Orato.com, based in Vancouver, had described itself as the only news site in the world dedicated to first-person, citizen-authored journalism. Its best-known assignment sent two former sex trade workers to cover the trial of Robert Pickton, convicted in December 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder over six women whose remains were found on his farm. The premise was minimal interference.
In mid-2009 the site abandoned that premise. As part of an editorial and design overhaul, Orato stated that for its first three years the previous management had deliberately encouraged intimate first-person stories and deliberately offered very few editorial guidelines or oversight on journalistic standards. The replacement brief was “concrete and trustworthy information that is objective and under-reported”. Founder and owner Sam Yehia said the changes were meant to professionalise the site, focus its newsworthy content, enforce a viable business model and keep pace with Web 2.0 standards. The incoming editor-in-chief, Joy Joy Gugeler, repositioned it as a market for freelancers: correspondents posting video, audio, photographs and articles live, editors reviewing within 24 hours, and payment from the first ad click.
That is far enough from the original model that the site could no longer be counted as citizen journalism, and quality control had troubled comparable sites. More voices do produce a fuller picture; the difficulty may sit in the label. Len Brody, then chief executive of the participatory news network NowPublic.com, liked to put it that “telling someone they’re going to be a citizen journalist is like telling people they’re going to be a citizen dentist.”