Lisa Johnson from CBC News Vancouver led this session, called What happens when big media dabbles in citizen journalism.

Thanks to everyone who came and had questions and comments about what we're doing.

UPDATE: Thanks to the suggestion from the Flock guys, we're going to rustle up some CBC swag for anyone who contributes a suggestion at NV08 to make this work better.

If you missed it...

I talked about how we've been trying to open up our newsgathering, to get more input from the "audience" — in the form of news tips and story ideas, personal anecdotes, photos and video.

We've been experimenting with this since last summer, and this page — called Your Story — has a lot of examples of how contributions from people have made a difference to the stories we tell.

This isn't (right now, anyway) citizen journalism in the way that, say, Now Public or Current TV do it, where anyone can upload a news story. But cj does describe the general universe we're talking about — where the "audience" isn't passive and the news doesn't come from on high.

Vigorous discussion ensued :)

Some suggestions:

We talked about how to engage people, and build a place online where people would want to contribute.

Here are some ideas that came from NV08...or add your own!

• give people a clear way in — don't confuse them with x, y, and z different ways to send their input
• be clear what happens to the stuff they send
  • I didn't mention this but we do have some guidelines on our site that try to give a framework for this
• give credit (and links) where it/they are due

• give treats (like mugs, window scrapers, whatever) to contributors 
• list "top contributors" on the site, with links, to give people recognition and a sense they are part of something
• maybe even name them (a la sports racers)
• make it personal, not anonymous — it's more interesting if people know about the contributors (and people are more likely to contribute if they know who will pick up the phone/read the email/etc.)
  • Thanks to Joshua and Mark from Flock for these ones

• hold a viral/collaborative design contest to design the treats/swag to give to contributors
  • Thanks to Pete Quily
• don't have too many fields in your forms, it creates too much friction for users
  • Thanks to Dustin Sacks
• we have all seen the 30 second soundbite not at all similar to what we experienced from the news event. If you have contributors, bloggers and others viewing the same event can't you find a way of presenting all of the information in a format that is understandable and would give the viewer/reader an unbelievable benefit of viewing the news from a number of eyes. For example if there is something happening in the US, when one views CNN, CBC, BBC, the Guardian and Politiken one sees the varied views and has a truly formative concept of what happened.
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• ... (please add your own suggestions whether you were there or not.)