I’m back from Seoul, South Korea, and seriously jet-lagged (so please forgive the delay in responding to emails). Here are some final notes, which I wasn’t able to post before I left:
Best citizen media site
Best citizen media site I was only dimly aware of: Scoop, the first citizen media site in Israel. It launched in January 2006. I met and interviewed Michael Weiss, the co-founder and editor. Some highlights from his talk to the forum:
Israel has 3.6 million internet daily users, out of a population of 7 million; 70 percent have broadband. “Israelis trust Internet news sites more than any other news channel.” The most popular Hebrew news sites are walla (45%), ynet (40%), nrg (36%) and haaretz (12%).
Scoop doesn’t pay contributors, but if you submit 10 items that are published you get a T-shirt; 50, a webcam; 100, a yearly subscription to a daily newspaper.
Why do citizen reporters contribute? For influence, excitement, recognition. You get your own page with a short bio, picture, links, archived stories and blog. A reporter’s zone and reporters forum on the site is open only to the site’s reporters.
The site launched with 250 citizen reporters and now has 800, who contribute an average of two articles a week. Reporters can publish up to two stories a day. The reporter writes the story, but the editors run a cross-check, take third-party responses and search the story’s keywords on Google to suss out plagiarism.
Coming up: ScoopTV, a news oriented video chanel, where users and reporters can send video clips. And Scoop International, exposing Scoop stories to the world and translating foreign stories from other CJ sites.
Other highlights
Eric Larsen, CEO of Flix.dk (Denmark), a Danish platform for citizen reporting that launched in November 2003, said it’s depressing watching the news in Denmark. “Very often it’s the same angle, it’s the same depressing facts and it rarely has much to do with ordinary people’s lives.”
Gary Chapman of the University of Texas, Austin:
The Internet is 37 years old. The Net just passed 1 billion users, but that’s still only 16% of the world’s population. The Internet is found in all countries except North Korea. Increasingly, people all over the world are turning to the Internet as their primary source of information. In the U.S., people spend more time on the Internet than they do watching TV.
For me, the highlights of the forum came after the day’s sessions, in meeting highly committed, extraordinary individuals from places like Nepal, Japan, Chile, Canada, Brazil and elsewhere. The breadth and scope of this movement is truly astonishing. Plus, we had a grand time bonding, sight-seeing, hitting local restaurants, beaches and karaoke bars. Great trip.
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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