Saturday, January 07, 2006
Citizen Journalism CNN-IBN has finally done it!
Umesh Gupta sent a Video from a Mobile Phone and CNN-IBN used it as a lead in to expose the crumbling AAAI Infrastructure at Indian Airports. Sahara Airlines felt the Impact of this Citizen's report. Kudos IBN!
What's been talked for long is finally here. Citizen journalism dawns finally. Here's how! CNN-IBN's Citizen Journalists Initiative invites you to be a part of their news gathering exercise by asking you to send original pictures, videos or news articles, to them: to citizen@ibnlive.com. So is that it? Well, yes!
What's more, IBN is also the first channel to have Blogs. Rajdeep Sardeshai's blog has the max comments so far (164 at last count). And why not! This is the way people can connect with their fav jurno folks! And feel one with the Indian Cricket Team and Raghavendra Rathore in dishing out best wishes to Rajdeep & IBN. Some find the blogs inconvenient and some welcome the very beginning. All said and done, it's yet another first by a Brand News channel. NDTV 24X7 has an unofficial watch though it carries Rajdeep’s Picture on the template. Headline Today has no such sharp ideas to sharpen their news.
Internationally BBC has been toying with Blogs on and off with Six apart. CNN has long been finding a lot of weight in Blogs and their power from US Elections to the War reportage.
But hang on bloggers, you can only post comments on IBN Blogs and there would be no links allowed. 'Comments with links in them won't be published other than in cases of rare exceptions', reads the fine print. Wow! How very interesting, it just makes it a glorified forum or better still, a feedback form.
Here’s hoping the Citizen journalist does wield more power in the times to come. So get up, speak out!.
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4 comments:
Hey, thanks for the feedback, but I'll clarify that point about the comments and blogs. If we were to leave the blogs open to the public, we'd be just another Blogger-wannabe, taking us away from our main agenda right now.
Comments with links are not allowed because a fair amount of comments we get in a day have links in them that only seek to publicize themselves and their websites. Yes, that policy does carry the risk of turning the blogs into just glorified forums, but prior experience has taught us once you lose control over the quality of the conversation, your community goes for a toss. And right now we have a small community, but a good and civil one with almost zero abusive comments. Once we get the proper forums up, we will be allowing the good contributors from them to blog on the main site.
Hope that does clarify things a bit.
Hey Codey, thanks for he feedback ... Well if individuals can manage and scan their comments, wonder why a news channel's online division can't?
Anyway, it's a good start and here's hoping that it only gets better!
The moderation is manual now, we clear each and every message.
Way to go!
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