citizenxpress.com is a new ( at least to me) CJ undertaking in India. I plan to do a detailed head to head to comparison in the next few days with one of the first such efforts in India, merinews.
While I initially was excited at the prospect of Merinews, I was a little disappointed in its response to last summer's Mumbai train bombings, as I detailed in this post at the time. That post also details some bold experiments in user-geenerated content by mainstream Indian papers.
I had a chance to relay some of our experiences here with a journalism class in Bangalore last year, at the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media. And though I dont teach much, invariably - whether in music or in the case of all these bright , committed young minds - invariably, I learn more from them, than they do from me:
A missing element when I was looking at CJ in India was that while even some of the smaller regional papers had comments on articles, I didnt see a lot of activity. I asked the students their opinion on this , and they all agreed: people were not getting their news from the web, or much social networking either, they told me: its all about texting on your mobile.
Armed with this bit of info, a news outlet's next step should be pretty self-evident.
Despite this, India's larger mainstream papers seemed to have developed a web relationship with the public voice well ahead of most of their American counterparts.
I'll check those latest efforts and look in detail at the two CJ initiatives soon. I'll also take a closer look at another interesting citzen journalism site in India called mouthshut, an enormous compendium of user-generated product reviews (you can upload your review as a video also).
In the meantime, an extremely belated hello and best wishes to the new media students at IIJNM. Hope all is well there, and I'll be in touch soon.
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