Citizen Journalists start the day off right

SXSW is underway and after four interactive panels, one fantastic speech and an introspective movie, my mind is on information overload.

I had a hunch pretty quickly into it, but the first one I attended was going to be one of the better hours of the week. TeamCJ ("Citizen Journalism") consisted of a panel of 6 thirty-ish Dallasites who basically just set the state for a great Salon discussion.

Starting out with the question “What is a citizen journalist?” the discussion first steered around the difference between blogging for pay and blogging for any other reason. Panelist claimed that TMZ can be considered citizen journalists—at least when they were getting started. Several in the audience disagreed, some strongly, arguing that if you make money, you lose the "citizen" part of the title.
The discussion veered, happily in my opinion, away from that and more toward differentiating citizen journalists from, say, the print newspapers. A great story was told about the recent plane crash in Austin, and how web surfers researched information about Joe Stack and Tweeted with #atxplanecrash. Twitter became a news source, faster than any news agency could have done it. Crowdsourcing, in essence, drove the mainstream media.

This can happen in other, slower, ways too. Say through comments on websites or blog responses or even corrections to articles. Or, as was stated in another panel, NASA feels it gets better driving questions—and ideas—from the general public via twitter or blog comments than it does from the mainstream media.

A couple of sites came up in the discussion that are worth mentioning. Demotix takes citizen photos and combines it with the news story. Annarbor.com is apparently a group of journalists who gather in a cafe and run an online newspaper.

This was a fabulous panel, which was a great start to my SXSW interactive conference.