gatewatching

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.

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citizen journalism citizen journalism, hyperlocal, preditor, youdecide2007

Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Youdecide ran during the lead-up and up to the 2007 Australian federal election; it was a practice-based project and the first step in an ARC Linkage project between QUT, SBS, Online Opinion, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. It offered aggregated hyperlocal content, crowdsourced from citizen journalists in local electorates and coordinated by a small team of site staff led by Jason. It gathered some 2000 registered users, and 230 articles from over 50 electorates were submitted to the site during its lifetime. (There was also a weekly YD07 TV show on the Briz31 community television channel.)

Users could submit text, audio, photo, and video content to the site, as well as comment on one another’s stories, and the site demonstrated that there was an appetite for this kind of project in the country - if from some areas and demographics more than others. Obviously, the focus was on original content (departing from the gatewatching and commenting model still very prevalent in citizen journalism), this was fairly successful.

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citizen journalism, government academic, citizen journalism, government, journalism, preditor

I thought I’d put up here my first piece that’s come out of digesting the youdecide2007 experience. This is the draft version of a paper I’ve submitted to an academic journal, though I think it’s accessible enough for anyone with an interest to read. 

It’s reflecting on the forms of cultural labour our small team did during the election in facilitating citizen journalism, which mixed more traditional tasks of journalism with new disciplines.

Downloadable below

Preditors - Making citizen journalism work (PDF)

As the paper makes clear, I’ve called the workers who  facilitate citizen journalism preditors - thinking through this new form of cultural labour will, I hope, help us get past some often silly oppositions that get set up between citizen journalism and “teh MSM”. Crowdsourced citizen journalism projects actually need “go-to” people with a certain minimum of journalism training; mainstream media organisations are increasingly looking to harness user-generated content. This has implications for journalism training, established media and independent journalism initiatives.

I’ve nominated four areas of responsibility for preditors: content work, networking, community work and tech work. You’ll see how they blend in the paper.

It’s pretty long - over 8000 words - but if you think it’s hard work reading that much, you should try writing it! My long-form writing muscles got a good work out. Fellow scholar-nerds might care to know that this length might be unacceptable for many Australian journals, but is pretty normal for international journals. I’ve handed this one in to one of them (it’s a secret while its in peer review).

I’m looking for reactions and comments, which you might like to put in the comments below… I will give out minties to anyone who finds typos! I’m giving a version of this paper at this conference on citizen journalism in Brisbane this week, and again in England in April!

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, elections, preditor, research, youdecide2007

As well as our regular co-written posts, I thought this blog would be a useful space for some timely practice-based reflections on youdecide2007, and my role there.

Youdecide2007 is the project we’re running with some other folks to create a citizen-led coverage of the 2007 Australian Federal Election.

I’m keenly aware that there are scores of people, all over the world, trying to bring citizen journalism projects into being, and I hope that this might be one useful space for discussion around that. What we all find out sooner or later is that “build it and they will come” is just a cute line from a movie. You’ve got to actively bring the produsers to your project, and it can be tough. I’m hoping this will be a good place to reflect on that.

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citizen journalism, media citizen journalism, journalism, media, preditor