Here at nuroa, our real estate search engine, we’ve been experimenting with citizen journalism.

In Spain, we’re recorded 3 videos so far under our series called “Y Tu Que Piensas” (So What Do You Think)? Our first episode asked people on the streets of Barcelona how the current real estate crisis might affect their votes in the recent Spanish elections. Our second video covered the March for Decent Housing and asked the participants to define “decent housing”. Pretty soon, we’ll launch our third video.

In Germany, we’ve recorded 9 videos when we visited Germany to attend the Re:publica conference. Kirsten has already launched two of the interviews (here and here) that we did at Re:publica asking well-known German bloggers where they live in Berlin and why. We’ll be launching our Berlin series of videos over the next few weeks.

So that’s why I read with particular fondness the post about the supposed Obama-supporting blogger that’s taking down the Obama campaign.  Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for OffTheBus.net, went to a campaign fundraiser as a citizen (press were not allowed to report on the event — it was supposed to be off the record), but she decided that as a “journalist” she had to publish in her blog Obama’s comment that poor small-town voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations. Of course, Hillary Clinton immediately jumped on the comments to show that Obama doesn’t relate well with an important base of the Democratic Party — poor whites. She claims that he’s elitist, as opposed to her and Bill Clinton, two Yale-educated lawyers who earned more than $109 million from 2000 to 2007. Obama, on the other hand, just recently paying off his student loans from Harvard Law School. But nonetheless, the quote is causing Obama a lot of grief, and some people are saying that it could change the course of the current race. (Maybe that’s just the traditional press looking for a story in a relatively slow news period?)

But my point is less to focus on Bill and Hillary, or Obama and Michelle, and to focus more on figuring out what a blogger’s responsibility is when she is both “citizen” and “journalist”. On the one hand, it’s clear that the Obama political team hoped to exploit “citizen journalists” by inviting them to political fundraisers and expecting traditional, fluff coverage about how great Obama is. On the other hand, it’s not clear that a blogger who’s invited to an “off-the-record” political event should be writing a story in which she breaks the basic rules by quoting the political candidates. After all, she wasn’t the only “journalist” invited to the event, she was just the only one to quote Obama in her blog.

What are the limits and responsibilities of a “citizen journalist”, and do they differ in any substantive way from the limits and responsibilities that “real journalists” face? What do you think? Is Mayhill Flower a snake in the grass, or a modern day Woodward and Bernstein?