Citizen Journalism News & Articles

As many American newspapers and news agencies close down news desks scattered strategically around the world, citizen journalism is filling the gap. By offering local journalists and concerned citizens a platform from which to offer their perspectives on local and global events, coverage of world news is showing signs of life again.

The holiday season has not slowed down the web publishing world. In fact, they might be looking to pick up speed as the year comes to a close. From Google to Bing to YouTube, it seems that things are heating up, like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Sometime today, The New York Times is supposed to launch two new citizen journalism sites focused on local communities.

"The Local" will appear on the Times' Web pages with sites dedicated to three communities in New Jersey -- Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn -- and two Brooklyn neighborhoods, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.

User-generated content is a rapidly developing revolution in media. News media have been implementing user generated content in an effort to supplement content and community perspectives.

Citizen journalists now wield power over online content and new business models are emerging in response to this shift. To help bring together content-trendsetters and business leaders in a variety of fields, Mediabistro presents User-Generated Content Conference and Expo.

Jay Rosen, the founder of Assignment Zero, a project where journalism is run by the public rather than the media, seems to be re-affirming his beliefs about citizen journalism and new media.

Rosen has long believed that citizen journalism promotes social democracy. Recently, he published an essay on how the Internet is weakening the authority of the press that further expands on his idea.

In 1990, Rock the Vote was born. Soon after, Choose or Lose was created.

These MTV campaigns worked to “build the political clout and engagement of young people in order to achieve progressive change in our country.”

More than a decade later, Street Team ‘08 takes the stage.

Whereas previous campaigns relied heavily on celebrity rock and pop stars to carry their message, today MTV is capitalizing on the popularity of citizen journalism to help them cover the 2008 elections.

Everyone’s talking about the citizen journalism movement these days. Getting the masses to contribute their perspectives on politics is vital, some say, to getting people to take the issues seriously.

But when it’s not limited to politics, the ordinary citizen might just blather on and on about celebrity gossip or what they ate for breakfast. A line has to be drawn between journalism and diarrhea of the mouth.

Or maybe not…

Like some of you, I’d never heard of Orato.com before. I consider myself hip to the jive on sites that cater to the citizen journalist so when I received press about Orato.com and all that it claimed to be, I was intrigued.

Orato, Latin for “I speak,” touts itself as an outlet and resource for the citizen journalist. No longer do mere mortals need to wait for those in the news media to report to us; we have taken the pen (or laptop, or camera phone) in our own hands and fought back.

“On Orato.com,” it is said, “the subject owns the story.” And the story isn’t just limited to politics, as other citizen journalism sites are. Orato covers all the juicy tidbits of health, popular culture and sex … oh yeah, and current events, too.

Belgian media group Cornelio announces Polypoly as their long term partner in providing Web CMS functionality for the company’s family of web projects. Polypoly Content Manager will serve as the central platform for the ongoing development of Cornelio’s publications in the digital arena.

We last reported on Assignment Zero a week ago. Assignment Zero was NewAssignment’s first pro-am journalistic endeavor, which has since closed. Moving on, OfftheBus, a collaboration between NewAssignment and Huffington Post, launched on July 18.