Journami Pitch

Journami is a mobile collaborative reporting platform that combines professional news judgment with the power of crowdsourcing to create a new way to report real-time breaking news.

The Journami app allows users of GPS and camera-equipped smartphones to create and upload Breakers—audio-narrated images or short video clips of unfurling events, with descriptive text, autotagged with time/location data, as well as semantic tags from a context-sensitive menu.

Each of these semantic tags is associated with a self-updating Groundswell page that aggregates Breakers identified with that tag. Breakers and Groundswells are viewable online and on the web in a threaded Twitter-style newsfeed and on a real-time map.

A team of staff editors tracks Breakers and Groundswells to create Current pages offering additional reporting and links to other resources. Hot Currents are pushed to the Journami Wavefront—a news portal optimized for real-time coverage of major events.

While other "social reporting" applications exist, they are polluted with questionable content and not positioned as real tools for journalism. To reduce signal/noise issues, Journami incorporates guardrails not found in other crowdsourced platforms:

1. Content locked to system (no third-party uploads)
2. Automatic semantic structuring
3. Multiple permissions levels (user, trusted user, editor)
4. A real-time messaging system, encouraging collaboration among virtual newsteams and giving editors a level of centralized control

Journami seeks to enhance traditional journalism by offering a unique participatory tool for reporting phenomena that challenge standard coverage—highly distributed events like elections; fast-moving, hazardous situations; and news in communities underserved by traditional media.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

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• knight
• newschallenge
• journami