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Well, the citizen journalism discussion at Thursday’s weblog writer’s group wasn’t nearly as exciting as I hoped it would be. The moderator, Lisa Williams, showed us a bunch of citizen jouranlism efforts, but there wasn’t much discussion about what citizen journalism is and such. We’ve hashed that out many times before, so there wasn’t exactly a need to review everything. A few guests joined us in person and on IRC and their input, to me anyway, was much more interesting than that tour of Web sites.

Pingswept talked a bit about his endeavors with Wikinews and how he got sucked in. A few Wikinewsies joined us on IRC, too. We ended up having what I hope was a productive discussion about some changes to the Web site that might help and encourage more people to contribute to the effort. I noticed quite a few tweaks to the English page today. (Now I find myself wondering about navigation on other versions of Wikinews and if there’s some effort to have fairly uniform navigation and help pages for each of the languages or if it’s up to each group to maintain and organize their own pages.)

I invited some news librarians to join us and invite others who might be interested in the discussion, but so far, I only know one of those people tuned in live.

Addendum 4/18: Dan100, one of the Wikinewsies who joined us remotely, writes about the meeting on his weblog.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.