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Wii Have a Problem, Houston: Citizen Journalism and Beyond

by Actual News Geezer | January 29, 2007 at 06:41 am

819 views | 10 Recommendations | 3 comments

We Media holds its 2007 conference in Miami Feb. 7-9. and its blog is already busy with baffling brainbusters.

Travis Smith asks a very interesting question in a posting to the We Media conference Blog: is it possible the expression "citizen journalism" carries too much ballast to be useful? He writes about a blog, "Wii Have a Problem" which is doing excellent work documenting the hazards of Wii use (but so far no documented cases of spontaneous Wii combustion, apparently).

I find the phrase “citizen journalism” is in some cases far too weighty a label for the most interesting examples of the activity. Not every CJ site is about global warming or local democracy in action. . .

. . . Many musician forums, Jack Johnson’s for example, will have a great deal of distributed reporting about the activities of that band, some by one-post individuals on the scene, but much by a smaller hard-core group.

And then there’s Wii Have A Problem which is doing a great job of documenting the injuries and destruction wrought by those who have just purchased a Nintendo Wii.