In the Loop: March 25, 2009 Archive

Go ahead, give us an assignment!

Posted at 5:27 PM on March 25, 2009 by Sanden Totten (1 Comments)

First, the audience became a photographer, sending in pictures of hurricanes to CNN's iReport. Then came the citizen journalist, turning the public into full fledged reporters. Now, more and more websites are asking the reader to step in as the assigning editor.

Last month I stumbled across Spot.us and Business Week's "What's Your Story Idea?", two sites where readers suggest a story and real life flesh and blood reporters will go out and cover it. Now the trend has come to the blog world.

This is a Skribit widget (try saying that five times fast). The idea behind it is that readers of a blog can suggest topics for a blogger to take on. Others can see the topics posted and vote. Bloggers then go and write about the most popular suggestions. Sounds okay, but what if you are a blog that works in conjunction with a podcast / video blog?

So here's my thought, ignore the bloginess of this app and imagine it for the whole In The Loop package. What segments should we do?

Suggest an interview topic or specific guest (keep in mind, we like newsy stuff on the show). Give us something to investigate or a question to tackle. Tell us your idea for a video! Or do you have an insightful question we could pose to our network of smart and thoughtful listeners? Let us know, go ahead and Skribit.

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