The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

Or accept "applications" from bloggers, saying you'll choose the best to be published on your site (and perhaps paying them a modest fee).

If your site takes the selective approach, it's worth thinking about what topics the blogs might cover.

The best strategy may be to have citizen blogs that complement what the news staff produces. A great promise of citizen blogs is that they can cover topics and areas uncovered by or too narrow to warrant the interest of the news staff.

If your newspaper, say, has a small sports staff, citizen bloggers who are passionate about minor sports can fill in the gaps, ensuring that sports like trail running and girls' softball get at least some coverage.

If your news organization doesn't provide much coverage of pets, consider finding a local veterinarian or animal trainer who might like to start a blog.

One word of caution, however: Citizen bloggers, because they're usually volunteers, can't be counted on to keep a blog filled with content consistently or for very long.

Most news Web sites that have used citizen bloggers report that the blogs tend to be short-lived; starting out strong is common, followed by less-frequent posting, then complete inactivity.

Paying citizen bloggers — even if it's a token amount, or in the form of prizes or "goodies" — might help to alleviate this problem.

Examples:

1. Bluffton (S.C.) Today Community Blogs.

1. Lawrence.com Blogs (The Lawrence Journal-World, Kansas).
2. The Denver Post Bloghouse.
3. NJ.com Weblogs.

5. Newsroom citizen 'transparency' blogs

A specific type of citizen blog deserves its own category here. It plays on the notion of news organization "transparency," or sharing the inner workings of the newsroom with readers or viewers.

This involves inviting a reader or readers to blog with public complaints, criticism, or praise for the news organization's ongoing work. A reader panel can be empowered via a publicly accessible blog to serve as citizen ombudsmen, of a sort, offering public commentary on how the news organization is performing.

A milder form of this is the editor's blog — typically written by a paper's top editor and explaining the inner workings of the newsroom and discussing how specific editorial decisions are made — along with reader comments, so that the editor has a public dialog with his/her blog readers.

Example:

1. SpokesmanReview.com's "News Is a Conversation" blog.

6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version

OK, now we're swimming in the deep end.

This next step involves establishing a stand-alone citizen-journalism Web site that is separate from the core news brand. It means establishing a news-oriented Web site that is comprised entirely or nearly entirely of contributions from the community.

Most such sites focus on local news — very local news. Citizen contributors can submit whatever they want, from an account of a kids' soccer game, to observations from an audience member at last night's city council meeting, to an opinion piece by a state legislator, to a high-school student telling of her prom-night experience.

The site's editors monitor and perform a modest degree of editing to submissions, in order to maintain some degree of "editorial integrity" of content placed under the publisher's brand name.

Photos are also a big appeal of such sites. You'll find citizen-submitted shots of pets, cars, vacations, kids graduating...

If that sounds like a big mish-mash of not-that-interesting content, you're right.

But that doesn't mean this is a bad idea. Rather, it means that editors of such local citizen-journalism sites need to guide community members into making quality submissions — to educate them about what's worth sharing with their fellow citizens.

That can mean recruiting community leaders, event organizers, and just plain interesting people to contribute to the site. It can mean guiding submissions by, for example, promoting an upcoming event and urging that participants take photographs and submit them, and write up their experiences.

And in this model, the site's editors also perform a line-editing role, ensuring that content is up to at least a minimal level of quality. (Correct spelling, proper grammar, attention paid to potential libel issues.)

The other imperative with such sites is to create a homepage and section pages that highlight the best of citizen coverage.

Since much of user-submitted content can be deadly dull to most of the audience, a page that simply lists everything people submitted by date — no matter how bad — can be about as exciting as reading a press-release wire.

But if site editors are doing their job well in terms of recruiting and educating citizen journalists, there should be enough compelling content within the submissions pool to populate a homepage that will engage site visitors.

An advantage of sites like this is that citizens can cover issues and events that local mainstream media ignore. If you as a community member think that your fellow citizens should know about a stop sign that was knocked down and the county government won't fix, then this is an outlet to publicize news that's not big enough to get on the radar screen of the local newspaper or TV news outlets.

Citizens likewise have a way to publicize big stories that local media outlets are avoiding. Got a complaint about the local press? Go around them.

Examples:

1. MyMissourian (Columbia, Mo., student-run site).
2. WestportNow (Westport, Conn., independent site).
3. iBrattleboro.com (Brattleboro, Vt., independent site).
4. Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record YourNews (sub-site of main news Web site).

7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version

This model is identical to No. 6 above, except that citizen submissions are not edited.

What people write goes on the site: blemishes, misspellings and all.

With this model of stand-alone citizen-journalism site, it is important to have safeguards against inappropriate content being posted.

Having a site editor review all submissions as soon as possible after they've been automatically published is ideal — but impractical, of course, since editors do have to sleep and posting by the public is possible 24 hours a day.