The Fire Log

New Mexico is high mountainous desert, and every summer the threat and reality of fires is very real. The summer of 2003 proved to be a precarious one (but not disastrous), and provided our first real experience of the ptential of citizen journalism.

We've always allowed individual comments on each story, and its now become one of the cornerstones of our participatory work.

When comments on the regular fire stories started to show reader frustration between the Forest Service press releases or print staff reports and the actual amount of smoke /asthma they were experiencing, I set up a dedicated article called the "fire log", asking people to report experiences, health conditions, fire visibility, etc in their specific areas. It ran for over a week, was consistently in the top ten, and generally had more traffic than the official stories and even my thrice daily updates.

We started the piece on July 16,2003. It ran three pages of posts (about 14 or so, and when I pulled stats, it ranked as the 5th most visited story across the entire site for the month. The most revealing stat, however, was that no other fire story in that date range ranked in the top 10.

Here was real-time human experience that was very very different from what was officially being passed down, and was receiving more hits and traffic than any "official news". Since more people were reading it than were posting, peoples posts were being treated as a legitimate *source* of news - and were relying on it over official coverage. People defining their own social response to events,
trusting a neighbor over a traditional source.

It's reminiscent of Amazon's success with their ratings, buddy-system and reccomendations functions. Instinctively, I would rather have a friend (or at least someone's whose interests are close to mine) tell me about a new CD rather than some outside agent or source. To trust a source of information, one has to be connected to it, in some way.

Why traditional media can sometimes lose that trust I'll explore later on, but the fire log experience was the first profound early lesson we discovered about media, trust, and citizenry - and we've looked ahead ever since.

It also got us a mention in Online Journalism Review at the time (although the links in that article back to our site aren't functional, as this was a redesign ago).