Citizenside - A professional agency? Hmmm…

The French are at it too. It seems that every country from Korea to the U.S., and now France have some sort of online outlet for the aspiring citizen journalists they house in their towns and cities.

French website Citizenside aims to:

CitizenSide aims at creating the world’s largest amateur and/or independent reporters community with a commercial goal, thanks to an easy to use and transparent system, and a commission rate much more important than traditional agencies.

Whether there is something lost in translation here or not I am unsure but I thought the whole drive behind citizen journalism was that its value system was pure and incorruptible as it had no ties to a commercial imperative?

Again, if a journalist is being paid or receiving some type of financial renumeration then are they not simply a journalist? Or is a journalist both a journalist and a citizen journalist? What is the distinction?

Back to this website, however, and regardless of their aspirations it is clear by the stories which feature on the front page that this website is still at an amateur level.

There is a story from February on the home page and the headlines section hasn’t been updated in a week. Also, the stories that do feature are predominantly French and concern demonstrations by students and other French school related incidents. At a guess One could assume that Citizenside’s writership is made up of French school-children.