Basic Set of Rules for Citizen Journalists
1. No Plagiarism – If you want to report the news, REPORT IT, don’t steal it from other writers.
2. Don’t Exaggerate, Embellish or Lie - Report the reality of the situation. You’ll be more trustworthy and more people will read you.
3. Don’t Create News, Report What’s Already There – There have been way too many cases of reporters writing fiction and passing it off as news.
4. Be a Good Editor – Use spellcheck, make sure your sentences make sense and don’t write tirades. No one is interested in tangents or reports that make no sense.
5. Fix Mistakes Immediately – Everyone makes mistakes no matter how hard we try not to. If you do make one, report it, don’t hide it. Apologize for it, correct the information and move on.
6. Follow-through
a) If your sentence starts with “In an effort to…” then please continue with that formula. i.e. In an effort to do this, this person or entity did this.
7. Story Flow- Make sure your story continues with the same idea from the opening sentence onward.
8. Don’t mix your metaphors. It makes you sound ignorant.
For now, we’ll start with these. There will be more in the future since I find new errors every day.
I was wondering if there were any blogs out there that teach responsible citizen journalism. First I started working the popular search engines, and I came up with the Online Journalism Blog, then I decided if anybody was writing on the subject in WordPress. I tag searched for “citizen journalism” and found your blog.
You appear to started the blog within the last day or two. Welcome to WordPress! I’m still exploring around, looking into my capabilities, and it seems that every time I do, I find something more that I can do. You’re definitely going on my blogroll.
Thank you. Yes I just started this blog today. It is in relatiation to the number of blogs with brilliant ideas but terrible writing. I love that there are citizens out their reporting, I just want it to be done well.