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Hurricane twitterer Mark Mayhew on rebuilding after Ike and Gustav

September 22nd, 2008 | 2 Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Citizen journalism, Online Journalism

Mark Mayhew, who used microblogging service Twitter to update from New Orleans as Hurricane Gustav hit, is using a range of multimedia tools to document efforts to rebuild towns and cities affected by Gustav and Hurricane Ike.

Starting with Twitter again, Mayhew has set up the @RebuildHouston channel to update on the recovery efforts in the Galveston and Houston area. He’ll also be posting longer reports, videos and photos to CNN’s iReport site.

“I’m leaving New Orleans as part of a two person crew who has a van that is “locked and loaded” (my associate’s term) and should be arriving in Houston on Monday morning. We have stockpiled food, tools and we have an EVDO-enabled laptop with a digital camera (that can shoot vid as well,” writes Mayhew on iReport.

Mayhew hopes local journalists will get involved with his coverage, creating a ‘collaborative journalism’ project.

He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty either - posting the following ad for ‘”pay what you want” clean up/home repair/property management’ on Craigslist:

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Digg teams up with CNN’s iReport for US convention interviews

August 26th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted by Laura Oliver in Citizen journalism, Social media and blogging

Digg is working with CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport to allow users of the social bookmarking site to pose questions to members of the Democrat and Republican conventions taking place in the US over the next two weeks.

The Digg Dialogg feature, which will be used for the first time at the conventions, lets users submit text or video questions to be put to a particular interviewee. These are then ranked by other Digg users with the top 10 posed to the subject during a live interview.

The first candidate will be Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US Democrats’ House of Representatives, said Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, in a blog post.

According to a release from CNN, the news organisation broke the one billion barrier for page views on its politics site, which was launched last September; while its blog, the CNN Political Ticker, recorded its highest ever traffic on August 22 with more than 2.7 milion page views - driven by the announcement of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s running mate.

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CNN’s iReport marks second birthday with 175,000 contributions

August 21st, 2008 | 1 Comment | Posted by Laura Oliver in Citizen journalism

Two years since its launch and CNN’s iReport has received 175,000 videos and photos on news topics from users.

According to a press release from CNN, 125,000 of these submissions were made in the second year of the project.

The user-generated content initiative attracts an average of almost 15,000 reports a month.

In February this year iReport launched its own website, which now has 85,000 registered users and, according to Nielsen Online figures, attracts 2.3 million unique users each month and generates 7.1 million page views a month.

The scheme has become ‘an exceptionally powerful newsgathering tool for the network’ and submissions and iReporters have been featured across CNN’s broadcast and online platforms, the company said.

“Sometimes the iReports we receive are first images of breaking news and often exhibit powerful points of view on issues or news events. But every day our iReporters show an enthusiasm for and pride in the community they have created,” said Susan Grant, executive vice president of CNN News Services.

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