CITIZEN MEDIA INITIATIVES LIST

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So many citizen journalism initiatives are cropping up now it's hard to keep track, so CyberJournalist.net has begun keeping a list.

Here are some of the more ambitious citizen's media efforts that have launched or are in the works. Click on the links for more information and to post your comments about each one.

(This list will continue to be updated)

At our New Voices Web site, we have profiles on a number of citizens media sites, including:

We at Minnesota Public Radio have, for the last two years, been working on a project called Public Insight Journalism.

This is an intersting site. we are publishing information to the public on http://www.familieslink.co.uk whcih may be of interest to your readers.

This is an interesting site. we are publishing information to the public on http://www.familieslink.co.uk which may be be of interest to your readers.

UrbanVancouver.com (Vancouver, BC, Canada) in operation for more than a year has all the features of H20town.info

Check out http://citizen.nfb.ca (in english) and http://citoyen.onf.ca (in french) for some action up north. The citizen journalism side is still in evolution but growing nicely. Some great multimedia (text/audio/video) coverage of citizen related issues.

Check out my alternative monthly publication, Waking Planet Chronicles at www.wakingplanet.com

See the Beast Blog, covering the San Francisco East Bay ("beast" in pig latin is "east bay"). http://beastblog.com

Participatory Media is media of, by, and for the people where for the first time the producers, editors and consumers of information are the same.

We like to think of it as a window on to Congress for the every man. We also like to think we're unique because we're a nonprofit and are "really" nonpartisan (we have liberals, conservatives and moderates all collaborating to create the content).

If anyone really likes it and wants to get involved, feel free to email me - julia@citizenjoe.org.

http://Paulding.com is a community site that has gained significant local support and participation. Members, there are over 4500 of them, post news, photos and comments while the largely volunteer staff produce audio and video including a local call-in Internet radio program that interviews loacl leaders.

-fostering information sharing, discussion and knowledge sharing between Africa especially Eastern Africa.

-promoting African talent and creativity.

-changing global perceptions about Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi- about Africa.

Please put a link to http://www.pushaz.com on your website, as this will give us more exposure and further the cause of citizens media.

http://StateInformer.com
Right now, we are in the process of building one of the largest citizen journalist web sites around. Make sure to check back, regularly, to see our progress. We will be looking for people that are interested in writing news and information that involves their home state. We will be offering, for free, web space and tools for getting your news out to the world.

All of the fifty United States will be included on this site, and we will have links from the main site, to each one, so that you can easily find them all. We plan on having citizens in every state report on the things that are affecting their lives. Our members will have the ability to upload files to their web sites, such as pictures and audio. This means that you will be able to offer podcasts, directly from your state's section.

I wanted to add iTalkNews.com to the list of great citizen journalism websites out there.

I would like to tell you guys about a new site www.iTalkNews.com. iTalkNews.com, part of the Oak News Network, Inc., is a breaking news forum and a forerunner in a new kind of news journalism, where everyone can participate in current events. A site where you can post your own articles. You can write on any topic as long as it relates to current events/news.

We here at iTalkNews.com felt a need for an interactive community where people can read breaking news, discuss it, and post their own articles. Our goal is to foster diversity and offer a wide range of opinions on any topic in the news, while creating a nationwide network of writers and thinkers.

SO CHECK THIS SITE OUT, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!!!! www.iTalkNews.com, Its just a click away.

Desert Sunrise News at http://www.desertsunrisenews.com offers readers a place where they can post their own news and free ads for everything from babysitting to making local business connections. While the main news pages are produced in house, the readers definitely are encouraged (and do) contribute to the religion page, the hiking page and more.

I've been particularly interested in methods of meriting trust for citizen journalism and in ways of covering the full spectrum of viewers' perspectives so that we can have more dialogue and beter representation of minority political views.

The site's motto is "Listen and be Heard." Anyone can become an editor, and represent a a perspective that isn't yet represented. Space on the frot page is determined according to the percentage of viewer endorsements for each perspective. Note that this is different from most online moderation schemes because you moderate the editors, not the pieces of news themselves. It's less work for the reader/voter and, I think, more inclusive.

http://prattnews.com provides Pratt Kansas residents, past, present and future, a place to interact and exchange ideas in cyberspace. We provide an online community oriented toward our geographic location.

This concept began as a conversation with a local veterinarian and poet of some note, Donn Blevins. Donn lamented the lack of ability to get his message out about readings at a local restaurant without somewhat of a large advertising budget.

Our local newspaper charges a LOT per subscriber to advertise because they have newsprint and distribution, as well as talent, to cover. digitalBURG.com pays talent, but doesn't have the overhead and can charge a couple of dollars per day for advertising.

In fact, our sports writer covering Central Missouri State University athletics, Dave Kopp, recently resigned from the local newspaper after 10 years there. He coordinates our sports, including an initiative to use young writers at the high school and JHS levels to report their own sports.

We also use several citizen journalists, subject to editorial control, at the local Parks and Rec and other groups in town.

digitalBURG.com also features a free calendar space, and free classifieds. We will ultimately charge for classifieds from commercial groups once we fully implement version 2 of our software.

Speaking of which, digitalBURG.com used inexpensive, easily available software to design the website. Because of the programming and interoperability difficulties of some of the modules, we decided to roll out our own software that will be available for sale soon. The software features a "docking station" that allows design control along with many modules (content management, blogging, calendar, classifieds, forum, voting, etc.). These will be relatively inexpensive and will work together on a common platform with a common entry point.

Additionally, our next version will feature zip code relevance so that we can expand our Warrensburg site to include other local communities... and ultimately every small town in the world.

From a group of small weeklies in the suburbs of Denver comes www.MyMileHighNews.com.

Judy's Book (http://www.judysbook.com) is a free platform for "citizen lifestyle journalism" that's open to citizen authors anywhere in the U.S. Registered members can author and publish first-person reviews of local services, public resources, blogs and websites, and any Web user can visit the Judy's Book site for their city or town to read and respond to their neighbors' opinions about local people, places and things.

Mixeye accepts and publishes viewpoints of news and events expressed through a combination of imagery and text. Anyone can contribute. Viewpoints are categorized into channels to facilitate browsing and finding viewpoints of interest to you.

Although anyone can contribute, we are focussed on attracting contributors (bloggers) who already operate their own website. The goal is to allow bloggers the opportunity to showcase their insights and to attract new web surfers.

The Independent Media Center http://www.indymedia.org, has over 150 local affiliates around the world. The network tries to operate from the bottom up. It has been in continuous operation since November 1999.

It's an unabashedly leftist and anti-capitalist site, and so, is very different from the local news sites being listed here. It is a good example of a federation of locally-based news publishing services.

Indymedia sites have "scooped" the major networks and papers, and are often read by the local reporters looking for story leads.

The community site ToledoTalk.com started three years ago, and today a companion wiki project was announced.

We just launched our first citizen-media site, www.seaside-sun.com for the beach community on the north Oregon coast. Modeled after many of the other initiatives out there, we are hearing good feedback and are doing much legwork to get the word out. It's a product of The Daily Astorian newspaper.

I should have provided the Web link in my posting above. Here it is: www.seaside-sun.com

PodcasterNews.com the first news network being delivered by citizen journalist. 75 current content producers with a goal of 500 by years end.

We operate a Metroblog in Albuquerque, New Mexico whose staff are volunteer citizen journalists. ABQblogs.com has been live for 4 months.

www.epluribusmedia.org
ePluribus Media has been active for 15 months after breaking the Jeff Gannon/fake White House reporter story. They now get nearly 12,500 visitors per month now, and were a finalist in the "Best Community" category for the annual Koufax Awards.

Thought I should mention ours...one year and going strong out of Madison, Wisconsin:

the German language citizen journalism project
www.netzeitung.de - readers edition goes into operation end of march 2006.

Reidsville Free Press is run by a former newspaper reporter in a small town in North Carolina. The site is gaining steam and growing in citizen contributions. Launched in Feb. 2006.

The Progressive Podcast Network is a group of independent grassroots podcasters, volunteers, independent netroots media; non-commercial, visionary and passionate, hoping to change the world.

New Media Revolution is the overall organizational concept that will eventually include vlogs and possibly other forms of new netroots media.
find out more at http://www.newmediarevolution.org

The BaldGuyShow, Political Tuesday brings you talk about what is happening in Minnesota and the country, I bring the truth and I have guest's that tell you things that they see as well. check out more about this podcast at the RSS Feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/bgs_tuesday
or logon to the main web site at http://www.baldguyshow.com

www.merinews.com is the first Indian news portal based on the concept of citizen journalism. It provides a platform to the common people across the globe to express their views and news that they feel is important to bring about a change in the society.

ePluribus Media is a citizen journalist group with a journal site at http://www.epluribusmedia.org. It also has a community site, a blog that can be reached through the journal site.

www.theoverlandexaminer.com is a new online Citizen Journalism project for (but not supported by or even liked by) the City of Overland Missouri.

Our Immediate Goal is to keep the residents of Overland Missouri informed about the actions of their Local Government.

Our Scandinavian inititaive Super Local uses mobile positioning and citizen journalism to establish a new type of mobile media that is more local than any existing newspaper or tv-channel. For instance, when publishing an article or an advertisement in a traditional local news paper, precision of target audience is restricted to the geographical area that the paper covers, like a suburb, city area or small town. However, when coupling XHTML or Java-based mobile Internet services with mobile positioning, precision can be as good as 50 meters (approximately a city block) in urban areas, allowing advertisers and journalists to pinpoint their audience with much higher precision than with traditional media.

The service is running in Sweden and Norway and local people wishing to test can send text message SUPER START to 72777 (Sweden) or 2040 (Norway) or use wap-browser to hit xhtlm site: http://superlocal.com

The McIntosh Mirror features news, editorials and audio downloads of the public meetings in the government in McIntosh, Fla. The blog serves an online news source for a town too small to have other media coverage, as well as a forum. The site is run by a freelance, student journalist, and it's reportage relies heavily on public records.

Common Ties is a new citizen journalism project that pays people $100 to $1,000 for their personal stories. The idea is to provide a more intimate form of journalism by encouraging people to write about what they aready know, namely, themselves. Check out the stories we've already published and submit your own! www.CommonTies.com

it is very use ful list for all of those who are working on citizen journalism as their research subject.
I want to up date this list with one from India.
www.citizenxpress.com
this citizen journalism portal is research work of young Indian research journalists.

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A lot has changed in just the few months since Dan and I started working on Grassroots Media, Inc. and Bayosphere.

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