On the BackFence

One up-and-running citizen journalism effort is  Backfence, which has launched two sites in suburban Washington, D.C., and has plans to launch more in a national rollout over the next few years. Here's a really interesting interview with the two principals, Mark Potts and Susan DeFife, in the latest American Journalism Review. One intriguing aspect is how these citizen journalist moguls-in-the-making view existing mass media -- will they partner with them or not? ...

Potts says:

"Some people going into this have been very, like, "We're going to kill all those media companies, those mainstream media companies, those mainstream media guys, we're just going to knock 'em dead." But we don't look at it that way, and we've talked to all the major media companies. We've had very good ongoing discussions with them and they pretty much unanimously understand that we are very complementary to them. We sort of complete the last mile for them. We can get them into citizens' journalism in ways that they haven't been able to themselves because they're blocked by their infrastructure or their branding or their various other issues."

DeFife adds:

"The media companies understand the power of the technology. They understand the need to be far more local than they are, and they understand their own limitations.

Potts acknowledges the potential misunderstandings between professional journalists and citizen journalists, but notes: 

"There tends to be, oftentimes, but not always, a little bit of conflict on the editorial side between what the brand stands for in the marketplace. You know, "We are edited journalism, we filter it, we decide. We report, we decide." But citizens' journalism is a free-for-all in a lot of ways. And that makes a lot of editors really nervous. So there's a question of how you separate that. Do you do it at arm's length with a different brand?

I talked to a very smart, very old-line traditional editor the other day who said, "Well, geez, if you label it [as citizen journalism], why is there a problem?' And I said, "Well, you're more evolved than most people." So it's sort of all over the map. But everybod's looking at it."

There's also a long overview of citJ in the same issue.