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CNN Readies All Citizen Journalism News Site iReport

By David Kaplan - Mon 11 Feb 2008 10:28 AM PST

CNN, owned by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), is preparing to unveil a news site made up entirely of news gathered by users, Mediaweek reports. An offshoot of its iReport citizen journalism feature, which the Time Warner cable net launched in August. 2006. Since that time, CNN has received roughly 100,000 news photos and videos from viewers. The pickup in activity has been gaining lately, as CNN said it has received nearly 10,000 viewer-submissions just last month. Only 10 percent of the submissions have made it to the air, however. CNN paid $750,000 to acquire the urls “ireport.com” and “i-report.com” from self-styled “Domain King” Rick Schwartz.

-- Learning to let go: The iReport site is still under construction, but should be up this week. Aside from featuring only viewer submissions on the site, users will act as their own editors as well, in contrast to the control CNN exercised over what viewer material to run on cable. While the site will be largely unvetted, CNN will monitor it for objectionable material. Mediaweek says iReport’s look and feel resembles YouTube’s very closely in terms of the uploading capabilities. The site will also let users rate clips and comment; they’ll also be allowed to embed videos on other sites.