Allvoices Allows Anyone to be a Citizen Journalist

August 14th, 2008 at 3:00 PM - Conferences by John F. Braun

LAS VEGAS, NV -- Allvoices was on hand at this weekis New Media Expo to demonstrate their outlet and tools for citizen journalists. Centered around an outlet of user-generated news articles, Allvoices adds to that a suite of backend tools that adds context and other resources to that citizen reporting.

While the Internet and new media technologies have given everyone a chance to have their voice heard, one area where this concept hasnit quite taken hold is the reporting of news. With some people feeling the MSM (Mainstream Media) outlets may have an agenda that slants their reporting, the team at Allvoices have created a platform that allows anyone to become a citizen journalist. Amra Tareen, the founder of the group, gave us the details.

Basically, Allvoices provides you with all of the basic tools necessary to be a citizen journalist. Whether the news is important, exciting, or unusual, you can document it all, using video, images and text as the building blocks for your news event and report it on Allvoices.

In order to get started, a citizen journalist writes a short title and a description, and indicates where the news event being reporting took place. After the report has been published, Allvoices will find relevant newspaper articles, blogs, images and videos, and add them to the report to provide multiple perspectives.

Any member of the Allvoices community can discuss and contribute, by making comments, or uploading other media to the report. Whatever you do on the Allvoices site gets added to the citizen journalistis page.

We also noted that the entire Allvoices platform is Mac based, except for a PC that the company said it must grudgingly use to make sure their platform performs well on all browsers.