Aboard the crowded D train, rumbling into Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, the inevitable rant explodes. A rant courtesy of Faye Anderson, whom we’ll call Ms CJ, a k a Citizen Journalist. A rant directed at us, Mr MSM, a k a Mainstream Media, for all our perceived faults. “It’s not you, the journalist, it’s the [...]

Agence France-Presse (AFP) has bought a 30 per cent stake in the citizen journalism platform Scooplive, which will be renamed Citizenside. AFP has stated that it will not take part in editorial decisions on the site, which allows users to publish and sell films and photos for commission. According to a press statement from the agency, it [...]

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s muzzled press and burgeoning Internet have given citizen reporters an audience and an opportunity — however fleeting — to spread news quicker than government censors can control it. Zhou Shuguang, whose amateur reporting of a famous property dispute lead to him being hailed as China’s “first citizen reporter”, poses in front of [...]

The Guardian today launched its US website with an exclusive interview with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The site, Guardianamerica.com, has been designed for the Guardian’s growing US audience, which now accounts for nearly a third of Guardian Unlimited’s readership. In the latest audited ABCe figures for August, Guardian Unlimited had 15.9 million unique users, of which the [...]

NEW YORK — A news site that has allowed its users to write and submit their own articles is shutting down, citing unspecified “business issues.” Backfence Inc. had “hyperlocal” sites serving 13 communities in the Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Chicago areas. Residents were allowed to write on any topic, including event announcements and neighborhood [...]

From evening arrests on the M6 to the vehicle in flames outside Glasgow airport, the events of the past three days have highlighted the role members of the public play in reporting news as it unfolds. Rolling news channels and newspapers published scores of videos and images taken on mobile phones and digital cameras by so-called [...]

BEIJING (AFP) – In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, “citizen journalism” is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had [...]

It seemed like a good idea at the time. With blogging flourishing and citizen journalism just budding, Mark Potts and Susan DeFife thought they had a winning formula for a new kind of journalistic enterprise. One evening in the summer of 2004, they sketched out their common vision: A series of hyperlocal, news-oriented Web sites [...]

CHICAGO: The Chicago Tribune has launched a community journalism Web site encouraging readers in nine suburbs to post their own unedited articles, photos and blogs. “This started with the question of how can we make the paper more relevant to readers who continue to live further and further away from the center city,” said Ted Biedron, [...]

As the attack by a deranged gunman unfolded at Virginia Tech on Monday, one thing became increasingly clear: In many ways, and for a growing number of people, blogs and wikis — and Facebook and MySpace — are the new CNN. In the same way that reporters for the TV news network became a symbol of [...]

During the Easter weekend, Cedar City saw a strong example of citizen journalism. Darin Bloomfield, an SUU student, upon seeing a SWAT vehicle with its lights flashing cruising through his neighborhood, grabbed a video camera and began taping. When he realized he had something significant, he contacted various news organizations and provided the footage to [...]

Web news search site Topix, owned by three top US newspaper publishers Monday began recruiting users to report local news that traditional outlets do not sufficiently cover. Topix’s platform addresses the pent-up demand for local news in towns and cities across the country where traditional news media alone cannot cover enough of the hyper-local events and [...]

OhmyNews introduced the world to “citizen journalism” — breaking news, investigative reporting, tales of daily life, written by thousands of amateurs all over South Korea. But now the online newspaper finds itself in the throes of change. After having turned a small profit for three years, OhmyNews slid into the red in 2006. It faces growing [...]

A free web portal to help both citizens and journalists create and responsibly operate community news sites launched Monday with an array of learning and resource modules contributed by a network of participants. The Knight Citizen News Network (KCNN) seeks to help build capacity for citizens who want to start their own news ventures and [...]

NYU professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired News have launched an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero, as the project is called, is to develop [...]