The Guardian’s readers’ editor on modern day implications for journalistic privilege… and Moby Dick.
Guardian: Journalistic privilege in an era of blogging
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Category Archives: Citizen journalism
Digg teams up with CNN’s iReport for US convention interviews
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.
CNN’s iReport marks second birthday with 175,000 contributions
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.
Allvoices.com offers $10,000 reward for citizen journalists
Citizen journalism website Allvoices.com has launched a cash reward programme for its contributors.
Under the Excellence in Citizen Media Incentive Program, cash incentives will be given out to contributors based on the number of page views that their work generates, an announcement by the site said.
A user will receive $1,000 for every 100,000 page views (up to one million) generated by their submissions, while one million page views will result in an award of $10,000.
Allvoices is encouraging users to promote their work through social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and Reddit, and by commenting on and contributing to other users’ portfolios on the site.
The program is open to work submitted between now and February 19.
Chinese citizen journalist Zhou ‘Zuola’ Shuguang twitters his detention
Chinese citizen journalist Zhou ‘Zuola’ Shuguang has used microblogging service Twitter as he was detained by officials, Global Voices Online (GVO) has reported.
Zuola, who has used his blog to publish his own investigations into incidents such as the recent Chinese earthquake and the cover-up of a teenager’s murder, recently purchased a Blackberry and has been sending updates with the device to the Twitterberry service.
According to translations of his tweets by GVO, Zuola was forced to leave his parents house in a car by officials from the Meitanba Mining Group:
Zuola has since reported that he is under ‘town arrest’ and cannot leave the town of Meitanba:
MySpace and NBC select citizen journalism competition winners
Decision08, a competition organised by MySpace, NBC News and msnbc.com, has selected two citizen journalists to cover the 2008 US Democratic and Republican conventions.
Matt Britten and Sara Pat Badgley were chosen by more than 50,000 users who voted in the Decision08 convention contest, a press release said.
Entrants were asked to post a video to the Decision08 MySpace site answering the question ‘How will you stand out in the crowd and get the scoop no one else can?’
Below are the winning vids:
DAG hands over cameras to readers…
Dutch newspaper DAG handed out 1000s of disposable cameras to its readers today, the Newspaper Innovation blog reports.
Recipients have been asked to take one photo with the camera and then pass it on. The last person should return the camera to the paper for the pics to be developed.
A rough translation from the site suggests the aim is to get a snapshot of 24 hours from 27 (the number of pictures on the film) different perspectives.
The paper will then publish some of the photos with the best winning a prize – announced on October 1.
Telegraph.co.uk blogs: Citizen journalism matters
Turi Munthe, founder of cit-j site Demotix, explains why the site has been launched and begins a series of posts on citizen journalism.
YouTube vid catches police clash with cyclist
A video uploaded by a New York tourist to YouTube has captured a seemingly unprovoked attack on a cyclist by a police officer.
According to CNET, the video is at odds with the officer’s own report of the incident.
The video-sharing site has plans to harness the power of ‘citizen journalism’ with the launch of its Citizen News channel. Was this video submitted to any news organisations before or at the same time as YouTube?
Whether it was or not this video shows YouTube’s potential for newsgatherers and illustrates the changing relationship between the public and the media – some citizens would rather broadcast the news themselves.
Video: When MoveOn.org and ColorOfChange.org petitioned Fox News
Fronted by hip-hop star Nas, MoveOn.org and ColourOfChange.org delivered its petition to Fox News over alleged ‘racist smears’ made by the news channel against presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The 620,127 letters to were boxed up as Fox refused to accept them.