More television stations and cable companies are starting to join the citizen journalism movement:
- New England Cable News Network on July 15 will begin accepting viewer-produced videos to broadcast on its network and to post on its web site, the Boston Globe reports. (Link props to J.D. Lasica at New Media Musings.)
- KRON-TV in San Francisco has launched The Bay Area is Talking, which features a blog by KRON online news manager Brian Shields and aggregates posts from Bay Area bloggers.
- KRON mimics WKRN-TV's Nashville is Talking, which launched in April with Brittney Gilbert doing the blogging and featuring a local blog aggregator.
- KRON and WKRN are moving to a videojournalist model, switching from the usual two-person news crew to one person who does the reporting, camera work and editing. It's a concept that has its doubters.
NECN's announcement on its home page reads:
COMING JULY 15: NECN wants you to join the newsgathering effort. VIDEO NEW ENGLAND is our project to have viewers send in video, directly through our website, for use on air and on the web. All you need is a camcorder and a computer. Join the conversation. Tell us your news. Come back July 15 for VIDEO NEW ENGLAND. In the meantime - get out your video camera and start shooting!
The latter efforts don't make the kind of statement that NECN is making, but they're reminders that it's not just the Lawrence Journal-Worlds that bear watching when we talk about citizen media. Keep an eye, for instance, on Current TV, which recently announced its payment policy for video submissions.
In an ongoing Poynter Online discussion this week, which blogger Tim Porter discussed today, Kathy Gill of the University of Washington Digital Media Master's Degree Program reacted this way when the participants were being too newspaper-centric:
There is no difference, technically, between a newspaper and a TV station. Both use a medium capable of delivering multi-media stories for the news consumer who wants to see-and-hear (v "read").
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