Teeming with Citizen Media News

First off, we know the headline is misleading. This post is all news about citizen media - we're not going to be bold and try to claim that it actually is citizen journalism. Some say Dan Gillmor is the father of citizen media. Regardless of whether you believe that, he did, in fact, write the book on it. This year he’s a non-resident fellow at the Berkman Center and lectured there earlier this week. A Gillmor, Doctorow, Irish, and local confluence of events redux has Bostonist suggesting that you fill out this five minute Collaborative News Survey. It was last month around this time that we ran into Dan Gillmor following a DRM talk given by Corey Doctorow, at which we met up with our Irish blogging friend, Gavin. This month, Dan tipped off Corey at BoingBoing about the Harvard survey and we read all about it on St. Patrick’s day. Follow?

We have been burned a bit in the past by folks who promise to tally survey results, but don’t deliver. Hopefully Hsing Wei, the KSG student administering this survey, will provide useful information to those looking at the new citizen/collaborative journalism on and in the future.

In somewhat related news, Mark Jurkowitz puts up on the Media Log the launch of the Wicked Local site. Wicked Local pulls from several local established media outlets (Patriot Ledger, Brockton Enterprise) and thier own little web 2.0 outgrowth. There’s a little tool box on the right hand side (pictured at left here) “Be a Citizen Journalist.” We’re not quite wowed with this new site. The citizen journalism has been going on in some form at both newspapers – the Herald has quite a few bloggers, the Globe has the Sidekick (?) and forums on Boston.com. While not entirely impressed with these as citizen media, Boston does have quite a few bloggers and even a site driven by the goal of pulling together citizen media, another aggregating their choice of the top ten sources, and others just trying to make heads and tails of it - or dollars and cents.