Citizen Journalism | Communication Is The Key

The Guardian Witness is a big step in citizen journalism. Free publicity awaits.

The Guardian Witness is a new platform from The Guardian (monthly online visitors: 77,931,138) opening journalism to the world. News, photographs, videos and comments are submitted by the public, or ‘contributors’ to a dozen ‘assignments’.

Assignments are given on the home page, inviting contributors to respond to the brief. For example:

Guardian Witness invites London Marathon runners to talk about who they’re supporting

Contributions include photographs, one liners and videos:

You can see here that Adam in the video above is running for Children with Cancer UK – a cause for which he has gained free publicity and raised its awareness by creating this 30 second video and submitting it to Guardian Witness.

Whilst you cannot simply publish anything i.e. it’s not a PR free-for-all, and it does seem submissions are reviewed before they go live, Guardian Witness is an opportunity to get some press coverage.

Some PR associates of mine, for instance, submitted photos of The Shard in London to the assignment Views Of Tall Buildings (they manage the reputation of The Shard and try to increase footfall to the area).

Indirect contributions may also be beneficial to your business. You do not have to say the name of your company to raise awareness of it. For instance, say you’re a pharmacist commenting on national health service reforms, and you put forth the argument that pharmacists have a greater role to play – this could still drive awareness to your business without saying the company name.

Guardian Witness is an opportunity for startups, entrepreneurs, SMEs, sole traders and joe the plumber to be smart and get some free press coverage. It may even be possible to media hack it and submit an assignment idea that gets chosen for you to answer yourself.

And it’s more than likely that popular assignments with good contributors will make it into the main Guardian site and paper.

There was a time when news was local. Every village and town had their own local paper, and people would read local stories. Then the papers got bought up, dismantled, merged or left to die by some bigger fish, and people began to read national stories from national papers.

But it’s difficult to write a story for which the entire country will find interesting. Instead of writing facts, journalists had to write for emotions (things we all share): Fear, excitement, or sympathy. This meant that businesses and individuals with interesting facts to share couldn’t get a wedge in sideways (without the help of a PR who would dress it up).

Now, however, that’s all changing and coming back around thanks to (yup, you guessed it) the internet. People can find their chosen interest online and ignore everything else. They can choose a category, then a sub-category, then a sub-sub-category, or an individual journalist and read only that (with ease).

Furthermore, news outlets online don’t have limits. They aren’t constrained by printing costs or page numbers. On the contrary, more is better, and so now they’re starting to allow anyone to contribute. The more contribution, the more content, the more content, the more traffic (in theory), the more traffic, the more advertising revenues.

This is entirely in our (the business, entrepreneur, individual’s) favour. We, the lonesome warrior sitting at home, can finally share our news again with our local community.

Anyone can contribute to Yahoo! Voices (featured authors get their articles published on the main news site), MSN Social Voices, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes (almost), BuzzFeed, CNN, Science Daily and more. More outlets will open up soon, it’s just a question of when and how.

Some news outlets such as The Guardian invite their top commenters to write for them.

Archives For citizen journalism

Introduction to The Guardian Witness

You are the future media