by Denise

Here at The Rapidian, we’ve tried to create a framework for honest and relevant content. A week and a half after launch is still too early to assess the outlet’s strengths and weaknesses, but here’s what we’ve learned:

Content type

Since the beta launch, we’ve discovered our site structure is not sufficient. Currently, we have three main categories: News, local life and opinion. News has the most sections, but the majority of content we receive are features that fit under local life. Of the rest of the submissions, it’s a toss up between news and opinion, but even news submissions aren’t necessarily time-sensitive.

Coverage

With little prodding, few people are initially going to look at citizen journalism as an opportunity to explore issues they don’t know the answer to. People are going to start out creating content on what they care about, what they know and what they’re involved in.

With our general target audience, it might be a hyped up assumption that citizen reporters are most valuable because they cover what’s not published by professional media. In professional journalism, the news section is the heftiest because news pieces are generally succinct. They don’t necessarily ask the audience to think critically as they consume. At least in the first week, we’ve realized that citizen reporters will naturally start out reporting on specific aspects of news that have not been explored in-depth by mainstream media.

Disclosure

So what does this mean? Ithaca College Student TJ Gunther asked, “what’s more important, freedom of citizens to report or truth and preservation of the Rapidian name?”

To us, these aren’t polar opposites; they go hand-in-hand. We’ll only have a name to preserve if our citizens report truthfully, and the citizen reporters will determine what reputation we have to guard.

However, we also need to do our part to tease out content that is relevant to everyone. Quality information can sometimes be obscured by first-person narratives that keep audiences from digesting content critically. To address this, once we take care of the quirks on the Web site, we’re going to add another text field to each submission that goes something like this:

Disclosure: What motivated you to create this piece? (300 characters max)

We’ve received pieces that use first person in the intro but then continue as features. We’ve also received some very self-promotional pieces that needed to be edited down. The disclosure text field is our attempt to nudge citizen reporters to focus on the subjects in their pieces rather than their first-hand experiences by providing a separate space for that.