Since I have been working with OnEarth this semester on citizen journalism and their greenlight blogs (yes, this one!), I would hope that my progress has been well chronicled in my own blog posts.

In case I missed anything, I’ll give a brief run-down of this past semester’s work:

My personal goal this semester was to explore how the public—you and me—interacts with science and the media. I was introduced to, and started stumbling through, a realm of media I had never heard of: citizen journalism. I am admittedly a traditionalist, so until I started working with OnEarth, all of my news came from the most mainstream of sources: NYT, BBC, CNN, and other three letter acronyms. I soon found out, though, that trusted news could come from a bunch of other places. And one of them is from you.

To my surprise, as I began investigating sites that involved citizens and non-professionals in reporting, I found that these news accounts were interesting and informative. I could trust the reporting as accurate and, if not always unbiased, at least owning up to their status as opinions. Reading these blogs, diaries, and articles exposed me to a broader range of subjects, opinions, and details that I otherwise might have missed while reading my 3-letter-acronym news sources.

What I found most interesting was the potential for sites—including OnEarth—to promote citizens to report on local issues and news pieces. Some of the citizen-generated articles I read focused around events that were taking place in a part of the world I was unfamiliar with; many would not have been covered by mainstream news; most took an interesting and enlightening aspect of the news and made it central to the piece.

I’m still working with OnEarth to assess and improve their citizen journalism portion of the website. I plan on keeping up with my own blog posts, both to provide updates on the project and to show my support and enthusiasm for citizen journalism. Hopefully the changes that come about from this assessment will encourage more people to get involved with environmental reporting. I now firmly believe that we citizens play the most important role in sharing the urgency of the environmental crisis, and that our collective involvement in media has the potential to shape our environmental future.

Thanks to all who are reading my posts. I hope that I have inspired some of you to start your own reporting, and all of you to reflect upon your views of citizen journalism.