Editorial: Best Citizen Journalism, July 2005

Swimming the Yucatan Channel

Brooke Hadley

The best citizen journalist stories:

• Deal with local subjects
• Are written compellingly
• Are about something remarkable
• Are well researched and accurate pieces of journalism
• Contain original quotes that can only be gleaned from a one-on-one interview
• Cover events likely to be overlooked by other news organizations
• Are uplifting and inspirational

Brooke has written a number of citizen-journalism articles, but we keep coming back to this sports story about 61-year-old Paul Ellis, who swam the Yucatan channel. Her feature writing draws people into the story and the narrative flow of the piece just keeps you reading. With original research and quotation, as well as some great original photography, this piece is easily one of the best we have received. And the message: "Regular people do extraordinary things every day," is partially why Happynews was founded in the first place.

We chose Brooke's story not only because it was one of the best but also because it serves as a great example of what we look for in Citizen Journalism pieces.

Brooke Hadley will also receive an extra US$50 for her work.

Festivities bring people together in D.C.

Joe Ahlers

One of our earliest citizen journalism submissions was by Joe Ahlers, a student in Washington D.C. with a digital camera and an urge to write. During the Fourth of July celebrations in the nation's capital, he went out and interviewed people to get original reporting and took brilliant photographs of the crowd gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol building.

It was a moving and informative article which showed a variety of viewpoints and showcased a number of great events. It was well written and well presented, and he spent his July 4th holiday writing the story for us so that we could have it up soon after the events happened.

Crowd of 30,000 in Trafalgar Sq. for memorial

Roger Jones

When the bombings occurred in London in July, it was quite easily the biggest story for any news organization - for us, it presented our first real dilemma. How do we cover a great tragedy on Happynews? But how do we not?

Roger Jones, who originally wanted to write about sports, came through for us. The U.K. resident covered the gathering in Trafalgar square in a way that was utterly fitting, and his work covering the subsequent events has been top notch. In many ways, Roger did what we expect of any citizen journalist - find a local story and report the good things people do. It's just that local, for him, meant London, at a time when the world's attention was drawn to it.

A brief history of space flight

Ku'uwehi Hiraishi

One of the things that we often find annoying about much news coverage is that reporters often don't mention the things leading up to the event. While every news organization has footage of Discovery, this overview of the space program provided additional context that any reader would find useful for following NASA's return to flight.

17th annual Toronto Beaches International Jazz Festival: A big hit

Chloe Richter

Chloe's article about a local event with original photography was a well written, well researched article that did what citizen journalism is designed to do - cover the community.