twopointouch

Douglas Fisher, who has helped set up the online community newspaper Hartsville Today over the last year, has published a 75-page guide (PDF File) to citizen journalism and running a community paper online.

It’s well worth a read. Perhaps of especial interest is what he says about training for these new journalists:

Other sites have done more extensive training, but we specifically made ours “training lite” based on earlier misgivings from interested people about doing “journalism.” Plus, we had concerns about where “citizen” ends and “journalist” begins when the training becomes more extensive (we also felt our turnout would be very light if we went beyond a half-day).

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Keep it simple, short, focused and effective. Do not expect to turn your contributors into journalists; just help them learn to use your site so that they do not feel intimidated.

It’s interesting that despite pitched battles between the champions of citizen journalism and old guard media elitists, the actual practitioners of citizen journalism here felt that they were more citizen than journalist. There’s no judgement in that about the readability and relevance of the publication, it’s just that the people involved didn’t feel that they’d automatically become journalists despite their power to publish.

There’s lots of other very interesting information and advice in the guide, from the costs of setting up to the attractions and perils of hiring professionals to help to seed the content.