Last week, CNN sacked over 50 staffers, many of them camera-lugging photojournalists, in part because it will lean more heavily on its citizen journalism outfit iReport for more, better content.
With Monday's relaunch of iReport as a "social network for news," CNN's strategy of shifting various tasks from its paid journalists to the five-year-old network of iReporters is coming into focus. We doubt that CNN will soon replace news anchors with holograms any time soon, but the network is trending towards giving its citizen journalists more assignments, surfacing more of their content on TV and generally making iReport content more of an editorial fixture. And feature-by-feature, there's little doubt that CNN wants the new iReport to be a money-saver as well as a scoop factory....
The Wire is a branch of The Atlantic, an authoritative source on business, domestic and global news, politics, tech, entertainment, education, and health. Citizen journalism has become a large participatory network in the digital age, and traditional institutions such as CNN are beginning to adapt to this phenomenon.