Grasswire is Your Newsroom.

Grasswire, which I’ve just joined as a Managing Editor, is open source news where the news is not simply a product. It is a democratized environment where the reader controls the process, not just the output.

I have been a news curator since Iranians took to the street to protest the 2009 Presidential election. It was a high point for social media reporting in general and Twitter in particular, before the company had agreed to censor news for despots and give advertisers free reign over promoted tweets. Media outlets had not yet learned they could share others’ tweets as their own content. We were all fixated on news and images purported to be coming from the streets of Tehran and other cities.

I learned two major lessons from the #IranElection:

1. News and news access are inherently democratic and democratizing. In the violent aftermath of the election, people overcame language barriers, censorship and even the cutoff of telecommunications to produce and consume news. When major outlets lost access, we turned to the people on the ground, and their stories resonated more than any televised report.
2. Everyone has an agenda. In a vacuum, this is not a big deal, but during breaking news events, it is exponentially more difficult to navigate the onslaught of news, bunk, satire and propaganda hurled across social media platforms.

These lessons were reinforced during high-profile events such the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Marathon bombing, to name a few.

Today we turn to social media for breaking news from all over the world, confident that reports from the ground will be more timely and accurate than the inevitable studio rehash that comes after.

At the same time, social media reporting has earned its backlash. Fake images and false eyewitness reports are expected by now, and no one seems very good at recognizing satire. Platforms such as Twitter seem either unwilling or unable to solve the verification problem.

Grasswire’s democratic nature is important to me as a reporter and someone who truly loves “the news,” but also as an informed world citizen who believes that information empowers people. To that end I believe in Grasswire’s potential to reshape the way we interact with information. That is why I see it as not simply a product, but a process.

What you see at Grasswire is the most important news as decided by its users. News is submitted, fact-checked, edited, and shared — by all of us. The community is in control, and it is about to get easier to use.

You are the media and Grasswire is your newsroom.