Poynter Online, “It’s Your WeatherBug”

I admire the chances that WeatherBug takes. It’s practically on its own with its smart approach of asking users of its free service to “pick a sponsor” to run for 30-day stretches. The company also has been paying attention to the chatter here and elsewhere in the world of new media about “participatory journalism.” Jon Dube over at Cyberjournalist.net has conducted an interview with WeatherBug’s product director about this initiative, who says that the service receives hundreds of images a day from its users. Photos are all screened before going online. Very smart. Many news sites seem to shy away from such innovation — waiting, perhaps, for concepts like citizen reporting to be proven by others. They’d be smart to watch WeatherBug’s experiments.
? Steve Outing