Crowdsourcing

A Belated Congratulations: ProPublica Gets on the Bus

Last week a friend and erstwhile colleague, Amanda Michel hit not one but two home runs. Michel was the driving (and as our mutual friend David Cohn notes, unheralded) force behind the Huffington Post's citizen journalism project, Off the Bus. OTB was arguably the first truly successful attempt at citizen journalism, and the Columbia Journalism of Review wisely tapped her to write an in-depth feature on her experience running it, called "Get Off The Bus - the future of Pro-Am Journalism."

Amanda, David and I worked together on Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero. When it ended I wrote that it had been a "beautiful failure," which was to say that while we hadn't achieved our goals, we'd learned a lot about how the crowd might be tapped to produce quality, investigative journalism. I've been inexpressibly pleased to watch Amanda make lemonade out of those lemons with Off the Bus.

As it happens, she now has the opportunity to further develop the distributed reporting model. The same day the CJR piece came out the non-profit, investigative journalism outfit, ProPublica, announced it had hired her to head up its own citizen journalism effort. This is a big deal in our small world of pro-am journalism. Michel is possessed with a big brain, a big heart (an essential attribute when managing dozens-nay-hundreds of unpaid contributors) and a tireless work ethic.

Here's Knight Foundation's Michelle McLellan on what it all means for the journalism community at large. 

8020 est Morte! Vive le 8020!

The funeral dirge for newspapers continued as the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News published its final edition last Friday. The casualty list is sure to grow. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz summed up the dire signals in his State of the News story today: "Newspapers are killing sections and closing bureaus, particularly in Washington. The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press have cut back home delivery to three days a week. The Washington Times has dropped its Saturday print edition. The Christian Science Monitor is switching to Web-only publication in April. Gannett Co., publisher of USA Today, is forcing staffers to take a week-long furlough. Hearst plans to close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer unless it gets a buyer."

So it seemed somewhat incongruous to learn that 8020 Publishing—purveyor of the lush, user-generated photo magazine, JPG Magazine—had found an investor that would allow it to keep trucking. Former CEO Mitchell Fox, wrote in an email that a joint venture between camera retailer Adorama and private investors had formed "for the purpose of executing on the unique vision that led to the creation of JPG Magazine, jpgmag.com and everywheremag.com." Was it a fire sale? Possibly. Fox has said 8020 had lots of suitors, but they evidently weren't serious enough to keep 8020 from shuttering earlier this year.

But who cares? The fact remains that JPG—the magazine and the vibrant community around it—provides a robust model for how communities and publishers can collaborate to create compelling content. In these most grim of times, newspapers could do worse than to follow its lead.

Convergence Happens: Newspapers and YouTube

Alan Booker, longtime Crowdsourcing.com reader and gadfly, tipped me to a couple great maps this morning. They show how many newspapers in the US and the UK have created YouTube channels to showcase video reporting. The number is larger than most of us would expect—265 in the US alone. Kudos to 10,000 Words (US) and Andy Dickinson (UK) for creating the maps.

The US:

and the UK

View Larger Map

Mumbai and the Media

The coverage of the Mumbai attacks offered the bizarre and increasingly frequent spectacle: the news media reporting on its inadequacy. Within minutes of the first attacks, on-the-scene reports started appearing on Twitter, Flickr and citizen-media sites like NowPublic.com. Unencumbered by expensive cameras, skeptical editors or professional ethics, citizen journalists filled the breech during the early hours of the crisis, "while there was a vacuum of official information from government sources or from mainstream media outlets still struggling to understand the extent of the attacks," according to a somewhat breathless New York Times piece yesterday.

How fast was the crowd? I was in the office on Wednesday afternoon, sifting through a mountain of paperwork and generally ignoring my news feeds. "Jesus," exclaimed Noah Shachtman, from his cubicle here at Wired's New York offices. "Terrorist attacks in Mumbai." Less than an hour later Noah published this post to Wired's Danger Room blog, noting that dozens of videos (there are now hundreds) had been uploaded to YouTube, a GoogleMap showing attack sites had been created and blood donors could find out which blood bank to go to on Twitter. Also noted: The fact that Wikipedia was transformed from a reference site to a one-stop shop for the latest updates, a news aggregator nonpariel. (The page now runs over 6,000 words and contains 226 citations.) How fast was the crowd? This chart (courtesy of tweetip) shows the spike in "#Mumbai terror" tweets in the hours following the first shots.

 

What's interesting isn't so much that people used social media to report on a tragic, rapidly unfolding calamity. What's interesting is how commonplace that phenomenon has become. It characterized the coverage of the Asian tsunami, the London bombings, Hurricane Katrina, the Kenyan political unrest, to cite a few examples. It's become institutionalized to the point where the New York Times had sent out a "call for eyewitness accounts" by 5 PM on Wednesday. That's a good thing, because having established that citizen journalism, unlike Santa Claus, actually exists—that it's feasible, and that amateurs can add enormous value to the coverage of an event—we can move on to critiques of its actual usefulness.

I think we're going to see just such a crique playing out in the next several days, but a few excellent posts have already emerged that effectively problematize the simplistic (and unhelpful) "look-ma-we-beat-CNN-at-their-own-game" back-patting that floods the blogosphere after any one of these calamities. My hope is that we're entering an era of Crowdsourcing 2.0 when it comes to journalism.

Writing on the Made By Many blog, Tim Malbon asks if the coverage of the attacks on Twitter wasn't less a "crowdsourced version of the news" than "an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets"? (He has an excellent follow-up as well, asking how we might create a filtered version of twitter, to keep out the "twats.")

Another valuable source of critical commentary comes from the social media scholar, Gaurav Mishra. He's created a "work-in-progress case study" of how citizen journalists covered the Mumbai attacks, and as far as I can tell it's unrivaled in terms of depth and critical analysis. More, I'm sure, is to come.

The Pitfalls of Citizen Journalism

I've got my kids today (sitter's home sick), so I'll keep this one short and sweet: As many of you already know (certainly the readers of my book), I'm ambivalent about the usefulness of crowdsourcing in journalism. Today proved my ambivalence isn't misguided. This morning a citizen journalist with supposed inside information posted a story to CNN's iReport site claiming that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains. Apple stock, unsurprisingly, dive bombed as a result, its fall only arrested once Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton came out disputing the claim. (The story has been removed. Here's CNN's statement). (Update: Now the SEC has announced it will investigate the posting.) CNN wanted to give its viewers a voice. Instead it provided stock manipulators with one. Nice.

I think the crowd make excellent sources and additional sets of eyes and ears, but I believe the future lies in carefully cultivated partnerships between professionals and their audiences. Examples: I'm a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and their TPMMuckraker project, am bullish on my colleague David Cohn's crowdfunded journalism site, Spot.Us. Both let professionals work the phones and write the copy, but encourage the crowd to do what it does best (unearthing data and marshalling support for underreported stories, respectively).

Okay, so I never make things short and sweet. But here's my point: I'm much less enthusiastic about straight-up, so-called "citizen journalism," in which readers are asked to perform the same duties as their professional counterparts, without any support or guidance from them. CNN's iReport is a case in point. CNN threw up a shingle on their Website, and asked its viewers to contribute their own reporting. This both diminishes the contributions of the amateurs by ghettoizing it onto the back of the bus (metaphorically speaking), and fails to hold it to the sort of standards that professionals must adhere to. Like, say, identifying yourself before posting a story that could cost shareholders millions of dollars. Anonymity has its place on the Web, and it might even have its place on news outlet comment boards (though that debate continues to rage). It does not have its place in journalism, per se.

iReport's tagline is "Unedited. Unfiltered. News." I think there are some internal conflicts in that claim. "Citizen journalism makes about as much sense as citizen dentistry," Leo Brody, the founder of NowPublic, told me when I was writing the book. And it looks like someone—or in this case, Apple's shareholders—nearly got an accidental root canal.

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!