www.demotix.com
This weekend, Demotix CEO Turi Munthe, CTO Alex Macfadyen and Commissioning Editor Andy Heath decamped to Hellens Manor in Herefordshire to discuss the future development of Demotix. With huge sheets of paper and coloured pens, we took Demotix apart and tried to reform it for the future. Now we want to share our early thoughts with you and ask for your thoughts and priorities.
New kinds of news
Today, Demotix hosts - simply - THE best citizen photojournalism around on the web. But we need to take it further. Over the next few months, we'll be making it possible for you to tell your news stories through Video, Text (blog and microblog) and Audio. We are also working out how to grow our Investigative Journalism side.
Deepening the site
As Demotix grows, so does the amount of fantastic original journalism produced by our users. We need more ways to showcase this content, and we are deepening the Demotix site to reflect this breadth of content. As well as the Homepage, and imminent pages for each Continent and Category, we will include News Hubs - special reports for important or breaking topics. As we deepen Demotix, we plan to fundamentally change the way news is treated on the site - giving more and more editorial control away from the Demotix team to the community via voting - a system which we are preliminarily calling Juice.
Encouraging collaboration
The potential for collaborative citizen-journalism really excites us at Demotix. The ability for multiple reporters to pool their stories into a News Hub is interesting. We want to take this further, encouraging collaboration between journalists in a particular region on the Reporting Teams, and on a particular story in our News Labs (another codename).
Verifiability
Demotix believes that serious citizen journalism needs to take all the ethics of traditional reporting and build on them, such as verifiability and protection of sources. This poses fundamental challenges to Demotix. By combining technological warnings, editorial judgement and community moderation, we think we can come as close as possible to a trusted source of news.
Facilitating input
We listen to all your feedback about the Demotix website and experience, and will continue improving our system to make using Demotix easy and trouble-free. This involves designing a custom Java application to allow stable batch uploads, allowing automatic FTP drops, and accepting news through a variety of input methods including email, SMS, microbloggin (Twitter, etc)and more.
Sharing and distributing
Sharing news is the very foundation of citizen journalism. Demotix wants to get your news out to as wide an audience as you want - this includes social networks as well as the mainstream media.
www.demotix.com