Want to create a citizen journalism website that will attract both pageviews and advertisers?
The key, says expert Steve Outing, is to feature great content.
Sounds obvious, right? But Outing, a media consultant and Editor & Publisher columnist, says too many citizen journalism websites fail to separate the wheat from the chaff.
“The trick is, if you have this huge pile of stuff coming in, unless you have some way to identify the really good stuff your site won’t be terribly interesting to anyone,” Outing says.
Outing should know. He earns a living writing about the evolution of the news biz in the digital age, and once tried his hand at running a citizen journalism site.
But his sports-themed site failed, he admits, because “we didn’t vet the stuff as well as we should have. Not that anything bad got in, but a lot of the stuff was were really mediocre. We just didn’t create a compelling enough experience to attract advertisers.”
There are many ways to vet content. Some citizen journalism sites have editors who select and polish submissions, while other sites rely on their users to review and rate content.
As an example, Outing cites Newstrust.net, which “encourages people to be editors and reviewers of stories. Through their network the content is rated, and the best stories rise to the top.”
Whatever the method, the idea is to move the best content to the fore.
Editing is also important for vetting material that’s libelous, offensive or just plain wrong, such as the now-infamous CNN iReport post that claimed Apple CEO Steve Jobs had died.
“You need to watch out for the wrong kind stuff, inflammatory stuff,” Outing says. “If there’s so much content coming through and no one’s looking at it – that’s the worst situation.”
But with so much content available on the web, “it falls a bit more on the consumer to be savvy and take what they see with a grain of salt,” Outing says. “The fortunate thing is that most pf these sites have comment threads, and the bogus stuff tends to get pointed out quickly.”
