The driving force behind reporter.co.za is Johnnic Communications, a leading media and entertainment company that publishes some of the country’s biggest newspapers, among them the Sunday Times.

Peter Malherbe, one of the editors of reporter.co.za, says the idea behind the site was to give a voice to the less privileged. “Traditionally, people who have been involved in the media have attended university or have had some sort of formal training,” Malherbe says. “By introducing citizen journalism, people who have no qualifications, but who do have an interest in reporting, can get involved and have their articles and photos published.”

Submitting an article is easy. A person needs only to sign up online then send in their written material. These can be news articles, or comments on a story that has appeared on reporter.co.za or in the mainstream press.

Malherbe says the site normally gets 100-150 stories per day. “If something big happens, it is usually a lot more.”

Of the hundreds of stories sent in every day, only 16 get published. Malherbe says work is being done on the site to extend this number and to make it compatible with mobile phones. “We cannot receive information from mobiles at the moment, but the number of contributors will increase dramatically once we are able to do that,” he says. The contributors represent all levels of society, ranging from working professionals to the unemployed. Their copy mostly includes news reports from their local areas and comments on different issues that are widely discussed. “It’s particularly interesting when they write from a first-person perspective in the form of ‘I heard’ or ‘I saw’ or ‘this happened to me,’ ” Malherbe says. “We think these pieces are especially valuable because the likelihood of the traditional media finding them is very small.”

Apart from working closely with the Sunday Times, Malherbe says the site acts as an information source for the mainstream press. “By reading the entries on our site, they get an idea of what people find interesting,” he says. “Sometimes, there’s a major news story in the Sunday Times that fails to be mentioned on our site, which maybe says something about the public’s interest in that story.”

Since being launched in 2005, reporter.co.za has gone from strength to strength when it comes to the number of readers it attracts every month, which Malherbe says is now in the tens of thousands. “People like the site because it gives them a different point of view and they can also identify with a lot of the pieces written,” he says.

Malherbe also receives feedback from the contributors, some of whom say the site has transformed their lives. “Ordinary people are becoming reporters and they feel empowered by that. This is especially true for our columnists, who write a lot. They feel the site has given them a meaning because whatever they feel they can write about it and send it to us.”

Apart from the advantages of citizen journalism, there are of course disadvantages. Malherbe says one of these is how some of the contributors use the site to promote their views. “But the readers normally work this out after a while and see it for what it is.”

Another issue is plagiarism and, even though Malherbe and his team check facts, some articles sometimes fall through the cracks. “We have had problems with people copying articles from other media sources and it’s not very easy to pick up on that,” he says. “But at the end of the day, the advantages by far outweigh the disadvantages.”

Malherbe has no doubt that citizen journalism is the future. “We are really only at the start,” he says. “I don’t know what will happen but the development is certainly a good one for the public.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen