The Blog Peoria Project » Citizen Journalism

‘How to Create a High Quality Blog’

Billy Dennis — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:34:35 +0000

Focus on just one or two blogs.
Speak to CRITICAL needs of your audience.
Create a team, not just a blog.
Content of the highest quality is content that HELPS.
Create a schedule and content types.
Create a marketing plan.
Involve your audience.
Set goals and measure your performance.
Have a strategy.

These tips seemed geared toward journalists and j-bloggers, but some of the thinking and attitude can be applied for the citizen-journalists/pundit blogger who WANT to attract large audiences and affect change.

How to login when your site isn’t showing up

Billy Dennis — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:47:24 +0000

There are times when your cannot see your blog. This happens, usually, when a corrupted file or plugin causes nothing but error messages to appear. Sometimes, the theme you have been using gets deleted and you will see nothing but a white page.

And by “gets deleted,” I mean “I deleted it” or “I lost it in the site migration.”

In any case, you probably need to get into your blog’s “dashboard” to make fixes.

So, how do you do that when you cannot see your site to click on “login?”

Simple. Visit any other Blog Peoria blog and click on “login” and then enter your existing username and password. You will be taken to that blog’s dashboard, and it’s a simple matter to redirect the page to the controls for your blog.

There’s a login button right at the top of the Blog Peoria Network homepage.

And it all else fails, contact me and I’ll send you a temporary password

Some citizen journalism/online news org sites of note

Billy Dennis — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:59:51 +0000

Here is some interesting reading for all you citizen journalists out there (and those who fund them):

Here is Windy Citizen, a group blog site based in Chicago.
Media Mouse, based in Grand Rapids, Mich.
MinnPost, a well known online news organization.
The Citizen Media Law Project is dedicated to preserving the rights of CitJo’s.
Chi-Town Daily News is another online news org with a heavy blog emphasis.
St. Louis Beacon looks like any newspaper Website.
Voice of SanDiego is about SanDiego.

More coming.

And while I have my issues with Jay Rosen, I found his definition of citizen journalism to be on-target and useful:

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

‘How to be a citizen journalist’

Billy Dennis — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:01:00 +0000

Sometime soon, I plan to add a section to the front page that lets people browse through some citizen journalism-related videos.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/xdMPAocnu2E" width="350" height="280"/]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/xdMPAocnu2E[/youtube]

OJR.com closes its digital doors

Billy Dennis — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:08:50 +0000

NOTE: The following was sent to me by Rich Miller, and is of interest to those interested in online journalism:

After a decade, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of OJR.org. The archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles.

One of OJR’s goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I’m pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, http://www.sensibletalk.com . I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

Finally, on behalf of OJR, I want to thank you. Thank you for your readership, tips, corrections, kind words and support. And I want to wish you success as you work to build engaging, informative and sustainable websites, to better serve your audiences.

THIS is what I wanted to do with Blog Peoria

Billy Dennis — Sat, 17 May 2008 01:18:19 +0000

From New Voices:

Ten innovative citizen media projects have been selected as this year’s New Voices grant winners and will each receive up to $17,000 in start-up funding.

Many of this year’s winners focus on special-interest communities as well as geographic locales. One grantee will create a new model for regional news coverage in Ohio and Indiana. Others will start news and social networking sites for war veterans, families of prisoners, aviation buffs, immigrant and Native American communities and the eco-conscious.

I like running Blog Peoria, although I don’t have nearly enough time to devote to it as I should. I’m going to be upgrading soon, and after the fine folks at BuddyPress are done working out the kinks, I’ll be making this site more of a social site. If it all works out, I’ll be moving Peoria Pundit posts over here, and pointing the PeoriaPundit.com domain here. It’s gotta take less energy running one WordPress installation instead of one.