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| | What are the lessons from Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere? |
 | | Gillmor and Goff won outside funding from Mitch Kapor and the Omidyar Network and assembled a small, humbly paid staff and stable of volunteer citizen journalists. The anticipatory buzz began. In the summer of 2005, Gillmor and his team launched Bayosphere as a site that would be "of, by and for the Bay Area." |
 | | Between the June 23, 2005, launch and Gillmor's letter last week to "the Bayosphere community," it was a rocky and sobering seven-month journey. By last fall, things were going so badly that Gillmor said he and Goff decided not to seek any more investor funding and chose to operate the site with their own resources. |
 | | In his letter, Gillmor said he was not giving up on citizen journalism, and would take his mission to the new Center for Citizen Media at the University of California at Berkeley, the nonprofit he founded and directs. It's unclear at this point whether Bayosphere will survive and, if so, in what form. |
| www.ojr.org /ojr/stories/060129grubisich (1549 words) |
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