– Dan Gillmor is building a non-profit ‘Center for Citizen Media’, moving on from his previous (for-profit) project called Bayosphere. [via SiliconBeat]
– The much-anticipated Pegasus News has released their first product, a music and entertainment news site called TexasGigs. It started as a music blog by Cindy Chaffin in 2002 – Chaffin will continue to be the chief editor in the new Pegasus operation. It’s interesting that TexasGigs keeps its blogger-created brand, rather than adopting the Pegasus News style (whatever that turns out to be).
Steve Outing on Poynter remarked:
“A key characteristic of the Pegasus model is to have people like Chaffin drive the site, while soliciting citizen submissions and offering lots of opportunities for user interaction. It’s very different from some other citJ sites like those of Backfence.com, which simply offers local citizens an easy way to post articles and photos without a highly visible editor driving things from the core.”
– Speaking of Backfence.com, Jay Rosen sent me a link a week or two ago to an article on his site PressThink about Backfence. Liz George wrote the article. She runs a similar site called Baristanet, but with a different model. She said the issue with Backfence is that it’s not creating much interest from ‘citizen journalists’: “…how will Backfence drum up more users to produce the content if thereÄôs so little there to draw users?”
Finding that balance between professional editors and ‘citizens’ who contribute content is crucial in these ventures, it seems. I don’t have all the answers, so it’ll be interesting to watch how the above ventures progress. I do like that Pegasus News decided to run with the unique brand that Cindy Chaffin built up with TexasGigs.
