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:

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."

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.

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.

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.

According to citizen reporter, Johntw: "Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack." Apple quickly squashed the story, claiming it to be untrue. Did citizen journalism just fail us? You bet it did.

The report about Steve Jobs appeared on CNN's citizen journalism site, iReport this morning. It read as follows:

Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven't seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.

Silicon Alley Insider then proceeded to follow up, making phone calls to Apple. They were able to reach Katie Cotton, Vice President of Worldwide Communications, who replied saying "It is not true."

This Is Trouble

The question was then raised: do false reports like this damage CNN's credibility? The answer is yes, absolutely. This particular report may even lead to an SEC investigation where CNN will be asked to provide an IP address for the user who posted the story.

The problem here stems from the fact that because CNN has obviously decided not to police or edit the iReport section of their web site, the section is left wide open to "reporters" who want to wreak a little havoc.

But who are these citizen journalists? And how easy is it to become one?

Apparently, it's as easy to become a citizen journalist on CNN as it is to sign up for a new web app from an internet startup, if not easier. The process involves nothing more than filling out a name, screen name, and email address. Adding a phone number is optional and only necessary if you want the story to be considered by CNN. There's a CAPTCHA to prevent bots and an email confirmation link, but thanks to disposable email addresses, those are practically a waste of time these days.

Above: The Registration Form - Congratulations, You're A Journalist!

While most citizen journalists take their responsibility seriously as reporters of actual news, it's apparent that with iReport, just as with any web site on the internet today, there is going to be someone who decides to have a little sick "fun" with it. Who is the reporter by the name of Johntw anyway? As far as we could tell, the only way to get in touch with the reporter is through iReport's built-in messaging system. We sent him an email asking him why he reported this story, but it remains unanswered. In our minds, we're already imagining an adolescent kid who's having a good laugh with their friends this morning over how they just "punked" CNN.

We're interested in seeing how will CNN respond to this muddying of their good name. Will they disassociate themselves a bit from iReport? Or will they just be happy for the pageviews it brought? And will this give pause to other news outlets thinking of launching citizen journalism sites of their own? It's very possible. In these tough economic times, news reports that affect how the markets move are taken very seriously. Had the timing of this report been different, Apple stock could have really suffered. Fortunately, the rebuttal today came out fast enough that it shouldn't have any long-term effects. Next time, we may not be so lucky.

Rumors Gone Wild

Specifically, Noughton cites a rumor that Michelle Obama, wife of US presidential candidate Barack Obama, was caught on video tape hurling a racial epithet about white people. The rumor started on Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog. His source? "Someone in touch with a senior Republican" who knows that a "major McCain backer has a copy of the tape." Later, Johnson says he's learned more about the tape via "five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

Despite the clear lack of a credible source, the rumor had serious legs. From friend of a friend of a friend hearsay, to a mention on Fox News as "credible buzz," to Obama being asked about it by a reporter from the well-respectd McClatchy News Service. "So the story whirls around the echo-chamber of the paranoid, right-wing blogosphere, with the odd whisk from Fox News reporters, until it reaches hysteria," says Noughton. And though no tape has surfaced, damage has potentially been done.

Therein, perhaps, lies a danger in putting too much credence in the blogosphere and citizen journalism. At times having untrained eyes on the ground can be invaluable at getting the story reported, and sometimes citizen journos can beat the mainstream press to a breaking story. But when your sources are relying on rumors heard from friends, lending credence to those rumors by mentioning them in the mainstream press is toxic.

We've seen rumors run wild on the tech end have real-world consequences as well. Last May when Engadget erroneously reported that Apple was planning to delay Leopard and the iPhone, the company lost $4 billion in market cap in an afternoon. Even though Engadget quickly updated its headline and story when Apple denied the rumors and said their source (a memo) was a fake, the story was frozen in time on Techmeme and in people's RSS readers with the wrong information.

The Solution

With the rise of Twitter, mobile video blogging, and other tools of citizen journalism, the news cycle is now seconds. With news rolling in non-stop 24 hours per day, the continuous, Twitterized cycle doesn't leave much time for fact checking -- speed matters. But that's not the future that Noughton hopes for.

When rumors published and repeated without checking the facts can have far-reaching consequences -- like influencing voters in a US presidential election, or knocking $4 billion off a company's market cap -- accuracy should count for something. Noughton provides a moral for the tale of the phantom Michelle Obama tape: "If confronted with online rumours, investigate first, report later."

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). The biggest success story in CJ so far has been OhMyNews, out of South Korea.

As yet there's been no successful Western equivalent to OhMyNews, although there have been a lot of attempts at it. Some have crashed and burned, such as the recently closed Backfence. But many other entrepreneurs are actively pursuing the idea - e.g. Australian-based PerthNorg, Buffalo Rising and Assignment Zero - to name but a few. And there have been controversial attempts too, such as Associated Content - recently in the news themselves due to claims they're gaming Google. But no single CJ site has hit it big in mainstream news, yet, in the english speaking world.

Current mainstream news organizations are also experimenting with user-generated news. CNN has I-Report and Yahoo and Reuters have You Witness (see also http://www.reuters.com/youwitness). We'll profile these in a later post.

Newsvine

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.

Let's focus now on current stats and trends....

Stats and Top Topics

According to founder Mike Davidson, who I contacted today, Newsvine currently 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.

These stats seem to be borne out in the following Compete graph showing Newsvine's "velocity", which basically means the growth in user engagement:

The top topics in Newsvine are Politics and Technology, echoing the popular topics in the blogosphere. Other topics on Newsvine include World News, U.S. News, Local News, and Entertainment.

Top Trends

I asked Mike what are the big trends he's noticed in citizen journalism - i.e. what has Newsvine learned so far, after 15 or so months of operation? Mike noted 3 main trends:

1. Explicit actions like "votes" are not a sufficient enough indicator of what's important and/or good on a news site. Mike said they also look at things like vote-to-comment ratio, average number of seconds spent reading a article, user reputation, and more.

2. Communities, by definition, do not scale - and Mike says "nor should they". They're looking for "truly intimate and meaningful interactions" and Mike thinks this can't happen in large networks.

3. Reputation building is the big separator in quality news communities. Mike says that "it is much more useful to sacrifice quantity [of comments] for quality and encourage community members to really take ownership of their words." To this end, Newsvine has a reputation system called "Vineacity", which serves as a visual indicator of what sort of contributor any given community member is.

Who is contributing?

I was also curious about the type of person who contributes content to Newsvine. Mike told me that the profile of a contributor "varies wildly" - some of the best writers include a college student from Ohio State, a political writer of Korean descent from Denmark, and "a 70 year old gentleman who ended up getting his name on the ballot for U.S. Congress last year and documenting the whole thing on Newsvine."

So what, if anything, do Newsvine's contributers have in common? Mike says that they all share "a desire not to soapbox but to play a legitimate role in the news ecosystem." In other words, they take an active interest in the news.

Tests, Conclusion

Newsvine appears to be ramping up nicely and from my own browsing round the site, there was a reasonable amount of seeding, writing, voting and commenting going on. In the Politics section, one of the top stories as of writing is President Bush Makes A Little Girl Cry, which had 56 votes and 125 comments when I checked (does the title reflect a liberal bias on the site?).

The topic I'm most familiar with, Tech, didn't have as many comments or votes - the most comments on a story was 17, and 23 votes was the top. However the content in the Tech section seemed up-to-date and relevant, mostly filled with AP wire stories. Personally I'd still choose Techmeme or Topix over Newsvine Tech, but overall not a bad selection of stories. If you're looking for a tech community to join and actively participate in, other than Read/WriteWeb of course, then Newsvine Tech could be your cup of tea.

Next up in this series, we explore localized Citizen Journalism sites.

Jeff Jarvis does a great job of defining a different way to do investigative journalism, which he calls process journalism. I prefer to call it iterative journalism. Everyone follows a "process," so that word doesn't really define it. Traditional journalists follow a process, and so do blogger journalists. Theirs are just different processes.

"Iterative" is the way of the Web. Create something, put it out there, get reactions, improve. That has to be the future.

But apart from the name, I take big issue with the way some bloggers seize on this as a way to put a respectable spin on what has always been called "yellow journalism" or "gossip rag" material. You can make a ton of money doing that. No, I won't name names here, but the best practitioners of this game have no illusions.

I recall an interview with the editor of one of the most notorious gossip rags, one of whose headlines trumpeted: "Hitler found alive in Afghanistan." I just had to pick it up and scan it while waiting in line at the supermarket. The publication's evidence went as follows:

• Here is a picture of a German Shepherd dog outside a cave in the mountains,
• The cave is in Afghanistan (which looked plausible, if not for Photoshop),
• Hitler liked German Shepherd dogs,
• Ergo, Hitler was in that cave.

The editor had just retired, and the interviewer asked him, "Okay, now that you have retired, you can admit it. You made up some of those stories, right?"

The editor laughed and said, "No, I can tell you with 100% honesty that we never made up a single story. Really. We were simply not that rigorous in checking the stories that people sent to us."

He had outsourced creativity to his readers! Crowdsourcing is not new.

I didn't buy that paper. I just scanned it in the check-out line. But online, I might have clicked. I would have snorted with derision and left the website quickly, but I still would have clicked. Just as I might click on the headline "Google said to be in talks to buy Apple."

That click is money. And yellow journalism exists online.

We can do better than that.

We have to do better. No matter what bloggers believe, the "man on the street" view is that they cannot be trusted. Well, maybe some can be trusted, but that trust is earned every day, the hard way.

The Fourth Estate's Claim to Public Good

In an earlier post on Journalism 2.0, I posited the question, "Would citizen journalists have exposed Watergate?"

The debate was clearly between traditional journalists ("No way. That required serious investigative skills, time, and money.") and bloggers ("With millions of eyes, the truth will always come out.").

In this debate, I am 100% in the blogger/citizen journalist's camp. My opinion has been forged by seeing what happens in countries where government pressure shuts down a story. The Watergate story was not just about tenacious journalists. It was just as much about the bravery of Katherine Graham, the publisher who agreed to take on the wrath of the government by going with the story. Imagine a different publisher, who gets a call from the White House...

In Asia, I have personally seen tenacious journalists stopped dead in their tracks by government pressure and seen their financial backers ruined and exiled. It's ugly stuff and happens all the time. But now there are far too many ways for a story to get out. That kind of government control is no more, and that is great.

The news from Iran shows that pretty clearly.

But Twitter is unreliable drivel that can be gamed, you say? This is not about Twitter. Twitter is just one piece in a layer in the emerging news/journalism stack.

The Emerging Journalism Stack

The old model was vertical integration. The publisher owned the printing press, bought the ink, hired the reporters, delivered the paper, and sold the ads. As in many technology industries, change begets a layered stack. And like it or not, news is now just another digital artifact.

So, here is the emerging stack:

• Bottom: millions of eyes, with camera phones, SMS, Twitter, whatever works at the time. No media firm can replicate this. When people talk about funding journalism through non-profit foundations, it should be along the lines of: make sure everybody in the Peace Corps knows how to do this, or give Amnesty International money to report on prisoner abuse, or give Greenpeace money to report on environmental issues. In fact, not much else is needed beyond what is already happening; the crashing prices of cell phones is making this available to billions of people.
• Middle: the spotters and amplifiers, people who see the potential importance of a story and do a bit more research online and use their network to push the story out. Many of these people have an axe to grind, which makes them motivated, but one has to take what they say with a grain of salt.
• Top: the final mile of media, the trusted brands. Each has to earn the public's trust every day. When you see a news item coming from multiple sources, which do you click on? Different clicks for different folks; this is no winner-take-all market. Can be MSM, can be niche. But that trust is earned every day. Facts have to be checked, and that takes time, money, and training.

The truly amazing thing today is our ability to cruise up and down this stack at will: to see the raw reports from the million eyes, to hear the impassioned voice of the amplifier, and to see how the story emerges down the final mile of media.

Finding Common Ground

The future will play out as it will no matter what either party says. The only question for individuals involved in the journalism/news business is, how do you position yourself in that stack.

It is time for both parties to accept some truths.

Traditional media journalists have to accept that the economic model of their industry is fundamentally and irrevocably broken. It will not return. Ever. Get used to it. Adapt. Many people have to adapt to change, and journalists are no different.

Bloggers have to accept that readers are looking for the rigor of traditional journalists. We have to figure out how to get enough money to do that properly or else do it much more efficiently.