I, Reporter

Glimpse the Citizen Media of Tomorrow

The Knight Foundation, the funder behind the I, Reporter Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project, today launched a new web site that provides a fascinating window into the citizen media innovation. The group blog is called MediaShift Idea Lab, and the idea is to allow the folks behind each of the Knight Challenge Grant winners to explore the progress of their innovative Internet projects with each other and in the public eye.

As the blog editor Mark Glaser puts it, "Idea Lab will be a place where you can read about what innovators are doing to help reinvent community news. The dozens of authors at this new group blog -- hosted by PBS.org and funded by the Knight Foundation -- have received grants from Knight in their 21st Century News Challenge, and are going to report first-hand on the status of their projects."

Check out our first entries on Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker-- a blog post about our initial progress with the project, and another about some lessons learned.

Searching for CitMedia – Start Here!

So where are all these citizen journalists? We can help you find them.

One of I,Reporter’s biggest and most exciting projects in recent months has been our ongoing work for the newly launched Knight Citizen News Network website, KCNN.org. The task set for us by Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab at the University of Maryland, was to build a searchable database of hundreds of sites around the country that offer citizen journalism. 

Test: Map Widget

Here's a test of the KCNN citizen media map widget. You must be logged in to the J-Lab system to see it:

CitJ Clubs: Sounds Cool to Me!

Right now I'm at the Denver International Airport, waiting with my friend and fellow blogger/podcaster Koan Bremner for a flight to San Jose so we can attend the inaugural BlogHer conference for female bloggers.

So this is just a quick note to follow up on something that Wes Thorp mentioned in his Daily Grit blog yesterday. See his post: "Citizen Journalism: The Next Steps." There, he writes:

"We have troves of motivated citizens in the area who could and maybe would cover the issues of the day, like city council and township board meetings, stuff local media used to cover. 

"Gahran talks at length about how to train average citizens for this kind of duty.  Is it time?  Is it time to have a Meet-Up in our area to talk about citizen journalism and give it a whirl?"

Oh, that gets my gears going...