Last week some great news hit the headlines; the first grassroots reporting sites received venture funding. Editors are after one thing and one thing only; on the spot reporting of evens as and when they happen.
Two of the three websites that received funding are investing in technology enabling editors to locate useful people within yards of major news events. The sites–publicnow.com, associatedcontent and Ohmy.com, are investing the extra cash also in paying their contributors for quality stories.
Mobile telephones are the most obvious tools to fill the gap for the time being. A strong example of the power of mobile telephones is the Dutch Skoeps, an international project which is even branching out into Africa. Journalists in Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa, armed with mobile phones report news as it happens in the Voices of Africa Project. The sponsors of the project, the Africa Interactive Media Foundation, say that they provide effective communication. That’s a novel approach to moving toward the broader goal of more open and democratic societies. Newspaper editors frequently publish the Skoeps’ footage sourced by grassroots reporters.