A few days ago I wrote about how the University of Alberta was planning to purchase the Hudson’s Bay Building in downtown Edmonton. I figured the story would a great way for me to test out some of the community news sites available, so I wrote a story out, took some photos, and started testing. I particularly like the idea of having “normal people” create and edit the news, as opposed to the media outlets we have now.

I first discovered NowPublic when I was in Seattle. It walks and talks like a community news site, so this was the first one I tested. Here is the story I created, and here is what I thought of the site:

• Creating stories and footage (images or other media) on the site is faily easy and exactly what you would expect. Once you create the story, others can add footage or reports to it.
• I had taken some photos so decided to add them as footage to my story. In theory it should have been easy, but it turns out that my photos were all at a resolution larger than NowPublic allows. So I had to delete all the blank images it created, and then resize my images and try again.
• The layout of the site is questionable perhaps, I don’t like how the story appears below the footage.
• One of the really cool features of NowPublic is tagging. You can tag your stories and footage so that they are easier to find.

I liked NowPublic, even though the process of adding footage was a little difficult. The other site I tested was WikiNews, from the same people who created the wonderful Wikipedia. Here is the story I created, and what I thought of the site:

• Adding a news item in WikiNews is a little more difficult than NowPublic, mainly because you have to be familiar with the formatting the wiki uses. At the very least, the learning curve is steep compared to the WYSIWYG interface at NowPublic.
• One nice thing about WikiNews is that anyone can edit your story, hence the idea of the wiki. That feature isn’t available at NowPublic, as adding footage or reports isn’t quite the same.
• I like how the concept of a “source” is built into WikiNews, and the formatting is uniform.
• Adding images to a story isn’t as easy as NowPublic, simply because the method of uploading images is a little more cumbersome.

After using both sites, I think I would recommend NowPublic over WikiNews, simply because it’s much easier to use. I think WikiNews is more conducive to community participation though, and that was after all the reason I was testing these sites at all. I guess another distinguishing feature is that with WikiNews you need to have a story to write, whereas with NowPublic, you can simply add some footage and let others write the stories. It’ll be interesting to see how the sites (both of which are basically in beta mode) mature.

It occurred to me as I was testing the services that maybe we really don’t need them. Blogging, photoblogging, and other conversational applications all do essentially the same thing anyway. Combine them with a powerful aggregator like Technorati, PubSub, or something similar, and you’ve got your community news.

You can check out the photos I took for my news story here – they are all licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.