Citizen Journalism

I just saw an entry over at craigblog (Craig, from craig's list) about Citizen Journalism. Although there isn't a great deal of web content around CJ yet, it looks like Backfence.com is working on putting together a CJ site. OhmyNews is currently being touted as a frontrunner site and, according to Poynter, GetLocalNews has been working the field for several years. Also, AFreePress has a Citizen journalism area.

It'll be interesting to see what happens. With the explosion of blogporters (my very own made up word) over the last year or so, I think we're going to see some amazing stuff.

I already have a tendency to put more faith in bloggers than I do big media reporters. I do so not because I think bloggers have the most accurate, unbiased, or reliable research but because most of them aren't writing to accomplish a hidden agenda or support a certain corporate viewpoint. It's probably six of one and half dozen of the other so maybe formalizing as "citizen journalism" will give blogporters more credibility and incentive for fairness and accuracy.