Budding Thoughts on Citizen Journalism (and more on Google alert curation)

A video review of Dan Gillmor's book is coming soon, but in the meantime I thought I'd give a quick update on my thoughts with citizen journalism as a broader topic. As I've continued to curate content using Google alerts, I've come across some useful articles and some not-so-useful articles, which I fully expected. Luckily, it's easy to filter out the bad ones quickly.

Funding and Audience Participation

Image by Howard Lake

Through two articles in particular (one article on a Chinese man changing up his journalism career and crowd-funding his entire income, and another article on a new news outlet in Philadelphia to be run by "an army of citizens" who are interested in having a say on how the city runs), I've had some new thoughts.

For one thing, economics play an interesting role in this new form of journalism. The two articles I've mentioned take it as a positive that only stories that the public finds interesting will be funded. In many ways this makes participatory journalism not only about more citizens participating in the creation of news, but also its funding.

My Own Contribution

I'd like to also take my participation in news up a notch from a simple consumer to a true contributor by using both my personal passions and skills and the information I've gleaned in my research. My thinking so far has led me to the idea of compiling and laying out a guide to good citizen journalism using the information I gather. As I've mentioned before, I love design and editing, and I'm sure this will be a good mix of new information and my own expertise. The book (or short guide) will, of course, be available for free online.

Where Next?

Aside from the obvious of gathering more information to compile into the guide I've talked about, I also need to figure out the best way to get my creation into circulation. Something I need to focus more on is social connections and proof in networks that would care about such a publication. While Google alerts has been a great tool for research, I need to find another tool that is more suited for social connection. More to come there. I also should decide what I want the final format of my guide to be (a simple PDF? Many file types that can be read on e-readers?).