Great news this week as both the Huffington Post and New York Times announced their plans to recruit student citizen journalists as part of a scheme to create hyperlocal content drawn from university campus news.
Adam Clark Estes, editor of citizen journalism at HuffPo, has been inspired by the skills learnt as former editor of IvyGate, gossip blog of the Ivy League universities, to launch an appeal for enthusiastic student citizen journos to collaborate with the professionals at the Huffington Post to create hyperlocal news. Clark Estes says in a blog post:
“Student news, I’ve always believed, is news in its purest. The same way that small town newspapers chronicle the history of a community, student journalists amplify the voice of a generation. When there’s a protest on campus or reactions to world events, reporters from campus newspapers and magazines are often the first to cover it. When it comes to capturing the zeitgeist of America’s youth, student bloggers are inevitably the best.”
And he makes a good point. While it’s one thing to recognise and reward the audacity, skill and ingenuity of student journa-preneurs, working all hours to produce high quality journalism in print and online; it’s quite another to put this to even better use – something Clark Estes and the Huffington Post have decided to do. Last week, they put out a call for applications to join their citizen journalism unit, aiming to brigng 30 students, both photojournalists and videographers, to cover college issues. The job includes weekly assignments, training events, crowdsourcing projects, and most importantly, daily access to Huffington Post’s editors.
Image copyright Huffington Post
Fear not if (a) you missed the deadline for this; or (b) you’re not an American student living on campus – there are many more opportunities out there for student citizen journalists..
This month, the New York Times also announced that it plans to collaborate, via its website, NYTimes.com, with New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute to create a local community news and information site covering the East Village in New York City.
The Local East Village site will be developed by NYU’s journalism faculty and students and is due to launch in October 2010. As well as amassing content generated by student journa-preneurs, the site will be edited by Richard Jones, an award-winning veteran journalist and former New York Times reporter. He will work with students, faculty and the East Village community to cover neighbourhood news.
The Local East Village is one of several collaborative journalism efforts The NY Times is exploring. In March 2009, the paper began a similar project with the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism for The Local Brooklyn site, whose citizen journalism-generated news serves the residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.
The newly-planned East Village project will be followed by one in San Francisco, where the New York Times will work with the non-profit Bay Area News Project to provide citizen reporters’ news for the Bay Area edition of the paper.
Once again, it seems that America is leading the way when it comes to citizen journalism and journa-preneurialism. The recent pronouncements are not, however, without their critics. Hollywood gossip site The Wrap features an article damning the Huffington Post for launching yet another “exploitative” venture. On the back of HuffPo’s College Project, started earlier this month, The Wrap criticises the media giant for using unpaid interns to do its work for it:
“All of this is not surprising. Arianna Huffington has largely built her business through scaling a mass of unpaid bloggers — celebrity and non-celebrity — who trade payment for exposure on a Web site that averages about 21.9 million unique visitors per month in the U.S., 28 million globally. And she’s been widely criticized for exploiting that model.”
Oh dear. Yet another installment in the “should we pay interns?” debate, hyped up recently in the UK as a result of articles by Celia Walden and Barbara Ellen. But that’s not the point. By focusing on the monetary aspects of the project, the Wrap reporter is missing the significance of this whole thing. Yes it’s a thankless task being an unpaid intern – but the kind of exposure offered by the HuffPo and NY Times citizen journalism projects is unparalleled. It’s exactly the kind of venture that we, as citizen journalists, need to get involved in; and exactly the kind of venture that – finally – promises to unleash the true potential of citizen news.
It's a bit more complicated than you'd think (Image courtesy of Flickr)
Keep an eye out for more opportunities like this coming our way. Preferably in the UK. One more thing - we had a talk by bestselling author and journalist Nick Davies in our Journalism and Society lecture last week, and he expressed his dislike for citizen journalism: “If professional journalism disappeared and citizen journalists were all that were left, I’m just not sure they could fill the void,” he said.
Once again, with respect, I think he’s missing the point. Citizen journalism – as these two new student-led projects show – is all about collaboration. It’s not about competition; it’s not about replacing professional journalism with amateur reporting on an iPhone. It’s all about working together – with professional journalists – to ensure that news penetrates all geographical areas and appeals to the widest audience possible.
This is what citizen journalists aspire to. And this is what journa-preneurialism is all about.
