Dan Gillmor Launches Grassroots Journalism

kbahey writes " Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a 'grassroots journalism' project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "

Comments

Re:drupals ok, I prefer mambo

[Handbrewer]

I agree, drupal is ok, but i use mambo too, and i cant get enough of all those high quality themes, extensions and the ultra easy setup. I run it on several production sites, and ive never had a problem with it. And the default mambo install feels more complete than drupal, last time i checked it out, i was left with a handfull of configs, and a somewhat running site. Mambo is much easier to manage imo.

Corrected Text

[kbahey]

I am the submitter of the article and here is the correct text. It was fine when I submitted it.

kbahey writes " Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a "grass roots journalism" project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "

Is Wikinews misguided?

[alienmole]

For the last 6 months, the community over at Wikinews has been building up a citizen journalism project that does not narrow its focus on a single region, or a single to topic.

Focus can be a good thing. When I look at the Wikinews home page right now, I see an eclectic mix of headlines that look as though they might have been ripped from a combination of Reuters and Slashdot, but really not much of interest to me.

This is intended as a constructive question: what is it that's going to bring readers back to Wikinews day after day? What can they expect to see? If the answer is a fairly random collection of stories on any possible topic, why do you think that's better than sites which do focus more closely on particular regions or topics?

Most of the best real-life examples of journalism are either topic-focused or region focused. It's difficult to be the best at everything.

Re:Is Wikinews misguided?

[Eloquence]

At 5-25 stories a day, we can afford to put all of them on the frontpage. However, our mid term plan is to have topic portals, such as Science and technology, or region portals, such as South America, where you get all the news from that particular category. We already have some automation in use to do this, but it's a bit flaky, and we are in the process of putting in place an extension for MediaWiki that will do a better job at it, and allow you to subscribe to individual categories via RSS.

So, just like Wikipedia, Wikinews will have areas where people interested in certain topics will work on these topics only, while at the same time benefitting from the potential for massive collaboration, i.e. the entire community can quickly get involved in an individual dispute, or try to refine a problem article until it meets our standards of quality and neutrality.

NowPublic.com

[DNSjunkie]

NowPublic.com, a technology platform enabling citizen reporting is also based on drupal. The site has been live for about six or seven weeks now, and while they consider it a beta, I'd say it's has tons of promise.

Outside of the single most established Korean based OhMyNews most, if not all of the citizen reporting web sites I've looked at, including WikiNews, have had a hard time gaining traction. I'm not sure why they're having such trouble, particularly given the popularity of WikiPedia, but it is clear however that the movement is beginning to take off, and here to stay. News will never be the same - and imho that is a VERY good thing!

What I really like about NowPublic, and what imho differentiates it from the other sites, is that the site is NOT trying to be the hub of citizen reporting itself - it's trying to create a toolset to facilitate citizen reporting. Through creative commons licensing and their really nifty 'SmartMedia' technology their goal is to facilitate the spread of newsworthy information created by people like you and I (though admittedly they need to do a MUCH better job of communicating this). Anyone (you don't need to be a member) can use the content posted on NowPublic. So if you have a blog and are writing a story and you need/want pictures or video you can use existing or request new photos/audio/video from NP members.

Being a photographer, I like the fact that through their SmartMedia my photos always show my name, and provide a way to contact me directly (actually had one person offer me a gig through this already!!) - this is all done through the image itself ensuring that anyone who uses my photos attributes it back to me (anyone who has posted a good pic to the web has most likely had it ripped off and should really apperciate this new idea). Additionally, anyone who sees the photo on any site can in turn copy it and put it on their site... it's really a great promotional vehicle for photographers. But my favorite bit is that every story is implicitly a request for citizen coverage - if you want to see a local perspective on a story, simply post it to the site. In effect every story is actually an assignment - you now have an army of people, soon to be larger than any major media organization willing to go out and get coverage of the story for you! As a photog, I'll never be at a loss for photos ideas again!

They are currently running a contest, awarding cash prizes to encourage people to go out and take photographs of newsworthy events. Their Citizen Photojournalism Awards were created to encourage people to go out and cover news stories. Any newsworthy photo uploaded to NowPublic is eligible for weekly $100 cash awards and there is a $500 grand prize. I'm hoping I win something so I can get that fish eye lens I've been drooling over.

Re:Why they choose Drupal?

[factoryjoe]

I worked with Dan early on in the design process for this project. At the time, I pushed Drupal (and CivicSpace -- since I work for them) for its modularity, ease of hacking, community-centered design and superior architecture (taxonomy, etc) and for the experience I had using it on Spread Firefox, but I can't take credit for "convincing him". In fact, I didn't realize that the project had moved forward so much until it came up on the Drupal-dev list. But now the site has launched and I've talked with Dan, it looks like I'll yet again have the chance to contribute to this project!

Funny how disinformation flows though...!