by Sean Smith
I’ve been surfing the Net the past couple of days looking for information, stories, examples, etc. of citizen journalism (CJ) and journalists.
I came across a good number of websites for the major American newspapers, a few sites of international news organizations, and of course a gazillion blogs.
The newspapers sites, of course report most of their stories the traditional way using professional journalists but they did have some written by citizen journalists. However, navigation to get to the page that includes the news written by normal everyday citizens, like you and I, is almost an afterthought. On each site of the major news organizations, I had to hunt down the links to the appropriate page. It’s as if they are hiding these stories that have the potential to be the most important to the average person.
It’s easy to find citizen journalism in the form of blogs, but they are typically based on a specific topic or theme. I do agree that they are a form of citizen journalism but I’m looking for a source or journalist that is organic, pure, and covers a wide range of topics that may affect all of us.
Finally, I came across Spot.us. This is the type of site I’ve been looking for. It’s genius!
Spot.us is a nonprofit project of the Center for Media Change that looks to publicly fund news. It’s a place where traditional news organizations, independent reporters, and community members can work together in finding, developing, and collaborating on news stories that may typically be overlooked or ignored by mainstream news organizations.
The best thing about this site is that when you get to the home page you instantly see stories written or funded by local community members. Visitors to the site are encouraged to donate money to fund the development and completion of stories. They can easily do so by clicking on the “Donate” buttons associated with individual stories. By doing this the average citizen who visits the site decide what information or news will be reported on Spot.us.
If a reader doesn’t have the desire or means to contribute funds, they have the option to “donate talent”. Readers, like myself can request to participate in reporting a story and Spot.us will send a message to their reporters informing them that I’m interested in helping out. The reporters will then send leads or assignments to me that can start working. All I have to do is dig up some information about the story pitch it in Spot.us’s blog and see if Spot.us’s freelance reports will cover the story or better yet, a national news organization will pick it up.
In addition to the novel idea of publicly funding and including community members in news reporting the site does a great job of informing readers who has started or contributed financially or physically. On the page of an individual story is a list of all the people who contributed, how much, and in what capacity. This is basically a reward for those that did contribute. They get there face on a website, earn credibility, and of course form a bond with the site and other readers/contributors.
Another great thing about this site is that underneath the incomplete stories is information from the reporter regarding the various benefits or goals of covering a story and how reporting the story will help citizens, community, or world.
Imagine a world where all online news sites were similar to this. We can finally receive news that is honest and actually matters.
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