1. Personal homepages
2. Indymedia: a global collective of independent media organisations
3. Blogs
4. Hyperlocal Citizens Journalism eg US sites The Northwest Voice and Muncie Free Press
5. Media Citizens Journalism eg CNN citizen journalism site CNN Exchange
6. Networked/Collaborative Citizen Journalism eg. Assignment Zero

Timeline of Citizen Journalism

18th century

• US pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine and the anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers gained prominence by printing their own publications

19th century

• 1803 - George Howe, printer of Australia’s first newspaper the Sydney Gazette, gathers local content directly from the public, with them dropping suggestions for stories into a ’slip box’ hung outside the Gazette office.

1960s

• video footage captured by citizens of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy

1980s

• video footage captured by onlookers of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles. This article describes how the tape was first rejected by local police and CNN.
• rise of talk radio, cable access TV and ‘zines (self-published magazines) give people the chance to share their views with a much larger audience
• in newspapers, there were letters to the editor and op-ed pieces submitted by citizens
• (US) pirate radio stations hit the airwaves without the permission of the FCC
• New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen helped spearhead the public journalism or civic journalism movement, focused on getting mainstream reporters to serve the public

1994

• First blogs emerge, like Justin’s Links from the Underground
• Drudge Report starts as subscriber-based email by Matt Drudge (not a journalist), and later a website most famous for breaking the Monica Lewinksy scandal

1999

• Indymedia site launched after the WTO protests in Seattle that year. At Indymedia, anyone can share photos, text and video with other activists and the world.
• Blogger.com starts, giving anyone free access to blogging tools and web space

2000

• OhMyNews site launched in South Korea, now a popular mainstream news source.

2001

• eyewitness bloggers in Iraq such as Salam Pax giving stunningly detailed early accounts of the war

2004

• Conservative bloggers helped discredit documents related to President Bush’s National Guard service used in an episode of “60 Minutes II” in 2004. This became known as Rathergate.
• hyperlocal citizen journalism emerges. By and large (though not entirely), reports from hyperlocal news sites tended to focus on small-scale community events like the building of new high school gyms.

2005

• OhMyNews goes global, seeking international contributors

2006

• A former Lockheed Martin engineer takes his story about security flaws with Coast Guard ships straight to YouTube after the mainstream media ignored his entreaties. Later, the Washington Post wrote about it.
• CNN launches its own citizen journalism site, I-Reports

2005

• the earliest photos on the scene of the London bombings on July 7 were taken by ordinary citizens with their cameraphones. Mainstream media sites run by the BBC and MSNBC accepted photos, video and text reports — a practice that continues to this day among many major broadcasters.

2007

• Assignment Zero publishes its first collaborative news stories
• Endemol, the developer of Big Brother, started to produce daily user-generated TV news shows. The Dutch-language shows ask viewers to send in their own reports from which they make local news TV items. Videos are then screened before being placed on the sites and selected for the presenter-led TV show. The daily half-hour programmes - called IK OP TV (Me on TV) - debuted this week on seven regional TV channels in Holland
• bloggers document the uprising and violence in Burma, and included in mainstream news media like BBC

Sources

Mediashift: Your Guide to Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism defined, history, terminology, ad hoc examples, big media and hybrid examples, and resources.

Unpacking my Library: “Actually Existing” Citizen Journalism Projects and Typologies: Part I
Looks at some of the citizen journalism projects that have either existed in the past and continue to exist today - the personal homepage, Indymedia and Blogs.

Wikipedia Entry on Citizen Journalism

List of global citizen journalism (news) site at Sourcewatch

What is Vodcasting? explains how vodcasting uses similar technology to podcasting (RSS feeds) to get internet video onto your computer or media player.

Like its audio counterpart (podcasting), video podcasting seems to be most popular for professionally produced shows made for TV.

Vodcasting Directories
http://www.vodcasts.tv/

http://www.podguide.tv/

http://mefeedia.com/ (Video blogs, vlogs and video podcasts)

Articles on Vodcasting

Video-on-Demand! Webisodes! Hollywood Writers Want a Cut
Wired Online 24/7/07
US writers for screen and TV are demanding a “piece of the new media pie”. Their existing agreement of residual payments from reruns of movies and TV shows expires at the end of October, and unless the new agreement with movie studios and production houses incorporates online delivery and other spinoffs like blogs, American Writers Guild members are threatening to strike. The article several approaches writers could take to improve their lot, like taking a slice of ad revenue, trading upfront payments for a cut of profits and waiting till the Screen Actors Guild renegotiate their contracts next year.
Thinking of video blogging? You should probably forget it
Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog 21/11/06

Want to be a Video Star?
Newsweek 25/09/06

Podcasting And Vodcasting In Higher Education: How Disruptive Will They Be?
Robin Good blog 16/4/05

Lights! Camera! Vodcast!
Wired May 2006

Uses of Vodcasting

Public relations, for business and government (including electioneering)

Education

more to be added…

Vodcasting in Australia

ABC puts vodcasting to the test (Sydney Morning Herald 22/8/06)

Questions about Vodcasting

How is a vodcast different from a YouTube video?

“Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production provides the first comprehensive study of the latest wave of online news publications. It investigates the collaborative publishing models of key news Websites ranging from the worldwide Indymedia network to the massively successful technology news site Slashdot and further to the multitude of Weblogs which have emerged in recent years. ”
Read the rest of the Snurblog review

The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia by Margaret Simons

“In The Content Makers Margaret Simons explains the changes taking place in the Australian media. She analyses audiences, our major media organisations, the role of government - and the implications of all of these for our society and our democracy. ”

Read the rest of the Penguin summary

And all this means that more and more bloggers are posting, and that blogs are serving more purposes.

There’s the:

• Commercial blog: “please believe our multinational corporation has a human side that is caring/cool/sincere , rather than a human side that resembles a sociopath” blog
• Commerical Internal Blog: “please believe our multinational cares what its employees think, despite our labour practices indicating the opposite” blog
• Publicity blog: “find out what movie star sulks in their trailer/turns up drunk to set/doesn’t get along with their fellow actors while we make this movie” blog
• Collaborative blog: where many authors post their thoughts on a topic or issue, project, problem… (can’t make a cynical joke for this one cos this kind of collaboration is pretty neat)

Previous Limitations of Blog Software
Blogs can be used to build a simple website with navigation that goes one-level deep, or a website that clearly resembles a blog.

In Wordpress, static pages can be published using the “Page” function, and displayed as a “menu” in the style of a typical website menu. Most Wordpress templates do not have the functionality for “submenus”.

This limitation means that small-medium size sites, especially those on a small budget, are more likely to be built using CMSs (content management systems) that are free, small scale, reasonably user-friendly and open source like CMS Made Simple and Website Baker rather with than blog software.

Viva La Blog Revolution: Blogs as “Self-contained” Websites
When I was looking to build a website in Wordpress six months ago, the only way to build a comprehensive website with many pages and navigation two levels deep was to use plugins like FoldPageList (the name should be a warning to non-programmers in itself, right?!) in which you needed to modify php files (erk) and spend lots of time on the Wordpress Support forum posts brushing up on the plugin’s related quirks.

This week I was trawling through Wordpress templates and suddenly, setting up a self-contained, traditional “website” for a business or project using blog software seemed a whole lot easier!There are now Wordpress templates like this which allow for submenus that don’t look like they’ve been designed by a programmer and, with simple customisation of the template, mean that your site can successfully disguise its real blog indentity!

Until the search function of Wordpress themes has a “pages submenu” filter, it’s hard to indentify which and how many themes have this functionality, but hopefully more developers are incorporate the possibility of submenus.

Another previous limitation of blogs “realising their potential” as stand-alone websites was that the index page was dynamically generated and displayed the most recent blog posting. This feature in the latest Wordpress release 2.1 allows the home page to be static, while RSS feeds of dynamic content allow dynamic content to also be displayed (though the implemention seems tricky - more php file editing)

While these additions are small cogs in the blogging software machinery, these extra functionalities increase the ability of organisations or projects, especially those working on a limited budget, to make an updateable, small-medium size website without too much need for specialist designers or developers.

The familiarity of blogging software to many people also means other people besides the designer/web content manager/online producer can manage and update their organisation’s website.

CMSs promise us easy collaboration but it’s blogs that have shown they can really deliver.

Now that blogs are moving closer to transforming into stand-alone websites, they reduce the barriers to anyone having a diy web presence that is accessible, standards-based, multimedia, Web 2.0 compatible, and doesn’t look like crap!

Suspended Life http://www.sptimes.com/2006/04/07/trapeze/ is an animated comic accompanied with an audio commentary by its creator, journalist S.I. Rosenbaum. It was the Best of New Media Design Monthly Winner for April 2006, a competition run by the Society for News Design, and was published on the St Petersburg Times newspaper website, where S.I. Rosenbaum works as a journalist.

On first inspection, Suspended Life is the simple and sweet story of a teenage girl’s passion for the trapeze, her family’s history in travelling circuses, and the impending pressure on her to get a ‘real job’ as college looms. The beautifully minimalist comic illustrates her trapeze routine and daily practice, and uses well placed, direct quotes to describe how she feels on the trapeze, and her fears for the future.

It’s a well-told and well-illustrated online animated comic and it could easily be fiction, but it’s not - it’s the result of an interview with a real person, Simone Dykes, 16 year old trapeze artist.

Why “journalism comic”?

In the accompanying audio commentary, S.I. Rosenbaum says that it is “very refreshing to be able to tell stories in a different way than in the way I usually do. Everyday as a reporter I’m storytelling using words and sentences, and this way I can use words and pictures instead.”

She also points out that comics allow her to “combine different pieces of information.” While she didn’t elaborate on this, perhaps she means how the comic format necessitates that only certain information from a story is extracted, interpreted and highlighted - and that it is these poignant moments or quotes, especially when combined with illustration, that can make a story of this kind emotionally powerful in connecting with its audience.

The reduction of content also means that a story may have more impact, because it is not lost in “background information” or the need to set the story in its wider context.

And because it is “art”, its beauty, magic, uniqueness and handmade qualities connect with us differently than a standard journalistic feature.

Journalism comics in the newsroom?

One journalist arguing the case for journalism comics is Jim Willse, editor of US newspaper the Newark Star-Ledger.

[My summary of his seminar, Super Prose: Comics Can Make You a Better Writer, to go here.]

In a very indepth article for the Columbia Journalism Review, The Case for Comics Journalism, Kristian Williams outlines the history of the journalism comic, or “graphic journalism” as it was known,  the variety of styles and approaches to this medium, and puts forward its many strengths.

[My summary of this article to go here]

The history of journalism comics

Fantagraphics Books, publishers of comics and graphic novels, would argue that its artists have been producing what it calls “graphic journalism” long before newspaper journalists got on to the idea.

Comic artists like Joe Sacco and Ho Che Anderson are not journalists, yet their comics are clearly investigative or historical stories based in fact. Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine, published in 1993 “combined the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comics storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighted situation”. Sacco’s biography argues that Palestine “set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium, and was the first non-fiction graphic novel to invite serious comparison with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus”.

[conclusion here]

Newscorp CEO Murdoch urges a “complete transformation” of traditional journalism to meet the needs of the ‘digital native’.

In a speech to newspaper editors today, global media magnate Rupert Murdoch declared the internet as the new medium for media success, and called for an overhaul of traditional print journalism.

Media owners, editors and journalists must change their practices to stay in touch with ‘digital natives’, younger generations who have grown up with the internet, Murdoch said.

Murdoch called for the “refashion” of media websites with continuous updates and relevant, engaging news. The media and its audience needed increased interactivity, with blogs, video and podcasts supplementing news reporting. It was, he said, the end of a “god-like” media telling audiences what was important.

His calls were backed with a recent study showing low levels of trust in newspaper content and increasing consumption of news online and on demand. The study reported that 44% of people aged 18 – 34 access an online news portal once a day, compared with 19% reading a newspaper.

With falling consumption of print media, Murdoch said that advertising revenue must also be shifted online, and outlined the unique advantages of the internet, like “targeting potential consumers based
on where they’ve surfed and what products they’ve bought.”