Tampa Bay’s 10 is looking for twenty people around the Bay area to help us with a special project. We will teach twenty lucky people how to shoot a video camera, and how to get the video to us here at the station.

And not only THAT, there is even more great news for those LUCKY 20:

Each time you send me a video story that either makes it on the news or on our web site, Tampa Bay’s 10 will pay you TWENTY DOLLARS!

The caps and bold are all theirs. But look at this added piece of generosity:

If you hold up your end of the deal, after a year, you will KEEP the video camera we assign you.

So let’s see, if you as a citizen keep up your end of the bargain, which is 40 web posted pieces a year, Tampa Bay’s 10, would pay you all of $800, and throw in a video camera too. Wow, how generous of this Gannett owned station.

Update: Amani Channel, who has worked with citizen journalists making video, has his own take on this Tampa Bay project.

Here are a few excerpts:

Steve Yelvington, strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, talking of citizen participation says:

The key to meshing the bubbling social media elements of the site with the print product…is ensuring that the newspaper staff keeps tabs on—and participates in—online conversations. “When it works, the newsroom staff is engaged and comes back with a lot of impressions and leads they didn’t have before,” he says. “To me, that’s the way it fits with journalism. Trying to get people to go out and cover stories like a cub reporter doesn’t work very well.”

Kate Marymont, executive editor of the Fort Myers’ News Press, is quote in this passage:

Both the paper’s crowdsourcing and teamsourcing experiments have one thing in common: “A level of civic engagement I haven’t seen for a while…which is just fabulous.” While that’s a goal shared by many in the citizen journalism movement, it’s one particularly important for newspapers’ long-term survival as well.

And talking about our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota, in which we will provide the online community a fulltime reporter, I say:

“It’s not just an online newspaper that’s thrown on the online doorstep and the reporter walks away. The reporter is one voice in the bigger community—an informed voice, but one voice. Everyone else can jump in and add a bit of information, providing a higher-quality conversation.”

As I said read the whole white paper, it is an excellent overview of what’s happening.

 …innovation and transformation are all about: vision, hope, execution, pain, confusion, fear, failure, revision, excitement and then – only then – success.

He adds of the birth of USA Today 25 years ago:

…its content was short, easy to read and very customer friendly: Inconceivable in the journalism world of 1982. Disruptive and disturbing to an industry then, as now, set in its ways.

Then began the execution of this vision: multiple prototypes; failed attempts; trial-and error; hard work and long days. Many paths were followed, with much doubling back. Revisions were made before, during and after the official launch on Sept. 15, 1982.

Bringing employees up to today, he writes:

Right now, Gannett is again in the middle of a transformation. We have a very powerful vision of where we need to be and now are on the winding, torturous paths of executing that vision. We all are feeling the pain and doubt and, I hope, some of the excitement.

It is not a “step-one, step-two, step-three and we’re there” process. It is not a simple transition. This is a full-fledged, hold-onto-your hats TRANSFORMATION….

What will we look like in the end? Hopefully what I’ve been talking about all along: a company that is customer-centric; innovative; leaner and more nimble, and without silos. We will be full of exciting, new, people-pleasing products in the digital space as well as in print and broadcast. Will we be structured like we are now? I doubt it.

Will we have more or fewer newspapers and TV stations than we have now? That depends, but we’re working on finding the right portfolio. Will we be a major player in the digital space? Absolutely, but what that looks like is a work in progress.