McGill offers seven points of advice about citizen journalism

A-Citizen journalism
McGill offers seven points of advice about citizen journalism
By MGP Staff
Nov 3, 2007, 11:25

An early expert at training citizen journalists has authored "What I've Learned Teaching Citizen Journalists," an essay listing seven lessons learned. Doug McGill is a former New York Times reporter, foreign correspondent, university lecturer and Internet innovator. He also briefly headed the World Press Institute.

McGill, a native of Rochester, Minn., and a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Ore., spent 10 years as a reporter for The New York Times on its metropolitan, culture, and business desks in New York City. In 1989 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study environmental issues in Japan in affiliation with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Tokyo, for whom he wrote a regular column in its Sunday magazine. He joined Bloomberg News in 1992 as an editor in Tokyo and subsequently worked as Bloomberg's bureau chief in London and Hong Kong. In the late 1990's he was the founding editor of two web sites that delivered daily news about China written in English, China Online and Virtual China.

In recent years he founded and has run two web sites, The McGill Report (www.mcgillreport.org), which publishes articles about Minnesota~Rs international connections, and Local Man (www.localman.org), a discussion blog for journalists interested in global journalism ethics. A collection of his Minnesota-based journalism and essays, "Here: A Global Citizen's Journey," published last year from Artpacks, Inc. of Rochester, Minn.

In 2005, NPR's "On the Media" program dubbed McGill ~SGlocal Man~T for pioneering "glocal" journalism, which runs the gamut from human interest and business stories to global investigative pieces. In 2003, McGill broke the story of an unknown genocide in Ethiopia by interviewing refugees who had fled to Minnesota, and by using cell
phones to interview eyewitnesses to a massacre of 425 people as it was happening in a remote Ethiopian village. The story led to a major research report published by Human Rights Watch in 2005, and is now used as a case study in journalism schools and textbooks.

From 2003 to 2006, McGill was an adjunct professor of journalism and mass media at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. In 2004 he taught a graduate level course on the media and public affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in Minneapolis. He is a founding board member of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, a non-profit group that sponsors events and public conferences about citizen journalism and that publishes The Twin Cities Daily Planet (www.tcdailyplanet.net), a web site of ethnic, immigrant, and community news. Since 2005, he has taught a six-week citizen journalism class each spring and fall at the Resource Center of the Americas in
Minneapolis.

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