Whose Web is it anyway? Photo by m-c

When’s the last time you thought you were getting the full, unadulterated truth from the media?

Chris Dykstra, jaded by traditional media (”Propaganda!” he cries) and insisting that people need the straight goods to make informed decisions on issues they really care about, has decided it’s time you got just that: the truth.

And so started The UpTake.org, founded on the principles of citizen journalism.

Arming citizens with education (50 bucks gets you an eight-hour video reporting course in Minneapolis), UpTake is taking your news to the streets. Finding the real story via people like you and me, it’s truly democratically produced news: for the people, by the people.

Users join the website and submit upcoming events that they’d like to see covered: a rally, a speech or protest… whatever they’re interested in. Users then vote on the events they’re most excited about. The stories are offered up to the citizen journalists who assign themselves to an event. They shoot, interview, write and upload it all.

And the results? In its first few weeks, The UpTake broke stories that otherwise would never have made it to the masses. A 100-person march on Republican Senator Norm Coleman’s house might not have registered on the local paper’s list of hot stories. But The UpTake’s journalist caught the senator trying to leave by the back way and engaged him in a discussion about the war in Iraq. It was in this “intimate discussionâ€? that he admitted the U.S. had no business in a civil war — when he’d previously been towing the party line on U.S. involvement.

The Uptake: Fake Official Press badge
by Chuckumentary

Score one for the people’s press!

Certainly, The UpTake hasn’t invented the notion of Citizen Journalism. Even some of the smarter mainstream news agencies have been trying to do something similar for some time now: empower the people to bring the news to them. And, aside from these media gatekeepers, there are bloggers and other regular people now participating in the media – think 9-11 cell-phone images and the tsunami and flooding in Southeast Asia.

What’s different is The UpTake uses Zanby’s community social software to organize their mix of volunteers and paid editors. The software enables public consensus about what is important, allows self-organization and plugs the community of users in to each other as well as to other groups so that meaningful discussion on these issues can take place. They benefit from a wide variety of sources (and biases) while doing away with the big media gatekeepers.

The UpTake has taken advantage of existing tools and concepts and merged them into a new sort of business: a mash-up of digg, YouTube and Facebook technologies aligned with democratic principles.

The result is a convergence of social change, an innovative use of technology and a new type of business based online, inciting offline action.

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