We launched our first Meetup last week. We had quite the turn out from traditional media outlets along with some of the newer stand outs in Citizen based journalism.
Read below as we recap the fantastic events of last week.
Firstly, thanks for all who attended last night. In the room we had AP, Associated Content, Aurora, ABC News, urbis, NY Times, Metro Newspapers, Nowpublic, Newassignment.net, PDN, groundreport, citizen Image, neighborhood america, mogulus to name, well, quite a few, and a few citizen journalists.
Jay Rosen gave us a rundown of his Newassignment.net site and his assignment zero initiative- what worked, what didn't, how important it was to "right size" the assignment for participation. He also touched on how they approached editing and refining the submitted content to create the final product (which in the case of assignment zero is a major article for wired magazine and a shorter version to be posted on the web). Next up for them is a crowdsourcing initiative around writing about each of the presidential candidates and their campaigns.
Owen from ABC talked about their approach to seeding content using the most popular pro stories on the day as a guide for what to request of citizens. Steve from Urbis explained their peer review system. There was some healthy debate (andrew from Associated content and Jay fromNew assignment.net) on incentives (getting paid for particpating versus public good ).
Thoughts on where to take the meetup from here..
1. Have a theme. Elliot from the NY times suggested using the Presidential race as a case study throughout but others suggested mixing that up every meetup.
2. Have up to three people present / demo their offering each meetup. Andrew from AC suggested an alternative way to divide the discussions or break up the presentations - a. The content providers. b. The Public (the readership or the beneficiaries) c. The business side of things (company and advertisers). It was decided that we would use the messageboard for people to request to speak.
3. Noel from Newassignment.net suggested we eventually start to create a "barcamp" - sort of a think in where people can branch off into different areas - eg concerns of contributors (copyright etc), monetizing cit-journalism, attracting contributors. He promises to explain more to me about how these barcamp things work next week so apologies if I haven't described it accurately.
There was some back and forth on how do best embrace the "pros" and the citizen journalists in the same meetup and make it relevant and interesting for both. Jay suggested we focus the meetup and the topics discussed around the "practice" of citizen journalism which is a clever way to guide the discussions and embrace both sides of the house - those producing the content and those soliciting it.
Overall, it seemed like it was a useful event, a lot of good contacts were made and we have a solid basis to move forward. Now if only the next time the organizer can get the address right!
Labels: Citizen Image conducts Citizen Journalism Meetup
