New Delhi: Four months ago, in the middle of the night, a land mafia demolished Santo Joseph’s house. It had stood unoccupied on a little plot in Dodda Nagamangala, a village close to Bangalore’s glittering Electronic City and yet vulnerable to the mafia’s extortion.
Showing the way: Subramaniam Vincent and Meera K., founders of Citizen Matters which was launched in March. The website publishes around 10 pieces a week, with at least three submitted voluntarily by citizens. Hemant Mishra / Mint
“When I first heard of the mafia, I’d begun going to the village every weekend, to stand there and talk to site owners and residents,” says Joseph, a human relations manager at a Bangalore company. But after he took an initiative to form a residents’ association, the land mafia responded by tearing down his house. “That was when I wrote the article.”
His article appeared in August, with only minor editing for language, on Citizen Matters, an online interactive news magazine that exhorts Bangalore residents to contribute articles with the battle cry: “Speak up! It’s your city.”
On the ground in Dodda Nagamangala, Joseph has seen no improvement as yet. “But I’ve been getting plenty of calls from people in similar situations—even now, two a week,” he says. “And if people have taken note of the article, the next time we approach authorities, they will be forced to hear us.”
Since its discreet beta launch in March, Citizen Matters has democratically covered local news and civic issues, regularly beating mainstream newspapers to important stories and forcing them to follow suit.
“We felt there was so much happening at the local community level that the major papers were simply not covering well enough, and we wanted to address that lacuna,” says Subramaniam Vincent, a founder of Citizen Matters.
Perhaps the most flattering proof of how effectively Citizen Matters has been able to do that lies in one of Vincent’s claims: “We know of at least three newspapers watching us, including one or two that even have a staffer specifically maintaining a watch on our stories.”
The website operates on a so-called hybrid model. Citizens voluntarily submit three out of every 10 published stories, although Vincent notes that the proportion is increasing; the remaining seven are commissioned articles from freelancers.
The website publishes roughly 10 pieces a week for a base of readers that has grown more than fourfold in eight months, according to Vincent, who refused to divulge the numbers. True to its spirit of community journalism, these articles spring primarily out of civic woes.
On 23 September, a Citizen Matters journalist wrote about the city corporation’s violation of due process in appointing consultants for a road works project—a story that The Times of India then pursued and published on 31 October.