When fire destroyed a historic building in Brattleboro, Vt., in the wee hours of Saturday, the local daily newspaper had already been put to bed. But by dawn, local residents had posted photos and their own stories about the blaze on iBrattleboro.com, a local Web site where anyone can write the news.
Residents in the town of 12,000 spent the weekend using the site to publicly discuss ways to help the 11 people who had been hurt or displaced — and even look for lost cats.
“It served its purpose,” said site co-creator Christopher Grotke. “For many people, it was the only place to find any news throughout the day.”
So far the site has attracted 2,100 stories from readers and more than 12,000 comments on those articles. But it’s audience remains pretty small; it gets on average about 3,000 page views a day.
The story goes on to mention NorthwestVoice.com, one of the more innovative citizen journalist projects. CyberJournalist.net was one of the first to report on it — see this article about the site and this Q&A with the publisher.
