A group of community reporters trained as part of a citizen journalism project have seen their first story published in the Lancashire Evening Post.
The group of citizen journalists were trained as part of a project called Bespoke, a scheme that sees members of the public in Preston provided with flip cameras, mobile phones and journalism training in order to generate their own news stories.
The year-long £150,000 project will see residents in three areas of the city scouring their neighbourhoods for stories.
As well as being printed in the LEP, the stories are also being published in a local newsletter and on a news site carrying multimedia material.
People living in the Callon and Fishwick areas of East Preston were specifically chosen for the project as those areas were once demonised by the national press over race relations problems and featured in ITV’s Neighbours from Hell series.
The project, led by the University of Surrey, is also being run in other parts of the country with the aim of creating teams of reporters covering issues that are important to them and to their local community.
Those taking part are also encouraged to use think about the design aspects of the stories they produce.
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We’re all doomed. I assume these citizen journalists are filling pages for free?
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Let’s hope their English is better than John’s. “For free” is either “free” or “for nothing”. Another Yankie piece of slang gaining currency.
But nit-picking aside he’s right. Directors will happily fill papers with unpaid contributors as long as it is is cheap. Look at some of the dreadful sent-in pictures used.
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Design aspects? They’ll have them producing the paper next! Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “free newspapers”. They used to be produced by paid staff and given away free. Now they’re going to be produced by unpaid staff and sold…
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Great news for the future of journalism. I am sure the remaining hacks on the LEP who are clinging onto their jobs are delighted. By the way, who is coughing up the £150,000? Surely not cash-strapped, redundo-happy JP?
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This is the last thing demoralised LEP hacks need.
Years of training, university degrees, shorthand classes ad infinitum.
And the reward? Local nosey parkers with mobile phones are netting page leads.
Coupled with the laughable, if not suicidal, decision of Northcliffe to allow any old village idiot (and indeed the local PR firms and press offices) to upload stories on to the regional papers’ websites, I think it’s a worrying trend.
So-called citizen journalism should not extend beyond a phone call or submission of on-the-spot footage to the nearest newsroom.
There’s really no such thing as citizen journalism outside of the egotistical “blogosphere”, populated by keyboard warriors and bigots who feel they can do a better job than anybody else at everything – especially the news.
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Can’t wait for the day they introduce Citizen MDs thus clearing out an entire layer of over-paid fools and replacing them with an entire layer of fools for free.
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Even the LEP can’t put enough spin on this story to make it seem like a positive step. I’m sure all those talented, long-serving journalists who lost their jobs on the LEP last year will be so happy to know that the paper has replaced them for free.
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