“Citizen journalism”-have you heard that term before? If not, one of the best examples I can give you is NowPublic, a participatory news network based in Vancouver. NowPublic has thousands of reporters operating in 140 countries, ready to report on breaking news stories. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic reports that they had more reporters in the affected area than “most news organizations have on their entire staff”.
The tagline for the site is “Crowd Powered Media”, which means anyone can contribute a story to the site. You create an account, submit your story, upload photos, video, or audio, using easy links on the site. If you use the photo sharing site Flickr, you might find one of your public photos in a story, which is how I found out about the site. A photo I took of Kaitlyn standing on our sidewalk with her wagon was grabbed for a story, and I got an email from the reporter asking me to approve or deny the use of the photo. All my Flickr photos are public so I approved it.
And now I’ve just had two more photos used in a story, photos I took just of a plate of tomato slices and a plate of lettuce leaves were grabbed to illustrate a story about how a new research study on how consuming fruits and vegetables may protect against lung cancer. By checking a box under the post, I made sure that my photos are credited to me and give a link to my Flickr page.
I’m just fascinated by this concept of participatory news, that I could be somewhere and see something news-worthy, take a photo or video of it, and have it appear on a news site. What do you think?
Comments
I ran across this recently myself when somebody came an requested use of a couple of pictures I had for use with a story.
The concept sounds good in theory. What I worry about is that people will not see it as a source of serious news for two reasons, and both of them relate to content.
1. Access. Unless they get somebody onboard that can get access to events and such, it will remain “interesting” but for example if they have somebody AT the Democratic and/or Republican Conventions covering these events, then it will be “validated”
2. Quality. You want to obviously open the door to as many people as possible, but at the same time, if you have a lot of poorly edited, poorly written and/or lots of misspellings… well, then it again becomes tough to be accepted as a “serious” outlet.
I’d like to see it take off, and see some real potential… I just wonder if it is slightly ahead of its time.
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