Obama's bypass complements journalists

President Barack Obama is fielding questions directly from citizens.

The White House's virtual "new take on President Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats" might seem like a bypass of bona fide journalists -- if only the president hadn't already held two elaborate media conferences, and several broadcast interviews with mainstream media organizations, since taking office.

CNN has a report on the online town hall. To submit questions you may use the "Ask the President Coalition."

Exploit the new reality that audience is an ally, OffTheBus director exhorts journalists

Amanda Michel authors a crackerjack piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review chronicling the success of OffTheBus, the "citizen-powered campaign news site" which saw a 27-fold increase in contributors during its 17 months of existence ending November of 2008.

Set up to cover the American presidential campaigns, OffTheBus was joint-sponsored by The Huffington Post and NewAssignment, and hosted by NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. It was the biggest citizen journalism experiment of its kind.

Ms. Michel, "not a journalist by training," directed OffTheBus. Her must-read story is available here. An extract:

OffTheBus discovered a niche market. Our market was defined by our access to on-the-ground information that other news outlets lacked, and collaborative, crowd-powered methods of newsgathering that made some traditional journalists uncomfortable. Private fundraisers, official campaign conference calls, volunteer meetings, and rallies—where mainstream reporters found themselves stuck in pens—were our specialty. We wanted to tell stories inaccessible to the national press. This required replacing objectivity with an ethic of transparency—we would never have broken Bittergate if we had not. ["Bittergate" refers to candidate Obama's guns-or-religion comment reported by San Francisco blogger Mayhill Fowler.]

Collectively, we could do what a single reporter or traditional news organization could not. We dispatched people to report on dozens of events happening simultaneously around the country. We distributed research tasks among hundreds of volunteers, instead of a handful of paid reporters working full-time for weeks. Ground-level access, networked intelligence, and distributed labor became our editorial mainstays. More than twelve thousand people eventually signed up to participate in one way or another, including seventeen hundred writers. With such numbers, Mayhill Fowler’s Bittergate story—or something like it—was almost inevitable.

AllVoices claims a leap in popularity

AllVoices, the citizen media platform founded in April of 2007, claims to have turned into "the fastest growing participatory media outlet on the Web" by getting in excess of one million visitors last month.

How did they do it? Try this. The site lists Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, ahead of President Barack Obama in "People in the News" with "Most Buzz." Number three on the list? Morgan Fairchild. Check it out.

Operating out of San Francisco, AllVoices' multicultural team comprises "passionate people who believe that everyone has a story worth telling [and that] sharing that story can be the first step in changing lives."

Have advice for President Obama? Let GroundReport pay you for it

If you're a citizen journalist living outside America who'd like to be on TV in America, then read this.

GroundReport, the citizen journalism platform which pays contributors, has launched Talk To US, a monthly segment on American Public Television's Worldfocus show.

The first month's question is, "What's your advice for President Barack Obama?"

Submit your advice in a one-minute video via either YouTube or GroundReport. Deadline: February 15. If you're among the first 100 to upload, you will earn $5.

Rules: You should be a non-U.S. citizen living outside America. You may submit multiple videos but would be paid for only one. And yes, the resolution should be good enough to air on television.