Participation is the order of the day on these and the billions (trillion?) of other pages on the Internet. Users want to inform themselves but also to share, to comment and to participate in the process. GroundReport, another in the emergent niche of user-generated news, grew out of that ethos.
GroundReport positions itself as “a participatory news platform that democratizes the media by helping everyone get involved.” The site claims to provide world news, politics, business and opinion from “reporters” around the world. These reporters earn money based on the traffic to their stories. Click on their name and you’ll see their picture along with a brief profile, their earnings to date and users’ rating of their work.
New York Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger stands behind this exercise in opening up the media. “GroundReport is putting yourself out there for the good of democracy," he says. Still, we have to ask some of the same questions we asked last week. Who edits the material on this and other user-generated news sites such as OhMyNews? And what value do such sites add over traditional media? Oh my, indeed.
Thanks Matthew. I founded GroundReport.com and would like to respond to your questions at the end, since they are crucial in the citizen journalism.
ReplyDeleteTo monitor content, GroundReport.com uses a combination of Wikipedia-style self-policing via "Report Abuse" buttons. In addition we have a team of editors who edit articles every day for spelling, grammar and plagiarism. Third, we allow our community members to rate content if they are logged in, and every contributor earns a personal rating based on this average. That way readers can see at a glance what and who should be trusted.
As for the value that GroundReport adds, we present a unique, authentic perspective on what is happening in the world. Instead of the same repeated Reuters or AP story, you get someone on the ground, at the site of an event, telling what happened. It adds a personal, insider dimension