At a recent Berkman blog group meeting, Dan Gillmor, Berkman Center fellow and director of the Center for Citizen Media, led a session on citizen journalism. The Center for Citizen Media is a project affiliated with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The Center is “a new initiative aimed at helping to enable and encourage grassroots media, especially citizen journalism, at every level.”
Dan’s profile has a nice quote for a journaliist, “My readers know more than I do...” In this session he was true to this sentiment and spent most of the time looking at the blogs and other online citizen journalism efforts. There were two local citizen journalism efforts present, H20 Town covering Watertown, Massachusetts. It is a great local online paper, started by Lisa Williams. I wrote on it a while back and it is great to see the effort continues and has grown in its a coverage. There is a restaurant listing with reviews and Lisa has promised me her favorites to be added to the restaurant list in this blog
The other site we looked at was Wicked Local Plymouth covering Plymouth Massachusetts. It is run by the Wicked Local Girl , aka, Courtney Hollands, who has a blog within the site. They also have two blogs from locals and another staff blog. There are a lot of innovative features, a marketplace, what to do, life in Plymouth, news, and sports. The encourage participation and invite you to write a story, join a forum, publish a picture, or post an event. You can also apply to start a blog within the site.
Many of the blogs we looked can be considered citizen journalism. I especially liked The Real Estate Café blog by Bill Wendel. It covers the online real estate market and new business models in this market.
Hey Nice post
There is one site I would think is relevant to this subject. It is ireporter.org it is partially the work of Amy gahran who is the author of contentious.com and therightconversation.com. She is rather knowledgable on the matters of the web and connectivety.
Posted by: Lumpy | May 18, 2006 at 09:19 AM