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Newsvine is one of my favourite sites and I have learned a great deal from it, but you have to question whether it achieves its goal of providing a breeding ground for Citizen Journalism or will ever get close to it.
How much content appearing on NV could objectively be described as Citizen Journalism in its true sense?
By definition, "the Wire" is the establishment press. Seeds, by definition, are not original content, so even if the seeded articles constitute Citizen Journalism, that journalism happened somewhere else and NV is just acting as a bookmarking site, like a Digg or del.icio.us.
That leaves us with Viners' articles. How many of those constitute Citizen Journalism, in the proper sense of reporting "real news"? This article certainly doesn't qualify! Mostly we get opinion pieces, effectively long commentaries on news reported by someone else. Some of the articles are excellent, and achieve a lot more than a simple rehash of the Wire. They can sometimes bring strands from different sources together to paint a clearer, more comprehensive or more objective picture, adding insight and providing context. But that is the stuff of blogs. It is not, to my mind at least, Citizen Journalism.
To qualify as Citizen Journalism, content should be "news" in the sense that it might have been appropriate for publication in some conventional news medium somewhere. We can't expect Citizen Journalists, with their limited resources, lack of press passes and their day jobs, to unearth hard news about crime, political intrigue, financial misdealings, wars in foreign climes, well at least not on daily basis, but we need something more than "my gran tripped over the cat".
There have been some notable and impressive exceptions, such as Zaki reporting from Kabul, Killfile on the Virginia Tech Shooting and Sandy Frost on the Shriners. But the point is that they were exceptions, so much so that they were all automatic shoe-ins for the RAV award.
Let's be brutally honest with ourselves. Genuine journalism by Viners is a rare commodity on Newsvine. Does that make NV a bad website? NO! Far from it! But is it fair to trumpet NV as a significant seat of Citizen Journalism?
Only if you redefine Citizen Journalism as something pretty soft, in which case you could equally claim the vast majority of bloggers were "citizen journalists".
In this post on Read/Write Web, newly seeded by Ready, NV is lumped in as just another social bookmarking site. This article by Zenaid shows say OhmyNews having the more convincing credentials in the Citizen Journalism stakes.
