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CNN has officially launched the beta of iReport, the citizen journalism site we learned about earlier this week. As Mark noted, the launch is part of an ongoing effort from CNN to integrate user-generated content both online and in the news network’s on-air coverage. According to the company, they’ve already received 100,000 video, photo, and text submissions since first launching iReport on CNN.com in 2006.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]In the company’s announcement, they shed some light on what iReport content makes it on-air, and what makes it onto CNN.com. In a nutshell, iReport will include all submitted content, while editors will decide what makes it to CNN.com and onto the cable network. So far, CNN reports that about 10 percent of submitted content has found its way onto CNN properties, so, it’s safe to say that iReport.com is going to have quite a bit of content that won’t be seen elsewhere.
Moving onto the actual site, iReport appears to have borrowed many best practices from successful user-generated video sites. Users can browse content by most viewed, highest rated, newest, and a variety of other filters. Additionally, the site uses tags for browsing stories about specific topics. iReport is also providing incentive to its best citizen journalists, establishing a “Superstars” area that will feature the top 20% of iReporters, based on a formula to determine the quality of their contributions.
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My only criticism of the site would be that while there are some basic sharing options so you can submit stories to Digg, Facebook, and the like, there do not appear to be options for embedding videos elsewhere. This would be a nice feature for iReport to add, but perhaps this is an area where CNN wants to keep some exclusivity since content could eventually be “promoted” to CNN.com or the cable network. We'll see if it's something they include when the site officially launches next month.