Writing has always been my thing – which would explain why I started a student newspaper in high school. My interest in politics & current affairs, combined with my writing skills, had me flirt with a career in journalism. Disappointed with student media at university, I started a society for journalists, which was meant to be a democratically run media outlet that created various thought-provoking publications.<\/p>\n
Six months after the concept came to me on the back of an envelope whilst visiting family in Athens and London, we created a 24 page colour magazine, with a print run of 4,000 – fully funding the cost with local advertising. Among many lessons from that experience, I learnt two valuable ones: funding is hard, and distribution is key. Better said, funding was a function of distribution – you are not going to get advertisers without an audience. Distribution was the key to having an audience.<\/p>\n
That experience led me to experiment with a website, with bling bling effects thanks to Microsoft Frontpage. What was originally meant to be a complement of the print publication, soon in my eyes became the future. In various forms, we tried community-generated journalism<\/a>, and built a strong following of readers through a weekly web publication<\/a> on a niche topic (local campus politics).<\/p>\n So whilst that is very much skimming over the top of that 2 1\/2 years, I think it illustrates how I’ve experienced through a natural progression of what is now called citizen journalism (or CitJ if you’re cool). I was interested to hear about Bronwen Clune’s Norg network<\/a> when I met her at webjam<\/a> and reading Pete Cashmore’s opinion that citizen journalism is dead<\/a> has me feel like it’s time I wrote about what I think on the issue.<\/p>\n