Results matching “to experiment with citizen”

Following the trend of the growing citizen photojournalism websites, Katharina Borchert, WAZ's new media managing director plans on launching an online pro-am photography service in which professionals and amateurs can pitch their photos to be used by WAZ and other regional media groups looking for local coverage. Other websites that work similarly are Citizenside, Demotix The Observers, and WeSay, although The Observer and WeSay function more as blogs than as an agency service.

"It's an interesting experiment and a great opportunity to tie the community closer to you paper online," said Borchert to Journalism.co.uk.

This week the New York Times launched two new hyperlocal news sites entitled The Local in New Jersey and in Brooklyn, each supervised by an NYT staff member with content provided by local citizen journalists. According to the Local sites, they will provide "news, information, entertainment and informed conversation about the things that matter to you, your neighbors and your family, from bloggers and citizens who live, work and create in your community -- as well as journalists from The New York Times."

Senior editor of Editor and Publisher Joe Strupp, who reported last week on the launch of the local sites, discusses the New Jersey site in an article yesterday. The Local covers three communities in New Jersey, including Maplewood, the town where Strupp and his family reside. The Maplewood site provides daily updates by local residents and includes children's artwork, comments, and photos.

On Sunday, Patriot-News reporter Daniel Victor posted on PennLive.com about his prospective blog, a "community-directed reporting experiment" that Victor believes will lead to a very different way of reporting. He proposes that readers submit their ideas for community and neighborhood news stories that they feel deserve the newspaper's attention via comments on his blog. Victor will then create a poll of the best ideas and allow readers to vote on his next story for both the blog and the printed paper.

The saturation of news by Indian media during the Mumbai terrorist attacks is now a subject of debate for the country's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, who are charging that the intensive live coverage may have helped the terrorists.

Citizen journalists, who used the Internet to post updates and criticisms on services such as Twitter and Flickr, made the realm of Internet reporting an unparalleled sensation.  Traditional media were "too slow and inaccurate," citizen journalists said.

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.

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

Lessons on the brave new world of citizen journalism via cell phones are coming from the unlikeliest of places: Disney World. Using a new website called Twisney.com, anyone strolling around a Disney park can upload live updates and images from their phone.

Believe it or not, Twisney is not a Disney project nor the work of a venture-capital incubator. Rather, it was created by a 34-year old software developer with two kids who was taking his son to Disney World on a guys-only trip, and wanted to be able to update his wife and daughter back at home.

Twisney users can send short messages to an email address provided on the website, where the messages appear overlaid on an aerial view of the theme park provided by Microsoft's Virtual Earth map. Twisney is also tied in with Twitter; all you have to do is send a Tweet to the Twisney feed. 

The posts on Twisney are a mish-mash. While some users post trivial information such as their locations or their photos, others are sharing information valuable to navigating the Disney World parks.

And therein lies the potential of these types of sites, which offer instantaneous information sharing. Writes Wall Street Journal blogger Tom Weber, "The next logical step for Twisney is to have users consistently share real-time intelligence throughout the parks."

As these services evolve and become more popular, there's an opportunity for companies like Disney "to encourage passionate customers and even participate directly in the electronic conversation." There is also a risk for logistical headaches. Imagine one person sending a message to Twisney saying that a ride has a small line; pretty soon all the park will have descended on one place.

The Twisney experiment does, however, illustrate a key truth about today's citizen journalism: it's getting easier to participate. That will inevitably increase the numbers of people who do, changing the landscape of journalism along the way.

How do newspapers cope? The most effective model, like so much in journalism at the moment, remains elusive. Some news organizations like CBS and CNN have launched their own citizen journalism websites. But offering a chance at participation alone is not enough; a good business model is equally key, as Dutch cit-J site Skoeps recently discovered. The only thing newspapers can't do is bury their head in the sand and ignore the increasing levels of amateur participation.   

Source: Wall Street Journal  through I Want Media
  

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

No more waiting to upload a video onto a site. Several companies such as Qik and Fixwagon are now offering software to accomplish "street journalism", a term used by BBC to describe the phenomenon of transmitting a live video filmed with a camera phone onto a site.

An Israeli television channel is conducting an experiment in giving camera phones to residents in Sderot and Askelon so they can have live evidence of missiles being shipped to their regions.

Leading bloggers already participate in street journalism by streaming live video footage of them attending conferences and of the supporters of American presidential election candidates, which they send to MTV online campaigns.

This is a new development that can bolster citizen journalism since people who are on site at events can immediately transmit their footage to the web, and in turn, viewers can receive on the spot coverage.

Source: Tribune de Genève (in French), Digital Photography School (image)

The Polling Place Photo Project from The New York Times is "a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year's primaries, caucuses and general election. By documenting local voting experiences, participants can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America."

The New York Times had experimented with user-generated content on their website before, its first being "How We Met," which asked couples to submit footage of their relationship.  The Polling Place Photo Project is among the Times' first attempts to include user-generated content in the news process.

Source: Cyber Journalist

CNN.com, which forayed into citizen journalism last year, is to expand its experiment by creating iReport.com, a citizen journalism feature within its actual news portal.

According to MediaWeek, the site (still under construction) is to be similar to a video-sharing platform and will be video-centric, where “wannabe Anderson Coopers can upload videos, photos and audio files.”

It’s still unclear as to how the site will be moderated, if at all.

During previous attempts by CNN to delve into citizen media, such as its campaign debates organized with YouTube, “they not only came away with egg on their face, but gave significant black-eyes to New Media in the process in the eyes of the public,” according to Mark Hopkins in Mashable.com.

Source: Mashable.com through Journerdism

Economically, print publishing is very different today than it used to be. There is massive amounts of free content on the Web, content that hasn’t really changed that much in general, or in value. It’s the value of the distribution of that content that has changed.

Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor & Publisher decided to talk about his failed company, the Enthusiast Group, which was an experiment in grassroots media and social networking, to teach the lessons he learned and to save others from the same failure he experienced.

Launched two weeks ago, LePost.fr is not your typical online-only news site. With a resolutely ‘new media’ approach to news, the website fearlessly tackles new trends in news consumption, and caters to a younger public generally perceived as having deserted the arena. Its editorial content and processes have been adapted to this aim, which can also be seen as a traditional media publisher’s attempt to experiment with the future of online news.

Jeff Howe, a contributor for Jay Rosen’s “Assignment Zero,” has written a summary of the experience, its failures, successes, and ultimately, what he learned about such a massive and ambitious pro-am journalism experiment.

Introducing his “pro-am” (professional-amateur) journalism project, Assignment Zero, Jay Rosen tempers his success with reminders that these methods, although full of potential, still have a long way to go.

The Chicago Tribune today launched Triblocal.com, allowing readers in far western and northern suburbs to post stories and photos and write blogs in a mostly unedited forum. The Tribune will also publish the best content from the site in a weekly tabloid.

The Washington Post launched on March 4 an unprecedented 25-part series, initially in print and continued on the web, about Washington DC’s lobbyist K Street. The series has caused mixed reactions, but one must salute the experiment.

MSNBC.com’s FirstPerson might be one of the most complete citizen journalism projects conducted by mainstream media so far. It combines user submissions with editorial support and filtering, as well as a user voting and ranking system.

A recent memo to employees of America's largest newspaper publisher Gannett Co. Inc. announced the plan to make over many of its newsrooms across the country.  In its new project, called “the information center,” Gannett hopes to create 24 local newsrooms with more locally centered reporting through audio and visual media.

It's no secret that the Internet is rapidly and radically changing the traditional news landscape of top-down journalism. For over a century, the pipes through which information is distributed have generally been one-way. Now that everyone has a voice on the Internet, the pipes have been siphoned and the flow has become reciprocal, causing a monumental change in news production and consumption. Having tracked these transformations, New York University professor Jay Rosen and PressThink blogger has embarked on an ambitious project to mold a new form of journalism adjusted for the digital media world.

Netzeitung, Germany’s revolutionary “paperless newspaper,” has taken yet another step toward the future.  Its ‘Readers-Edition.de’ is a unique example of citizen journalism: an online publication written entirely by non-professional journalists.

The leader of this week's Economist presents yet another doomsday prediction for our beloved print medium: "Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades, half the rich world's general papers may fold."

The Editors Weblog and Visual Editors are joining forces to bring a new feature to the world's gathering for newspaper editors. Robb Montgomery, CEO of VizEds, and I will be getting crazy with citizen journalism tools to show editors how they can integrate them into the newsroom in order to enrich their reporting.  

Ever hear of Bluffton, South Carolina?  If you are a newspaper professional, you should know about this small US community of 15,000 people, where a new model for newspapers and newspaper web sites is succeeding.