Friday, September 24, 2010

iReporter on CNN

Since web 2.0 largely concerns itself with easy data sharing, naturally it has already found many interesting applications within Journalism. One such example is CNN iReport, a web 2.0 system allowing any user to submit and edit news stories within a community of “citizen reporters”. Essentially any news can be uploaded since the contributions are neither edited, nor fact-checked, or screened, a-priori. Certain (urgent or timely) stories do get vetted and cleared by CNN, and these would be subsequently used by CNN in its mainstream broadcasting.

iReport is defined by a distinctive news-friendly community, which seems to find pleasure in reporting news. The community of contributors consists of around 20'000 enthusiasts who get ranked based on their site activity and value of contributions. Clearly the chance of an iReport item being selected by CNN for broadcast acts as a strong motivation itself (31'800 out of 485'000 reports were vetted by CNN, to date). See http://ireport.cnn.com/ and http://ireport.cnn.com/faq.jspa for more information.