Several of our folks from Morris DigitalWorks went up to Vancouver last week for the Open-Source CMS Summit and some stayed for Northern Voice, the Canadian blogging conference. It may seem bizarre for a big U.S. media company from the South that creates and sells closed-source software to be in that particular situation, but it makes sense to us.
At the National Press Club in Washington there's a framed copy of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper covering the Dred Scott case in the middle of the 19th Century.
Right at the top of Column 1 are these words:
"We shall be happy to receive personal narratives, including adventures and incidents, for every person who pleases to correspond with our paper.
The Bakersfield Californian is working reader contributions into both online and print products through a feature it calls Your Words, and kpaul has an interview with Ray Hacke of the Californian about how that process works. They're avoiding the term "citizen journalist" and preferring "contributing writer."
The UK's National Union of Journalists has conjured up a thoroughly bizarre "Code of Practice" that attempts to throw wooden shoes into the gears of the new journalism that is growing around us. It's available only as a Microsoft Word file.
