miércoles, marzo 07, 2007

Una investigacion sobre el periodismo ciudadano


En el enlace de arriba aparec el informe final de una investigación sobre el fenómeno nuevo del periodismo hecho por ciudadanos. El informe está en idioma ingles.

En la introducción al Informe Jan Schaffer señaló lo siguiente:

J-Lab has been funding citizen media start-ups with micro-grants for two years now. We’ve seen how quickly committed founders can build momentum and gain traction in their communities. The findings in this report were less of a surprise and more of an affirmation of what we had started to see.

We agree with 98% of the respondents in our web survey who said that the emergence of local news web sites with content built from community members is “a good thing” - although it may not all be “journalism,” the kinds of finished stories you see in a newspaper. Because of that, we prefer the term “citizen media,” although we use that term interchangeably with “citizen journalism” in this report. Over 79% of the respondents to our web survey considered the information on their sites to be “journalism.”

This report focuses specifically on micro-local community news sites that contain content generated by users. When we started this research in the spring of 2006, we were able to identify about 500 citizen media sites. As we issue this report, we have been able to identify several hundred more and will soon catalogue them on a new web site, the Knight Citizen News Network (www.kcnn.org), supported by the Knight Foundation.

More impressive than the numbers, though, is the impact these sites are having on their communities. With limited readership and very little revenue, 73% of those who responded pronounced their sites to be a “success.’’ Why? Because they have watchdogged local government, provided news that couldn’t otherwise be had, nudged local media to improve, helped their community solve problems, even, to a degree, increased voter turnout and the number of candidates running for office.

This study takes an early snapshot of a very robust development. We interviewed 31 site operators in-depth, and we fielded a 60-question online survey. Not all 191 respondents could, or did, answer every question, but they poured out their hearts in open-ended responses. Their resolve to continue, often on their own dimes, was palpable.

No hay comentarios.: