Wednesday, June 15, 2005

11-steps to incorporating citizen journalism in your site

[Keyword: ]. Steve Outing has put together a great 11-step guide to incorporating citizen journalism in your site - an article so good I'm thinking of ways to 'highlight' this posting so it stands out as a particularly useful one. Here's the bare bones:
  1. Opening up to public comment
  2. The citizen add-on reporter (i.e. "solicit information and experiences from members of the public, and add them to the main story to enhance it.")
  3. Open-source reporting ("a collaboration between a professional journalist and his/her readers on a story, where readers who are knowledgeable on the topic are asked to contribute their expertise, ask questions to provide guidance to the reporter, or even do actual reporting which will be included in the final journalistic product")
  4. The citizen bloghouse (adding reader blogs to your site)
  5. Newsroom citizen 'transparency' blogs ("inviting readers to blog with public complaints, criticism, or praise for the news organization's ongoing work. [...] A milder form of this is the editor's blog -- typically written by a paper's top editor and explaining the inner workings of the newsroom and discussing how specific editorial decisions are made")
  6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version ("establishing a news-oriented Web site that is comprised entirely or nearly entirely of contributions from the community")
  7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version
  8. Add a print edition
  9. The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism (e.g. OhmyNews)
  10. Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof
  11. Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors (e.g. Wikinews)
Amazingly, he also provides examples of nearly all of these (note that these are not necessarily techniques he advises using all of the time, every time).

UPDATE: Outing has since added 'wikitorials', although he's yet to find out what it is yet...

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