The Online Journalism Review just published my article about how citizens media sites are turning increasingly to rich media — photos, video, audio — supplied by users. It focuses on three pioneering citizens media sites: NowPublic, Bluffton Today and New West. Excerpt:
“We believe the real problem plaguing American newspapers and draining the lifeblood out of circulation and readership is that people are no longer primarily focused on their own communities,” Steve Yelvington [of Morris Digital Works] says. “You’re living in this cable TV world of the outside observer instead of acting as participants. We’re trying to make people come out of their gates and become players. We want a participative culture to evolve.” …
“The big news organizations always say, we have journalism school grads and Pulitzer Prize winners and people trained in the craft. Fair enough, but you have two people on the story, and we already may have 20 or 50. What happens when we have 2,000 people covering that story? There will come a point where they can’t compete,” Michael Tippett of NowPublic says.
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.
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