Rinku Sen on change in community-based journalism

SAJAforum: What have been the most significant ways in which you have seen community-based journalism evolve and change over the course of your career?

As media, technology and politics merge, it's become possible for people with few resources to create their own media outlets and disseminate widely. Communities of color are still struggling to get themselves into the mix, but there's far more video, blogging, writing and reporting than there was ten years ago. Activists of color know we're getting killed on cable news and in the blogosphere, so there's an urgency that I didn't feel from the field ten years ago. Giving enough focus to the storytelling remains a challenge -- getting specific, proving every point with reporting, finding people to tell the story through, carving up our journalistic projects into digestible pieces in the age of youtube, and just making sure that our production is high-quality enough to attract the unconverted.