fullsize version of this feature matrix, click here.)

Items about lived experience form the backbone of the most popular placeblogs, and are the crystallization point for the neighbor-to-neighbor interactions that they thrive on. But that lived experience is, on occasion, news, and this is reflected in items where nonjournalists use placeblogs to forward information to the rest of the community that they witnessed or know about. This can take the form of spot news – documenting an accident or fire the person witnessed; analysis and “inside baseball” provided by local political junkies; or coverage of meetings, events, and businesses the local paper does not routinely cover.

In essence, the news organizations profiled here are attempting to combine the “lived experience,” spot news, and deep local expertise that successful placeblogs display, and combine that with their traditional strengths: access to political figures, a paid staff of professional journalists, photojournalists, and reach into segments of the populace for whom the web isn’t a primary way of getting information.

When we mapped the basic features of the online community sites developed by news organizations, it became clear that there were four common approaches to creating a new online community:

1. User generated content (UGC). This is the most common approach. The news organization’s website is revamped (or a new, standalone website is established) that allows participants to post “stories,” photos, and event listings. Individual users don’t have their own unique presence on the site but are contributing content to the site bearing the news organization’s brand.
2. Blog hub: Like the UGC strategy, participants are able to submit stories, photos, and event listings, but they get their own weblog with a unique URL on the site that displays all the material posted by that participant. Often the weblogs have comments, and this allows participants to spark conversation with other visitors and establish an ongoing presence, in a sense, a personal brand within the news organization’s website.
3. Community hub: These sites emphasize social networking. Generally, they allow many of the same things that the UGC and blog hub sites do, but the sharing of content is treated as a means to an end, namely, connecting participants to each other. These sites have much more highly developed user profiles, personal pages that a participant can use to tell other participants about themselves and their interests, and some allow the ad-hoc creation of invite-only groups with shared interests and “friend lists” for individual participants composed of links to other users’ profile pages who have accepted invitations to be on a participant’s friend list.
4. Newsroom transparency: While UGC, blog hubs, and community hubs can be seen as part of a continuum, the newspaper transparency strategy is actually quite different. Organizations like the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, take a different route to breaking down the barriers between newspeople and the communities they cover. At the Spokesman, editorial meetings are both open to the public, and webcast over the internet.

One Bad Idea: Building a community, keeping the walls

Sites with all the latest features, a reasonable degree of user-friendliness, and significant traffic can and do fail to gain traction. Two hallmarks of these sites that haven’t caught on yet:

• They allow user content but the staff of the newspaper ignores it and never interacts with the visitors who have become participants.
• They allow user content but users have to conform to some version of existing journalistic norms.

These two mistakes are basically the same: they represent the desire to build a community without having to make any changes in philosophy or work practice on the part of people at the news organization.⁶ In the first scenario, some number of participants start displaying antisocial behavior – such as name-calling, demeaning other participants. The initiative does nothing to change the daily lives of newsroom staffers and does nothing to increase the level of interaction between staffers and readers – because reporters and editors don’t use it. Soon the small group of hostile users drives off all other participants who find the online community unfriendly and boring as the same arguments are recycled. In the second scenario, only a few people feel that they fit the bill for this new journalistic endeavor, and the result is anemic and produced so inconsistently that few readers begin to look forward to the next installment.