CNN’s IReport To Let Users Tell Own Stories

February 12, 2008 By Geoff Duncan

CNN

CNN's new iReport.com will embraces citizen journalism by letting anyone post news...and letting anyone access it.

Back in 2006, CNN took a tenatitive step into citizen journalism with iReport, a service that enabled users to upload their own photos and video of news events for possible use on CNN sites and broadcast channels. Even though participating in iReport essentially meant signing away all rights to your content forever, news junkies apparently embrace the service, because from time to time items submitted via iReport would turn up on CNN properties, or even on CNN broadcasts. CNN says more than 100,000 stories have been submitted via iReport.

The problem with iReport was that it comes across like a big black hole: users would submit content, but fewer than 10 percent of the items submitted would be selected for use by CNN editors. So the new version of iReport.com (due to launch next week) will feature nothing but user-produced news. And CNN editors won’t get to pick and choose what’s featured: like YouTube, the new site will enable users to post whatever content they choose and have it be available to the world.

Visitors to iReport.com will be able to browse categories of user-submitted information, rate stories and videos, and embed the content elsewhere on the Web. CNN says it will moderate uploaded content to weed out inappropriate content and outright bogus items. The site will also feature ways for users to report items as potentially inappropriate or inaccurate.

The new iReport.com is due to launch next week.

Showing 2 comments

Will at 10:31pm 16th February 2008 Huh? Jason are you kidding? I thought iConflict was boring. The whole point of iReport is for citizen journalists (in this case armed with a camera) to turn in what they find interesting. It's a smart idea, it gives people with a camera power, and it lets others view videos that might not otherwise make it on the web. Plus it let's CNN filter the videos so there is no gore, swearing, etc. Sounds like a winner to me.
jason at 6:43am 16th February 2008 The point that CNN misses is that If news was a computer program, it has been Microsoft - a closed source program. Today, news needs to shift to an open source model and become the Linux of reporting. On CNN.com and iReport.com it achieves neither.

On February 15th the top story on the iReport homepage was entitled "Breaking News Ketchup." The second story was on the weather in New York City, which happened to be lousy. As if bad weather in February was news worthy? For those seeking substance, there was a story on the children's character Elmo posing as a prostitute. Clearly, on iReport, the online community is amusing itself to death.

With all that is happening in the world, who cares about what's on iReport? Clearly there is a better way for media. That's where iConflict.com comes in.

You can read more about this blog post and the soon to be released iConflict at http://blog.iconflict.com.