OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Survey on hyperlocal citizen media released

A University of Maryland report looks at 31 initiatives to cover communities with reader-contributed reporting.

Posted: 2007-03-07

The University of Maryland's J-Lab has released the results of its survey of hyperlocal "citizen's" media websites:

Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?

Cruising through the report quickly, I think it's worth noting that the survey did not look at all "citizen's media," just efforts to create geographic-oriented websites. I'd suggest that the vast majority of reader-contributed news content on the Web goes to topic-oriented websites, but that's not the way that the traditional, offline news media is oriented. Nevertheless, there's quite a bit of engaging information here about this small subset of citizen's media.

If nothing else, check out the page where the authors list the 31 hyperlocal websites they interviewed and click around.

I was drawn to the section on "making money" and found the results fairly bleak. Thirty-eight percent of respondents didn't even know if they were taking in enough money to cover their costs. Forty-two percent knew that they were not. While people can, and have, run sites out of their own pockets for many years, I think the public would be better served by sites that brought in enough cash to ensure that their publishers have ample incentive to keep these communities open, vibrant and informative.

Other reactions to the report?

Responses:

From Jeff Wilson on March 7, 2007 at 4:27 PM

He carefully distinguished between "citizen" journalism and citizen media. He said that a lot of what is on these sites isn't journalism per se, but it does count as media. Nevertheless, he used the words "journalism" and "media" interchangeably.

While you may choose to frown on the fact that none of us make any money, I found it interesting that 82% of survey respondents said their site had been used to to create dialog within their communities.

One would think that if regular newspapers and their online equivalents were doing a good job that such place-based dialog would already have a home on these newspaper websites. We know that topic based discussion on the web is huge; maybe geographic based discussion sites are becoming more utilized as well.

Also, many respondents apparently thought they had prodded the local media to improve.

Overall, his conclusion was somewhat encouraging:

We think citizen media sites will become an enduring part of the emerging newscape. While we think many individual sites will collapse as their founders burn out, others will arise to take their place.

With this study, we urge those who can help build capacity in this arena to pay attention. Legacy media companies: Think about partnering - and even supporting - successful sites, not competing with them. Journalism schools: Pursue the possibilities of citizen media sites as learning laboratories. Community foundations: Be alert to real possibilities for building community capacity.

From Robert Niles on March 7, 2007 at 5:25 PM

To clarify, I want these indie sites to make money, so that their founders can enjoy the financial success their hard work deserves, instead of having to get by on the good will of their communities. That's nice, but money would be nice, too.

That said, old media partnerships can provide one excellent source of income. It blows me away to see old media companies dump the amount of money that they do on new initiatives when they could have partnered with an exisiting local sites, doing the same thing, for a fraction of that cost. And gotten more traffic, too!

And we in j-schools have to do a better job not just of preparing tomorrow's journalists to elicit and manage reader content, but to build and manage start-up businesses as well.