Citizen Media Sites

"The Knight Citizen News Network is a self-help portal that guides both ordinary citizens and traditional journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news and information sites. It seeks to help build capacity for citizens who want to start their own news ventures and to open the doors to citizen participation for traditional news organizations seeking to embrace user-generated content." --from the website

The organization also conducts qualitative and quantitative research on emerging trends, such as:

Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News? A Ford Foundation funded study of citizen media sites in the United States. In-depth interviews were conducted with 31 founders of and contributors to citizen media sites, and hundreds of site contributors were invited to take part in an online survey

and:

Hartsville Today: The first year of a small-town citizen-journalism site Journalism's future may well be in the hands of your readers already, in their cell phones, their iPods, their digital and video cameras. We have become a world of content creators, and if you don't find a way to engage them in your product, they may well establish their own.

The site also boasts a list of over 200 citizen media sites from every state.

Another citizen media site to check out is The Center for Citizen Media, affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School. You can see what they're working on in the Projects section of the website.