San Francisco’s “second” newspaper, the Examiner, launched Examiner.com last year not as the online equivalent for the San Francisco paper, but as a national forum for recruiting citizen journalists to report on the variety of topics a typical newspaper would cover. Participants set up blogs for their topic and city that allows them to develop a unique, granular voice. For example, one of the more popular “columnists” discusses San Francisco radio.

The mission behind Examiner.com is to create massive local blog networks covering as many topics as possible. The Examiner.com management then encourage their bloggers to virally market their blogs themselves, and provides pocket change incentive of $.01 per pageview.

In conclusion, Examiner.com is a great experiment taking an obscure local publishing brand and creating a new online journalistic (albeit not a professional journalist) business model. It melds its mass media name with the social media. I’ve signed on as a Social Media Examiner and will test the concept.

In any case, at least the Examiner is creative enough to try a new business model in light of the horrid newspaper advertising collapse now happening:

(fr. Techcrunch)

Today’s New York Times acknowledges the citizen journalism that was so prominent during the Mumbai terrorist incident:

The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years.

Forbes acknowledges the power of Twitter and points out its weaknesses as a news source:

Social networks were flooded with bunkum about the events in Mumbai, to be sure. Cynics pointed out that much of the information was of questionable value. As one blogger pointed out, many tweets, particularly later on in the developing crisis, simply echoed the latest reports from mainstream outlets such as the BBC and CNN.

Finally, Poynter Online recommends the development of journalistic protocols for “Responsible Tweeting”:

1. Check information source before “retweeting”.
2. Include hashtags to categorize news, make queries and providing corrections.
3. Encourage updates and corrections.
4. Encourage the use of these protocols.

The age old (at least during this decade) new media question: is citizen journalism journalism?

Tom’s Tech Blog decries Twitter as an unreliable news source, and therefore not a news source, receives backlash from prominent bloggers:

Yes, Twitter is a Source of Journalism – Mathew Ingram

I Can’t Believe Some People are still Saying Twitter isn’t a News Source – Michael Arrington, Techcrunch

(Why is Twitter Unreliable?) The facts are often wrong.

This is the same argument that mainstream journalists used against blogs when they rose to fill a void in the news over the last few years. Yet even the NY Times admitted years ago that blogs were an important news source when disaster struck: “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.”

But blogs are nothing compared to Twitter, which lets anyone with a cell phone instantly update the world with what they see and hear, via the simple and ubiquitous text message.

Sure, lots of Twitter messages are flat out wrong and can spread disinformation. But as Ingram notes in his blog post above, other people tend to immediately correct those errors. Bad information is quickly drowned out by good information.

CNN provides examples for both sides of the argument with Tweeting the Terror – How Social Media Reacted to Mumbai – remarkable Tweets emanating from the battlefront as well as wayward rumors and noise that questions Twitter information credibility.

Mumbai Attack Aftermath, Detailed Tweet by Tweet – Wired Blog

The simple conclusion is the fact that all citizen journalism – Twitter, cell phone conversations and pictures, Flickr – potentially contribute to the illumination of breaking news. The responders are the first on scene, minutes to hours before the mass media reporters, and news credibility simply requires filtering by both other citizens on scene and the trained media. There’s really no argument here.

Government transparency has always been oxymoron. Sordid details of profligate spending get outed and become legend – everybody knows about the $600 toilet seat or the half-billion dollar travel system that isn’t used.

Now we have citizen journalists watching over the bailout with BailoutSleuth.com:

BailoutSleuth believes that transparency is vital to the success of the taxpayer-funded bailout program. The $700 billion allocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program translates to roughly $2,300 for every man, woman and child in America.

BailoutSleuth surveys for suspicious documents and interprets why items have been redacted…

MSM publishers like Washington Post should consider partnering with sites like BailoutSleuth, providing supplemental journalistic resources and pushing traffic to the site. Citizen journalists don’t cost as much as staff reporters and appreciate the mass media exposure.