subject: Report Your Own News [print this page] Report Your Own News Report Your Own News
Have you ever witnessed a newsworthy event and had nobody to tell what you saw? Ever taken any important pictures or video of a current event and wanted to sell it or share it with others? In todays world your options are limited. You could start a blog or tweet what you observed, but the chances of someone happening to read what you witnessed are slim. What is needed is a centralized location for first person news reporting.
To fill this niche a website called http://www.primwit.com - PrimWit was created. This forum provides people an organized one stop location where people can tell others about the newsworthy events they witnessed. The events are categorized into typical news sections where people can detail their observations, show pictures and video, and answer questions from interested third parties.
Its rather suprising that something like this hasn't been tried before. Today we obtain our news from secondary sources. A journalist writes a news article after having interviewed several witnesses from an important event. This coalesces with their own observations into a news story that they should be represents the most accurate description of the event. There is some obvious problems with this methedology. For one it often results in important specifics being left out from a given news story. The jouranilst may mistakenly believe one witnesses description over another or might exclude what they learn for political reasons. The only way to avoid these problems is to have a venue where the primary sources take precedence and the readers are left to ascertain the truth from them, not the reporters. Another advantage is that there now exists an easy way to tell the world and the news media that your saw something important. Often events are witnessed by many hundreds of people that the news media doesn't interview. As a result, there exists many times many people with important information to tell the world with no avenue to get noticed. PrimWit provides journalists a consolidated location where they can search through primary sources to compose their stories. If contact information is left by the poster, they could be contacted by the news media for the purpose of purchasing their story, photos, or videos. So check out PrimWit and cotribute. Help to make this missing possibility available to everyone.
