The concept of "citizen journalism" is getting a lot of people excited. Proponents of it, such as Advance.net's
Jeff Jarvis, have suggested that citizen journalism is a huge business poised to take off. One of the first companies to try to make a buck from this is
GetLocalNews.com, which has established a network of news websites for communities large, medium, and small across the U.S. The company has developed a web publishing infrastructure that can be used by interested local-news entrepreneurs. As GetLocalNews founders
Ari Soglin and
Ed Schlenker explain it, "People expressing interest in becoming GetLocalNews.com community publishers have ranged from the local gadflies who want to offer their take on city hall to trained journalists interested in running an online version of the local paper. ... A community publisher can be a one-person operation, can rely on freelancers' contributions, or, as one site,
GrantsPassNews.com, is doing, can hire a staff of reporters."
GetLocalNews won some praise in 2002 when its flagship
BeniciaNews.com site won an Online Journalism Award for general excellence. At the time, that site was modestly staffed with full-time reporters. Since, the staff has been let go and the site is now populated mostly with audience-produced content, plus some original content. Says Soglin, "Since April, when we laid off our news staff, the site's traffic has continued to grow. We're getting more than 32,000 unique visitors a month (at BeneciaNews.com), generating more than 500,000 page-views." Soglin's pitch is that citizen journalism, enabled by technologies like his company's, can even be a threat to local traditional newspapers that don't do a good job covering their communities. "If a citizen journalist's website does a good job of telling readers what's going on around town -- even if it's from a slanted view -- it will be a threat to lousy papers."
