|
AP / CBSnews.com
AP has more on recent flooding in many Chinese provinces. |
Much attention is going to the
"highly satisfying failure" of
Assignment Zero, a citizen journalism project aimed at organizing collaboration between volunteer reporters and professionals. In the light of the many critical assessments of Assignment Zero, it makes sense to point at a highly successful project with citizen journalism, coming from China.
On July 18, Jinan (the capital city of Shangdong province) was hit by a devastating flood that has killed dozens so far. At QQ, a popular Chinese Internet service provider, instant messaging service, and blogging platform, editors asked users for input: "How is it we have only this frosty [unfeeling] information about "26 dead", 6 missing and 171 injured? We want to know how those deceased passed away, and why..." (Translation by the China Media project, not currently available online.)
In a few hours time, the dedicated Web page was flooded with postings from local citizens, hinting at a failing local government. For instance: "Yesterday the water flooded into our house. Our house is on the first floor. We were just sitting down to eat. Dad went off right away to find sand to fill up bags, but the water came too fast and washed the bags away. It looked like a dam had burst, and the water was putrid. Today Dad's busy building up the threshold. It's too thin and needs to be replaced. No one cares. Our government is just busy making money."
| RELATED RESOURCES
|
Get E-Media Tidbits as an RSS feed:
* Copy this link and add it to your feed reader
Subscribe to receive E-Media Tidbits by e-mail:
* Sent Monday-Friday, 5 p.m. ET | |
QQ is one of China's top three Internet companies in terms of traffic and organizing a large portion of that country's
162 million Internet users. Consequently, QQ is well positioned to experiment with this kind of citizen journalism, and is likely to follow up after this initial success.
Citizen journalism is here to stay. The question is: How to organize it?
