Tag Archives: sports stories

Guardian and Citizenside team up for Tour de France photos

The Guardian is gathering spectators’ photographs from the 2011 Tour de France by partnering with citizen media agency Citizenside.

The Tour de France 2011 page of the Guardian’s website features a slideshow dedicated to sharing the experience of being a spectator.

Citizenside is paying the citizen photographers using fund from the Guardian, editor-in-chief of Citizenside Philip Trippenbach told Journalism.co.uk.

The slideshow includes shots from local eyewitnesses from every stage of the race and spectators are encouraged to post pictures by a series of geo-targetted campaigns.

The Guardian has so far used 645 spectator photos from Citizenside, averaging 38 photos per stage for the first 17 stages of the Tour de France.

In a release, Philippe Checinski, co-founder of Citizenside said:

We’re very excited to be providing our members with such a great opportunity to share their experiences of the Tour de France. It’s not every day that locals from those remote towns get their own photos published on the fifth most visited news site in the world.

Matt McAlister, director of digital Strategy at the Guardian, added:

Working with Citizenside has given us a chance to explore some new ways of partnering with other communities and platforms that share our approach to openness.

Other stories on Citizenside are at this link.

Guardian America

The long awaited US-focused website from the Guardian has arrived – time to dig a little deeper into what Guardian America has to offer the reader (American or not).

  • Search: using the search facility on Guardian America is the same as using it on Guardian Unlimited. Results for a search on “Hilary Clinton” do not show any results for the America site despite an interview with the Clinton being its main interview of the day.

This is good and bad – after all the site is intended to link in with Guardian Unlimited, but this could be frustrating for US users using the search as a means of navigating around the US site.

  • Blogs: Comment Is Free and some of the site’s blogs have been up and running for US users for a while – a clever tactic as it has ensured active readers and commenters on the new site. Deadline USA seems to be the flagship blog for the new offering with a healthy dose of US political news.
  • Homepage: American content at the top of each section – Guardian Unlimited content tacked on at the bottom. Yes, this may be a little unfair – it’s the first day so this format is likely to change – but having British sports stories slap bang in the middle of what is meant to be a US version seems inconsistent and is surely off-putting for a reader.

It will be interesting to see how the site develops, particularly to see how much this it fulfils its remit as a dedicated US platform as opposed to just another section of the main website.