Building A Better Citizen-Journalist Newsroom
April 2nd, 2008 | by Brad King |There’s a wonderful piece at Poynter today about the work required to build a community-driven, online news operation within the confines of a newspaper.
Once you start building an online community, it’s difficult to wrangle them in the same direction — and keep everyone updated as to what citizens are covering. The piece discusses recruitment (Craigslist over street recruiting), software (Highrise customer service management software) and daily meetings. The biggest problem, as with any organization, is communication between the professionals and the citizens.
The paper, though, is working to upgrade its systems to allow the community editor to text message people directly, instead of relying on emails and phone calls.
It’s well worth the read to get an idea of what it takes to actually herd the cats into a usable, functional addition to the newsroom.
