Online Journalism News

Newsvine reports strong early growth

Posted: 11/01/06 By: Robert Andrews

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One of the most anticipated launches amongst a recent slew of new citizen journalism sites has reported "overwhelmingly positive" traffic since its debut last week.

Newsvine runs Associated Press wire stories that are syndicated to many US news sites, but lets readers tag, comment or chat on the articles, publish links to other stories and write their own columns.

The site shares its philosophy with an emerging number of online news publications that rely on users to filter stories, and chief executive Mike Davidson said things "have gone swimmingly so far" during a restricted pilot phase.

"Newsvine logged more than 100,000 page views on our first day, Friday, which was above our expectations, considering you still need an invite, a login, and a password to even get in," said the former Disney and ESPN.com internet manager.

"But most early adopters already 'get' concepts like tagging, commenting, user-generated content, and everything else that's gone into the mix. The proof is when the other 99% of the world makes its own judgement."

Newsvine readers who choose to take to their keyboards and write their own columns will earn 90 per cent of the revenue from adverts on their work while the site will also reward those who recommend stories at other news destinations.

The site has already been used to garner witness reportage on news events; Mr Davidson said readers in Colorado had added personal accounts of wildfires in the state this weekend.

"With regards to locations like the UK, we're getting a ton of requests to further develop the local angle," he told journalism.co.uk.

"Currently, we cover about 225 regions across the world but not all of them are visible through our locations menu. London.newsvine.com is, for example, but waterloo.newsvine.com is not. Clearly, local news is one of the most under-served areas of information on the internet and we plan to fill that gap as quickly as we can."

More news from journalism.co.uk:
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Oil depot fires put citizen journalists to the test
Creative Weblogging boosts network to 50 sites
Craigslist head confirms citizen journalism project
Union drafts guide for citizen journalists
Setting the record straight on citizen journalism
Citizen journalism most successful when offbeat
Citizen journalism: Dealing with dinosaurs

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