I’m always looking, but there are very few independent citizen journalism initiatives in the UK so I’m in a session looking at four successful US projects.

Westport Now founding editor Gordon Joseloff spent years as an international reporter for several big organisations including CNN CBS but wanted to exploit his new-found freedom when he moved to Westport. A few years on and he’s had to step back from it after being elected something like Mayor, but he’s also fostered a wifi town hall. The Westport Now reporter gets council meeting coverage online in almost real time and people have a thirst for this now, thanks to the prevalence of near real-time news on NYTimes and so on.

“People will get home from the meeting and go to our site to read it. The other day a woman heard sirens and didn’t know what they were – ten minutes later there was a picture up on Westport Now of a burning house fire.”

Editing contributions

The site gets more reader submissions than it can use but won’t put everything up – it’s all professionally edited (and yes, the photos do look really good). The site gets 5-7,000 visitors per day from a community of 25,000. Joseloff also said that early on, the site made more money from syndicating local people’s photos than it did from advertising.

ibrattleboro is pretty well known – a better looking citJ site started by two web designers. Christopher Grotke said he thought of the founding fathers to promote the site: “They joined every group going and casually mentioned the independence movement…”

A split between Joseloff’s traditional journalism background and web designer Grotke: Westport Now sticks to the AP style guide and edits all contributions. “The subtle conformity to professional standards enhances our credibility and brings more people to the site,” said Joseloff.

Rutland Herald reporter Dan Barlow agreed: “The spread of citizen journalism will come hand-in-hand with more media awareness. If content is badly written or inaccurate it will damage your credibility”.

But on iBrattleboro: “We don’t edit people and we haven’t had a problem with it either,” said Grotke, adding that he tweaks formats (like line breaks and capitalising headlines – I hate that!) and has only ever been called twice to correct a factual change. “We don’t train people and we don’t expect people to write like journalists.”

Filling a news vacuum

The Philbrick James Forum (funded by a J-Lab grant) publishes two annual print editions but considers them advertising and a way of getting people online. How refreshing!

“It’s a community of 4,000 and there’s no newspaper coverage of anything in town at all unless it’s a serial killer. There are real junkies who enjoy doing council meetings and can be depended upon to report upon those. If someone lets us know something’s going on we’ll cover it but it’s very hard. But we’re pretty happy with the result.”

Not making money

Terribly worthy, but they really do mean it: money is just not important. No wonder newspapers are having trouble getting their head round this all.

Grotke: “We try to cover costs, a little bit of our time and enough to add new features. But everything on our site is owned by the people that put it there. It’s not about money – it’s about news and information. We wouldn’t be doing this if we were getting what we needed in another place. The money question always comes up but if we did make a million dollars we’d probably give it back to the community.”

iBrattleboro already runs field trips and meet-ups – interestingly because they think it helps diffuse some of the flame wars that can erupt online.

Maureen Mann from The Forum (there’s a big posse of them here) said their arts section is extremely popular with poets and writers who all retain their own copyright when they contribute to the site: “It means an enormous amount to them and it’s one of the most important things we do, letting people have a venue for their arts.”

Williams quoted Dave Winer: “You’re going to make more money because of your blog than from your blog”.

As for start-up money, Backfence got $3 million in venture capital but there was some doubt here about its strategy of using one editor to cover multiple regions.
Success requires the writers to be right in the middle of their communities – a return to that ‘proper’ journalism then. So the web appears to be fostering a new era of healthy, community-focused local reporting…

And also:

- Lisa Williams, H2Otown, on getting started: “Write a blog for a year. You’d better be willing to do it indefinitely by yourself.”?- Barlow: “I was always frustrated with ivory tower of journalism and the way people could not easily interact with journalists.”

- Barry Parr from CoastSider.com said requiring the audience to register with their full real name was the best thing he ever did. “Getting real people to take real responsibility for their remarks”. That was after a libellous comment was posted… ouch.

Oopsy – did I say audience? That should’ve read “the people formerly known as the audience…”

Technorati Tags: citizenjournalism, mediagiraffe, mgp2006

1 July 2006 | Journalism |