I did a bunch of work for a local news station in my long haired, goatee touting, superstar university student days. Basically what this involved was sifting through a staggering payload of faxes every morning then spending 24 hours a day permanently handcuffed to your police radio. We spent so much time with our radios we named them after our favorite female celebrities. Mine was called Posh. If we drove across divided highways and through a few backyards we'd often beat the police to the scene, which was great, but we'd never beat the crowds of people who witnessed everything right from the start. The problem here is that they had nothing more than an anecdotal story to recall. And some of these characters were the most boring people on camera you'd ever seen.
But today is the age of the cameraphone and the big news organizations now acknowledge their importance in telling the whole story right from the beginning. What's the one device you've always got with you?
So we've just added yet another new site to our already exploding catalogue:
NowPublic is the world's largest 'participatory news network' allowing you to not only upload your newsworthy pics and vids with ShoZu, but also write the entire story yourself.
If citizen journalism is 'news' to you, then you should probably be checking the continuously-updating ShoZu site catalogue on your phone a bit more often, because these ones are already in there :-) And yep, they'll pay you if you send up something good. So you don't need a radio called Posh and 200 outstanding traffic infringements, you've got everything you need to be a journalist right there in your pocket!