St. Pete CBS affiliate seeks 'citizen journalists'

I'm thinking someone will wind up filming something a bit more, umm, shall we say, uh.... interesting than grass growing.

Hint: It might rhyme with shmanal shmex.

 

Grass growing.

The rain outside the house.

Your kid playing in the street.

Your neighbor's flower bed, and your other neighbor's garden.

The crazy old neighbor who bangs on your door screaming at you to come outside (with your camera), then points out the moon and tells you the space station (which is actually Jupiter) is about to crash into it

Channel 10 in Tampa will do well to get a couple of breaking news stories out of this deal.

 

Sirs, Madames,

I hate the term "citizen journalist" and for some reason students that I taught this year had all fallen in love with it. I bit my tongue because they had no idea what it was to be either a citizen or a journalist.

Saying that, I don't know that it's a bad strategy if you get very good people -- not professional people by any stretch, just if they can set up their tripod in a milieu where the pros don't trek. Hey, you can't blame them for trying. After all, that approach only won the Oscar for Best Documentary three years ago:

http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/bornintobrothels/

Even the way "grass grows" in the everyday mundane is pretty gut-wrenching.

http://kids-with-cameras.org/kidsgallery/

Probably has a broader application than we might want to acknowledge. Spellbound was a pretty cool doc but I wondered after seeing Born into Brothels if Spellbound would have been better if the cameras had been left with the kids. Not that there's no journalism involved here -- there's lots when it gets to editing the raw stuff into a coherent storyline.

YD&OHS, etc

 

I'll look at this as the equivalent of paying someone a few bucks to call in a story for the paper.

Wonder how much the video camera is worth. Better be at least $5,000. But's it's probably really cheap.

If you just shot video, it would be a cinch. But if you have to edit it, too, that's a pain in the ass.

 

Is this Tampa TV station owned by Media General Generic?

 

That would be correct.

 

No, Media General owns the NBC affiliate in Tampa/St Pete.

 

It would be awesome if one of the citizen journalists did a story about what a joke it was that a TV station is trying to hire people for $20 a story.

 

Mr Predictor,

Maybe the guy would land on Last Comic Standing. So long as somebody would watch it.

When you get down to it, $20 for the amateur hour is far less of a joke than, say, newspapers and magazines and TV stations getting interns doing near-professional work for nothing.

YD&OHS, etc

 

Blogging on Twitter by lovely and talented people not withstanding.

 

For some reason, when I see a reference to "citizen journalists" a scene from the Andy Griffith Show pops into my head. Gomer Pyle is chasing Barney Fife down Main Street in Mayberry shouting "Citizens arrest! Citizens arrest!"

 

Worse. Gannett.