Citizen journalism hub Allvoices adds mobile reporting

Citzen journalism hub Allvoices has announced that it is making it “even easier” for its citizen participants to contribute, as they can now send in news via an SMS. The Allvoices system will immediately begin to build a report page around the submission, searching both mainstream media and user-generated content, including picture and video. The system will also send a report code back to the contributor so that more content can be provided to the same report using the code.

“Mobile device technology has reached a point in its evolution where text reports and media are of comparable quality to data delivered via a PC or media shot with dedicated cameras,” explained Allvoices CEO Amra Tareen. She added that she believes “it’s becoming increasingly clear that people want breaking news delivered immediately, and with little editorial bias or interference.” In the US, contributors can send an SMS to ‘VOICES,’ and international participants can find an SMS number on the Allvoices site.

Allvoices gathers contributions from its members and places their reports alongside aggregated stories from mainstream media, distinguishing amateur journalism from professional by colour and title. There is no human editing, rather it is carried out by Allvoices’ proprietary algorithms, which assess reliability of the content sent in. Members, however, can rate or flag content. As newspapers begin to struggle to provide the same level of coverage that they have been for decades, is this a chance for citizen journalists, armed with phones and cameras, to flourish?

Posted on editorsweblog.org by Emma Heald on April 16, 2009 at 8:29 AM