In February, CNN launched user-gen citizen news site i-Report, which was originally just a feature of the CNN web site. They also held two CNN-YouTube presidential debates over the summer. The new site, which looks and feels a lot like YouTube, offers many similar features like the ability to rate and discuss videos and embed them elsewhere.

But CNN is far from being the only large media outfit to launch citizen journalism ventures. For example, Yahoo and Reuters teamed up on You Witness News, BBC has Your News,and MSNBC has a section of their site that features citizen journalism, as well. MSNBC also owns citizen journalism site Newsvine, too.

Apparently, YouTube now wants to bring some of the focus on citizen journalism back to their site, where so many of today's citizen journalists post and share their work.

About Citizen News

On the introductory post, Olivia writes (and posts a video of course - see below):

"Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold." 

Even if you're not a citizen journalist yourself, but you just happen to stumble across some excellent citizen journalism on YouTube, she wants to know. She's also interested in knowing how YouTube can serve citizen journalists even better and she asked for all thoughts, questions, and other feedback to be sent to citizennews@youtube.com.

In the video below, Olivia introduces Citizen News and gives examples of the types of reporting they're looking for, which can include everything from university newscasts to citizen journalism straight out of Sudan:

New countries represented include Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Egypt, India, the Philippines and Armenia.

"Likewise each country and continent has their own landing page," said Aki Hashmi, AllVoices Chief Marketing Officer. "An algorithm promotes the best of the city page to the country page and the best of the country page to the continent page. Finally, the best of the continent page will be promoted to the Allvoices front page."

According to AllVoices, 300,000 journalists and citizen journalists contribute to the service and serves and audience of 4.5 million. Citizen journalism site Demotix, by contrast, claims 14,00 members in 110 countries, though it acts as much as an agency as a news site. NowPublic claims it serves, and is served by citizen journalists in, 6,000 cities in 160 countries for five million monthly readers.

As of two days ago, iReports had been filed from every single country in the world except one: Nauru. Neither Nauruan nor visitor had ever sent in a story or photo or video from that South Pacific nation.

"Only Nauru is left! We want to hear from citizens of, or visitors to, this tiny island in the South Pacific, halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Send us a snapshot of life in Nauru -- the local culture, food, architecture, natural sites, or an unusual event happening there."

Today, Nauru came through. San Franciscan Lee Miller dropped some shots he had taken during a 2008 trip the country.

The value of leveraging readers as reporters is their distribution on-site all around the world. How many people would have known about Nauru without both the curiosity of Miller and the muscle of CNN?

"'It's a really sad story because it wasn't that long ago that Nauruans were driving around in Ferraris. ... It used to be one of the richest countries in the world,' Miller said.

But there was a lot more about the country waiting to be seen. Miller recalled "breathtaking scenery" and touching moments with locals. The owner of the island's only hotel noticed him wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt and insisted on paying for the rest of his stay. Another time, when he got sick, a Nauruan bus driver who worked at the hotel took him to a store and bought him medicine."

Citizen journalism grew in tandem with the growth of blogging and other social media tools. There has been a lot of shaking-out in the past few years as it's veered from a curiosity to the salvation of journalism to a point of fact. To be able to say, "Tell me what you see!" and get an answer is the real fruit of citizen journalism.

From iReports to companies like Demotix, Now Public and AllVoices to blogs and Facebook pages, it looks like that dynamic has found roots in our experience of news.

In counting the world's countries, CNN has used the U.S. State Department's list of independent countries. This list has 194 countries, of which iReports have been filed from 193.

While the Knight Foundation's endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.

Another good example for an organization that was awarded a grant by the the Knight Foundation is the Coral Gables Community Foundation in Coral Gables, Florida. This group, together with the University of Miami, will use its grant to train seniors to report, write, and blog about local affairs.

A complete list of sponsored projects can be found here. A second round of grants will be awarded later this year.

The N95, as readers of this blog will recall, is also being used by Reuters as part of a "Mobile Journalism Toolkit," which some Reuters field reporters are testing to help them file stories from the field and use the cell phone's camera to take photos and videos of news events. This is all part of a growing trend toward legitimizing citizen journalism and the embrace by mainstream media of amateur journalism's tools and techniques.

"'Citizen journalism' is beginning to embrace a wide range of public engagement with the media," said Timo Koskinen, project manager with Nokia Research Center when the mobile toolkit was announced, "from groups of contributors organized around subject or geographic areas to the casual participation of observers who are lucky - or unlucky - enough to be at the scene of a newsworthy event."

Yesterday we wrote about Twitter's growing influence in the reporting of news and its use by mainstream news reporters as an information distribution tool. It is interesting that while MTV is building technology to instantly stream live mobile video reports from amateur reporters in 23 states, they're apparently not planning to use Twitter. Those reporters will have cell phones, afterall, making them more than capable of Twittering.

MTV has actually used Twitter before. About 4 months ago during the Video Music Awards, MTV set up a handful of Twitter accounts to stream live updates from the awards show floor. Though it featured mostly inane updates from artists and hosts, like Lil' Wayne saying, "Yo we just left the awards It was crazzzzy," it at least shows that MTV is open to trying out new tools to push information to users. Though their Twitter experiment at the VMAs resulted in sub-par content (in my opinion), it was a modest success, attracting almost 1500 followers on their main account.

Twitter or not, though, MTV's emphasis on streaming mobile video next Tuesday, and their continued use of amateur journalists during the 2008 election cycle is part of a growing trend that is pushing citizen journalism into the mainstream and increasing its impact on how we report and consume news.

According Dickerson, tools like Twitter provide a way for reporters to disseminate information quickly while a story may still be unfolding. "It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room," he says, describing Twitter reporting the way someone might a live television newscast.

In another piece, the NYT writes about blogger Michael Yon, who uses his blog to cover the Iraq war from the front lines. "Michael Yon was not a journalist, and he wasn’t sure what a blogger was," the piece begins. But after spending more time embedded with US soldiers in Iraq than any other journalist, and writing about his experience on his web site, Yon "has recently, grudgingly, accepted that he has become a journalist."

The Times praises Yon's reporting, who went to Iraq because he thought the mainstream media was "bungling the story."

"Along the way, he created a niche outlet that is better reported than most blogs, and more opinionated than most news reporting, with enough first-hand observation, clarity and skepticism to put many professional journalists to shame," writes Richard Perez-Pena. "The Internet has fostered such citizen journalism, shaking up ideas about where news comes from, but few have taken on the expense and danger of working in a war zone."

The story notes that bloggers and citizen journalists have swelled in ranks in Iraq, while the number of mainstream journalists operating there has shrunk, putting added emphasis on the reporting that amateurs are doing.

The New York Times itself has experimented in recent months with running content from amateur journalists. We reported last month that the paper would begin running videos produced by an amateur production company about the US presidential race, and since October it has run a series of video debates from Bloggingheads.tv. They also recently sponsored the Polling Places project, which uses contributions from readers to document polling places on film during the 2008 US elections.

The rise of tools like Twitter and blogs to report on events as they happen is something we recently predicted will be a growing trend in the coming year. Stories like those in today's New York Times help validate citizen journalists and the tools they use as legitimate methods of reporting breaking news.

- The much-anticipated Pegasus News has released their first product, a music and entertainment news site called TexasGigs. It started as a music blog by Cindy Chaffin in 2002 - Chaffin will continue to be the chief editor in the new Pegasus operation. It's interesting that TexasGigs keeps its blogger-created brand, rather than adopting the Pegasus News style (whatever that turns out to be).

Steve Outing on Poynter remarked:

"A key characteristic of the Pegasus model is to have people like Chaffin drive the site, while soliciting citizen submissions and offering lots of opportunities for user interaction. It's very different from some other citJ sites like those of Backfence.com, which simply offers local citizens an easy way to post articles and photos without a highly visible editor driving things from the core."

- Speaking of Backfence.com, Jay Rosen sent me a link a week or two ago to an article on his site PressThink about Backfence. Liz George wrote the article. She runs a similar site called Baristanet, but with a different model. She said the issue with Backfence is that it's not creating much interest from 'citizen journalists': "...how will Backfence drum up more users to produce the content if there’s so little there to draw users?"

Finding that balance between professional editors and 'citizens' who contribute content is crucial in these ventures, it seems. I don't have all the answers, so it'll be interesting to watch how the above ventures progress. I do like that Pegasus News decided to run with the unique brand that Cindy Chaffin built up with TexasGigs.

What better way to pull together the bits of a story has has been "reported over the years" than by using links to the actual reporting, asked Karp. The traditional media method would be to summarize the previous reporting, said Karp, "but on the web, with its infinite space and connectedness, the Times could have added an important supplement to their own perspective" by linking.

Unfortunately, a quick search through Google News archives reveals that much of the important historical content is stuck behind pay walls -- the rationale being that old news doesn't get enough page views to monetize with advertising and is only of value to people researching a story, who are likely willing to pay for access. But as the New York Times' public editor pointed out, sometimes historical context is helpful. But is framing significant historical reporting around current events and using links to the actual reporting to build a readable trail really journalism?

The Drudge Report, seen here in 2006, has been doing 'link journalism' for over a decade.

This sort of reporting is something that bloggers and others on the web have been doing for years. One of the best known examples is The Drudge Report, which has been putting out link-based reporting since the mid-90s. By organizing links to other original reporting, Matt Drudge has really pioneered a type of online news that is something like the web-based equivalent of a paper that carries only wire stories, and does no original reporting.

The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they're being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.

According to Wikipedia, "Journalism is the discipline of gathering, writing and reporting news, and broadly it includes the process of editing and presenting the news articles." Karp's link journalism falls at least into the "gathering" and "editing" pieces of that. It's certainly not on the same level as original reporting -- which link journalism relies on completely -- but it does have an important place, and I hope newspapers are listening to Karp's call to tear down pay walls and start recycling relevant historical content by utilizing links. And not just to their own reporting, but to any reporting that could add value for the reader.

There is, of course, one major hurdle in the way of convincing newspapers that this is a smart thing to do: the mainstream press doesn't like to send people away from their web sites. To that, Karp responds, "Just remember Google’s law of links on the web -- the better job you do at sending people away, the more they come back."

The new site, according to Mediaweek who got an advanced look at the site, will be completely open in terms of what users can upload. Users will be in charge of deciding what constitutes news, and which submissions should be removed from the site. "The community will decide what the news is," CNN News EVP Susan Grant told Mediaweek. "We are not going to discourage or encourage anything -- iReport will be completely unvetted." (Though CNN will monitor the site for inappropriate content.)

Mediaweek says that the new site will look and feel a lot like YouTube and will also feature the usual community features, such as the ability to rate and discuss videos, and embed them on other pages.

CNN recently paid $750,000 for the domain names "ireport.com" and "i-report.com," so this is clearly something they are serious about. And they should be. As we've noted in the past, citizen journalism is fast growing in importance. The only way to keep up with a shrinking news cycle, is to have distributed reporting capable of capturing breaking news as it happens. Often times, the people best suited to report breaking news are amateurs. CNN saw that happen with last year's California wild fires, when much of their most compelling footage came in via i-Report.

"The real contribution of citizen journalists in a story like this, where whole areas of land are closed off and the fields of greatest danger keep shifting, is in having more eyes on the ground," Thomas Hollihan, a professor of media at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, told the Baltimore Sun. "Citizen journalists are swapping information back and forth - reporting where the flames are now headed or showing images on their cell phones of the fire. And with so much happening so quickly, that kind of information can be really powerful - if it is accurate."

Accuracy is a potential concern for CNN, who have had editors vetting users submissions before allowing them on the web. CNN's Susan Grant said the network will be clear about labeling the new iReport site as a "post-moderated site" (i.e., moderated after posting, rather than before) and that the views put forth in videos uploaded to the site don't necessarily reflect those of CNN.

But accuracy concerns aside, not embracing citizen journalists, or at the very least their tools and methods, seems to be something that the mainstream media can't afford to do. As Scott Karp says, "The news business -- and the journalism it supports -- can no longer afford to wait for innovation to happen in due time. It needs to happen NOW."

One such crowd-funded website, Spot.Us, has released a series of new features today in its efforts to save us all from the closed-minded future we're currently facing.

The changes to the site include a widget, which allows individuals to show their support for a specific story on third-party websites, social networking connections for Twitter and Facebook, new organization of stories, and a progress blog for each story on the site, to make it easier to keep track. Spot.Us has also said it is open to suggestions for other cities to be a part of, as it only operates in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, currently. Most importantly, we think, Spot.Us has released a new feature concerning how "community funded" journalism operates on a base level.

In an interesting twist, Spot.Us has recognized that there may be more to funding journalism than money itself, and now its users can pledge talent instead of cash. According to the press release on today's new features, "Citizens who may not have financial resources or want to participate more actively, can now collaborate on a story through an assignment agreed upon by the primary journalist and the citizen."

In addition to the widget, Spot.Us is looking to make an open API in the near future "that would further enable journalists and communities to realize journalism through technology." We think this could be a great addition, as the project could expand geographically according to where users would support it, in much the same organic fashion as stories are funded.

So far, the project has raised over $70,000 and funded 50 stories from more than 700 contributors. We hope these new features will only help to further the cause of community-sourced and -funded journalism. If we aren't willing to pay after the fact, maybe we will be more willing to pay beforehand, since we'll know what we're buying.

Newsvine officially became part of MSNBC on Friday, October 5th, but Davidson said they'd "been talking since May." The company will continue to be based in Seattle, the home of MSNBC.

What is MSNBC getting, other than a slick and feature-packed website? Newsvine is also a thriving Citizen Journalism community, with solid stats. In our July review of Newsvine, we noted that Newsvine gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.

The explanation of why Newsvine sold to MSNBC, from Davidson, makes interesting reading. It is all about scale and partnering with MSM to achieve that:

"Why would a young, efficient independent news startup become part of a large organization? For us, the answer is simple: it's all about growing the community and spreading the idea of participatory news as far and wide as possible. Although going from zero to over a million users a month in less than two years is heartening, msnbc.com operates on another scale entirely. While Newsvine may be well known in early adopter circles, we want every college student, every farmer, every weekend journalist, and every household to have their own branch on the 'Vine. In order to spread this idea further, we could have gone out and raised a lot of money, quadrupled our staff, and gone it alone, but when one of the finest news organizations in the world is headquartered right across Lake Washington, the potential of partnering with such a great team is dramatic. We feel strongly that we can learn from the successes of their experienced team, in a way that will empower Newsvine to become the worldwide mouthpiece of the citizen journalist."

For a deeper understanding of the attraction of Newsvine to MSNBC, check out our review of Newsvine in July - which also doubled as an introduction into The State of Citizen Journalism. Here is an extract:

Citizen Journalism (henceforth CJ) is a classic example of the read/write web in action. In a product sense, it is a news publication built using the voices and recommendations of ordinary citizens, or 'users' in Web-speak. The readers are the writers and editors, unlike traditional journalism which is written/edited by the 'few' (professional journalists) for the 'many' (consumers). [...]

Newsvine is a good example of a startup CJ site aiming to be a mainstream news destination. Along with most of the other current CJ sites, Newsvine uses many of the tenets of 'web 2.0' in its design - such as user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more. It allows users to 'seed' stories, by adding a link and short description. Or users can write a full article. Newsvine is probably more advanced in its design than other CJ sites, often trying new things and design techniques - e.g. the Newsvis, a color-coded visual representation of a user's impact on the site.

The site opened as a private beta in December 2005 and was officially launched on March 1, 2006. For a full feature run-down, see Read/WriteWeb's Social News Faceoff last October - which has a chart of features for Newsvine and three other sites (digg, reddit, netscape). As Alex Iskold noted in that post, Newsvine has an outstanding user interface - it illustrates that a lot of features and a lot of information can be presented in a simple and digestible way.

Check out Read/WriteWeb's Newsvine review for more stats and analysis. Allen Stern also has some slides from Newsvine's FOWA presentation last year.

Earlier this week Nokia and Reteurs announced that they had partnered to create the 'Mobile Journalism Toolkit,' which teams a Nokia N95 cell phone with a keyboard, small tripod, and solar charger -- technologies often used by amateurs to capture local news. The toolkit has been deployed to select Reuters journalists to help them file stories from the field and use the cell phone's camera to take photos and videos of news events. "By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene," said Nic Fulton, Chief Scientist at Reuters.

For now, the toolkit is aimed at professional journalists, however Nokia acknowledged that citizen journalists themselves, not just their techniques, are being more often relied upon by mainstream news outlets. "'Citizen journalism' is beginning to embrace a wide range of public engagement with the media," said Timo Koskinen, project manager with Nokia Research Center, "from groups of contributors organized around subject or geographic areas to the casual participation of observers who are lucky - or unlucky - enough to be at the scene of a newsworthy event."

Current events in California have made the emerging symbiotic relationship between citizen journalists and the mainstream news media quite apparent. In order to report on the fires ravaging that part of the United States, many news outlets have solicited, and subsequently used, submissions from people capturing news with cell phone cameras and on blogs (and Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.). Multimedia platform Veeker, which last week signed a deal with NBC to handle viewer uploads in 10 major cities, said that NBC San Diego recieved over 2000 submissions of pictures and video related to the wildfires. CNN's I-Reports section reportedly received about the same number of fire-related submissions (up dramatically from the number of submissions it received about the Virginia Tech shootings or the Missouri bridge collapse earlier this year). Note: Veeker has an interesting analysis about what they think made the citizen journalism efforts of NBC San Diego so successful on their blog.

"The real contribution of citizen journalists in a story like this, where whole areas of land are closed off and the fields of greatest danger keep shifting, is in having more eyes on the ground," Thomas Hollihan, a professor of media at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, told the Baltimore Sun. "Citizen journalists are swapping information back and forth - reporting where the flames are now headed or showing images on their cell phones of the fire. And with so much happening so quickly, that kind of information can be really powerful - if it is accurate."

Perhaps the biggest development in the citizen journalism space this year was the acquisition of Newsvine by MSNBC earlier this month. The news network framed the deal in terms of adding social features to MSNBC properties ("Coming together allows us to take advantage of the tremendous market opportunity to expand social media and community features across all of our brands," said MSNBC Interactive News President Charlie Tillinghast in a press release), but what it really gives the company is access to citizen journalists. The mainstream media clearly sees the value in tapping into the general populace to access a more extensive coverage network. When your viewers are your reporters, you can have the news covered wherever it breaks.

The journalist blogging fraternity is where all the action is regarding analysis of 'citizen blogging'. An article I thoroughly recommend is Jay Rosen's Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative (and do read the comments too). One of the key points Rosen makes is that political campaigning is now a "two-way and de-centered world where the tools of communication are coming into public hands. And so politics in the open style is here and there being de-controlled." De-controlled, that's a choice phrase and not all the journo bloggers agree on that point. In another Jay Rosen piece, fellow A-list journo Jeff Jarvis comments:

"I'm now questioning that, operational and recruitment issues aside, the Dean campaign is giving up control or can give up control[...]Headquarters is still wherever the candidate is."

The issue there is about power - isn't that what all politics boils down to? Jeff Jarvis says control (which I equate to power) is still centralised, even though Jay Rosen claims it is "de-centered". We don't know who's right yet - it'll all pan out as the Howard Dean campaign rolls out and the other Presidential candidates join in.

On his own weblog, Jeff Jarvis also posted a response to Lawrence Lessig and Dave Winer. He ostensibly disagrees with their use of the term "citizen blogger":

"That's what the [journalism] Reformation is all about: not that citizens blog but that bloggers do what those in power used to do."

Actually I think we're all on the same page, it's just semantics getting in the way again ;-) Jeff Jarvis' "journalism reformation" is saying pretty much the same thing Dave Winer's Two-Way Web manifesto says: consumers are now producers, readers are now writers. One guy who I always trust to bridge the gap between journalism and web technology is Dan Gillmor and he sums it up beautifully in his recent article:

"The broadcast culture assumes that most of us are "consumers" of mass media. We are merely receptacles for what Hollywood, the music industry and even our local daily newspaper decide we should view, hear or read.

The post-broadcast culture is a democratization of media, and it comes at things from the opposite stance. It says that anyone also can be a creator, not just a consumer. There's a world of difference."

Later on in the comments to Dan's article, Tim O'Reilly emphasizes that even though some bloggers are more equal than others (yes, the power law), people do have opportunities to participate/produce that didn't exist even a few years ago:

"...that's the nature of freedom. You don't get it just once and forever. Entrenched interests do try to stay on top, but new tools do create fresh opportunities."

I have some other lines of thought that I want to pursue on this topic, but I'll leave that for my next post. I do want to add that I hope the concept of "Citizen Blogging" is applicable not just to Americans blogging for Howard Dean, or Wesley Clark, or George Bush, or whoever. Sure, the American President campaign in 2004 is where it's all being invented. And I will be watching very closely from my little spot on the other side of the world (New Zealand). But I hope too that I can use the principles in my country too.

Actually the more I think about it, the more I want to initiate political blogging in New Zealand. A personal aside: a couple of years ago I applied for a few jobs at the New Zealand E-Government Unit, something which I've always had an interest in. I didn't get a job there, only because I didn't have government dept experience - catch-22! I was very disappointed at the time, because I knew I had the skills to do a great job. But I still harbour an ambition to contribute something worthwhile in the service of the public, using my skills in web technology. Perhaps Citizen Blogging is my opportunity. I'll explore some more.

Since ProPublica announced this policy, articles from ProPublica journalists have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and online publications, including USA Today, Politico, Salon, The Denver Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and the Albany Times Union.

To some degree, ProPublica models an approach that could eventually help newspapers to stay afloat by pooling resources and making stories available across a wider network of papers.

ProPublica and Citizen Journalism

Just this week, ProPublica also launched a new citizen journalism project, the ProPublica Reporting Network, that invites citizens to "commit acts of journalism." As its first mission, the ProPublica is asking people to "adopt" a stimulus project and monitor it. Essentially, this project crowdsources investigative journalism, and given the scope of the stimulus bill, this might just turn out to be the only effective way of monitoring the efficiency of a project of this size.

Will More Projects Follow this Path?

It would be nice if other non-profit news organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting would adopt similarly liberal licenses, though for now, we think this is a great start. If you are aware of similar projects, please let us know in the comments.

Demotix, the winner of a Media Guardian Innovation Award, has placed its crowd-sourced photos on the front pages of traditional media organizations from Le Monde to the New York Times to BBC News Online. Although there have always been articles as well, it is the photostream that has proven to be Demotix's bread and butter. Video, like photos, may prove capable of speaking across more borders than words.

Munthe said the site now features 3,000 active photo-contributors in 190 countries and a photostream of 200,000 images.

Demotix's first video is an interview Munthe did with Kazakh journalist Ekaterina Belyaeva of Vzglad Newspaper in Almaty. The two attended "a monster regime-backed fluff fest: the Eurasia Media Forum."

"I almost had a fist-fight with the Iranian Ambassador there," Munthe told us. (Horseshoes and hand-grenades, Turi.)

Other larger-scale citizen journalism sites, such as NowPublic and AllVoices also feature video. It is hard to say if it's been used to good effect, and impossible to say whether Demotix will.

In keeping with its heightened profile and success, Demotix has also launched a new look, more saturated and uptown. It looks like a Web version of that moment when a young turk gets made partner and winds up on Savile Row for his first bespoke suit. A window-pane preview shows the latest video, surrounded by feature stories, and postage-stamp rows below are broken out into geographic sections. All in all, a fairly handsome attempt. Citizen journalists in areas both nearby and far-flung deserve to feel like they're not begging at the back door.