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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged citizen journalism

1. June 5, 2012 03:50 PM

   GOOD Mag to be ‘a Reddit for social good’ (updated)

   Ex-staffers at work on a new publication

   By Alysia Santo

   GOOD magazine fired six of its nine-person editorial staff on Friday—and two others accepted buyouts—as part of a move from being a journalism-focused outlet to a community engagement platform. “They said they wanted to be a Reddit for social good,” says Megan Greenwell, the former managing editor at GOOD. Staff members from GOOD magazine told CJR they had suspicions that...

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2. February 24, 2012 03:43 PM

   A New App for Citizen Journalists

   Rawporter joins an increasingly crowded field

   By Olivia Smith

   Rob Gaige and Kevin Davis were having a drink at Dandelion Market in Charlotte, North Carolina, when a car crashed into the restaurant next door. “We saw a number of people recording the excitement on their smartphones,” Davis said, “but noticed the news crew arrived after the scene cleared.” Gaige and Davis watched the news that night, expecting to see...

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3. June 3, 2011 11:52 AM

   Best Practices for Social Media Verification

   Some tips and thoughts from the experts

   By Craig Silverman

   Whether you view it as long overdue or just in time, I believe we are starting to see the emergence of best practices for verifying social media content and citizen reports. Recent weeks and months have seen leading practitioners of social media verification and crowdsourced verification share tips and thoughts to help move the discipline forward. Below is a summary...

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4. October 25, 2012 11:00 AM

   HuffPost launches a platform for user-generated reporting

   “Firsthand” to premiere “a new type of comment”

   By Hazel Sheffield

   An October 1 editorial from Arianna Huffington announced The Huffington Post’s latest development in user engagement: Firsthand. Developed using a reporting platform called Ushahidi, Firsthand invites users to contribute words, images, or video to show how issues track across geographical areas. For its first month, Firsthand is appealing to the Huffington Post community for stories on mortgage refinancing and foreclosures....

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5. May 9, 2012 03:10 PM

   OffTheBus takes a ‘breather’

   New technologies and partnerships in the works

   By Alysia Santo

   OffTheBus, The Huffington Post’s citizen journalism program for campaign coverage, hasn’t posted new content in almost a month. But the company says, though it may look like the wheels have popped off the bus, it’s just taking a pit stop. “It’s giving that brief breather before the rush begins,” says HuffPost Media Group’s chief of staff, Jimmy Soni. The lull...

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6. April 5, 2012 01:58 PM

   Seven Years of New West

   Experiments in regional reporting, the pro-am model, and a multi-pronged business plan

   By Alysia Santo

   When the website New West was founded, it had grand ambitions. The digital news outlet blended local and regional reporting to tell stories of growth and change in the Rocky Mountain West. Today, however, New West has been dormant for over six months, and is now transitioning to its third owner since it launched in 2005. The site went dark...

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7. August 16, 2012 03:37 PM

   Straight news from the citizens of Syria

   How reporters sort, organize—and verify—a flood of information from a chaotic civil war

   By James Miller and Matt Sienkiewicz

   On June 5th, the never-ending Twitter discussion on #Syria moved in a shocking new direction. According to numerous accounts, violence had finally engulfed Aleppo, suggesting for the first time that Syria’s largest city would face the violence already so prevalent elsewhere in the nation. Details remained vague, but the rising tide of tweets grew increasingly disturbing. The assault from Bashar...

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8. November 14, 2011 05:00 AM

   The Voice of the People

   Citizen journalists to the rescue?

   By Patrick Giblin

   Like many communities in the United States, Modesto has seen its traditional news media diminish. The daily newspaper, The Modesto Bee, has eliminated more than half of its staff in the past five years. Reporters are typically assigned to multiple beats and, as a result, are so overwhelmed that they rarely have time to investigate in-depth stories. School boards, irrigation...

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9. May 18, 2012 04:10 PM

   You have a right to remain recording

   Carlos Miller’s crusade for freedom of photography

   By Alysia Santo

   On January 31, officers from the Miami-Dade and City of Miami Police Departments donned riot gear and headed to Government Center, in the heart of downtown Miami, to evict the Occupy protesters who had been camping there for three months. Carlos Miller, a local blogger, was there to film it—but he ended up becoming part of the story. Miller filmed...

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