Lend Us Your Eyes and Ears on Waukee Patch

As the editor of Waukee Patch, there are two questions I hear every day: “When are you covering this?” and “Why didn’t you cover that?”

I’ll keep working to answer those questions to your satisfaction. But starting today, I hope you’ll also consider joining me here, on this new platform that’s covering our community. Today we’re introducing beta versions of two new pages on Waukee Patch: “Eyes & Ears” and “OffTheBus 2012: Iowa.” And we’re opening these pages up to Citizen Journalists. (That’s you!)

Citizen Journalism, if you’re not familiar with it, is the simple idea that people who care about issues can help cover them. As our neighborhoods become networks, every snapped photo or link shared by neighbors can be a form of journalism, because it helps us all learn more about what’s going on nearby. Citizen Journalism efforts often succeed or fail based on the tools citizens are given, so I’m happy to tell you we’re using Tumblr, which we thought was the best tool available today for easily posting content online.

What’s Tumblr?
It’s a microblogging platform, which is probably the easiest, most fun way to publish content today. You could go there now, submit a photo your neighbors might like to see, and be done in sixty seconds. Whether you’re visiting our website on your computer or a mobile phone, Tumblr makes it easy to send in a post.

You said there were two new sites. What’s “Eyes & Ears” for?
This is a place to submit anything you’d like to see on Patch: A picture from a football game, video of a parade, a quote you heard at a town hall meeting, or a link to anything locals ought to be talking about.

OK. Then what’s OffTheBus 2012: Iowa?
This is a place explicitly devoted to politics, pulled from Citizen Journalists across the state, and it’s part of a collaboration with the Huffington Post. (Remember when then-candidate Barack Obama got in trouble for saying Pennsylvanians “cling to guns and religion”? That quote was reported by a Citizen Journalist for OffTheBus!) This is a page for the fliers from visiting candidates, videos of their speeches, pictures of the media hordes moving in a herd around our town. If you hear a candidate say something newsworthy, you can submit it and make national news yourself!

Isn’t this blogging, something I could already do on Waukee Patch?
There are a lot of ways Citizen Journalism and blogging are the same. The best way to differentiate them is to think of Citizen Journalism as a great place to share information, photos, and videos, while blogging on Patch is a great place to share longer works of opinion and analysis.

Can I submit text from my smartphone?
Yes! Download the Tumblr app or just visit our pages in your mobile browser.

Who looks at all these submissions?
Me and whoever else wants to join me. I welcome anyone who wants to help out with Eyes & Ears. (OffTheBus 2012: Iowa, by contrast, will always be vetted by a Patch editor. As you’ve seen from our comments section, usually political coverage needs a ref who’s above the fray.)