Learning Modules

These modules are designed to provide both professional and citizen journalists with step-by-step instruction on skills to help you launch or improve a web site based on user-generated content. The modules have been created by KCNN’s network of professionals.

Making the Most of Metrics

Whether you're running a small hyperlocal community Web site or a large regional citizen media site, you can use free or inexpensive tools to measure how many people are visiting your site and where they like to go most. With the right analytics tools, you can also get very specific details in addition to total traffic numbers. This knowledge will then empower you to improve your site, increase traffic and give accurate information to potential advertisers and sponsors.

Twelve Tips for Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines

There's good news for even solo citizen journalists who want to improve how their sites are found through search engines like Google: Your own homegrown search engine optimization can get you many of the benefits of a professional retooling. Search engine optimization, or SEO, just means making your site as easy to find and highly ranked as possible by search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. That way, people using those engines to look for relevant content can find what you have to offer. That's increasingly important as more and more visitors find their way to sites like yours not by typing in your Web address, but by plugging a few choice words into their favorite search engine. Learn some easy ways to boost your ranking and get more traffic.

Twitter Tips: Today’s Must-Have Tool for Citizen Journalists

Twitter has finally hit its stride as a leading tool for finding and sharing timely information from all sorts of places and sources. Its usefulness for breaking news is obvious. However, Twitter is equally useful for tracking ongoing stories and issues, getting fast answers or feedback, finding sources, building community, collaborating on coverage, and discovering emerging issues or trends. Learn how to sign up, log on and start posting "tweets" to enhance your hyperlocal coverage.

Top 10 Rules for Limiting Legal Risk

If you're running a citizen media site or contributing to one, these 10 rules will help you avoid potential legal piftalls. Get advice in videos from Harvard Berkman Center experts and Media Law Resource Center attorneys. Module produced by Geanne Rosenberg, associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism and Baruch College.
Read the press release from CUNY.

Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive

A guide to help professional and amateur news producers understand and implement digital tools to enhance their reporting. Written by Mark Briggs, assistant managing editor for interactive news at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington.

Tools for Citizen Journalists

This six-chapter training module will help site operators and citizen journalists cope with the challenges of covering communities on small budgets with little or no staff. Get tips on where to sniff out great ideas and turn them into a compelling story, how to use data to punch up your coverage, how to manage a site when you don't have a staff to help out, who to consider for partnerships that might help move your site along, and how to tap into the knowledge and passion of your readers. Module developed by Wendell Cochran and Amy Eisman, American University School of Communication.

Twelve Tips for Growing Positive Communities Online

Your site is up and all is running well until the conversation heats up and a flame war erupts. Here are a dozen ways to keep the discussion going while maintaining a civil environment and positive direction on your site.

Make Internet TV

Make Internet TV is an easy to read multimedia manual for publishing internet video. It has step-by-step instructions for everything from choosing a camera to publishing and promoting videos on the internet.

Principles of Citizen Journalism

Whether writing a blog or involved in a full-scale hyperlocal news site, you are going to face a higher degree of skepticism than traditional media. That means fairness, accuracy, transparency and independence are tantamount to success. See what citizen media veterans say about those topics and other foundations of citizen journalism.

Training Citizen Journalists

In these seven case studies from around the United States, get a birds-eye view of citizen journalism today.

Using E-mail to Jumpstart your Newsgathering

Even professional journalists, pressed by 24/7 deadlines, are finding a way to help jump-start their reporting on breaking news stories and find excellent examples to illustrate more ambitious enterprise stories.