Citizen Journalism

From the Wikipedia article:

URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism

Definition

"Citizen journalism, also known as Participatory Journalism is the act of citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires."

Citizen journalism should not be confused with Civic Journalism, which is practiced by professional journalists. Citizen journalism usually involves empowering ordinary citizens -- including traditionally marginalized members of society."

An alternative concept is now proposed by Jay Rosen, i.e. Networked Journalism

Revenue-Sharing

Some sites practice Revenue Sharing with producers of news articles.

"Examples from an article in [At Scoopt, photographers receive 50% of the selling price of their pictures, while ScooptWords shares 50% of the first sale and 75% of all subsequent sales with its writers/bloggers. ScoopLive shares 85% of revenues each time they license a contributor’s photo. SpyMedia pays an average of 100 USD per picture.

South African online newscaster Reporter has a more elaborate scheme: contributions are graded as Gold for homepage material, Silver for top placement on section pages, and Bronze for all other contributions, which carry a payment fee of R35, R20 and R15 per published contribution. South Korean OhMyNews pays 20,000 Korean won for a story published on its main page. A story published in a section (at the top) yields 10,000 Korean won." (http://trendwatching.com/trends/gen-cash.htm)

More Information

Interview with Jay Rosen on Open Source Journalism, at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/open-source-journalism.html

Steve Outing distinguishes 11 layers of citizen journalism at http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=83126

See the video From Pamphlet to Blog

The National Union of Journalsits published the Witness Contributors’ Code of Practice to address the important issues raised by the phenomenon of "citizen journalism." The Code sets down ways in which organisations and individuals can maintain the highest professional and ethical standards in the new media environment. It covers concerns about accuracy and checking sources, payment to contributors, copyright and moral and legal rights.

Available at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/003280.php