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Where Can Newsroom Editors Turn For International Grassroots Reporting?

Written by Angelique van Engelen

Sunday, 16 December 2007

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.

So far, newspapers themselves have come up with only a few solutions to these problems. Databases appear to be the answer for both problems. They are extensions of a reporter’s contact book though and don’t necessarily leave room for initiative on behalf of the person wishing to participate in covering the news. People with more money to spend use other technologies that match issues with people and come up with relevant rankings for crowd sourcing. A good example is CNN and YouTube’s collaboration hosting a presidential debate in which citizens used YouTube to ask questions.

Independent citizen reporting platforms thrive on initiatives from ordinary people. They can be divided into those that generate income from the traffic that their news generates and those that generate revenue through sales to established media. Michael Tippit at NowPublic brokered a breakthrough deal to supply Associated Press with citizen reports obtained through "crowdsourcing". This is seen as a potential landmark in the struggle to gain both legitimacy and sustainability for citizen media efforts in a conference organized by Ohmynews.com.

Established media take citizen reports seriously and some get a decent amount of funding to do so. A leader in citizen outreach is the BBC. The corporation employs more than 30 employees, so called entry level reporters, who sift through everything they receive, from comments on the Web site to news tips, which get sent on to the right reporters.

Many newspapers have some commitment to taking note of what the people on the street are saying but the landscape of who’s dealing with who is hardly visible yet. Reporters are not proactively seeking out platforms but tend to get approached by platforms’ marketers selling stories. And these platforms themselves are still experimenting with ideas and formats.

Ventures that are successful operate on a mixture of formulas. Some citizen reporting platforms thrive because they operate featherlight concepts. Others use cumbersome, laborious processes. Their success does not seem to be dependent on either concept, but newspapers prize credibility. An example of a platform that lets citizens upload their mobile phone camera footage is Dutch company Skoeps. The award winning platform enables users to send in mobile telephone camera footage. That’s all. Editors check it in five minutes and get the footage online or match it with news agency reports. Their output looks hot. The site’s marketers have good links to newspaper editors and offer 50% profit sharing if a story sells, which for the effort involved appears well paid. People find it an attractive option and the site is expanding in countries around the world, most notably in African countries.

Way heavier in appearance is the initiative led by a major figurehead in citizen reporting, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. Called Newassignment, it recently completed its first major project. Editors tested various functions of citizen journalism during the project, most notably the ability of series of people working together on fact collating and checking issues. On its site citizens compile stories about a hoist of listed topics and high profile thinkers. The topics cover a wide spectrum of issues pertaining to author rights and creative commons licensing issues. It’s in an experimental way of researching that is extremely well organized and edited yet the scope of the project appeared too vast. The company hired its first editor in the first quarter of 2007 and is a worthy competitor to NowPublic.

NowPublic has nearly 120,000 contributing “reporters” based in more than 140 countries. The company will spend the money it attracted from financers on developing a system to “geo-locate” contributing writers in order to see whether they are in range of a developing news story. AFP writes that content on the NowPublic Web site is completely user-provided. “Roughly half the material is original, with the other half being online links to other news stories”, the agency says. Credibility is a priority for the news site. It has a system of volunteer “deputy editors” who work to filter inappropriate material, and communicate with contributors when inaccurate statements are found. It makes its money mostly through the syndication of its content, along with fees that are charged when connecting established news organizations with citizen reporters.

Citizen journalism has that idealist feel to it. People involved in it are in it because they want to work real change. In this sense, it might be better to talk of grassroots reporting rather than citizen journalism because citizen implies a person responding to a description given to him/her as a subject of a governmental entity, yet millions of ordinary people in this world are stateless. It would be more appropriate to talk of grassroots journalism because that would include everybody, the goal of a people driven movement.

At the local level achieving change is quite easy. One example is www.getlocalnews.com. The people at this San Francisco headquartered site have 6,000 registered reporters who on a good day produce as many as 4,000 stories. The company was started in 1999 and has recently decided to pay its reporters a fee. Any 1,000 page views will get you earnings of USD5 and up. And then there’s of course ad revenues. The company is preaching the local message and has forged strong relationships with some local papers who depend on the ‘continuous flow of information’ the site claims it offers. What’s particularly interesting is that the site encourages criticism and debate under the guise of rational texts. “We hope to create a place where you can take on City Hall or even your boss without fear of retaliation”, they write on the site.

Internationally the challenge to work real change through grassroots reporting is bigger, yet platforms offering editors interesting packages are sprouting up everywhere. Mainly due to the successes of Ohmy.com and others.

A really miraculous top grassroots reporting story involved a 21-year-old Thai student who baffled the world last July because she got her country’s Minister of Information and Technology to revoke his decision to ban YouTube. How did she do this? She haunted him on a confession he made. The minister, Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, admitted that he was "terrible" at his job during a Bangkok press conference last June. The student simply pressed him on when he would lift the nationwide ban on YouTube and posted the audio of the conversations on her website: www.gnarlykitty.blogspot.com. “She forced an admission that he would speak to cabinet the following week, and the ban was eventually lifted”, according to the UK’s Telegraph newspaper. Kitty, the student, did not put her story on a citizen reporting portal, but her story was of course of great interest to newspapers. The way editors find their news is however more and more dominated by citizen efforts.

The Korean site Ohmynews.com was among the world’s first to become succesful. It worked real change in Korea. It collates perspectives from around the world and combines "amateur" reporters with professionals who both participate in the creation and dissemination of news and information. Launched in February 2000, the site today boasts nearly 60,000 "citizen reporters" worldwide, who work closely with dozens of professional staff members, creating content for websites in Korean, Japanese and English. Last year, it garnered financing of $11 million from SoftBank.

Associated Content, another site to win millions worth of investment, works pretty much like free article directories. It is edited however. Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway (an official advisor to Facebook, pictured right) sits on Associated Content's board of directors so these people likely know what they are doing.

Yoosk.co.uk offers the chance to interrogate the great and the good at websites. You can ask a question and get others to vote, which builds pressure on the person being questioned. Works on the crowd sourcing principle. It sees itself as a leads generator for journalists, who are free to search for interesting idea and or comments on the site.

As the independent initiatives peter out or shape up, newspapers themselves begin their own efforts. A good example is Minnesota Public Radio. It runs "Public Information Network", an internal database of volunteer sources. It’s now up to nearly 20,000 - that includes the topics people have knowledge about plus information about demographics. The radio station fulfils an examplary role in the US media and is part of its mother company’s Center for Innovation in Journalism, which teaches how to deal with citizen journalism to other public stations.

Some sites only work with trained reporters. These include www.greatreporter.com. The company, part of the UK’s presswire limited, is excellent even though their website isn’t updated that often. Years ago the venture started out as a studenty, first jobber type platform, but now its clientele regularly includes mainstream UK papers and magazines, as well as highly specialized trade press.

Last but not least; www.featurewell.com. Launched by an ex Wall Street Journal writer who decided to set up a boutique writing shop exploiting the copyright loopholes in US papers. If you are a regular writer for a newspaper in Missouri you are apparently free to sell your articles in Kansas City without any problem. Who’s to say that after all the world’s not a rather big place?

Angelique van Engelen is a freelance journalist who is involved in www.reporTwitters.com, a journalistic project that combines reporting with Twitter. She crowdsourced opinions on this issue on this site.

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