When the German online newspaper Netzeitung announced the launch of a new citizen journalism project, a message posted on its home page was, well, ambitious: “Wanted: 20 million editors.”

The Readers Edition, as it was named, did not quite live up to its goal. Currently, there are about 400 regular authors and around five to eight articles are posted each day. After its launch in June 2006, it was up to 40 or 50. Readers Edition wanted to be the first German online newspaper without a copy editor. Another interesting goal.

With Germany’s biggest online presence, Spiegel Online making money, German publishers have figured out that the Web is here to stay. But citizen journalism has been slow to catch on and some of the hesitancy may be cultural.

“Germany’s civil society is not very familiar with the idea of one feeling entitled to publicly articulate himself,” said Christoph Neuberger, from the university of Muenster, “and journalism in Germany is always reproached with seeing its audience more like objects of influence than as responsible individuals that just want to inform themselves.”

Hugo Martin, a veteran of print- and online-publishing is leading the re-launch of Readers Edition in several months and has his own views on what happened: “In my opinion, it was a fault to build it so much around the community of bloggers.”

Last December, Netzeitung’s editor-in-chief Michael Maier quit his job of six years, to buy the Readers Edition from its mother company. He founded a new company named “Blogform GmbH” to concentrate on citizen journalism, which he sees as the future of media (he coined the “20 million editors” slogan). His moves gathered attention from media-observers and publishers.

Maier and Martin are both looking to make the Readers Edition something different, even something more than a citizen online paper. “We want the Readers Edition and its readers to get involved. We want to be action-oriented. And we don’t have to and don’t want to be politically correct,” claims Martin.

Users can get involved in any number of different ways, the editors say. Those interested in an environmental scandal can join a community that gathers to think about possible actions like mass e-mails, boycotts or protests. Or, the community can invite political or economic players to discuss their ideas online with them – and vice versa. The journalistic task in this situation is to act as moderators of these discussions — as well as to ask the right questions.

Swapping third party involvement for legal support

Involving outside players could also be a way for the project to make money. “Journalism is not a kindergarten where everybody does what he likes. It has to be economically backed,” Maier points out. On the business end, advertisements and companies or NGOs presenting themselves to a test audience or possibilities for marketing research is one option the editors are looking at. The plans for this part are still being discussed among the Readers Edition’s managers, but Martin assures that participation in these projects will be voluntary and transparent.

The journalism behind this will be a merger between professional journalists (though it is yet unclear how big the editorial staff will be), moderators and the citizen journalists. Everybody can write about anything, but there will be a group of editors, moderators and possibly respected CJs and community members who are involved in setting a main agenda and search the net for writing talent. And after proving to be a good CJ, one may get assignments on a special topic by a managing editor. Payment may become an option at a later stage. As Maier sees it: “we cannot tell the people to do one week of research and not pay them for the result.” One possibility could be syndication, selling the articles to other media. “We will do a lot by trial and error,” Maier said.

The “new” Readers Edition will be ready in the first half of 2007, probably with features like podcasts, livecasts and webinars (webinars might be used to train citizen journalists). But the changes are coming slowly. When Maier announced his acquisition of Readers Edition in December, some moderators did not feel they had enough information about the changes about to take place.

Can a company that has to generate profits at the end of the day run citizen journalism? Neuberger sees this as one of the big challenges: “To be accepted by the Netizens it aims at, the Readers Edition has to be an honest broker, credible and neutral.” Matthias Kretschmer, Hamburg-based expert and consultant for net-journalism, notes another possible conflict that currently “a lot of profiles in Readers Edition’s list of authors are more or less well hidden advertisements for projects or services the authors offer.”

Another question is time: Though a large number of articles are well-written, they suffer from a lack of timeliness. Articles on hot topics are often uploaded days after the events and remain at the top-spot of Readers Edition well after the actual public discussion is fading. It may need a much higher number of contributing authors to get closer to current events.

But the big question is with the audience: Can the German audience change fast enough to make the Readers Edition a success? As former developer Peter Schink currently wrote in his blog: “The Readers Edition has to grow up very fast now.” It will be German Netizens and Internet users who decide just how big citizen journalism will become here.

Update: The owner of Readers Edition has fired most the moderators that have helped to build the plattform. As a reaction, more prominent authors like Peter Schink and Steffen Bueffel declared to end their relationship with the project. Former moderator Florian Siebeck wrote in an open letter to the editors: “I wil miss Readers Edition, but not the monster that lately held this name and that has afflicted the idea of Citizen Journalism.” Harsh words, indeed, so it is yet to see where the new course will lead the Readers Edition to. It seems, the new Readers Edition will have to figure out a way to get back its citizens before coming back to Citizen Journalism.

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Johannes Kuhn (born 1979) is a freelancer located in Berlin. He has worked for online, print, television and radio and attended the Berliner Journalisten-Schule. Recently he has launched his new project, a bilingual blog called Kopfzeiler (the English version is called Headlinesmen) which features news analysis and covers media developments.