Citizen expression

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Friday evening, I was visited by  Ignacio Escribano, founder of the Argentinian citizen media site igooh. That’s his slide show, above. Igooh is a vertical site that’s funded by Latin America’s most prestigious newspaper, La Nación, though Ignacio gets to run it with virtually no oversight by the media corporation.

We had a pretty engaging 90-minute conversation about the state of “citizen expression” — I’m reluctant to post this on a Sunday morning because I think it merits wider attention — a term that he prefers to citizen journalism. I think “citizen expression” is a brilliant term for the ways in which ordinary people are becoming part of the media conversation, much better than the alternatives I’ve heard.

Ignacio told me that he has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the term citizen journalism because users don’t think of themselves as journalists and are thus less prone to participate when pegged as a journalist. It’s a lesson that NewWest learned a couple of years ago when it stopped using the term and that other citizen media sites are also discovering.

Ignacio recorded our conversation on his iPod, but he’s been interviewing so many folks that I don’t think he’ll have time to post it. I should have done a video podcast with Ignacio about the fascinating things he’s doing with the Spanish-only igooh.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.