By Anna Poludenko

The Idea… And it’s going to get harder still. The hunter-gather

model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it – digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.

Phil Meyer

Citizen Journalism By the late 1990s critics were calling press arrogant,

elitist and unresponsive to the public.

Journalists discovered that the power of the people can help them jump start the process of finding sources, experts and new angles and provide instant feedbak.

Types Crowdsoursing

Open-source reporting

Pro-am journalism

Crowdsourcing Boston newspaper “Publik” – clean last page.

Britannica VS Wikipedia

Microsoft VS Firefox (Mozilla Foundation)

Our readers know more than us Structure the task

Make it easy and understandable

Use the best tools

How to Generate idea for information needed

Create a form

Collect the story information

Do you need to confirm anything?

Map coverage

Write an analytic post explaining what its all about

Open-source reporting To go public with your story idea early in the reporting

process.

Disclosure invites readers to help you report the story.

Welcome the audience’s feedback.

It will increate your credibility – they are following each of your steps.

People see how the process works.

How to make it work? There must be a drive of investigation.

Momentum – feedback that keeps people from being discouraged.

Expertise and diversity

Types1. Mechanical – many people doing the same job

2. The wisdom of crowd – diversity

Beatblogging Build a social network around traditional reporting

beat, either with a blog or a free platform, like googlegroup – bring the stakeholder on that beat together.

Link – to source or documents

Pro-AM Journalism Do-it-yourself Movement

OffTheBus (OTB) was a citizen-powered campaign news site co-sponsored by The Huffington Post – on-the-ground-information

http://www.nowpublic.com/ link to AP