Is Citizen Journalism the New Facebook?

Internet trends come and go faster than one-hit-wonder music acts. Three years ago, no one in the athletic community was terribly concerned about this thing called Facebook. Last year, it was all that anyone wanted to talk about. Why is Citizen Media not another fad? For the same reason talk radio is not a fad – money.
In an effort to find a mechanism to “pay for the journalism we need,” the Knight Foundation
awarded $5 million in direct grants to create support systems for Citizen Media, ranging from the Center for Citizen Media at Cal-Berkeley to the Citizen Media Law Project at the Harvard Law School. Notably, the goal of the Citizen Media Law Project is to provide resources “including a legal guide that will cover everything from how to form a business to how to use freedom of information and open meetings laws to get access to information, meetings, and governmental records, as well as other legal subjects such as risks associated with online publication.” Another $5 million in direct grants to blog operators is set for 2007.