When Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp we asked Josh Wolf- who holds the record in the U.S. for the longest stay in prison for a reporter protecting his source material- about why reporters take risks.

In the wake of the release of Ling and Lee, and the capture of journalist Shane Bauer by Iran,  KQED-FM in San Francisco had writer and editor Andrew Lam on as a guest to talk about the subject. In that conversation Mr. Lam- who works for New American Media- talked about how young freelance journalists are putting themselves into dangerous situations without the same training and resources that reporters who work for the big news organizations have.

We followed up with Mr. Lam today on that topic, and on how the rise of citizen journalism is affecting the quality of information in the media today.

Ground Report, the hyperlocal citizen journalism project that we profiled last week, has added a new twist to their experiment:

From now on, every news item submitted to GroundReport must be approved by our Editorial Team prior to publication. GroundReport's Editorial Team is a mix of staff editors and qualified members of our community.

 

After you publish, your work will wait in a submissions queue until our team checks and approves it. 

As the citizen journalism movement expands we're likely to see this pattern repeated: a hub site appears and begins to funnel a lot of information through it before the need for both an editorial voice and oversight assert themselves. Ground Report says that the "bottom line" is every report on the site "will be credible and trusted". The move also appears to be a prerequisite for the site's new syndication partnerships with the Huffington Post and Newstex.

Since we're fans of citizen journalism in general, and Ground Report specifically, here we're curious to see how this move plays out. 

What are the responsibilities of a citizen journalist?

How are social networking sites and bloggers changing the way the media establishment thinks about reporting?

We asked Paul Grabowicz, Associate Dean and Director of the New Media Program at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, for some answers.

[Our Feature Spotlight focuses this week on Citizen Journalism.]

Part Two In A Series

In the first part of the Guide we checked out Demotix, CNN's iReport and YouTube's CitizenTube and Reporter's Center. Now we continue the rundown of marketplaces for user generated content with a look at a hyperlocal powerhouse, the viewer-created pioneer, and crowd-sourced muckraking.

Ground Report

2009 will be remembered for a lot of things. We're only half way through the year and it already feels like history has tried to cram a decade worth of action into the final reel of the Aughts.

One thing that won't be forgotten is the emergence of citizen journlaism as a force to be reckoned with. It was only a matter of hours into the year before a major story- the shooting death of 22 year old Oscar Grant in Oakland- would become the first of many to be shaped by the actions of non-professional reporters. Other dramatic examples in the form of the Hudson River landing of Flight 1549 and the uprising in Iran have signal a major shift in how news and information are shared around the world.

The best part of citizen journalism is that anyone can be a reporter: if you're at the right place and right time, that is.

Deciding where to post your on-the-scene video, investigative reporting, or stirring photo essay can be trickier. To that end we're assembling this guide to the world of citizen journalism resources and outlets, to help you get heard in the roaring thunderstorm that is 21st century media.

This week we've been following the sentencing of Current TV reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling by North Korea to 12 years of hard labor with intense interest.

As journalists, this story strikes close to home. On top of that, there's the curious silence of Current TV- whose only official reaction, so far, to both the capture and sentencing of their reporters has been "No Comment". On Tuesday we spoke with journalist Josh Wolf- who holds the record, at 226 days,  for the longest prison stay by a reporter in the United States for protecting source materials- about his own investigation into why Current has been staying mum.

Josh's willingness to serve time, and Lee and Ling's very presence on North Korea's border to tell the story of human trafficking, speaks to the nature of reporters. Call it daring or just plain crazy: putting yourself at risk to tell a story isn't exactly "normal". So we went to visit Josh in San Francisco to talk to him about why reporters put themselves in dangerous situations.