This month, significant developments have taken place in citizen journalism. There’s no longer any doubt that audience participation is maturing; citizen reporting is on its way to become part and parcel of the established media. Handsome amounts of cash are being paid for platforms gathering reports by mere mortals who relay first hand experiences of events to the world. Associated Content landed $10 million in financing earlier this month from Canaan Partners. At the same time, NowPublic raked in $10.6 million Rho Ventures. So what are winning strategies for newsroom editors in dealing with the citizen platforms?

It’s time to map the landscape. Who is out there and what’s on offer for newsroom editors? And how do editors tackle problems here?

Some 45% of editors in the US use citizen journalism tools and techniques, according to a recent study on behalf of the Pew Center and the Associated Press Managing Editors. Editors considering using citizen journalism amount to 66% of the survey’s respondents.

There are two problem that people encounter; the sheer number of participants is way larger than they have the resources for and the efforts often are focused on special projects rather than a consistent feature in reporting. 

Stepping off the subway at Finsbury Park, the change in scenery could not have been more acute. Just an hour earlier, I had been awed by the grandeur of Big Ben, towering over the British Houses of Parliament. It is the symbol of the England in our history books: a beacon of liberty, tolerance, and stability.

Finsbury Park is different. Small shops and ragged apartments line the streets of this working class area of North London. More pronounced than the socioeconomic inequality is the cultural discrepancy. Grocery stores feature Middle Eastern foods and advertisements for cheap phone calls to the East while women clad in veils and burkas stroll with their young children wearing kufis. As Christopher Hitchens remarks of Finsbury Park in the June 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, “Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated.”1 

A bad few weeks for Hizb ut Tahrir Britain – the UK arm of the radical Islamist party which wishes to see its version of the medieval “Caliphate” established in Muslim lands and then across the entire globe. First, after a concerted campaign of complaints to the BBC following last November’s Newsnight program – when Hizb ut Tahrir in South London was infiltrated and exposed as being linked to violence, radicalization and threatening local mosques – their hundreds of complaints were summarily dismissed. Of thirty four complaints considered worthy of any investigation by regulators, and following a police investigation of the program, thirty-three were dismissed and only one was upheld and that was on a technicality – that the reporters involved should not have included a ten second clip (of a twenty minute piece) about a likely synagogue attack in the area, which may or may not have been planned by Hizb ut Tahrir members, but which police were investigating at the time of broadcast.

Second, a fortnight ago, another senior member of Hizb ut Tahrir Britain, who shall remain nameless, declared his intention to leave the group and declared interest in sharing his knowledge of the group and speaking out against it. This follows the high-profile departures from the group of Shiraz Maher and author of “The Islamist” Ed Husain – both of whom have spoken out against the group recently (notably, Shiraz Maher in giving a detailed account of his Cambridge Hizb ut Tahrir days, whose radical Islamist associates there included none other than Bilal Abdullah of failed Glasgow bomb attack infamy). For those who once doubted that Hizb ut Tahrir was a peace-loving talking-shop, suddenly the truth is emerging that Hizb ut Tahrir is without any doubt a conveyor belt to exactly the kind of extremism which breeds terrorism. As Ed Husain mentioned this week to the New York Times, “The only difference between Islamists from Hizb ut-Tahrir and jihadists is that the former are waiting for their state and caliph before they commence jihad, while the latter believes the time for jihad is now.”