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From 7-14 June the Olympic torch passed through Scotland. A “60 strong team of citizen journalists used this as a starting point to explore a deeper sense of identity in Scotland” – the Citizen Relay project.
As an exiled Scot I was moved by the pictures and gobbled up the Storifies from Gerry McG and Cameron King, but two months later I canna really be bovvered. Andy Miah puts the case for citizen journalism as an alternative to mainstream media, and it’s a great idea in principle, with the stress on participation and open content, but the word “stories” always makes me emit a sigh – just cut to the chase, I don’t want to be told a story…
Is citizen journalism and its cousin social reporting a new media form, a pool of data for others to plunder (perhaps via Storyful’s social media dashboard)? Or does it have standalone ‘value’?
Linkage:
- #citizenrelay: find out more | download the data | post-event report | mashups: the story data tells us | BBC Torch Relay site
- more: #media2012 newswire | @TheGamesFamily and @GM_Stories (tweets from Gamesmakers) | #citizencurators and daily Storifys (project to capture life during #london2012)
- analysis: The Olympic movement’s new media revolution | Citizen journalism and the London 2012 Olympic Games (slides) | The regenerative potential and economic value of citizen journalism
Update, 15 August: just come across Cowbird, a ‘multi-media storytelling tool’, which enables new approaches to storytelling incorporating such things as roles, relationships, tags, timelines, dedications and characters (and seven types of story?). See the results in National Geographic’s Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project and read Mediashift’s article about the project.
As a coordinator for the #citizenrelay project (and much of the shopfloor graft behind #media2012) I am happy to chat about this – I’m still articulating my own thoughts on it, but as it stands – one was funded, the other wasn’t – and you definitely need an infrastructure if there is to be any attempt at an alternative to the mainstream (if that was ever the goal, I believe not). The process was way more significant, to me, than the initial content and stories – and what we wil take and more forward from the groundwork that citizen relay will be in areas way beyond the olympic games as a catalyst.
Looking forward to tracking your further work on this – the concept of an infrastructure sounds interesting. It seems that curation is already reaching a tipping point, or maybe that we need to develop new methods of consumption. As you say, the process is as at least as important as the end result – perhaps a little like blogging, in that respect.
Thanks for commenting.