myHeimat - Distributed Hyperlocal Citizen Journalism in Germany
One citizen journalism project that I’ve been meaning to post about for some time now is the German-based myHeimat.de - a hyperlocal citizen journalism portal with some 14,000 contributors from all around the country. The problem with writing about it is that so far there’s precious little information available that will be accessible to what I presume is a mostly English-speaking readership here at Gatewatching - but happily, IFRA Magazine has now published an English interview with myHeimat’s CEO Martin Huber.
myHeimat (whom I’ll visit in Hannover and Augsburg on my Europe trip in October) is interesting because of its distributed setup and its emerging partnerships with print publishers which re-publish the best citizen journalism content in weekly or monthly print editions which are variously included as supplementary pages or sections in local newspapers, or distributed as free household magazines (similar to, say, the Brisbane News here in Brisbane). In keeping with this, its focus is on community news more than on ‘hard’ political coverage (though some political discussion does take place on the site, too), but of course that doesn’t disqualify it from being regarded as citizen journalism - and it remains to be seen how the site dynamics will change, say, around the time of the next federal election in Germany.
Some notable points from the interview: Huber’s comments about the need for some staff guidance and rolemodelling especially in the early stages of the project seem pretty well aligned with Jason’s reflections on his ‘preditor’ role in our own Youdecide2007 project. Limited by available funding and the election timeframe, ours was necessarily a much smaller project and more temporary than myHeimat, so it’s interesting to see that according to Huber, today it’s his “citizen reporters who show newcomers what can be done with such a portal” and that “in this way, within a very short time it is possible to integrate, qualify [i.e., train] and motivate the large number of new citizen reporters so that they are able to ideally use the network for sub local reporting”.
I’d like to think that, had our project continued past the election, we might also have reached that point where existing users would have trained newcomers and Jason and others could have stepped back from that task - and in fact, managing that transition seems to me to be a crucial make-or-break point for any citizen journalism start-up (and especially one backed by public or private funding). Seeding the site with staff content is clearly necessary especially in the early stages, but if the user community gets too used to relying on staff to contribute the big stories, and restricts itself to making only comments or other minor contributions, a site won’t reach sustainability; at the same time, if staff-contributed content doesn’t manage to set the tone and tenor of the site, user contributions may turn out to be too varied and erratic to allow the site to establish a reliable profile.
It’s interesting in this regard that Huber also highlights the possibility of seeing one’s contribution published in print as an organising factor:
The connection with print causes very many users to pay a lot more attention to quality. People write a lot differently when they know that their text could appear also in print. In addition, 80 to 90 percent of our users are registered under their real name, many also with a photo. Therefore, they stand up for their content with both their name and their face. That leads to wholly different dynamics as well as a greater quality consciousness.
Something similar may be at play in a project like Current.tv (with its promise to have your video screened on a cable TV channel in the US and/or UK). Seems to me as if finding a model that allows myHeimat to bring such external motivating factors to bear as a way of focussing their user community is one of the most promising innovations myHeimat has made.
There are a few more interviews with other hyperlocal journalism projects in the same issue of IFRA Magazine, by the way - if you can find your way through the suboptimal navigation system on the site. The best way to access them directly is through this link. And there’s more information about myHeimat on the site blog - including a number of links to other stories (mostly in German) about the project.
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