Citizen journalism quickie: training, optimism and pessimism

So how's the citizen journalism movement shaping up? Here's a briefing:

- Freelance reporter Amy Gahran is partnering with former senior producer of ABCNews.com, A. Adam Glenn to educate citizen journalists. The initiative dubbed I, Reporter will include a blog, training program, workshops and educational materials among other features. She is currently trying to form a volunteer citizen-reporting team to report on a polemic issue in her Boulder, Colorado community. Steve Outing at Poynter backs the idea, saying that citizen reporters "need to understand why they might benefit from participating in local media. And they need advice on how to do it, and how to do it well."

- Outing praises a short video promotion of a recently launched citizen journalism site noting that it captures the essence of what citizen journalism should be: news "shared with the community by people who witnessed uncovered news events." Outing is generally optimistic about the evolving medium and hypothesizes that it will be the local, independent sites that make it work. Eventually, large media organizations will accept the movement and incorporate it into their own models.

- On the other hand, Sam Whitmore at Forbes is more pessimistic. "It all sounds great--but I predict most citizens media sites will fizzle." He cites poor literacy levels, citizens who would still "rather be pandered to as consumers than fulfill their duties as citizens" and "info-vandals" who barrage sites with illicit material. On the other hand, Whitmore feels that citizen media success will be found in sites that embrace the Ourmedia.org model, which allows free storage and bandwidth for anybody's videos, audio, photos, text or software.

The idea of citizen journalism is generally accepted as being a useful tool for the promotion of democracy and reporting of local events. As we've seen, some experiments succeed (OhmyNews) and some falter (LA Times "wikitorials"). Those looking to launch independent citizen sites have a carte blanche when deciding where they want to go with their project. But media companies looking to include citizens in their news may have to toy around with various business models before they get it right.

Sources: Poynter (I, Reporter and video), Christian Science Monitor and Forbes