The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

The public-submitted information could even be crafted by the news staff into an online map of crime reports, featuring victims' self-reports and photos.

(This is another one of those areas that requires vigilance.

Imagine, for example, if someone posted a note with a photo of someone apparently breaking into a car, and the suspect was identifiable. If that person was an innocent car owner who locked his keys in the car ... well, you can imagine the libel threat.)

Many (but certainly not all) stories can benefit from this treatment.

A story, say, about bicyclists being harassed by motorists is the ideal type of story to solicit reports from the public.

Such an approach to citizen contributions isn't something you'll want to do on every news story, but, when appropriate, it's a great way to offer the community better and deeper coverage than is possible with a lone professional reporter.

So look for stories that can benefit from the citizen add-on approach.

3. Now we're getting serious: Open-source reporting

If you're willing to take yet another step up the ladder of citizen journalism, consider what's sometimes referred to as "open-source" or "participatory" journalism or reporting.

This is another one of those techniques that you'll use once in a while, when appropriate to a particular story or project.

The term generally is understood to mean a collaboration between a professional journalist and his/her readers on a story, where readers who are knowledgeable on the topic are asked to contribute their expertise, ask questions to provide guidance to the reporter, or even do actual reporting which will be included in the final journalistic product.

There are various approaches that a reporter can take under the umbrella of this general model. One would be to announce up front that you are working on a particular story, and ask readers to guide you.

An example would be if you have an interview scheduled with a famous politician or celebrity. Announce that you want to go into the interview armed with questions submitted by your readers.

Pick out the best ones, add your own, then do the interview.

Take it a step further: Distribute a draft of your article before "official" publication to the readers who've helped you out, getting feedback to "perfect" the article before it gets wide readership.

Reporters who publish on Web sites or on blogs can do this by publishing a draft online, getting public feedback, then later publishing the polished version on the Web as well as then publishing in a print edition.

An alternative to simply taking readers' advice and incorporating it into the article invisibly is to build specific suggestions into the story and give the readers credit.

One technique involves adding pop-up notes on a story that highlight reader ideas; these can appear when a Web site reader mouses over a "hot" word or phrase.

More advanced forms of open-source reporting involve a collaboration between writer and readers.

This could take the form of requesting that readers with knowledge or involvement in a topic do actual reporting, which is then incorporated into the final published story.

Payment for readers' work might be as simple as credit in the finished article, or event actual cash payment. Obviously, it will behoove the reporter to double-check reader reporting so as not to get duped.

Also (perhaps) fitting in this category of citizen journalism is the reader panel. Some newspapers have developed databases of volunteer readers willing to be interviewed by reporters.

When a writer needs to find a group of sources to be interviewed for a story project, he/she can search the database for certain characteristics and contact them.

Or reader-panel members can be used in some of the ways described in the paragraphs above.

Examples:

1. The Spokesman-Review/APME reader panel.

1. If you know of any other news sites deploying this approach, please e-mail me.

4. The citizen bloghouse

Blogging started out as an "everyman" phenomenon (and now, it seems, almost everyone has a blog), but then professional journalists took up the form, too.

But the real promise of blogs remains with the non-journalists, for whom blogging has given a powerful and inexpensive publishing tool to reach out to the world with their stories and thoughts.

A great way to get citizens involved in a news Web site is to simply invite them to blog for it. A number of news sites do this now, and some citizen blogs are consistently interesting reads.

A couple different approaches work for citizen blogs on news Web sites. The first is simply to invite anyone who's interested to start a blog, by offering a blog hosting service.

(Try using a service like Blogdigger Local to find local bloggers to invite.) What can turn into a long list of citizen blogs are listed by category on a blog table of contents page.

And a main citizen-blogs page can highlight new posts to the various blogs as they are published. Or site editors can watch the citizen blog postings and select the best to be highlighted on the main blog page.

Yet another interesting approach is an aggregator application which creates a sort of ?ber-blog featuring the newest entries from a variety of citizen blogs, continuously updated.

Your community might already have a Web site that's aggregating local blogs (like Greensboro101.com or Rex Sorgatz's MNSpeak.com Aggregator) — in which case, perhaps there are partnership opportunities to be explored.

The other model is to be selective, inviting people who you think would be good additions to the Web site to start blogging under your news site's brand name.

This might mean seeking out local people who already have independent blogs and encouraging them to move over to the news Web site — perhaps with enticements such as free hosting, promises of promotion to increase their blog audience and visibility, or even money.