Cell phone maker Nokia is sponsoring the first-ever 2006 Citizen Journalism Awards in the UK. The competition is "run and controlled" by Press Gazette, the UK journalism magazine which also runs the British Press Awards.

The citJ awards page says "The role of the citizen journalist or witness contributor has become increasingly important in the last year with many news reports taking their lead from submissions from the general public."

Note that "witness contributor" phrase -- which hails from a recently developed code of practice of the UK National Union of Journalists. The NUJ code seems, to me, to be largely designed to pigeonhole and limit citizen journalists while protecting the status (and possibly egos) of UK media pros. (That's just my perspective, of course. Read more about it in I, Reporter.)

Despite that, I think this contest is great -- even though it's not really about the larger emerging field of citizen journalism, but only still photos and video contributed by non-journalists.

Entries "must have been published/used in a recognised magazine, newspaper, broadcast service, self-published blog, citizen journalism site, photo-sharing site or internet news service company from within the British Isles" -- a geographic definition that probably will get controversial.

For instance, the popular photo-sharing site Flickr is owned by Yahoo! -- a U.S. company. However, Flickr gained global fame as the venue of choice for cell-phone photos posted by UK residents who were on hand during the 2005 London Underground bombings.

Deadline for entries is June 30.