Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism has been described as individuals "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information."

In their report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis write that "the intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires." [1]

Citizen Journalism is slowly being looked upon as a form of rightful democratic ways of giving honest news, articles, etc, directly by citizens of the world from anywhere. [2]

Kent Bye's "Echo Chamber Project" is attempting a new type of citizen journalism: an "open source, investigative documentary about the how the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq." By "open source," Bye means that he is sharing both the transcripts and footage from his documentary with anyone who wants to use it or remix it with other footage as they see fit. He is also trying to "develop more sophisticated techniques for citizen journalism," including new software tools that will enable other collaborative efforts. A preliminary video of the Echo Chamber Project is available on OurMedia.org, a non-profit initiative that provides free storage space and bandwidth to anyone with videos, audio files, text files, or software that they'd like to share with the world. [3]

NowPublic lets anyone publish their own work, collectively decide what appears on the homepage and upload photographs, video or sound recordings that relate to news stories. The site is just under 1 year old but with several thousand contributors is already a rival to conventional media in terms of reporting capacity.

Filling The Local News Gap

"It seems strange, in our day of multiple 24-7 news channels, the always-on Internet, and RSS to say that we don’t have enough news," writes Lisa Williams. "But in most cities and towns that happen to be more than 500 feet outside a major media market, the local people suffer more from media anorexia than information overload. It’s hard to find good information about the place where you live." Williams describes her own experiences trying to fill the gap with H2Otown, her citizen journalism website for Watertown, Massachusetts. Citizen journalism, she writes, takes real work and a different funding model than traditional newspapers: "It seemed to me that a successful newsblog might have a business model that looked more like public radio – periodic pledge drives and underwriters – than the subscription/advertising model that many news outlets were dragging into the online world. To make it work, they’d have to get over something I suspected they and many journalists had: hesitation about being directly involved with handling the money." [4]

Other sites, like The Third Report offer Citizen Journalists in any city or town in the world a platform to submit local news and opinions.

• List of local news sites

Case studies

• The Los Angeles Times Wikitorial
• NewAssignment.net

Books

• Dan Gillmor, "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People", O'Reilly, July 2004. ISBN 0-596-00733-7 (The whole book can be downloaded from from this link).

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Journalism
• OhmyNews
• The Third Report ThirdReport.com
• List of citizen journalism websites
• List of local news sites
• Tools for citizen journalism

External links

• Citizen journalism" in the Wikipedia.
• Citizen Journalism Sites" in the Yahoo! Directory.
• "iChagrin.com Local News: Written By You and Your Neighbors. True Citizen Journalism serving the Chagrin Falls Ohio, and South Russell Ohio communities"
• "Society of Professional Journalists Citizens Journalism Accademy"
• Matt Welch, "Salon's Coverage Demands Respect for Online Journalism," Online Journalism Review, April 30, 1998, and originally posted here.
• Mark Glaser, The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen Media Sites Want You (To Write)" Online Jornalism Review, Nov. 17 2004.
• Mark Glaser, "How to succeed as a citizen media editor", Online Journalism Review, March 22, 2005.
• Steve Outing, "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism: A resource guide to help you figure out how to put this industry trend to work for you and your newsroom", Poynter Online, June 13, 2005.
• Gheminga, "The first Italian citizen journalism project", Citizen Journalism Project, July 20, 2005.
• Jay DeFoore, "'The State' (Columbia, S.C.) Launches Community Blog, Citizen Journalism Push", Editor & Publisher, September 1, 2005.
• Sheena MacLean, "Care required in real-time news", The Australian, September 15, 2005.
• Lisa Williams, "If I Didn't Build it, They Wouldn't Come: Citizen Journalism is Discovered (Alive) in Watertown, MA", Press Think, November 14, 2005.
• Dan Gillmor, "From Dan: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community", Bayosphere, January 24, 2006.
• "Citizen journalism – NUJ launches Code", press release, National Union of Journalists (UK & Eire), January 24, 2006.
• Dan Froomkin, "A Compelling Story," White House Watch Blog/Washington Post, March 31, 2006.
• Jay Rosen, "Murray Waas is Our Woodward Now," Press Watch, April 9, 2006.
• Howard Kurtz, "Reporters in Glass Houses," Washington Post, April 16, 2006.
• Greg Sargent, "The Blog Rage Cannard," The American Prospect, May 4, 2006.
• Jim Boyd, "Editorial Pages: Why Courage is Hard to Find," Nieman Reports, Spring 2006.
• Murray Waas, A Reporter's Bias," Huffington Post, May 26, 2006.
• Jay Rosen, ""Migration Point for the Press Tribe," Press Think, June 26, 2008.
• Lauren Cowen, "Following the Heard: How Jay Allison Went Searching for Sound and Inspired a Radio Revolution",DemocraticVistasProfiles:Essays in the Arts and Democracy, 2006.
• Mayrav Saar, "Reporting's mass appeal: Amateurs working as journalists are giving rise to a new wave of 'citizen newspapers'", Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2006.
• Allison Orr, "Why the online revolution is just another line", Sydney Morning Herald, January 1, 2007.
• Douglas McGill, "What I've Learned Teaching Citizen Journalists", The McGill Report, November 2, 2007.
• Noam Cohen, "Journalism in the Hands of the Neighborhood," New York Times, March 10, 2008.
• Jay Rosen, "A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism," Press Watch, July 14, 2008.
• Katharine Seeyle, "Citizen Journalism Gains a Voice in the Campaign," New York Times, July 25, 2008.
• Jay Rosen, "If Bloggers Had No Ethics, Blogging Would Have Failed. But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue," Press Think, Sept. 18, 2008.
• Eric Alterman & Danielle Ivovy, "Blogosphere to Mainstream Media: Get Off the Bush," Center for American Progress, May 8, 2009.
• Richard Peerez-Pena, "A.P. to Deliver Non-Profits' Journalism," New York Times, June 13, 2009.
• John Hartigan, "The Future of Journalism", Address to the National Press Club, Canberra, Wednesday July 1, 2009. (Hartigan is the Chairman and Chief Executive of News Limited, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.)
• Ryan Chuttum, "Reuters is Excellent in Digging Up Insurer's Tactics," Columbia Journalism Review, March 17, 2010
• JournalismDegree.org
• Blottr (http://www.blottr.com) is a user-generated news service with a head office in London, created to empower anyone to break and make the news, and to collaborate with others to deliver stories.