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"On the ground" news site Indico News has been renamed and reborn as a tool for larger news organisations to recruit citizen journalists.

The new product, Civicboom , is based on Indico News' assignments feature, where users could alert others to forthcoming events or news tips in their area.

The Civicboom widget, which has been introduced on the website of local news agency SWNS.com , can be added to a news organisation's website and used to request news and information from readers and audience members. Users will also be able to request information via the widget. A mobile application is also in development and this will "complete the circle" in terms of the site's ambitions to plug a pro-am gap in news reporting, according to its founder

The platform is also hoping to build up a community of users and organsiations with Civicboom profiles which can be followed and "tipped-off" via the central site.

Users publishing updates and news and making requests using CivicBook will be covered by the Creative Commons "Attribution" licence. Organisations will be able to sell on user-submitted material but, using PayPal and the Civicboom service, a share of this will go back to the author.

The technology is available to organisations under a freemium model - anyone will be able to use the basic product from charities to news sites; while add-on services will be charged for.

"We need this to be value for money and to be cheap enough for news organisations to use it and not go and develop it themselves," Elizabeth Hodgson, founder and CEO, told Journalism.co.uk.

The widget is being trialled by local online news sites and a business tester, and talks are ongoing with media organisations in the US, says Hodgson.

For news organisations the tool is a means of soliciting content but also finding out more about their audience's interests, says Hodgson, adding that the "call for information" the widget provides will resonate with so-called "digital natives" who are used to working collaboratively and sharing information online with their peers.

In August, Hodgson talked to Journalism.co.uk about plans to develop Indico News, including a payment and reward system for contributors and eight revenue models. Despite adding some high-profile non-executive directors to oversee Civicboom - an ex-vice president of Citibank and a former head of design at Yahoo - developing the concept of news from networks and the ground up has not been shelved, said Hodgson.

"We've told our users that we've repackaged the system. We've gone from saying we'll be this hyperlocal news site and everyone will want to upload their news, to realising that there is this real demand for a tool that will enable other organisations, whether that's a news site or a documentary film company that we've got testing the tool, to use it as part of their research, their feedback or actual footage. If you don't adapt then it's not going to flourish and this has gone from us trying to do everything, to finding a focus," she said.

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Written by

Laura Oliver
Laura Oliver
Laura Oliver is a freelance journalist, a contributor to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, co-founder of The Society of Freelance Journalists and the former editor of Journalism.co.uk (prior to it becoming JournalismUK)

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