The lemmings’s suicidal race of citizen journalism start-ups
A necrology of the most brilliant citizen journalism start-ups
In the interesting exploration and research in the world of citizen journalism start ups, to answer the question how do you build an independent sustainable online platform for citizen journalists?, I am astonished to find out that most of them failed in less than 20 months. Indeed, the average life time of a citizen journalism start-up is currently estimated in 20 months — this doesn’t mean that they don’t have a reason to exist…may be they just have a short but wonderful and exciting life, which is still ok!.
Let’s start with the first one, quoted by various websites and ranked among the top 10 journalism start ups. Demotix. I read here “Demotix is the award-winning home of global user-generated news. Promoting free speech, changing the news agenda, giving you a voice, and getting you paid for your photos and videos.” Let’s find it online www.demotix.com , as you can see you will find a portal for selling photos that sounds a bit like Alibaba — which obviously has nothing or very little to do with the ambitious mission of the founders. Ok, let’s google it. Here is the necrology:
You can read about its glorious life ( it reached the peak of popularity during the Iran elections), interesting greek ethimology, cups and awards, but the fact remains that the platform doesn’t exist anymore. In 2016, all pages at the Demotix website were redirected to the home page of Corbis Images and then sold to a Chinese media business company.
Another US based platform was All Voices — local to global news. “All Voices is a global community that shares news, videos, images and opinions tied to news events and people. It is the first true people’s media”. Though, reading such description one might wander, what is the need of such platform considering the existence of facebook and other social media… but it’s already too late to wander because the platform doesn’t exist anymore, if you click on www.allvoices.com you find Pulsepoint. http://create.pulsepoint.com/?
Blottr , “Report, collaborate & discover breaking news as it happens…” launched in various UK cities in England in 2010, had the same fate. The brilliant idea behind Blottr is that multiple users could collaborate on the same story. Blottr had 1.5 millions unique visitors a month and over 60,000 registered users, but now… if you open the page, the last post is from September 2013!!!
Ok, let’s move to another one. Now Public — Crowd Powered Media. This CJ platform had more than 5 millions monthly readers, and contributions in over 160 countries. Articles were written on the trending issue of the day by verified contributors. I was really excited when I read about this one because this is something I am really thinking about for my project….but guess what? This platform doesn’t exist anymore… on Sept. 2, 2009 the company was acquired by Clarity Digital Group, and in December 27, 2013 the site was closed and the domain redirected to www.examiner.com , which is basically a website where you can upload your event (really?!?).
Anyway, let’s not loose hope and get another one. I have to find an existing model that is successful and I can adapt to my project. The research continues night and day, passing by IReport of CNN and Wikinews — which for obvious reasons I cannot take into account as a term of reference for my project. But one thing it strikes me about the neutral point of view policy as opposed to the opinion-led editorial of all the other CJs platforms. “We strive at all times to meet the policy of using neutral point of view, ensuring our reporting is as fair as possible”. Though, even here, the last news they have under the section “Africa” region, is almost from 2 months ago (3 August 2016)!!!
Let’s continue, Digital Journal is another Canadian initiative that begun back in 1998, and still existing up to now! The portal is up and running and has a very interesting business model. Digital Journal shares a portion of its advertising revenue with its contributors, so the more you contribute the more you earn. Definitely a big up for the team who came up with such model and made the Digital Journal to be a survivor in the quick race that these all these citizen journalism start ups are running! So I tried to log in and become a contributor for sure, in order to understand how the platform is working and be still up and running after 18 years….
But what happens is that I am not able to sign in as a contributor, http://www.digitaljournal.com/user/signup.php , this is what is coming up:
is it a temporary problem? So I try to log in with facebook and it directs me to a page where I can see the online engagement of the page, that surely doesn’t look like it’s been there for 20 years (I don’t even know why I am able to see the engagement… in any case it’s roughly 60.000 followers). However, in one way or the other this platform is running, because they have recent posts published…but is it running through citizen journalism if I am not able to sign up and contribute? I am not sure.
Anyway, may be it’s a temporary problem of the server, I am not a tech expert, who knows… but definitely I am wandering if a citizen journalist is trying to access it now, he cannot upload any story.
Let’s move on and here we have one of the most interesting ideas…. News Participation / citizen journalism at its best . Beside the design of the platform which is not really reader friendly with most of the articles having rainbow stripes instead of images, I notice that they have recent posts ( as late as today) and so I start opening and reading the contributions of the citizen journalists.
After reading all the articles above, the question is, who are the contributors of this platform? All the articles seem to have the same author and the same script: Russian’s interference with Ukraine. It looks more of a blog of 2/3 citizen journalists who are trying to speak out when — as they say— “media space is being cleansed”. Definitely very interesting because the mono-thematic posts about Russia’s occupation of Ukraine are interrupted by a Nigerian author posting about a well referenced Doctor recommending a treatment for neck and nose (???).
This platform is simply hilarious.
After all this research, which made me go through the vast world of citizen journalism start-ups almost looking like a funny lemmings race towards the edge of the mountain, let me talk about the most interesting projects that I found extremely inspiring to build my platform for citizen journalists.
First, is the Spot.us , by David Cohn, a crowdfunding platform which enables community-funded reporting. I find the idea extremely brilliant. The founder says “We take investigative pitches, here in the San Francisco Bay area, and we try and crowd-fund the money that is needed to hire a reporter to do an investigation”. Spot.us was indeed “a non-profit organization designed to bring citizens, journalists, and news publishers together in an online marketplace based on crowdsourcing and crowdfunding methods and principles.” This will be my first inspiration, for Sauti ya Mtaa. Indeed, I I think that the idea of crowdfunded journalism might really work in the context that I am considering. Though, as Wikipedia says, “while providing a new option for funding journalism, it raised questions about activism and new sorts of conflict of interests”. I am not sure about the meaning of such sentence…? In any case, it’s also a pity that this idea, funded by Knight Foundation, is also not existing currently. Wikipedia says that it was bought by American Public Media in 2011 but it was retired in 2015 because unable to maintain it. I am wandering if this was in terms of costs, expenditure, or what else. What made this brilliant start-up come to an end?
A very interesting project worth noticing is the citizen journalism platform founded by former BBC journalist Chubhranshu Choudhary . The project is called CGNet Swara and uses an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) a two way communication system that enables citizen reporters to record a meesage in their own language outlining an issue.
So far CGNet Swara has established its platform across 12 states in India. CGNet gets around 150 recorded messages a day. A report from 2015 by Krati Garg says that “CGNet modus operandi might be seen as ganging up on government, but in a country with a population of 1.25 billion and inherent problems of red tape, corruption and bureaucracy, this method of citizen activism appears to be hitting its mark”.
These will be my sources of inspiration, in a context like Kenya where we definitely need a simple way of engaging citizen journalists, but we also have professional ones who might follow up on that pitch with adequate resources.
In any case, after all this scrolling and research, it’s obvious that becoming a successful citizen journalism start-up is extremely complicated and you might want to give up on the way (or even before starting) and the problem of conciliating a noble idea with a sustainable is another challenge. Also reading this necrology is quite intimidating, but I think that before coming up with new ideas we should learn a lesson from those who tried before us. Why are these platforms no longer existing or they produce funny content? What went wrong? What makes this platform better than another? Why would someone use this platform rather than social media? Where are the citizen journalists who used to contribute in these platforms? Where are the founders of these start-ups? What can they tell us before we embark in another race? All these questions should be answered, before we open up another blog where nobody wants to write and that nobody wants to read.
During the time spent in this online research, I found this post, in another citizen journalism platform, that I found quite funny and consoling and I feel like sharing it to conclude this post:
