Tools for citizen journalists

I just received an email from the wonderful Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions, the organization behind the release of the new George Clooney movie “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and this week’s release of “North Country,” starring Charlize Theron (above). I saw a preview screening of “North Country” in Berkeley last night and liked it, though I wonder if reviewers and audiences may find it too didactic and dark. The Berkeley crowd was certainly appreciative, with a couple of call-outs from the audience during key scenes.

Participant has set up a first-rate group blog about the two films and is trying to use the blog as a vehicle for social change, so all of you are invited to head over there and post comments and observations. (I’m guest-blogging at the See It Now blog.)

As much as I admire Participant’s work, I don’t think, however, that it will become a place where people upload works of citizen journalism, as they’re trying to do here with citizen audio reports. Maybe I’m wrong — time will tell — but it strikes me as more realistic to build a Participant Productions area within an existing citizens media framework, like Ourmedia or NowPublic. We hope to work with groups and causes like this in the months ahead.

It’s also interesting to see Participant link to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics — I’m heading up the standards committee of the Media Bloggers Association, and we’ve found the SPJ code isn’t really applicable to bloggers or citizens media. (I’ll be writing more about this in a couple of weeks.)

Finally, Participant also links to Journalism.org, an estimable site run by my friends at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. But if you call up their Tools for Citizens, you get:

– How to Talk to the News Media

– How to Write a Letter to the Editor

– How to Find the Right Person to Contact [at a news organization]

– Getting Stories on Local TV News

… and so on. This just isn’t good enough in the year 2005. We need tools for people to create their own media, their own TV shows, their own podcasts.

We’ll be doing that at Ourmedia. Let me know if you want to help.

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.