Crowdsourcing

A Coup for Crowdsourced Journalism ...

I really have no business posting anything to my blog today, so I'm going to keep it short, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to congratulate Joshua Micah Marshall and the other folks at the Talking Points Memo and TPM Muckraker. On Tuesday TPM won a George Polk Award for their coverage of the US Attorney General scandal last year. Muckracker—and more to our point here, its readers—not only helped break the story, but proved the stunning efficacy of distributed reporting by delving through thousands of e-mails and internal documents released by the DOJ. If you're not a journalist (and maybe even if you are), the Polk award won't ring any bells. Suffice to say it's a big enough deal that by recognizing TPM the traditional journalistic establishment is essentially also recognizing that powerful new forms of journalism are emerging.

I won't recount the whole story, which can be found at the NYTimes, but here's Dan Kennedy's take:

Dan Kennedy, a media critic who teaches at Northeastern University, has followed the site from its inception. What Talking Points Memo does, he said, “is a different kind of journalism, based on the idea that my readers know more than I do.”

Writing on a blog for his journalism students, Mr. Kennedy called the announcement of the Polk award “a landmark day for a certain kind of journalism.” Talking Points Memo, he said, “relentlessly kept a spotlight on what other news organizations were uncovering and watched patterns emerge that weren’t necessarily visible to those covering just a small piece of the story.”

He added, “This is crowd sourcing — reporting based on the work of many people, including your readers.”

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.

Local Content Harvesting ...

A few weeks ago KFTY-TV, a Santa Rosa, California station owned by Clear Channel, laid off its 13-person news staff in order to cut costs. They have not shuttered the station, however, nor do they plan on ending their local news coverage, says Steve Spendlove, station GM. Instead, you guessed it, they'll be harvesting local content (all together now—"Eww.")

This is significant, readers, because up to now most outlets have claimed (many in good faith) that their citizen journalism efforts have been about establishing a more meaningful relationship with their audience and creating a better news product. Leave it to Clear Channel, the bete noire of all right-thinking Americans since they ruined terrestrial radio in the mid-90s, to turn it into a cost-saving measure.

Wish I had time to parse the various meanings of this move, but I've got a sick kid on my hands and lots of work for the book. And lots of smart people have already mulled this one over. Just want to make sure the crowdsourcing community is up on this ...

The original SF Chronicle Piece.
The always-savvy Matthew Ingram on crowdsourcing as cost-cutting.
Poynter's Peter Zollman piles on his indignation.

There are others, but an intrepid reader will pick up the conversation by following links in the above posts. Have to run ...

A Cautionary Tale

It seems that one of Gannett's larger newspapers, the Indianapolis Daily Star, has hit a snag on its way to implementing the company's "Information Center" newsroom, aka the Seven Desk Initiative (which I wrote about on Wired.com as well as in a series of blog posts). Part of the Star's plans for reinventing its operations included asking its editorial staff to write advertorials. In a memo to management obtained by Editor & Publisher, the union representing the paper's writers and editors strenuously objected to the violation of ethics guidelines that require the union to uphold a "high wall of separation between editorial and advertising." Management then modified its request to include only copyeditors and designer, but those "non-bylined" positions are also covered by the guild's guidelines.

Issues of "church and state," as they're commonly referred to in journalism, aren't central to crowdsourcing per se, but the situation at the Daily Star raises issues with which any newsroom putting the crowd to work will have to deal. There's a common misperception that the wacky ways of the Web have blurred all the old boundaries. This is true, as far as it goes. But new boundaries have been established, and some look remarkably similar to the old ones. Online communities may not give a whit whether reporters write advertorials, but they will damn well expect to be informed of the fact. When open source methodologies migrated to fields outside programming, certain cultural assumptions that helped define the open source movement came along for the ride. Transparency, in all its forms, is taken for granted. If Gannett wants to play in the new sandbox, it's going to have to learn the new rules. This shouldn't be too hard since, to restate, they look a lot like the old ones. To quote an excellent post on Ken Doctor's digital media site Content Bridges, "Cardinal rule number one for the digital content age: Build trust."

Happy Holidays!

Gannett Roundup: The Blogs, Part II

Jonathan Rothman at Web 2.0 Television wrote up a nice companion piece to my  "reaction round-up" from a few days ago. Includes a few choice excepts from Poynter's e-Media Tidbits, Editor & Publisher and the Brit media watcher, Press-Gazette. But don't believe me, check out Jonathan's post.

Gannett's Crowdsourcing in Action

Never mind the debate over whether Gannett's plan will or will not work. The Cincinnati Enquirer has put up a page through which readers can report any voting problems occurring in their precincts. Twenty-five instances of irregularities have already emerged, each mapped out using an embedded Google Map on the Enquirer site. An Enquirer reporter dashed off this note about the effect: "Look at these citizen reports ..and breaking news amid….reporter and photog threatened with arrest….Congressman sent home to get proper i.d. Crowdsourcing rocks."

Gannett Roundup: The Blogs

There was far more commentary than I could begin to digest, but it seemed like a worthwhile project to try to build a compendium, however incomplete, of the more trenchant takes on Gannett's Seven Desk Plan. I've split reactions into pro and con, with the latter running after the jump. If I missed you, and I won't be surprised to hear that did, email me or, better yet, post a comment expressing your views.

• Dan Gillmor calls the Gannett initiative "truly remarkable," but adds the world-wise observation that, "no doubt, a major part of this initiative is to save money. Gannett is famously careful with its spending, to put it mildly." Gannett execs didn't discuss the "local information centers" in those terms, but I've no reason to think Gillmor's wrong, and many reasons – from my experiencing looking at other companies putting user-generated content/crowdsourcing models to work – that he's right.

• The most lengthy consideration came, unsurprisingly, from NewAssignment.Net, where longtime Washington Post editor Steve Fox offers an enthusiastic endorsement for the Fort Myers News-Press' experiment with distributed investigatory journalism. Fox also contributes some excellent historical context, recalling reactions amongst journalists to the launch of USA Today and how papers rushed pell-mell to put up Web sites in 1996.

• Slashdot asks if Gannett "successfully duplicate what online communities have been doing for years?" which naturally has fueled discussion on the site's ever-active forum boards.

• I thought some of the most astute commentary came from Robb Montgomery at The Editors Weblog:

The key to me is recognizing that databases are the gold mines fueling the business models in this scenario and how well they are structured, mined and managed will be one of the keys to rolling this plan out. ...  I like how the values are focused on investing in community participation in a never-ending feedback loop. ... Look, what Gannett is really trying to do here is build a new model around their key assets – customer data - deep, local customer data. News, community and marketing data.

That's spot on. In my discussions with Gannett reporters and executives there was a marked focus on how best to utilize little league scores (this came up with multiple, unrelated sources), neighborhood watch information and potholes. In other words, "deep, local customer data." Gannett calls this "hyper-local" news. Robb ends by noting that,

Managing structured data is the linchpin in executing a vision like this. I know that sounds like gibberish to some but, mark my words, getting real smart about managing all of your company's databases will be the key to making this work

Spot on again, and this is why reporters and editors might think about dusting off their CVs, or more to the point, begin thinking about retraining. As Gregory Korte, the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter noted in my Wired News piece, ""The newspaper of the future is going to need more programmers than copy editors, and we're going to have to figure out how to make that transition." The only change I'd make to that quote is to strike "programmers" and sub in "database managers." Gannett exec Michael Maness told me that newsrooms might discover that the folks in research library departments might find themselves well-suited to this new kind of newsroom.

• Rhetorica, the press blog written by Dr. Andrew R. Cline, a journalism prof at the Missouri State, proposes that Gannett owes us something because, " after all, it was Gannett that played a big role in damaging print journalism with the introduction of USA Today--the paper that convinced print it should be like TV."

• Doc Searls welcomes the news, then compares key numbers (circulation, positive vs. negative mentions on Google, et. al.) between the News-Press in my article (Ft. Myers), which has repeatedly experimented with ways to involve readers and make the operation more transparent, and the Santa Barbara News-Press, which is closed in virtually every way. It ain't pretty.

• I left Jeff Jarvis for last, as he gives us a nice bridge between Pro and Con. He applauds Gannett's move on Buzzmachine, but also notes that he's "seen plenty of newsroom reorganizations in my day and they haven’t changed the biorhythms of news yet. ... I fear that the culture of the newsroom will do everything it can to stop this." My own experience in the newsroom – a formative year as a general assignment reporter at the Columbus Dispatch right out of college – makes me share Jeff's fears. There were guys who couldn't adjust to women in the newsroom; can't imagine how they might cotton to amateurs conducting frontline research on stories. Jeff goes on to note, however, that Gannett tends to own smaller papers, filled with young reporters. This point was emphasized by Michael Maness, one of the architects of Gannett's plan, who told me that anymore, cub reporters come in already knowing how to shoot and edit their own video footage so need very little training to move to a multi-media, multi-platform operation.

Read past the jump to hear the critics:

Gannett: When Writing the Story Is the Story

Watching the blogosphere dig its teeth into the Gannett article in Wired News gave me a sense of intellectual vertigo: The story embodied the very subject matter with which it was concerned. Put more plainly, the piece itself was an example of how new and old media can interact to create a reinvigorated form of journalism. To wit: A magazine article inspired a major policy shift at a corporation, which I discovered in doing some reporting for a blog entry a month ago. This led to a scoop I was able to take to my magazine's Web site. I then used the blog to provide supplementary materials, which not only allowed me to provide readers with a peak at the factual framework for the article, but also drove considerable traffic to the blog, which will result in more tips, ideas and contacts for further stories in both print and online versions of Wired. Three platforms working together, feeding off one another. Rad.

The New (Investigative) Journalism

There are several interesting issues raised by Gannett's reorganization, but the one I'm personally most fascinated with is how they will approach investigative, or "watchdog" functions. This hasn't received nearly as much attention as it deserves. Below I'm posting a story about how the Ft. Myers News-Press employed a crowdsourcing model to an investigation into a suspect sewer utility. While I was able to write up a compressed version of the anecdote in my WiredNews piece, that hardly reflects the time I spent with Gannett reporters and executives discussing the News-Press case in particular, and crowdsourced investigations in general. I'll be revisiting this subject over the next few days, but to get us started, here's Gannett's more in-depth coverage of how the News-Press put the crowd to work to great effect:

News-Press Sparks Huge Response with "Crowd-Sourcing" Approach

Journalists at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla are expanding First Amendment and watchdog coverage by engaging readers online.

Using a method called “crowd sourcing” — one of the innovative approaches under Gannett’s strategic plan to news gathering being developed by the Newspaper Division — the News-Press was able to enlist the community in a major investigation into local public utilities.

It began like all good newspaper investigations — complaints about the way the local government was working. Some Cape Coral residents were being asked to pay as much as $28,000 when public utility (water, sewer, irrigation) lines were installed in front of their houses.

But this time, says Mackenzie Warren, deputy to the publisher/special projects at The News-Press, “instead of doing months of investigation and then delivering ‘final’ answers, we told readers: ‘Here’s what we are looking at. You look too and report back to the community over our site.’”

“Obviously, people were unhappy. We wanted to understand why this was happening. Was there mismanagement? Was there shady dealing? So we asked our readers in print and online, ‘Help us find out why Cape Coral’s utility expansion project was costing residents so much,’” Warren says.

Reader response stunned newspaper editors. “Phones rang off the hook. We learned that if you are going to ask people to ‘come join us,’ you better be prepared to receive them. We had no idea of the level of angst waiting to be unleashed,” says Warren.

Information Center FAQ

Dubow's memo (see below) links to an internal Gannett site. Here's the information center FAQ. It's a longish document, but well worth reading as it expands considerably on the brief description of the "seven desks" I posted last night.

FAQ

Q. What is an Information Center?
A. The Information Center is a new way of transforming the process of gathering and disseminating news and information. It is the evolution of the newsroom, focused on gathering the information our readers and viewers want using words, images and video and distributing it across multiple platforms: the daily newspaper, online, mobile, non-daily publications and any other media possible to meet our readers’ needs. Creating an Information Center means retooling the newsroom, expanding into multimedia, embracing community interaction, shifting resources and rethinking the way a community is covered. Gannett’s Newspaper Division, which has conducted a series of pilot programs to create and test the Information Center concept, organized the Center around seven key information gathering areas: digital; public service; community conversation; local; custom content; data; and multimedia. (More about each desk below). Information Centers can be tailored to fit the needs of the individual operations in each division.

Q. Why is Gannett making these changes?
A. Gannett adopted a Strategic Plan in early 2006 that called for the creation of the Information Center as a way to become more customer-centric and innovative in the way we gather and disseminate news and information. Gannett’s mission under the plan is to provide must-have news and information on demand across all media, ever mindful of our journalistic responsibilities.

Q. What is the purpose of the Information Center?
A. The Information Center will enable us to gather and disseminate multimedia news and information in a way more suited to the needs of our customers today. We will deliver the content our audiences want at any time, anywhere and to any device.  As print newsrooms were geared to the scheduling demands of the daily newspaper, the Information Center will be geared to the 24/7 demands of our customers. We will provide more hyper-local information, more databases (restaurants, entertainment, schools, local sports, etc.), more interactive opportunities, more video and more breaking news than we ever have before. And we will deliver it on multiple platforms. The Information Center also is designed to make even better use of the exceptional resources we have. We will make wiser and more strategic use of our employees to do more of what our customers want.

Gannett: The Seven Desks

Earlier today I published a story on WiredNews about Gannett's newsroom reorganization. As often happens in my reporting, I gather far more material than I can possibly use. This time, however, the story deals directly with the same issues covered by crowdsourcing.com. So rather than let all that material – which is often as interesting, and more revealing, than what winds up in print – gather dust, I'll be running it here. Over the next few days I'll be posting extended transcripts with some of my sources inside Gannett as well as several of the internal documents off the Gannett Web site that provide some insights on what CEO Craig Dubow calls "the newsroom of the future." (My apologies to those of you more interested in the stock photo, or video game side of things. We'll return to those subjects soon enough.)

The following is a break down of the seven divisions into which Gannett newsrooms will be reorganized. It's a pretty significant departure from how most newsrooms are currently structured, and, I think, gives a glimpse of how Gannett expects their outlets to work in the future.

The 7 Primary Job Areas

By May, the editorial side of each Gannett newspaper will be organized into the following seven primary job areas, which make up the Information Center:

Digital — selecting the best platform for news delivery;

Public Service — extending First Amendment coverage, in part by involving readers and asking for community input on investigative areas;

Community Conversation — expanding the concept of the editorial page; managing staff commentary, from editorials and blogs to columns; and encouraging community participation online;

Local — expanding local coverage and re-establishing sports, business and feature reporting into hyper-local areas;

Custom Content — connecting with identified target audiences and looking for efficiencies in repurposing content across all platforms;

Data — elevating the practice of managing and acquiring deep local information;

Multimedia — leading all visual presentation across every platform; photographers will be trained for any type of multimedia.

More to come. -- Jeff

Calling all Reader-Reporters ...

Last Sunday Dennis Ryerson, the editor-in-chief of the Indianapolis Star, wrote an editor's note announcing a change in the paper's policy. Crowdsourcing, he wrote, is a term with which his readers may be unfamiliar. His newsroom wasn't too familiar with it either. Nevertheless, "it's a concept we will be using more and more as we work harder to involve our readers in the preparation of our news reports, in print and online." With more papers feeling open to experimentation in the wake of falling revenues and scary business forecasts, I see this as a sign of things to come. Read the whole editorial here. Thanks to Jeff Jarvis, who points to the note on his blog Buzzmachine.