This week the Chicago Tribune will join the brave new world of community-generated journalism by launching www.Triblocal.com – a site which allows readers to publish their own stories, write blogs and cover the "hyper-local" news that might otherwise be missed. Chicago is one of many cities across the nation that’s letting readers take control of newspaper content in this largely unedited and self policed forum. Pieces will be posted on Triblocal.com, but once a week, the best pieces will also be published in a supplement that will be sent out along with the Tribune.
Considering the events earlier this week where "citizen journalists" led the newsgathering during the Virginia Tech rampage, the move is not surprising. Newspapers are barely holding on financially with circulation and ad revenue flowing to the internet, and sites like MySpace.com are convincing publishers that they have to experiment if they want to keep readers. Sites like Triblocal.com and Yourhub.com in Denver and other cities will provide a worthwhile experiment to see if you can keep readers by giving them a say in the content of their newspapers.
It will be interesting to see whether these sites turn out to be more about free advertising than enterprising journalism. Then again, as one editor put it, "This is a whole different view of what can be news. It’s the very local feeling of a town square. Everything is news in the town square."
M. Weintraub
Public Relations
