An experiment in citizen journalism

Amongst the many challenges facing budding citizen journalists two stand out - access and audience.

Most current 'citizen journalism' is based on luck (or more often bad luck) and circumstance. You're driving by the Buncefield oil depot just after it's blown up. Or you happen to live in Tewkesbury and suddenly find yourself under water.

But what if you actually want to do some 'journalism'? Like talking to public figures, asking them questions, or challenging them about something they've done? Tricky to do without a news organisation behind you and the corresponding resources and access.

Which is why I'll be interested to see how Yoosk fares (www.yoosk.com). Yoosk is an experiment in citizen journalism being run in collaboration with City University's journalism school (whose Neil Thurman told me about the site).

The idea's pretty straightforward. You put a question to a public figure, people vote on whether they think the question deserves to be answered and, if enough people vote, Yoosk puts the question to the person in the hope that people power will convince them to respond.

Like all social media sites its success is reliant on scale - so it doesn't skimp on its ambition: "Our vision" it says "is for Yoosk to become the world’s biggest interactive global citizens’ news and gossip co-zine- collaborative magazine" (whatever a co-zine- collaborative magazine is).

But even if the site gathers lots of questioners it faces another, equally tough challenge - audience. As Matt Cain found out while running www.newscounter.com - a right-to-reply service that relied on a similar voting mechanism to elicit responses from public figures and organisations - it's awfully hard to gain an audience when your news agenda is so disparate and so lacking in context and editorial voice.

People want news stories to be timely, and to have both a narrative of their own and to fit within a larger narrative. Unless Yoosk can connect questions and answers with current news stories and link them to a bigger picture, it's hard to see how it will build up a regular audience.

But, by focusing on people, and allowing users to navigate by people's pictures and names, it's already considerably ahead of other efforts at citizen journalism. I wish it luck.