Raanan Bar-Cohen

I had the pleasure of attending NewTeeVee’s Citizen News event the other day, and I came away super impressed. The GigaOm team really knows how to put on a great event with the right mix of content, interesting judges, a good crowd and spot-on sponsorships that really ad value to the event.

The topic centered around citizen journalism/news and showcased several video clips that were later voted on by the audience ( via SMS ).

You can see all the videos here — but I wanted to highlight two in particular that really stood out for me, and turned out to be voted on #1 and #2 respectively by the crowd.

The first video was an installment from the “Alive in Baghdad” series, “Sectarian Violence is a Daily Experience”. Really compelling content, and unfiltered in a way that conveys maximum information and clarity. For all the mentos diet coke content out there (which rocks!), it’s great to also see truly powerful journalism being done by a small group of individuals who have the power of online distribution. (More great investigative journalism highlighted recently in a post by Marhsall Kirkpatrick)

The second video is called “Bodega”. It was very well produced and instantly genuine — to the point that I felt like I jumped back to new york, and was grabbing a yoohoo after a yankees game !