Crowdsourcing

When Crowdsourcing Isn't ...

Yesterday TechCrunch broke the news that "crowd powered media" site NowPublic.com had raised $10.6 million in financing. This isn't a lot of money if you are, say, a fledgling airline company. It's a boatload of cash for a company in the still largely theoretical crowdsourced journalism space. OhMyNews.com, the Daddy of all citizen journalism sites, came up with $11 million at one point, but as Globe and Mail columnist Mathew Ingram notes, that was Series B financing. (This makes it less meaningful for reasons  that are beyond my business acumen. Here's a Crowdsourcing Assignment: Someone explain the difference between Series A and Series B financing in the comment section below.)

TechCrunch and Ingram rightly place the news in the context of the recent failure of other high-profile citizen journalism efforts, such as Backfence. But I was hardly shocked to read about NowPublic's successful financing. NP's CEO Leonard Brody is a veteran entrepreneur, and has given VCs a satisfactory return on their investments before. Besides, NowPublic has, according to NowPublic, already built a sizeable user base, with 20,000 hardcore users helping draw over 1 million unique visitors a month. But God Damn I'm long-winded. This isn't even what I wanted to post about.

I wasn't planning on commenting on the news until I read a provocative post by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0. In the title Karp declares: "It's not citizen journalism or crowdsourcing—It's just journalism." Like hell, I thought, having recently decompressed from my own sometimes rocky foray into  "crowdsourced journalism." I knew it hadn't resembled anything else in my nearly two decades of journalism. But Karp won me over.

I think there is a battle going on over control of the word “journalism.”

Many people in the news business seem to have a vested interest in separating journalism as it has traditionally been practiced, by employees of news organizations that controlled monopoly distribution channels, from “citizen journalism” or “crowdsourcing” or anything else that represents the evolution of journalism in a networked media world.

So we have “serious, traditional” journalism over HERE, and all this experimenting with “citizens” and “crowds” and whatnot over THERE.

Well, it’s time to call foul on this. NowPublic and other sites like it are doing JOURNALISM — the practice of journalism hasn’t been fundamentally changed so much as it has been extended. Journalism used to be linear. Now it’s networked. It used to be in the hands of a few. Now it’s in the hands of many more.

I'd call this pretty unassailable logic. I've been practicing journalism since I was about 20 years old. Here's what my job entails. Most days I wake up, make coffee and start making phone calls. As the person on the other end of the line talks, I take notes. In between calls I see what other publications have written about the subject and, increasingly, what other bloggers and people on forum boards are saying as well. Generally I read the most recent, as well as the most seminal books on same. After many days of doing this, I begin to figure out a thing or two. After two or three months, I've actually learned quite a bit. Then I start writing.

These are really two different jobs, reporting and writing. The first job isn't rocket science, which is why until recent years few reporters bothered to go to college. You just have to be a particular type of person—nosy, sociable and truly, insatiably curious (if you're not, most assignments will just bore you). The second job is a bitch, and generally you're either good at it or you're not. And if you don't, journalism school won't help you much. All of which is to say—damn I'm long-winded—journalism isn't a job, it's an activity.

Karp notes that while NowPublic's Brody hates the "citizen journalism" label,  even the term "crowd-powered" creates false distinctions (he also says there's a negative connotation to crowd, which I would assert is no longer true):

The “crowd-powered” terminology again puts up a barrier between journalism being practiced at NowPublic and journalism being practiced on mainstream news sites, when in fact they exist on a continuum.

The future of journalism depends on collaboration, not silos and fiefdoms. Journalism with a capital J needs to maintain standards but it also, desperately, needs to evolve in order to thrive as in a networked media age.

I'm all for a continuum. As much hay as I've made out of my own little neologism, my gut instinct is to be deeply suspicious of labels and the use of categories to organize knowledge. I developed this aversion while working for an art dealer, when I finally figured out, after years of assiduously studying art history, that most "schools" of art making (from symbolism to op-art to minimalism) were just linguistic confections used to sell art to simple-minded rich people. The artists themselves couldn't care less, so long as they could sell their work.

This doesn't mean crowdsourcing isn't a relevant practice within journalism. When a newspaper uses an open call to solicit editorial content from its readers—that's crowdsourcing. And when it asks readers to pore over thousands of pages of documents to help ferret out malfeasance, that's crowdsourcing too. We need these labels, however inexact and simplistic they may be, in order to discuss the rapid change sweeping across our world.

But crowdsourcing is a process, a means to an end. The product is the same, whether it's "good" or "bad" journalism. We can't put the process on a pedestal, and neglect the product. Because I liked Karp's post that much, I'll give him the final word:

We need to recognize the larger sphere that journalism now occupies and the larger group of people who are now acting as journalists — and we need to help them all succeed for the greater good that journalism, in its ideal, has always been about.

Here, here.

WNYC Crowdsources its own Investigation

I appeared on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show yesterday. For those not in New York, WNYC is New York's premier public radio station, and Brian Lehrer hosts a daily political call-in show. (Full disclosure: My wife, Alysia Abbott, is a freelance radio producer and works for the BL Show from time to time.) Brian has had me on to discuss crowdsourcing before, but this time Brian and his team wanted to try their own crowdsourcing experiment. I was on hand to help launch the effort.

Brian is asking his listeners to count the number of SUVs vis a vis total cars on their blocks, and report the numbers back to the Brian Lehrer Show Website. This is an ideal citizen journalism project, in that it's a simple, discrete task that employs the power of a crowd without being overly reliant on its wisdom (a tougher prospect, to be sure.) And sure enough, barely 24 hours after airing, some 51 records have already been entered on the project's home page.

I know Jim Colgan, the producer who put yesterday's crowdsourcing segment together, and we spoke several days before the show about Assignment Zero and the lessons learned. What I find encouraging is that our "highly satisfying failure" is already leading to improved experiments. Jim read my assessment, and modified the Lehrer experiment accordingly. And Off the Bus, the crowdsourcing project run by AZ alums Amanda Michel, has incorporated many of those same lessons.

I'd like to wrap up this post with my own, mini-experiment. On the Lehrer show yesterday I spontaneously challenged some listener to come forward to create a GoogleMap of the SUV data once it comes in. I'd like to repeat that challenge. Anyone interested should contact me at JeffHowe at Wiredmag.com.

Web Apps We'll Learn to Tolerate

Yesterday Read/Write Web, the Internet blog (is that redundant in the way "landscape gardener" is?) linked to one of the Assignment Zero interviews published by Wired.com. The interview was between JPG Magazine founder Derek Powazek and Ragnar Danneskjold, the founder of Subvert & Profit, a site that claims to represent the "crowdsourcing black market." Subvert & Profit pays people to vote for it's clients stories on social media sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. S&P, claims Danneskjold—a pseudonym swiped from Ayn Rand, the patron saint of sociopaths—"will operate a full-fledged marketplace for clandestine actions on the Internet." All together now: Ewwwwwwwwww.

And Subvert & Profit is not alone. A company called User/Submitted employs the same strategy, which is, in a few words, to stuff the ballot boxes on enormously influential sites like Digg, Reddit.com (owned by Wired.com) and Stumbleupon. Here's my somewhat contrarian reaction: Yawn—I hear they're gambling in Monte Carlo too. I find script kiddies and other species of black hat vermin as loathsome as the next guy, I'm about as surprised to see them as I am to see slugs on a mushroom. So long as there's been systems, there's been people who will exploit their weaknesses. In some cases, subversion serves the common good. In other cases it serves up splogs and spam.

This isn't to excuse Subvert & Profit. Rather I want to discourage the finger wagging and encourage social media sites in their attempts to build a more fool-proof voting systems that are less prone to being gamed. God knows that our government has had its challenges stamping out voter fraud. For most of the country's first century, gaming the system was simply how municipal officials (and perhaps a few presidents) got into office. The feds' attempts to ameliorate the situation has, and continues to be, pretty darn slipshod.

But then, that's government. We expect more from private industry, what with the free-market incentives and all that. If Digg proves itself to be one big link farm, I'm confident someone else will come up with a social media site with teflon protection from "the dark side of crowdsourcing." And it will work, at least for a while. As Assignment Zero interview notes, "let the arms race continue."

The Importance of Community

It was exceedingly difficult to sum up a complex, six-month project in the 2,000 words Wired.com allotted. As such, there were several themes left undeveloped. Due to the same space constraints, I was also unable to relate the various heroics that went into snatching (a qualified) victory from the jaws of defeat. It's easy enough to dispense with both of these tasks at the same time, as there's much overlap between the two.

Crowdsourcing projects are generally characterized as being the product of a few super-contributors and a mass of people who contribute some minor bits. I've heard this called the "dirty little secret of open source," the fact that most of the heavy lifting is done, not by the crowd per se, but by a few select individuals from within the crowd. I'd like to posit another rule: Any crowdsourcing project must install one go-to guy (or girl) who will thanklessly toil day and night to keep the project on the rails. At a magazine this person is called the Production Manager. On Assignment Zero he was called David Cohn.

It is no exaggeration to say that Assignment Zero would have never launched, must less reached completion, without David. Saddled with the totally inadequate title of "associate editor," in reality David did everything from customize Drupal for us, play Webmaster, manage the content on the site and play point person for a wide variety of volunteers and contributors. It's no accident that contributor after contributor emailed me to tell me how much they loved working with him. "The great thing about David isn't that he'll take on all the dirty jobs and work all night to get them done," Lauren Sandler said to me several weeks into the project. "It's that he never plays the martyr. He's all walk, no talk."  David is not motivated by laurels and glory, but he deserves both, in spades. (Full disclosure: David is my writing and research assistant on the crowdsourcing book. I'm lucky to have him.)

Another concept that by all rights should have been more fleshed out in the Wired.com piece was the importance of community. While I'd like to think this idea suffuses the piece, I could probably have been more explicit in noting its importance to making AZ productive. Lucky for us, our organizers, Tish Grier and Amanda Michel, understood this to a degree that the rest of us did not.

There was a crucial turning point when a rift opened up between the journalist types (myself included) on one side and Amanda and Tish on the other. They felt our volunteer editors had to play community manager, going out and soliciting contributors, keeping people engaged, holding a few hands. Us hard-bitten journos essentially snorted in disdain. Editors do not play cheerleader, and God knows they do not do outreach. We won the battle and, in doing so, contributed to losing the war. The plain fact is that  in the future, journalists will have to develop these skills if they want to succeed in a future in which their readers are also their writers.

The crowd does not contribute in a vacuum. They do so as part of a community of other contributors. I see this again and again in researching my book and, no surprise, it was true with Assignment Zero as well. Tish has written an excellent distillation of how this went down at Assignment Zero, and I'd suggest anyone serious about crowdsourcing and journalism experiments put it on their summer reading list.

"The Process of Elimination is Undervalued" — My Assignment Zero Evaluation on Wired.com

And so it comes to an end. After more than six months Assignment Zero passed its final milestone today when Wired.com published my decidedly ambivalent assessment of the project. It was, as I wrote in the piece, a "highly satisfying failure." A few of my readers had asked me to enumerate exactly what elements failed and what elements succeeded. I think the Wired.com piece performs this task adequately, with one exception, raised by Daren C. Brabham in the same comments section in the above link.

I neglected to point out the degree of mission creep Assignment Zero suffered. As Daren points out, to the extent  that exploring "crowdsourcing" was our mandate, that term came to become synonymous with everything Web 2.0. That's a terrible dilution of a process and methodology as rich, and precise, as crowdsourcing. As I noted in my June 28th post, the subject could more properly be called "cool forms of collaborative production on the Internet."

The sad fact is that being a buzzword, people tend to apply crowdsourcing to whatever new, nascent and exciting phenomenon they're attempting to define. As Daren suggests, a lot of work (and probably no small amount of bickering) will be needed to lasso that word and establish some quasi-permanent definition.

At any rate, I hope the Wired piece inspires more debate, on this blog and elsewhere.

Assignment Zero on Wired.com

Wired.com has published some of the best products from Assignment Zero today. I'm anxious to hear feedback if anyone wants to post here or send me trackbacks/links. More on my own reactions soon ...