May 31st, 2006 | Citizen Media, Reimagination | No Comments
The International Herald-Tribune, which is owned by the New York Times, has signed a deal with the South Korean “citizen journalism” site OhMyNews.com that will see stories from the service appear in the IHT. Here’s an excerpt of the story from the Guardian’s media section:
A deal with a South Korean news website, OhmyNews International, could see so-called “citizen journalists” appearing alongside established writers. The agreement is believed to be an attempt to boost the Herald Tribune’s coverage of Asia. OhmyNews has been described as a news equivalent of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia written by its users.
Anyone can submit an article to OhmyNews and about three-quarters of the stories on the site are the work of the network’s 40,000 non-professional contributors. The rest come from about 50 in-house writers and editors, who also vet the public material to decide what is printed.
May 30th, 2006 | Reimagination, Social Media | No Comments
Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine.com points to a great piece by Georgina Henry, the editor of The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog hub experiment, about her experiences and how columnists have taken to it. Here’s an excerpt:
For those who have dwelt in the world of bloggers for years, none of this will come as a surprise. But for journalists who have spent a lifetime in print - like me and most Guardian columnists - it has been a rude shock. On good days I think this is the most exciting new frontier for journalism - the immediacy of the debate, the excitement at watching readers engage with the big (and occasionally trivial) issues of the day with wit, verve and insight make print seem sluggish, out of date, even a bit dull.
Jarvis also quotes her as saying at a conference that:
“When I started this, I did look on it as a newspaper journalist; these were things that we were putting up that you had to read. I didn’t really get the measure of the conversation that goes on. “Two months on, I’m kind of humbled by it. You have to think in a different way about what exactly does divide your professional columnists and the people that I recruited to blog from the readers, who are sometimes extremely erudite.”
May 30th, 2006 | Citizen Media, Reimagination | No Comments
Craig has passed on a longish piece from Alternet, in which a writer takes a look at the recent growth of user-generated sites such as Digg.com (including the recent controversy about control by a group of insiders) and surveys some of the other sites such as Vancouver-based NowPublic and Newsvine. Here’s an excerpt:
The need the new sites are addressing, says longtime tech journalist Dan Gillmor, is to cut through the noise of the internet and find the good stuff users are submitting. “This is the experimentation period,” he said. And the “big jump from where we are to where we need to be,” Gillmor says, is a long way off. Companies are trying out new methods for weighing credibility and trustworthiness of web news, so that there’s more than mere popularity at stake. “We’re not going to know for some years what works and really doesn’t,” he says.
