SMS based news networks: Citizen journalism through SMS

I have always been a big fan of citizen journalism. The whole idea of citizens becoming reporters of news and giving you the stories they have witnessed, not only adds credibility to the story but also empowers citizens to generate awareness and keep limited power in the hands of journalists, news editors and especially these days, news lobbyists.

If you have a look at some popular citizen journalism platforms like CNN ireport, Citizen Journalist (By IBN) and NDTV Social (the branded ones) and Rambhai.com, demotix, merinews (the independent ones),you will see that on one end such websites are giving citizens a platform to give out their frank opinions and insights into events while on the other end, there is a crowdsourcing element attached to the news pieces where citizen news articles are voted/ commented/ shared with others and you can see the most democratically sorted news pieces which can rarely be wrong.

What I feel is that with a mobile handset in almost every second hand in India and the power of social media and SMS based engines like txtWeb, the concept of citizen journalism can be made even stronger.  Platforms like Pakreport (built on Ushahidi) are using SMS in  an excellent way to get citizen report disasters and casualities via SMS. 

Another site called Votereport India used SMS reporting to report voting malpractices and incidents via SMS and online media. Similarly SMS Gupshup (if you follow the txtWeb blog you must have surely heard about it) allows users to form groups and send SMSes to members. This is another interesting way SMS based news networks can be architectured.

Given the popularity of news channels in India and the kind of semi cooked gossipi, manipulated material that is presented in news channels these days, I am sure citizen journalism and SMS based news networks have a long way to go. All that is lacking is appropriate tools to empower a citizen and an SMS can do that. 

I wrote this article as a guest post for txtWeb. txtWeb.com is a consumer generated SMS based app store.