I, Reporter

Some Amazing Katrina Photos on Flickr

I was just browsing through Flickr's collection of recently uploaded photos tagged with "Katrina." Most of them are beach or street shots, but some of them are what I would consider first-person photojournalism. They tell amazing stories.

Here are a few I'd specifically like to highlight...

Hurricane Katrina: More CitJ links

Here are some more links for citizen journalism about Hurrican Katrina, which is currently pounding the Gulf coast near New Orleans:

• Boing Boing offers an excellent list of links. Definitely start there.
• Here's a Technorati feed I've generated for the search terms "katrina" and "citizen journalism" -- you'll need to subscribe to that in your feed reader to use it correctly.
• The New Orleans Metblog is a group blog offering a steady stream of first-person reports.
• Dan Gillmor's overview and observations on Bayosphere.
• Current has put out a call for videos from Katrina.
• Mark Kraft is assembling reports from New Orleans and the surrounding area published to LiveJournal.

Also, I have MSNBC on the TV right now, and they are periodically reading reports from citizen journalists in their newscast. They also are publishing more citizen journalist reports online.

Watch Flickr for Citizen Journalism in Action

Where should you look to find current citizen journalism? There are many, many answers, which vary according to the type of citizen journalism that interests you at the moment.

When major news happens that affects an entire region, one good place to check is the popular free photo-sharing site Flickr. As we saw with the London bombings in July, this is one place where you can find first-person reporting -- in the form of digital photographs -- on any large-scare news event where pictures tell a lot of the story.

Here's my prediction...

BlogHer: Citizen Journalism Panel (audio)

For your listening pleasure, here is the audio from the BlogHer session on citizen journalism (or whatever you want to call it) entitled: "Suffragette Journalists: Op-Ed Pages of Our Own."

LISTEN NOW! Right-click (Mac: Click-and-hold) to download the MP3 audio file. It's about 10.8 MB and runs just over 45 min long.

More about this session...

What's in a Name?

At the BlogHer conference for female bloggers this past weekend, I led an informal discussion group on citizen journalism.

I was surprised how much of that discussion focused on a general unease with the term "citizen journalism." Yeah, it's a far-from-perfect term, for several reasons...