The citizen journalism beat has a new kid on the block in the shape of VancouverIAM. As you might have guessed from the name, it is a citmedia site about Vancouver, based in Vancouver. The site describes itself as: The destination for people who want to know what’s going on in Vancouver. It gives you the tools and support to become a video journalist, internet TV and film producer and

CNN is taking its approach to citizen journalism one step further by setting up iReport.com as a dedicated citizen media site. Like many other mainstream media outlets, CNN has had to cope with far more submissions from the audience than it could process and publish. Only around 10% of the 100,000 photos and videos sent to CNN have been posted since the launch its citizen journalism project in August 2006

A couple of days ago, the University of British Columbia campus was under lockdown following a threat against students in the Bio Sciences building. I was on campus at the time and, like others here, wanted to find out more. One of the best sources turned out to be not mainstream media, but the citizen media site, NowPublic.com. One of its contributors, ScienceDave, happened to be in the building at

Interesting to see that the Vancouver-based participatory news site NowPublic.com is expanding its editorial team. It comes after the site received $10m in venture capital funding last year. It has post several job ads on its blog. NowPublic is looking for: Regional Editors – US, Australia, China, India, South Africa and the UK A sports editor A community relations and content specialist Applications are due by February 1, so please

If you are heading into 2008 thinking, we must do more with social media, here is a useful primer to social news websites. From the post: Social news websites generally operate via a wisdom of the crowds principle; groups of individuals with different points of views are able to collectively determine the value or importance of content disseminated through the community. The users are given the editorial power to influence

CBC held a debate on the future of the future of news, ahead of the ONA conference in Toronto. This clip from NowPublic.com’s Len Brody gives a flavour of the discussion: The sound quality could be better. It was shot on a Nokia N95 and I was a few rows back from the podium

I’m in Toronto this week for the annual conference of the Online News Association. Ahead of the start of the sessions on Thursday, CBC is hosting a debate on The Future of the Future of News on October 17. On the panel are Andrew Keen (Cult of the Amateur), Len Brody (NowPublic) and Rahaf Harfoush (Wikinomics researcher). As well as the debate, I’m proud to say that one of my