Last night, I played some tunes at Shine and heard from some folks working at the intersection of technology and participatory journalism.

From Wikinews, we heard from Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass and Wikinews volunteer Jon Davis. Wikinews articles are written by volunteers and are only published after meeting a set of guidelines: copyright (or “not infringing anyone’s copyrights,” most likely), newsworthiness, verifiability, neutral point of view, and style. Wikinews has done some breaking stories with original reporting, and has a particular advantage in being able to continuously update a breaking story as it unfolds.

Bass and Davis stressed that ultimately, they need more users. If you’re interested in participatory journalism, consider contributing some time and effort to Wikinews. It seems like you could get a lot of eyeballs for your investment — articles are indexed by Google News and the organization is instantly recognizable thanks to the tie to Wikipedia.

Here are some brief, somewhat disjointed notes about Wikinews:

• Wikinews has implemented “flagged revisions,” (an effort to mitigate the effects of article vandalism and preserve quality) where the public version of a page is one that was vetted by a trusted editor.
• Wikinews has a “newsroom,” where contributors can go to see what articles are being developed and may need help. A lot of work gets done through the IRC chatroom.
• Story writers can use any photo available in the Wikimedia Commons.
• Wikinews rarely exercises fair use when looking for photos/images to add to a story.
• Wikinews articles have no bylines. (This seems like a factor in their low participation rate — if Wikinews could develop some kind of joint byline system, where writers are credited on the basis of how much of their contribution makes it to the final article, I think they may see more people signing up to write.)
• Wikinews articles are licensed with an attribution requirement only — share alike is NOT required.

We also heard from an interesting non-profit funded startup called Spot.us. David Cohn, a journalist and geek, won the Knight News Challenge — a contest/grant given to develop community-focused news and information projects, services, and programs. His idea was to create a site to promote community-funded journalism. Note that the product is not necessarily community-written journalism, a distinction that I think is rather important.

So, Spot.us strikes me as pretty cool. Citizens can submit “tips,” which are leads to stories developing in their community. Freelance, professional journalists can submit “pitches,” either in response to tips or of their own conception, that introduce the idea and boundaries of a potential story. Users can then fund the story with donations, creating the resources and incentive for the freelance journalist to investigate and write.

Crowdfunding is not exactly a new idea, but Spot.us is doing something really interesting — for the first six weeks, Spot.us tries to sell the exclusive rights to the produced story to a local news organization. If Spot.us makes a sale, it pays the original crowdfunders back. Also, six weeks after an article is produced, it is Creative Commons-licensed, giving the public the right to make use of the work.

Cohn believes that by having the articles Creative Commons-licensed, the end product is a public good — the public “owns” the end product. But Cohn also noted that Spot.us is partially an experiment to answer the question: “Is journalism a public good?” Will the public be interested in funding journalism in order to gain a benefit from it? Having come from a journalism background, I think it’s an interesting question to be asking now.

Also, Spot.us is built on Ruby on Rails and is open-source.