Hello there,
I ma online editor with a regional newspaper in Ireland, www.munster-express.ie and am keen to explore and and all ideas around citizen journalism and other related areas (later). I have quite a big techy team working on widgets and the like, and the site is being updated as they come online. The techy end is done by www.feedhenry.com
I have a reporting and various other backgrounds and am attempting to marry the two sites above with the creation of a form of citizen journalism.

Another matter I am interested in is connecting people in developed and developing nations through small investments through the likes of kiva.org and microplace.org.
In this are I have been trying to develop on online space combining all of the above to create awareness of and involvement in poeple around the globe, and being able to invest small amounts online.

This could ultimately be used to facilitate, bear with me here, poeple in developed antions investing small amounts of money and being able to follow it around the world, and also that people (reporters/investors etc. perhaps a little like myself to begin with, see a recent article http://www.munster-express.ie/local-news/invest-and-aid-african-developm... ) would be able to follow physically.

But this could create a community that would blog about their experiences (as I did crudely in the article), become aware of issues, visit countries (alternative holiday, to see where your money is, who it is helping, what is actually going on etc. and of course enjoy the whole experience), meet the people, tell others, grow the community.

This may in turn increase public awareness and resulting political will in developed nations (more a long-term goal there perhaps, but hey dreaming is still free) to really make positive changes etc.

Any thoughts, please feel free to pass all this on.
I am also involved in another similar idea, slightly further up the investment food chain www.microventuresupport.com

Exciting times, good luck with all this

i have been running a citizen journalism website myself from Pakistan. Its just that i wanted to do. launched the site in late decement and been up for one month.

My Site is called Taza Kino - http://tazakino.com

Right now i am toying with the idea of pitching this site to the rural journalist so that can bring out the story fast with credits.

Let see how that goes.

Today I read about neewassignment.net, in the Indian news paper THE HINDU. I would like to know if you cover new about India also. If so how can I get involved in it. I am a trained journalist, and presently I do online content writing for websites, belonging to my home town of mavelikara, in the southern most state of Kerala, India.

I was just wanting to know if Mr. Mcquaid followed up on a story he he did about the US contractors that crashed in Coumbia and have been held Hostage since 2-13-03.

I don’t know what kind of coding skills you have available to you, but there’s a method for enabling blogs to automatically update one another without creating duplicate entries.

It uses some extensions to the rss standard called “simple sharing extensions.” It was originally conceived to enable groups of people to automatically create an up-to-date centralized calendar, but can be used for any kind of information, including blog posts.

It seems like it would be perfect for this project - enabling the “reporters” to post to their own blogs and have those reports automatically sent to the newassignment.net blog.

Review: The Final Freedoms

On the horizon appears an approaching confrontation so contentious, any clash of civilizations may have to wait its turn. On one side, a manuscript titled: The Final Freedoms, against all the gravitas religious tradition can bring to bear.

The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Jesus the Christ is on the web. It focuses specifically on marriage and human sexuality, overturning all natural law theory. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history and moral theology.

What at first appears an utterly preposterous challenge to the religious status quo rewards those who persevere in closer examination, for it carries within its pages an idea both subtle and sublime, what the theological history of religion either ignored, were unable to imagine or dismissed as impossible. An error of presumption which could now leave ‘tradition’ staring into the abyss and humble the heights of scientific speculation. If this material is confirmed and there appears to be both the means and a concerted effort to authenticate it, the greatest unresolved questions of human existence may finally have been untangled.

Published [at the moment] only on the web as a free [1.4meg] pdf download, this new teaching has nothing whatsoever to do with any existing religious conception known to history. It is unique in every respect.

It is the first ever viable religious conception leading faith to observable consequences which can be tested and judged; a teaching able to demonstrate its own efficacy; the first ever religious claim of knowledge that meets the criteria of the most rigourous, verifiable scientific method; this teaching enters the public domain as a reality entirely new to human history.

This is pure ethics. It requires no institutional framework, no churches, no priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, no dogma or doctrine and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single moral imperative and the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.

Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls,The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle and offers the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds to an act of perfect faith with a direct, individual intervention into the natural world; correctiing to human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception.

This new interpretation identifies the moral foundation of all human thought and conduct and the single Law finds expression within a new covenant of human spiritual union, the marriage between one man and one woman. Transforming sexual energy into spiritual enlightenment. It resolves the most intractable questions and issues of human sexuality.

The beginnings of an intellectual and moral revolution are unfolding on the web and available for anyone to test and discover for themselves.

http://www.energon.uklinux.net
http://thefinalfreedoms.bulldoghome.com
http://www.dunwanderinpress.org

You folks should definitely see what these cats are doing over at www.aliveinbaghdad.org and now www.aliveinmexico.org .

They have started a bureau of iraqi videobloggers in baghdad, and are now starting a follow-up bureau in mexico!

it’s really great and probably could have a lot to offer your readers, and is certainly one of the best examples of citizen journalism on the web today!

I’m a multiple-time “prevailing” whistleblower in U.S. Department of Energy. I’m trying to “out” systemic and persistent lawbreaking failure of U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) and its attorneys to comply with it and their statutory duties to protect people like me

I have this documented in eye-glazing detail at but have not been able to interest MSM in the story.

The goal is to spur Congressional oversight of OSC’s compliance with law and Congressional intent in protecting civilian federal employees (including many in “front lines” in war on terror) from agency malfeasance.

My favorite blogger is Michael J Totten who, like M. Yon, has been getting bloggers to support his trips to Lebanon, thru Turkey into Iraqi Kurdistan, and Israel. He, like Jeff Jarvis (where is Buzzmachine?), has been helping to generate blog community building.

Pajamas Media is a clear competitor to you, as is the OhMyNews which you already list as a related site. Perhaps too TPM and Townhall. I suggest you look for a way to get more pro-Iraq war folk involved; as well as more pro-life folk, and more more pro-tax cuts folk. Both Conservatives and Republicans and Libertarians.

Tom Palmer of Cato University, glad to be rid of Reps in Congress, is starting to build some Arabic and Russian web sites.

In general this looks like a nice start. Maybe a tutorial on new “Citizen Journalists” might be nice, but maybe that comes with the first contact by the editors. I’ve just signed up for myself, this comment is my first visit suggestion.

www.pbs.org/now is the online arm of NOW on PBS, the weekly investigatory newsmagazine on PBS. We cover issues behind the headlines with web-exclusive video (on our site and YouTube), podcasts, tools, special features, and news links. Let me know how we can collaborate.

Joel Schwartzberg
NOW on PBS