Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism is the hottest nomenclature this side of blogosphere. The pitch: thousands of Americans are lining up to tell the true side of the story - to eliminate purported left and right-wing bias in media.
OhmyNews wants citizen journalists.
Several Web sites have popped up providing citizens with tools for their truth brigade. Newspapers have reported vigorously on the citizen reporter trend but the results remain mixed.
A lot of trees have died for newspaper coverage on the South Korean operation OhmyNews. Over 70 percent of OhmyNews’ content is written by citizen reporters.
The Japan Media Review, run by Erica Ogg and Robert Niles of USC, ran an interview with Oh Yeon-Ho, founder of OhmyNews.
Excerpt:
Q: Was there a moment when you thought, “This is it!” when you launched OhmyNews?A: Yes. In Korea, readers’ dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional press had considerably increased. Citizens’ desire to express themselves greatly increased. Thus, on the one hand, discontent with the conventional press, on the other hand, citizens desire to talk about themselves. These two things were joined together.
WikiNews has entered the citizen journalism fray touting itself as “the free news source you can write!” However, a quick search for South Carolina news yielded less than impressive results: two stories at publication.
Steve Outing of Poynter wrote an excellent story on incorporating citizen journalism principles into a traditional newspaper.
Scoopt sells amateur pictures to publications.
For the amateur photojournalism, there’s the British outfit Scoopt. Scoopt accepts photos and then sells them to publications. The person who took the photo retains 50 percent of the money and gets to keep the copyright.
“Lots” of pictures have been sold said Kyle MacRae, of Scoopt. MacRae declined to give an exact total. An Oct. 10 CNN story said Scoopt had only sold four photos.
Photographers receive anywhere from $100 to several thousand, said MacRae. The Scoopt Web site has several examples of pictures sold for large sums.
on December 21st, 2005 at 1:41 am
I search every few days for mentions of Wikinews in blogs — it’s amazing the number of ways people approach Wikinews. Almost all are readers — almost all (at least according to their blogs) edit something before they leave. I suspsect most never register for an account.
Reading your post highlights one of our failures at Wikinews… Namely, our coverage is not yet comprehensive. Of course, as articles are created and edited by our readers, I suspect that as readership increases so will the numbers of articles about South Carolina. I *did* however do a brief search for other articles about SC and found a few — I added the appropriate category and they now appear on the page you link in your post.
Thanks for mentioning Wikinews — every mention increases awareness of the project!
-Chiacomo