I, Reporter

Planning for User Content

In recent months, some colleagues and I outside I,Reporter have heard more and more from clients: How do I manage the content on my site, especially if I want to incorporate web 2.0 technologies? Careful planning is definitely in order, especially if you're expecting to make the most of user-generated content. You don't want to build an expensive web site, only to discover that you can't even easily allow for user comments.

So another partner and I, former ABCNews.com colleague Dorian Benkoil of Teeming Media, have put together a document that we hope provides some of those answers. "Choosing the Right Content Management System for Your Web Site(s)" is our comprehensive  67-page analysis of content management systems, products and solutions, as well as best practices and common pitfalls. The report was written together with digital media consultant Amy Webb of WebbMedia Group. You can click here to download an excerpt.

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. 

Key CitJ Resources

Adam Glenn and I often get asked for good starting points to get plugged into the world of citizen journalism. Here's my short list of my favorites:

• The Center for Citizen Media is a good first stop to learn what's happening in citizen journalism -- especially the blog by pioneer citizen journalist Dan Gillmor.
  
  
• The Knight Citizen News Network is another great place to start to learn about citizen journalism, and to find relevant citizen journalism venues (at least in the US). If you find yourself working with citizen journalists, recommend this site to them as a resource to enhance their efforts. (Full disclosure: Adam and I developed parts of this site, including the citizen media sites database.)
  
  
• NewAssignment.net is an ambitious pro/am (professional / amateur) "crowdsourcing" journalism effort. It's just getting started, but this is an important project to watch.
• Placeblogger is a resource site by Lisa Williams where you can find blogs and other sites that provide a sense of the "lived experience" of a place (town, city, state, region, country). Most of these sites are not specifically intended as citizen journalism, but many of them offer citizen journalism from time to time.
• OhMyNews: Perhaps the most famous global citizen journalism venue, based in S. Korea. It's a for-profit operation with a paid editorial staff. Eclectic and intriguing.
• Global Voices Online: A popular and high-quality aggregator of weblogs from most countries around the world. Much, but not all, of the content is citizen journalism.
• iBrattleboro.com is a vibrant, well-run independent community news and discussion site. I think it sets a good example for community-focused citizen journalism.

...What are your favorite citJ resources or example sites? Please comment below.

Stanford Journalism Fellowship: Citizen Journalists Welcome to Apply

I just found out about a pretty significant journalism fellowship from Stanford University's Center for the Study of the North American West: $3,500-$7,000  plus two weeks' access to the Center's facilities and resources.

The Western Enterprise Fellowship is for "research toward an article, series of articles or broadcast segment on a topic of particular significance to the United States west of the Mississippi, western Canada, or northern Mexico.  Research areas can range widely, and may be related to the demographics, culture, politics, economy, or environment of the region."

Now, the info page for that fellowship also goes on to say, "Since the fellowship is to disseminate new perspectives on these issues to the wider public, fellows must enter the program with an assignment letter from a news organization that commits to publishing or broadcasting the work within twelve months of the fellowship’s completion."

I thought that sounded rather exclusive, so I inquired further...

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...

State Informer: A CitJ Blog for Every State

I just learned today of an interesting new citJ site: State Informer, a project by Tom Simpson. It features 51 blogs -- one for each US state and Washington DC.

Registered members can post citizen journalism items to the blog for their state. So far there's not much there, but it's only just been launched. I'll watch its evolution.

Cyberjournalist: Citizen Media Initiatives

There are so many citizen journalism/media initiatives cropping up, I'm glad Cyberjournalist (a service of the Online News Association) is keeping a list.