Stations experiment with citizen journalism

Cory Bergman February 11th, 2007

Clear Channel station KFTY-TY in Santa Rosa, CA is going cold turkey after laying off most of its small news department. In the next few months, it hopes to get most of its news coverage submitted by the public. “Local content harvesting” is what KFTY exec Steve Spendlove calls it. “There will be a loss in local coverage, I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “But there are a lot of other places to get most of that information.” Just down the San Francisco Bay in San Jose, NBC station KNTV is trying a more measured approach to citizen journalism with “Moving Pictures,” a feature that involves giving digital still cameras to a dozen people to take their own photos, then following up with a TV interview to weave it all together. You can see the slide shows and the subsequent video on NBC11.com (screen shot below).