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`Citizen journalist' Web sites flourish

Bloggers have become a new generation of columnists. Bystanders with digital cameras are spot news photographers. And folks with personal causes have branded themselves investigative reporters.

News Web sites featuring videos, pictures, viewpoints and stories by users are flourishing.

"Citizen journalists" have been either reviled as an infinite number of monkeys banging away at keyboards or regaled as an Internet-age army delivering news from every nook and cranny of the globe.

"It is essentially a whole group of people who have had no formal training but an interest in joining the big debate," said Christine Tatum, president of the US Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).

In December Yahoo launched YouWitnessNews, a Web site that posts offerings from users after the submissions pass muster with professional editors.

Founded two years ago in Canada, news Web site NowPublic.com taps into legions of people that post pictures, videos, or commentary online.

NowPublic has more than 60,000 contributing "reporters" in more than 140 countries and expects that number to climb to 150,000 by the end of the year.

NowPublic and YouWitness News have alliances with traditional international news wire services and provide them photos or other worthy content.

Web sites such as Newsvine and Slashdot are community-driven, with users writing stories and sharing opinions.

Reddit and Digg are popular news-ranking Web sites that let readers summarize and link to mainstream online news and then shape "front pages" based on the popularity of items.

The number of Web logs, or blogs, in which people post commentary online is reportedly growing at a rate of one per minute.

Traditional news organizations worldwide are yielding to the inevitability of readers, viewers or listeners changing from passive consumers to contributors.

Citizen journalists were the sole source of images fed to cable news colossus CNN's I-Report from Thailand last year after a coup there.

Contributors with cellphones were the first to get pictures of the 2005 London terrorist bombings on the Internet.

"Citizen journalism is something that is taking off huge at newspapers and all levels of journalism," said Mark Fitzgerald, an editor-at-large for leading news industry publication Editor and Publisher.

Citizen journalism is a seductive trend that is poisoning traditional news organizations, argues Andrew Keen, author of a book titled Cult of the Amateur due out in June.

Keen refers to the online maelstrom of opinions, pictures and videos as "ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule, on steroids."

Society stands to benefit if reporters are augmented, not replaced, Tatum said.

"The downside, and it's a big downside, is a lot of these people have no exposure to media practices -- laws and fundamentals of sound and responsible news reporting," Tatum told reporters.
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