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.

Comments

[Mathew Ingram]

Great post, Jeff.

As for the difference between Series A and Series B financing, that's easy -- Series A comes first and Series B comes second. Assignment completed :-)

[alan]

I read Scott’s post yesterday and re-read it and came away from it with a little voice saying; yea right of course, common sense prevails.

As much as Scott’s common sense/striped down approach appeals to the practical in me I still think that the process part has some variables that suggest a complexity and profundity not present in pre-“citizen journalism” or “crowdsourcing” days.

The community/collaboration part of the process takes the negative connotation of “crowd” to a more positive place. The community/process has changed and is a lot less loosely connected than to-fore. One clue might be a generation of individuals who are at-one with the technology that’s being utilized. The process has more to do with the marriage and transformation of community and culture through individualized yet combined participation.

Great use of the George Orwell piece. Just as 1984, as a term, had little impact and no broader connotation in 1949 it did carry within it the seeds for a shift of personal consciousness regarding evolving cultural changes as they impacted individual lives. Today those four numbers bring to mind scenarios that fleshed out could fill any of the great newspapers many times over.

Language “is” the precursor of consciousness and to that-end the myriad elements connected to the process of crowdsourcing; cultural, social, economic, biographical and the list goes on, and how they are going to be fully manifest is still unclear. The language has yet to be clearly defined.

Here is the rub! We can see what social networking is doing to the landscape. We are experiencing the impact that access to, in this case journalism, is having upon traditional forms.

Scott is right and wrong! Right with journalism is journalism regardless of the surrounding noise and that “the words we use to describe things can have a powerful effect on how we perceive them.” His lens might have to be adjusted to catch the larger battle rather than the fight upon his home turf. CS is taking hold upon a much broader swath of the landscape and is going to be very broad and deep in its reach.

“Crowdsourcing as a process, a means to an end,” catches just a fraction of the manifest reality.

This unfolding impulse will need no pedestal. It is forming the ground for architraves intimating a new order, technologically and economically supported collective individualism.
An order that dispenses with the old Marxian connotations and replaces them with a wisdom gleaned from virtual collaboration and enlightenment gained from personal participation.

Cheers, Alan.

[tish grier]

Hi Jeff...I always take Scott with a grain of salt...

but, in all seriousness, I think the labels are there mostly to make a distinction between who gets paid, if they're going to get paid, and how much (as well as what rights they lose over their content.) If you read the various Terms of Service at many of the "citizen journalism" portals, you'll get my drift...

and I like your distinction on the two parts of being a journalist. I err on the inquisitive/talkative side myself. The writing's always been a total chore!

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heh, pretty nice :)

[Ethan Bauley]

Check out Scott's brainchild/startup...Digg by people who know what they're talking about on a broad array of topics:

"Publish2 is a social network and 2.0 platform for journalists (and independent “news bloggers,” “citizen” journalists, student journalists, i.e. ALL journalists, BROADLY defined), which aims to put journalists at the center of news on the web by creating a journalist-powered news aggregator."

Check out the rest of it here:

http://blog.publish2.com/2007/08/14/introducing-publish2-networked-news/

I think it's brilliant. Probably the smartest "Web 2" model I've seen in a while [well, besides kiva, AWS, etc]

[catererdude]

This is the first time I have come across this blog (on stumbleupon) however it is a very good analysis. A bit of "news blogging" you might want to check out is on http://www.secretarialblog.co.uk. The blog reports on a demonstration that secretaries and PAs had in central london. Cool stuff and crowd powered?

[Ansel]

Re: venture financing and Series A versus series B.

Series B investment means they recevied a 2nd amount of funding ($$$ or capital) from professional investors to fund the growth of their stratup, an unproven, or sepeculative venture. The inital investment from professionals is called the A round (or series A) and is made by venture capitalists (VC). The B round can be from the same investors as the A round or may include new investors.

Startups typically follow a pattern for funding their growth, starting with money from angel investors (friends, family, empoyers, wealthy individuals in the community,etc), and then a succession of investmens (series A,B,C,...) from VC's. All investors receive shares in the company, which are not avalable to the general public. For the investor the payoff typically comes from an initial public offer (IPO). This when the comany has grown large enough to be listed on a stock exchange and makes it possible for the general public to then invest in the firm (buy shares) and the original investors to sell their shares to the public for a profit. Alternatively the firm may be acquired pre-IPO and the general public does not have the opportunity to invest.

As a reader the fact that a firm has received a B round suggests 3 key things:
1 The category in which the firm particiaptes (e.g. social networking, or blogging, or search, etc) is attracting serious attention, which can be good for all firms in that category and suggests that some smart people are willing put money down that the category will do well in the long run.
2 The firm has made meaningul progress using the A round and convinced professional investors that there is a solid investment opportunity (not as easy as during the .com boom)
3. Using the firm's servcies is less risky than before the B round; they now have more money to keep the lights on and grow the value of the offering (more features, more users, etc.)

A great deal more can be said but those are the highlighs; hope that helps,

Ansel