Welcome to Citizen Journalism 101. This series includes several 20-30 minute recorded presentations on topics that are relevant to both individual citizen journalists and grassroots media organizations. Here, learn (or get a quick refresher) about how to report in a way that centers lived experience, important points about press law, live coverage, social media engagement and grassroots fundraising models for independent media.

If you're interested in additional resources, you can also view our library of videos from healthcare professionals about various topics for citizen journalists reporting on issues of health. You can sign up for access to that library here: Sign Up: Citizen Journalist Education Library.

Quick Links:

• Introduction to Citizen Journalism

• Identifying as Press, Legal Rights, and Safety

• Language, Editing, and Style

• Using Social Media to Deepen Engagement with the News

• Resourcing the News We Need

• Citizen Health Journalism Library

If you find these resources helpful, have additional insights or are doing citizen journalism work in your area, we'd love to connect with you! Please contact us at independentmediaus@gmail.com.

About This Project

In 2021-2022, Independent Media Association collaborated with scholars from the University of Kansas (Dr. Carli Zegers, Assistant Professor in the KU School of Nursing, and Brynn Fitzsimmons, PhD candidate in English) to create training resources for citizen journalists. This project was made possible with support from the KU Commons Health Humanities and Arts Research Collaborative (HHARC) Seed Grant, for which we are deeply grateful.

Citizen Journalism 101 is part of a library of recorded presentations and other resources draws from the expertise of both citizen journalists on IMA's team and expertise from healthcare professionals across a range of subject areas. Topics covered include everything from the basics of citizen journalism to specifics on how to report ethically about topics like mental health, COVID, and more (from healthcare professionals' perspective).

In this project, we aimed to create dialogue between those with subject matter expertise and the citizen journalists who work tirelessly across a variety of platforms to uplift and report stories that matter to them and their communities.