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HellishHolidays.com
Is it just a collection of funny/awful amateur videos, or citizen journalism? I think it's both. |
Brace yourself for an uncomfortable dose of deja vu... Here's a tidbit from the lighter side of social media and citizen journalism.
Check out Hellish Holidays. This site aggregates truly dreadful holiday-related home videos documenting all-too-familiar family holiday scenes.
Here's the caption from one video on the site, Thanksgiving After-Dinner Joy? "From the unfriendly mom at the sink to the immobile grandparents abandoned at the cleared table, to the screaming kids, this one just screams Hellish."
Is this citizen journalism? In a way, yes, I think so. Most of this content documents actual events, rather than staging some sort of show. Especially in the aggregate, projects such as these can provide a valuable journalistic window on -- and resource about -- real life.
Hellish Holidays was created by writer & consultant Laura Foti Cohen and Steve Loyola (founder of comparison-shopping site Best Web Buys). Cohen writes: "It's OK to admit that you're miserable when you're supposed to be happy, that you hate what you're supposed to love. We all feel better knowing that others share our pain, and it's a lot easier to laugh at someone else's exploding oven than your own."
Hellish Holidays is powered by Magnify.net, an intriguing free service (currently in beta) that might be of use to news projects. It provides a platform to allow a user community to publish a filtered, reviewed, and ranked library of videos from all the popular online video-sharing services (YouTube, Revver, and much more). Consider how a service like this might augment coverage of a community, election, weather event, public issues, local history, etc.
(Thanks to Steve Loyola for the tip.)
