Chicagodailynews.org transforming in several ways.

Geoff Dougherty and his new online citizen journalism enterprise was called chicagodailynews.org but the cease and desist letter from the Sun-Times and the threat of litigation has caused him, according to Jay DeFoore, to go for the chitowndailynews.org name instead. No matter what you call it, it is taking shape in pretty good time. I was checking it when it was just a few days old, and there were no zipcodes with stories. On 12/21/05 we looked at the site during a "Chicago Bloggers" meetup and browsing around talking about Geoff's site and all the zipcodes we "tested" had some story, though some were pretty short. Steve Outing in his Poynter columntoday writes about a South African cit journo effort that is paying for good stories, and mentions ohmynews.com which pays for stories, albeit not too much. He missed Dougherty's chitowndailynews.org where reporters get paid and he told me he envisions salaried reporters for some of the beats as the enterprise catches on. And as long as we are talking about some kind of payment for citizen writing, I want to express my distress about Outing's idea that the citizen journos be paid with trinkets. He initially was talking about t-shirts and mugs, and in this latest story he at least moves up to giving out cellphones. I think the idea that good writing is good writing means pay is pay. The trinket rewards sound patronizing to me. As a freelancer, I want to paid for my work, and not treated like a clever child. I know this idea could be threatening to those who are getting paid fulltime to write, but I also think that fulltime writing, especially reporting, is hard and that not everyone who can write well will quit their day jobs to be fulltime reporters. The point is, that almost everyone has at least one good story in them, and if it is a good story, we also respect it. citizenjournalism