Yahoo Promotes Its Citizen Journalism Project
Kevin Sites of Yahoo’s Hot Zones gives a tutorial, actually a sales job, for citizen journalists at the new You Witness News, where citizens can upload videos and photos for possible use by Reuters. The home page also has a good list of citizen journalism resources.
And what does Gawker think about all this? Well maybe there is a clue in the title of her post: Unpaid Hacks Magically Become “Citizen Journalists”:
Two days after launch, YWN hosts barely a dozen photos harvested from Flickr, plus a couple slideshows. Judging by the similarly anemic CNN effort (”Exchange“), it looks like “citizen journalism” suffers from the same disinterested malaise afflicting citizens in general. May be a clever ploy by Reuters to destroy citizen journalism by handing it to meme-killer Yahoo, in which case we say, good job.
It might be time for the Yahoo folks to watch Jay Rosen on motivating citizen volunteers.
