Results matching “every citizen i”

Demotix, a website that tries to link citizen reporters with mainstream media and their "professional" equivalents, was launched yesterday, reports the European Journalism Centre. The site will allow mainstream news outlets to buy content like video clips and images created by both professional and amateur worldwide correspondents.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announces its third annual Knight News Challenge, a contest that will grant up to US$5 million for ideas that transform local community news with the help of digital tools like social media, Web 2.0 or multimedia content. A new "incubator" site, the News Challenge Garage, was created in order to offer online criticism and advice for applicants.

Since 2004, the number of new, "citizen-generated" media and reporters at the US political conventions has significantly increased. It has become more difficult to differentiate between independent bloggers and traditional ones as traditional media is adopting a "multi-platform" method, according to Media Shift's Mark Glaser.

Reuters announces that it is spreading out its mobile journalism to include coverage of the US political conventions, so that the event is captured from "the ground up" and through "unique perspectives" reports Journalism.co.uk.

Citizen journalism sites like the Huffington Post's Off The Bus may be in competition as the global user-generated content site Allvoices.com announces the "Excellence in Citizen Media Initiative", a citizen journalism project running until February that will pay US$1,000 for articles that gather 100,000 page views over six months and US$100,000 for those that gather a million page views.

People had stories to tell, but there was no place for them to tell them," says the site's founder Amra Tareen.  "I really wanted to create a discussion around current news and events, a social networking community where anyone could report from anywhere in the world."

Allvoices.com will refrain from promoting political ideas itself and any of the opinions that show up on the site will "emerge organically", according to Portfolio.com.

Tareen mentions that once the website is "better" established the project may be re-launched.

Source: Portfolio.com

In a memo to his staff Mike Leary, Philadelphia Inquirer's managing editor, announced that the paper would now publish "signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews" online only after they have been published in print, but that the paper wouldn't stop publishing immediate breaking news online.

Bloggers may be the ones who have to adapt the most to the new policy, since they may work on content that may "end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first", according to the memo.

"What's long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print)," said Steve Outing in his blog, after calling the new policy "backward".

In his BuzzMachine blog, Jeff Jarvis criticized the editor's memo, saying that "even the slowest" in the "dying" newspaper industry would not do something like this.

"They know that the Internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future," said Jarvis.

On the other hand, citizen journalist Bill Dennis said, "By offering for free what their would-be competitors would have to offer for a fee, newspapers' free Web sites are an anti-competitive act."

Source: Poynter Romenesko, BuzzMachine, SteveOuting.com

When a session of Congress adjourns, so do C-Span broadcasts. C-Span cameras, which deliver live broadcasts of the proceedings of the US Senate and House of Representatives, are controlled by members of Congress, so when "Pelosi just turned out the lights," as John Culberson wrote on Twitter Friday, the cameras went off - but recording didn't stop.

Culberson used his cellphone to record video of discussions that continued after the adjournment, and later posed this video to his Qik site. One 12-minute video Culberson posted has received more than 22,000 views.

The House adjourned Friday for their five-week summer recess, but dozens of  Republicans chose to stay on the House floor to discuss energy legislation. Culberson, a Texas Republican, who reqularly updates both Twitter and Qik, "acted as a citizen journalist covering the proceedings, albeit one with clear partisan intentions," reported The New York Times.

Culberson used his Nokia 95 cellphone to record the discussions - described by another congressman as a "pep rally" - from a hallway (since House rules prohibit private cameras on the House floor).

"Mr. Culberson's online communications showed how new media tools like Twitter can supplement professional reporting," reported NYT. "As the Republicans departed the House chambers, a C-Span host explained the camera restrictions and said, 'We don't have a lot to show you.' So, in the absence of professional video, the cable channel showed one of Mr. Culberson's videos."

Source: The New York Times

Phil Bronstein, former Editor and current Editor at Large of the San Francisco Chronicle, said yesterday on Beet.TV that the integration of citizen journalism into mainstream media has not yet happened on a large scale.

During a discussion panel on Beet.TV about the issue, Charles Tillinghast, president and publisher of msnbc.com agreed with Bronstein that the integration of citizen journalism into mainstream media is yet to happen.

For the full debate on the issue click on the link below and watch the video clip.

Source: Beet.TV

Nicolas Kristof, of the New York Times, recently posted in his On the Ground blog, "Here at The New York Times, we still have all of our foreign bureaus -- partly because our strategy is to compete for readers who seek international news and analysis -- but most newspapers and TV networks have been pulling back. Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks."

Demotix, a new citizen journalism site, has been launched to fill the gap created when the vast majority of news outlets rely on press releases and wire services.

The site, somewhat uniquely, is trying to position itself as an intermediary for photojournalists, a source bank where media outlets can select images, buy them (for between $80-$1,600) and the site splits the revenue from the photo with the citizen photographer who uploaded it.

Source: On the Ground, New York Times blog

British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) is going to work with social media provider Pluck on embedding social media tools across the company's digital properties. Sky intends to boost audience interactivity by incorporating social networking features.

"With over 1 billion monthly page impressions and many millions of unique visitors, the Sky portal needed a social media platform that could support the high-volume needs of our growing network," said Andy Jonesco, Managing Director of BSkyB, the Online Business Unit.

Sky News will be the first of Sky properties to launch such tools, including blogs, discussion boards user comments and a citizen journalism section. Other Sky properties such as Sky.com, Sky Entertainment and Sky Motoring would follow suite, reported Market Watch.

Users will be able to use a single profile to access the various Sky websites, allowing for better integration.

Source: MarketWatch

A seminar organized by the Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication showed that while there is a trend towards citizen journalism, it shouldn't be "confused for a platform to write anything and everything", reported ExpressIndia.com.

News is too commercial today said Ujjwal Kumar Chaudhary, Dean of Symbiosis International University. Newspapers focus too much on advertisers and not enough on readers, whom he considers to be the "true audience".


Source: ExpressIndia.Com

It is known by now that the US newspaper industry is in a turbulent state, as print circulation decreases and ad revenue goes down. As newspapers downsize and more focus is put on Web-based news sources, the future of broadcast journalism may be in jeopardy, according to Variety magazine's Brian Lowry.

Broadcast media frequently use newspaper stories as their sources, sometimes not even crediting them, according to Lowry. But what they fail to realize at this stage is that what happens to the newspaper industry might have an impact on them; something that Lowry calls the "domino effect".  

"The thinness in assembling TV and radio news -- and the manner in which they use newspapers as de facto tip sheets and newsgathering surrogates -- has long been one of broadcasting's dirty little secrets," he said.

In today's changing world, news sources do not only include newspaper reporters but also bloggers, websites and citizen journalists.

"Although a few Web-based enterprises have begun to invest in original reporting, most are satisfied to engage in opinion and let conventional news outfits do the heavy lifting," he said.

Broadcast media is seeing declining audience figures and has had to come up with money-saving solutions. One way to do that has been to use citizen journalists, who will be paid a given fee for their contribution.

"Stations will survive, but the mind boggles at the sources from which they'll derive news as the dominos topple. In-depth and investigative reporting are already dwindling, creating an information stream that's often a mile wide and an inch deep," Lowry said.

Source: Variety

Local newspapers might benefit more from having healthy relationships with citizen journalists and bloggers, instead of seeing them as cheaper sources, according to Guardian.co.uk's Dave Hill.

 "Good local media are important to the neighbourhoods they serve and could be great innovators, showing the way forward for journalism. In an age of rapid change in every corner of Britain they have the potential to tell grassroots stories that are not only significant in their own right but may have wider implications that national counterparts are unlikely to find or tell so well," he wrote.

He condemns the way that local British papers (namely London's Hackney Gazette) use bloggers' material to write up some articles. He mentioned that newspapers like the Gazette are allowed to refrain from mentioning the source of material (which may be a blog) but that blogs may not be "worthy of this courtesy."

Source: Guardian.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service

Non-professional photography gets a boost, as the motto "right place, right time" becomes the guideline. Guardian.co.uk blogger Ravi Somaiya has shown that it doesn't take much to snap photos of celebrities, relating back to the Getty Images-Flickr deal that might turn the everyday person into a photo source for publications.

"Because the imagery is not shot for commercial services, there is more authenticity. Advertisers are looking for authenticity," said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and chief executive of Getty Images.

"Citizen journalism" such as including yourself alongside a celebrity may "work" better because it shows interaction, said Rob Bennet, a New York Times photographer and Photojournalism professor at Columbia University.

"You need good information or a good sense of where celebrities are going to be. Situations develop quickly so you have to be able to use your camera to be up and firing very fast. A certain tactfulness can go a long way, coupled with a willingness to take calculated risks. You're also going to have a lot more luck outdoors in the daytime than indoors," said Bennett.

Although the economic explosion that lead to the wide-spread availability of cameras gave a more "authentic" feel to photographs, editors may have to put more effort into verifying that a photo wasn't taken under illegal circumstances, such as a breech of privacy.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

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A new platform is now available for citizen journalists and traditional journalists alike to document their reporting on a wide range of news, be it science, politics or entertainment. Allvoices, an online world-wide community of user-generated news content, announced that it is now fully operatinal, following a beta release in April last year.

Citizen media like text, images and video is blended with content from news outlets to offer an innovative integrated news resource. First-hand reporting, with its "raw", "unedited" edge is counter-balanced by "finer-wrought", "editorially controlled" stories written by professional journalists, reported Social Media Portal.

Users can contribute postings that are then sorted by location, category and tine and put into context through automated cross-referencing. Stories can be sent through mobile technology like SMS or MMS and through the Web.

 "Allvoices is using technology to leverage a single voice. Contributed content is validated by the community, traditional media and other online sources," said Allvoices CEO Amra Tareen. "We believe our model of merging user-generated content and professional news sources into one community will create the first true people's media."

Source: Social Media Portal

The Associated Press (AP) has announced its Mobile News Network (MNN), a new native application for iPhone and iPod touch, is now available for free download from the Apple App Store.

The Mobile News Network, based on the previous web incarnation, "automatically detects location, allows readers to browse full stories while out of network reception, and provides navigation customization... viewers [can] save stories of interest and flip through photos and videos without delay," according to an AP release.

In an April interview, AP VP and Director of strategy Jim Kennedy told the Weblog: "There are new points of entry for the young consumer, sometimes they're based on content, in some cases they're based on device."

AP is trying to latch on to the iPhone's incredible success in the US. Speaking of delivering local news on mobiles, "Our hope is that it becomes a standard button on the US-distributed iPhones," he said.

The application also seems to embrace the rise of citizen journalism. MNN has a "Send Report" option, allowing users to report first-hand accounts and send photographs directly to AP editors.

The AP release follows last week's launch of the International Herald Tribune's iPhone-optimized site.

Source: AP Press Release