PeoPo:"an impressive multimedia citizen journalism project"(2010/02)

PeoPo:"an impressive multimedia citizen journalism project"

Philipe Harding, BBC World News Ex-director,
The Guardian, Monday 15 February 2010.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/feb/15/citizen-journalism-taiwan

〈PeoPo helps Taiwanese public broadcaster to restore trust
--- Public Television's citizen journalism project hailed a success〉
Philipe Harding, BBC World News Ex-director,
The Guardian, Monday 15 February 2010.

Whether Taiwan's media are among the most free in Asia, or not, there are certainly a lot of outlets. The island has eight 24-hour news channels, 20 evening newscasts, 4,000 magazines, 2,500 newspapers and 200 radio stations – all for a population of 23 million. But the Taiwanese media are also ranked by users as being the least trusted in Asia, according to the Edelman Asia Pacific survey.
 
Faced with such widespread public distrust, Public Television in Taiwan – a public broadcaster in the same way as the BBC – has launched an impressive multimedia citizen journalism project called PeoPo (an abbreviation of People's Post).
 
It's a project that goes much further than most news organisations' limp pleas to viewers to "send us your photos and videos". In just over two years about 4,000 PeoPo members have contributed over 30,000 completed reports to its website. When Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan last August killing more than 700 people and causing widespread devastation, it was the PeoPo project, with its widespread and persistent team of video reporters, which shamed the government into getting much-needed aid to the stricken areas.
 
Contributors must join PeoPo to post reports on the site but once registered, they are free to contribute what they like without moderation or interference. If someone objects to a report, it is forwarded to the contributor who is invited to reconsider and amend it if they want to. The TV station reserves the right to remove material, but it has never done so.
 
One of the ways quality is maintained is by an extensive training programme for members. The project has run over 300 face-to-face workshops; there are 50 online training videos.
 
The mainstream public television channel has integrated this output into its programmes. There is a daily five-minute programme on the best stories filed that day and at the weekend the main news bulletins carry at least four PeoPo reports. PeoPo could well be a model for citizen journalism in the future.