User generated news for Nepal

[Ganesha]

The major Nepali newspapers carry mostly news that they think are important. A heavy focus is on politics (of "who said what" type ) with not much importance to localized news. In this background, do you think a community website where Nepalis could upload their own local news could be viable?(Think of all the active bloggers, twitter users and enthusiasts that could upload content, at least, initially). What could be the risks and benefits of such a site.

[pkreli]

Did you steal my idea ?
Anyway, its a good idea that I was also considering. Citizen journalism, isn't it ?

[Ganesha]

Seems like I did!

Yes, it is called citizen journalism. Setting up a site for the purpose is easy. But maintaining integrity of the articles will be a real problem. If nothing else, the minimum basic that has to be checked is whether the article is true or false. This will have to be done by humans and its thus going to be costly and not scalable. A better idea would be to follow the Reddit.com style or better yet, StackOverFlow.com style where people give up-point or down-point to an article thus giving the reader a good impression of what is good read and what is not worth his/her time.

However, a point to note for all Nepali sites is that the user base is small compared to English language website of general interest. The biggest Nepali sites today draw about 1500 to 3000 hits a day (StackOverFlow.com started less than six months ago and it has 16 million hits a month and growing!). And since online ads is the only source of income, spending too much on technology or employing humans will not be viable.

An easier solution though would be something like a Nepali Drudge Report where only one or two people select stories or a Nepali TechCrunch.com with a bunch of dedicated people writing in. However, this idea defeats the purpose of citizen journalism altogether because the user submission is almost zero. And this leads me to think of SlashDot.org (whose source code is freely available I believe) but then again, a story on slashdot has to be commented over and moderated by a huge number of people and user participation of that kind in the Nepali context is yet to be seen.

[kazi]

@Ganesha This is one of those discussions that I really enjoy reading and learn. You have covered the topic quite well and provided a decent read. Thanks for that.

[Ganesha]

Those are nice compliments. Thank you!

[kazi]

you deserve it, @Ganesha and a whole lot more.