Reporterist.com co-founder Sindya Bhanoo has created something wonderful– if it’s all it says it is. In this interview, Bhanoo describes Reporterist as a “news exchange where freelancers and editors can connect”, meaning a device for reporters to sell their stories via the Internet. This sounds great to me, except for one thing: how do editors know that reporters are reliable? I understand that eventually freelancers have reputations, but if this service is opened up to the public (like Bhanoo said it would eventually), then how can sources be trusted? Who’s doing the fact-checking?
In the Society of Professional Journalists freelance directory, freelancers provide samples of work and state previous experience. I assume Reporterist does something similar (I tried to register, but have yet to receive a confirmation e-mail). This is fine for people who have worked as journalists in professional settings, but what about the budding citizen journalist? How seriously will publications take these people?
Bhanoo hopes Reporterist will someday be a sort of wire service– the Reuters for freelancers, if you will. This seems like a brilliant idea, but for the service to be trusted and used, there must be strict criteria for writers, implemented in a user-friendly submission interface. Bhanoo has great ideas. Let’s just hope she’s able to practically implement them.
