Its been few months since we launched See n Report (People Powered News platform). The prime motive behind the idea was to

• Provide a platform that equips an ordinary person to create news.
• To act as a catalyst for responsible media that represents people.
• To make it as easy as just Snap and Send.

These three points pretty much sum up our vision which is “Make News, Be Heard and Bring Change” . During these months (through common people out there) we provided mile by mile coverage of big political events like Long March, promoted several education activities like SOFTEC ( with our live coverage support ), raised sensitive issues like customer data privacy and under age driving, hosted citizen feedback like Sasti Roti, brought e-sports news to main stream and many others. Meanwhile See n Report was under a continuous improvement process with features like mobile reporting platform, fully slice and dice-able RSS feeds, dynamic reporter profiles, video support, live blogging through mobiles/notebook etc.

Finally on the night of 31st October 2008 all these efforts were recognized when See n Report Won Best Startup award in e-Inclusion & e-Community Applications category in P@SHA ICT 2008 awards.( P@SHA: Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT & ITES)

Now its about time we press the paddle. We invite every blogger, socially/politically aware person, some one who has an eye for good or bad happenings around him, a person with a mobile, students of journalism and everyone else to be the part of this moment and help us in shaping up the future of news.

More Details of the media coverage will be updated on See n Report.

Recently, we have been awfully quiet about the activities going on in See’n Report. A sure sign that a lot is happening or maybe nothing is happening :). Thankfully its the former. We have been working on a lot of features and enhancements. After countless hours of development, testing and feedback, the version 2.0 of See’n Report is here. The major changes are,

Registration

Registration is now open for all. Anyone can register with us and start reporting. The people who signed up for beta account but did not register, will also have to go through the normal registration process (the old registration links have been expired). If you created an account but forgot your password, you can follow our password recovery

Change in story page layout

All reports are listed on the story page. This way you can view the individual reporters in every story

Video Support

You can now upload video with your report. Currently you can only upload one video in one report, but we hope to remove this condition soon.

Search

After being neglected for a long time, search is finally here. The current search functionality allows for searching in stories only. But advanced search is on the way

Categories

Chose categories of your report at the time of upload

Report editing

Reports can now be edited even after uploading. This is particularly useful if you have submitted your reports via email/MMS. On your profile page, you should be able to see the ‘Edit’ link with all your reports

Organization and individual description of Images

You can now control the order in which the images appear in your report as well as add individual description to the images. This functionality is available at the time of upload as well as in report editing (mentioned earlier)

Other changes include visual changes (lots of them), performance improvement, UI redesign etc.

Feel free to give your feedback

Many of the Journalism theories state that media should act as a watchdog by maintaining no bias towards anyone, pointing out “THE BAD” in a society and promoting “THE GOOD”. The recent electronic media boom in Pakistan has given boost to local news providers where media houses got licenses to publish news through electronic medium. This has given birth to a culture where media played an important role in exposing the truth behind whats going on.

With so much News broadcasters at service, different perspectives are being bombarded and opinions are being molded. Many are accused of not being honest and promoting certain opinions under hidden agendas (lets not debate on how truthful these accusations are). At this point in time there is a true need of a medium to represent following (related to common people),

• There Opinion.
• Problems they face.
• Changes they desire.

How can this be achieved? That’s a million dollar question. All these goals can’t be accomplished without extending media’s reach, but that requires a lot of funding and even after that, news agencies can’t afford to have their representatives everywhere around the globe. The simple answer to this is,

• Empower people to represent themselves.
• Provide them the simplest possible way to accomplish what seems to be a tedious task.

In order for media to act as a watchdog there is a dire need of platforms where people can contribute instead of just being mere audience. This is a better solution in terms of cost, bias and other factors. We believe that the future is not about you being mere spectator, its about you shaping the news. That’s why See n Report is as easy as SNAP and SEND so that anyone can MAKE NEWS, BE HEARD and BRING CHANGE (for more about this go here and here).

During the initial phase and test launch of See n Report we had this in our mind that planned events should also be properly attended.  We ended up doing the first coverage as an event and now more and more events are being web casted through See n Report.

A majority of events have a very good hype during pre-event time and few of them have a very strong post-event followup. Whats missing is that people don’t have a clue about whats actually going on during the event. Now through See n Report you can webcast your event by simply contacting us and getting an event specific email id (i.e. event-name@seenreport.com). Once that has been created you can start sending us the updates and people can follow your event on the web. You can also broadcast the same updates on your site by embeding our slideshow widget. Recetly many youth related events have been covered on See n Report including SOFTEC 2008, Youth Edge etc, where ordinary people send us the updates mostly through MMS and email. These emails are immediately broadcasted online in the form of news stories.

Recently we have added the functionality of slideshow on See n Report. Now everyone can view all the pictures in a story through slideshow by clicking this button (). While creating the sideshow we kept this possibility in our mind that anyone should be able to put this up (embed) on there site/blog. You can get the code for that by clicking embed button () from the relevant story page.

We have approved all requests for beta accounts at See n Report *applause*. Please do check your junk/spam folders. Looking forward to your reports, feedback and suggestions

See’n’Report now provides every reporter with a personal sub-domain URL (e.g. http://sharjeel.SeeNReport.com/). The URL contains the contributor’s profile which maintains all the photo reports submitted.

Happy Reporting

Digging through the history of citizen journalism 9/11 was an incident that can never be forgotten. Similarly Long March wont be forgotten whenever the start of citizen journalism in Pakistan will be discussed. Many sites appeared who covered Long March in many ways on the web and few of them were powered by people.

We at See’n’Report were determined to provide ‘Mile by Mile‘ update of Long March on the web, from the eyes of the witnesses and indeed we were successful to provide a platform through which a lot of people benefited and we did justice to the cause(Thanks to all those who contributed). Just like CricInfo re-creates the craze of cricket in those who don’t get a chance to watch live matches due to there official or personal work, we created a desire in everyone to be the part of the rally who missed it(I personally got few calls of friends who said that after watching see n report coverage they are coming to Islamabad & will be joining the rally in Rawalpindi).

We know its still a long way to go for see’n’report and citizen journalism in Pakistan and we are very much prepared for the battle for free & responsible Media (The Watch Dog as per journalism theories). We are in private beta and working day and night to finalize stuff and release it for public (You can still contribute news by emailing at yourcityname@seenreport.com).

See n Report is a social newspaper that enables people to upload the photos of events they are witnessing. An event can be any thing ranging from planned concerts, movie premiers, protest rally, car accidents, press conferences, sports etc. Every such event is witnessed by many people but only a small percentage of these events make it to traditional media. We want these people to be more than mere spectators; anyone who can capture that event will be able to report. In fact we want to take this one step further by enabling these witnesses to provide real-time coverage conveniently. See n Report also builds the contributor portfolio and maintains his/her authenticity.

See n Report is in private beta. Please report any errors or your valuable feedback here.

– See n Report Team