Citizen journalism, the next steps

Amy Gahran from Contentious and I,Reporter has been an evangelist for citizen journalism.  She got my attention about a year ago with her talk about how the message consuming public is not responding to monolithic corporate style voices.  It's something that I could see, but I could never wrap my head around it until she put it in words.  The golden age of mainstream media was waning, she contended, and it was based on niche-based media.

Now she's talking about citizen journalism.  It's a natural off-shoot to mainstream medias lack of real news in many of its products.  In our town, Lansing, MI, we are about to have a primary for mayor and city council.  To say that there's a real paucity of news about any of this is a real understatement.

Good luck on finding any information on which to make a judgement about candidates.  And, we are the State Capital of Michigan.  It's not like we are a backwater in the Thumb of our state.

I'm tired of the Lansing State Journal carping away on its editorial pages about local stuff that it never reports on.  I'm getting closer and closer to ending my subscription to the local paper.  At one time, you could at least get good coupons on Sunday.  We don't even get that now.

We have troves of motivated citizens in the area who could and maybe would cover the issues of the day, like city council and township board meetings, stuff local media used to cover. 

Gahran talks at length about how to train average citizens for this kind of duty.  Is it time?  Is it time to have a Meet-Up in our area to talk about citizen journalism and give it a whirl?