The Chi-Town Daily News, a two-year-old nonprofit online newspaper, has been having success with its incorporation of citizen journalism in its news process, which highlights the potential benefits of citizen journalism for newsrooms with few resources.

A few months ago, construction workers had been injured in a building collapse, but the Daily News neither had a helicopter, nor a cops reporter, nor staff reporters to go to the scene.

Instead, they had a network of three dozen citizen journalists throughout the city, and thanks to Highrise, a software that lists their addresses and interests, the Daily News found a citizen journalist who lived near the building collapse and could cover the story.

The Daily News' experiment with citizen journalism began in March 2007, when they won a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant to build a local citizen journalism network that could be replicated in other U.S. cities.

The paper hired a community organizer, initially thinking it would get most of its contributors to sign up and local community events, through street-level interaction. But this didn't prove very effective.

So The Daily News recruited its citizen journalists online, through Craigslist bulletin boards and networking through Facebook and Myspace. Information about the Daily News' free monthly journalism skills workshops was posted on going.com and upcoming.org.

Up to this day, the paper has recruited 36 citizen journalists. The Daily News' CitJ network, still undergoing development, will eventually include at least one volunteer journalist in each of Chicago's 77 neighborhoods, who will be recruited and trained by the Daily News so that their articles will "meet traditional standards of accuracy, newsworthiness and fairness," said Geoff Dougherty, Editor of The Daily News. As of now, some of their most read articles are ones written by citizen journalists.

The paper is in the process of upgrading its content management system to allow editors to send writers text messages about breaking news.

Source: Poynter Online