E-Media Tidbits

We don't really know how "citizen journalism" will turn out, though as I noted in an item earlier today, a growing number of entrepreneurs and traditional news organizations are giving it a try. In these early days, it's worth watching the content that people are adding to these new sites.

Much of it, of course, is of the micro-local variety. For instance, from MyMileHighNews.com here's a piece submitted by "Michael" about a guy who collects Boy Scout memorabilia. At the Daily Camera's MyTown site, "Tekee" submitted a story about a kids' team winning the local Pee Wee hockey championship.

Yeah, that's definitely boring stuff to 99 percent of the audience, but that's fine. With citizen journalism's ability to give some "press" to micro-local news, we're talking about "long tail" news coverage. It's a way for a news organization to get back to the backyard level to a degree; it's a way for a metro newspaper to expand and inexpensively cover some of what's going on in the suburbs, encroaching on territory long ago ceded to suburban weeklies.

While there are still early days, I already notice some problems with the local citizen-journalism sites. A major one is that user-contributed stories often are simply listed in the order received. (Here's the YourHub.com page for Arvada, Colorado, as an example.) Since many of the submissions are (frankly) boring, I'd like to see some editorial judgment used. A simple list of stories submitted is fine, but there also must be a way to daily feature the best contributions -- a citizen-journalism front page, if you will, controlled to a degree by trained editors. A simple boxed area up top with featured citizen stories might do the trick. To omit this makes for one extremely dull website.

Also, submissions need to be categorized better. Here's MyTown's page for Broomfield, Colorado. Note the list of stories -- a hodgepodge. How about at least some basic categories: sports, business, government, kids, etc.?

As I said, these are early days. Things will improve at citizen-journalism sites. ... But if they don't evolve for the better fairly quickly, I'm not sure the audience will stick around.