Get Ready for the Crowd

One of the most interesting threads from last week's Networked Journalism Summit was reports on recent crowdsourcing projects.

Since my blog is read by more than just the news digerati and increasingly by small "mainstream" independent newspapers, here's some background on what the heck crowdsourcing is. (If you already know just skip half way down in this entry).

So you know that crazy "citizen journalism" thing we've been doing in Bakersfield, where average people are invited to write their own stories about their community that get printed and distributed to their neighbors? And that wacky "social networking" stuff that encourages anyone to blog and share their deepest secrets with each other on our web sites, including our main newspaper site, without any editorial oversight? Apologies for repeating myself, but in this case I'm speaking to the nice old editor I met at the Georgia Associated Press conference who picked up a print edition of The Northwest Voice and declared a cheerleader's story and photos about her summer cheer leading camp experience "crap that isn't anything new" (to which I responded, "that crap was written by some mother's daughter, and she's probably proudly displaying it her refrigerator and sending it to everyone she knows, unlike most of what you've written in your long career." No, I didn't actually say that last bit but I sure did think it.)

Crowdsourcing takes this all up about 100 notches by not just encouraging participation, but focusing a group of volunteer contributors on a specific research / reporting topic. Just a few examples:

• The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. uploaded public documents related to a proposed sewer expansion and invited hundreds of local experts such as accountants, lawyers and engineers to scour them and help identify relevant trends and facts that should be further investigated. Their work was folded back into the resulting news stories.
• More recently, the News-Press sued FEMA for information about how it provided aid to people affected by hurricane Katrina. They posted it in a database on the site, asked the public to search for information on their houses and friends' homes, and picked up leads that they further investigated and reported on. This worked because many of the people in "the crowd" who helped out had been trying to get this information themselves, but weren't having any luck. They had a stake in the outcome of the story because they were part of it.
• Another is Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero, which in conjunction with Wired Magazine invited a network of volunteers to conduct 80 interviews of people related to a trend story, including our Mary Lou Fulton (in this case the trend was crowdsourcing itself, which is a little ironic but certainly a valid story). You can read Rosen's initial thoughts and learnings about the project on his blog.
• And my favorite, simply because the barriers to entry are so low and the information is so relevant to everyone, is WNYC public radio's feature on price gouging. They invited people to go to their local grocery store and check the price of a gallon of non-organic milk and a six-pack of Budweiser beer and post the results online. The radio station then plotted the results on a Google map.
  

This idea of letting anyone not only contribute, but also research and report, is a radical new idea that borrows from the open-source software movement. In the information space it's probably best exemplified by Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, but anyone can also edit or "roll back" changes on to prevent abuse and bias from self-interested parties. One big difference when this idea is applies to journalism is that the content is much more focused and subject to all the time constraints in a business that is focused on the here and now.

This concept is either the old newspaper editor's worse nightmare, or her salvation. I happen to consider it a next logical step in journalism, because it allows stories to be investigated and told that may never have seen the light of day, especially as mainstream news organizations cut their reporting staffs (although that is definitely not the reason to look into crowdsourcing).

And to dispel any protectionist reactions, it doesn't do away with the role of the editor. If anything, it expands it to being more about managing and inspiring a group of people who are
getting nothing more than "psychic income" at best for their efforts. Jay Rosen said as much in his report on Assignment Zero, noting the importance of starting with the right people who have the right motivations, and the "sudden coordination costs" that come from identifying what needs to be researched when and by whom, and folding their material back into one cohesive story.

Another knee-jerk reaction in traditional newsrooms is that a crowd comes with a myriad of opinions, sometimes not socially acceptable, and that the newspaper has an obligation to limit that. Jennifer Carroll, VP of Content for Gannett, put a fork in that idea during her panel. She said,

We say "Bring on the debate." We say, "conversation is messy, welcome the noise." From what we hear, our credibitliy is measured by the multipolicity of viewpoints. At the same time, we're never backing away from the journalism side. We're just looking to have a much more open sense of what the dialogue needs to be."

We haven't done anything that could be considered crowdsourcing in Bakersfield yet (one possible exception is our collaborative maps), although as always there are some ideas out there. So all I can offer to this discussion is what I have learned again and again in my career. It all comes down to community.

One thing Jay Rosen said that I thought really rang true was that you'll do better off by getting an existing community to report on a topic -- preferably one that has some shared connection to the topic that you're investigating -- than if you just invite anyone in to contribute. This is more true for the Big Investigative Story than for the average pothole map.

This is similar to what we've learned about participatory media in general. In Bakersfield, the second most popular social networking / participatory news site we have is Tehachapi News because it's focused on a mountain town of 10,000. It gets slightly more traffic than Bakotopia.com. I suspect that's because we provided a community watering hole to a community that existed already. We tapped into behavior that already existed and just made it easier and more convenient for these people to do what they were already doing. (Bakotopia still gets a lot of traffic, and it did reach out to an existing community of musicians and downtown-focused people, but its existing community wasn't quite as big as Tehachapi's).

Jennifer Carroll said much the same, and cited the early success they're seeing at the Des Moines Register with an ongoing story about biofuels. They reached out to people in the biofuels industry and invited them to blog about the topic. She said the biofuels area is quickly becoming one of the most authoritative sources on biofuels.

And that gets me to the big missing element I see in many of the crowdsourcing experiments out there. In my opinion, most are missing a key ingredient: a robust online community where people can not only share information, but express themselves and share with each other.

One of the most important features on all of our participatory sites in Bakersfield is the user profiles. If you go to any of our sites, you'll see that peoples' smiling faces are prominently featured under the heading, "Meet Your Neighbors". On Bakotopia the persona functionality is right at the top, while on Northwest Voice and Tehachapi it's off to the side, but it's always there. Related to this, whenever anyone posts anything, their user profile and photo show up right next to the headline. And everyone's profile can be found through site search, right along with news content and blogs.

People come to our sites not just get published in print, but to get validation from each other. And some never publish a single thing, but update their profiles regularly and post a comment on someone else's content every so often. I think this shows that you can't divorce crowdsourcing from the crowd, or "networked journalism" from a network. Some journalists tend to think of social networking as somehow less important than Journalism with a capital J, but I say what people cover and the people themselves are intertwined. By having social networking tied into a user-contributed content experience, you have the broadcaster(s) and audience all in the same room.

I think Jay Rosen is onto this too, because he hinted that future Assignment Zero projects may seek to engage an "existing social network" around a story of interest to that network. If I can make a suggestion, Facebook groups would be the perfect platform for that, perhaps through a new Facebook application that lets groups collaborate through wiki-like editing tools. But whatever comes of Assignment One or Two or Three, it will be worth watching. Kudos to Rosen for being so open about his successes and failures.

crowdsourcing, netj, networked journalism summit, jay rosen

Networked Journalism Summit: Myheimat and Groundreport

I was fortunate to participate in the Networked Journalism Summit in New York City this year. The premise of the conference, as iterated by organizer Jeff Jarvis, was "more action than talk" to outline next steps to make even more use of "pro-am" journalists (read: bloggers, people who contribute to sites like The Northwest Voice).

The conference was only one day, so truthfully it's pretty hard to get everyone to commit to next steps in such a short period of time (especially the jet-lagged ones). I did collect a zillion business cards though and had some very interesting discussions, and I do believe that some very concrete next steps will emerge. The first step for that next step is for everyone involved in this area to more openly share information with each other, which I started to do with some people who are in this space and pledge to do more of in the future. It's not all about personal PR, folks!

There are two people who really stood out to me, though. I suggest watching what they do next, because I think they're both onto something powerful.

First, there's Martin Huber from a German outfit named Myheimat.de (loosely translated to "My Town" but I'm sure I'm slaughtering that as I don't speak German). You can read his writeup here. The short version is that he's built a system in Germany that automatically creates print publications based on user-contributed content.

Since 2003, his company gogolmedien has gotten 5,000 German contributors to write stories for 18 locally-focused publications that are distributed as what they call "freesheets" in their cities. There are 1,800 such small cities with less than 10,000 residents in Germany, and their objective is ultimately to get it's citizens to cover their own communities.

The concept of regular people writing stories is not new, as we've been doing it in Bakersfield since 2004, along with larger operations like Denver's YourHub.com and Morris Digital.

But what is new is something I've always hoped someone would do. Myheimat print publications are created automatically based on users' content ratings. The highest rated content automatically flows into prefab templates which an editor can view in a PDF, then edit in Adobe InDesign to make just right. If an editor is really busy, he or she can just choose to automatically print the PDF without review. Is this heretical to traditional editors? Well, yes, but ... to potentially cover an entire country like Germany with printed user-contributed content in a way that's profitable, you almost have to do something like that. And in my opinion, we lower the bar on quality a little with user contributed content anyway, so it just makes sense to do the same with printed material. I'm sure there are some legal concerns to work out, but as I've learned in my career, where there is a will there is a way. They've done it in Germany.

Second, I found myself captivated by Rachel Sterne, who has a relatively new site called Groundreport.com. The concept of the site is also not new -- she has 1,000 citizen contributors around the world reporting on international issues (a focus that came out of her experience reporting on the United Nations Security Council and events taking place in Darfur) -- but her ideas and passion for democratizing media are refreshing in a "new" field that is sadly becoming more rote and cookie-cutter by the day.

What's great about Rachel is her knack at matching needs with possibilities. When Rachel was reporting on the U.N. she was also working for file-sharing service Limewire. She felt that she had so much access to information and people at the U.N., and she could see that there were global events that people in the U.N. should pay more attention to. Unfortunately nobody was adequately covering these beats, which was partly the fault of the editors and of the subjects they covered. She realized that the tools that allow regular people to report on important events existed. So she got some funding and hobbled Groundreport together.

Groundreport seeks to democratize news in several ways. From the Netj writeup:

1. GroundReport allows everyone to participate by posting articles, videos or livestreaming content.
2. The community decides what is on the front page through voting - there is no editorial control.
3. GroundReport shares revenue with all contributors based on traffic to their stories.

So again, we see this concept of loosening -- or in this case removing -- editorial control (citizen editing?) and giving profits back to the contributors/editors. Taking myself out of my newspaper shoes, I love this idea of giving total control over to the citizens in certain situations. It doesn't have to happen in every case, but there is a place for it in everything we do. Letting people vote stories to appear higher and lower on a page is just another way for people to share their voice and take ownership of news.

The other thing I loved about Rachel is that she didn't just stop with what was in her technology platform. At Limewire she saw how easy it is to stream video if you have a Webcam, so she worked out an arrangement with a site called Mogulus that does just that -- for free! A prominent "Watch TV" tab at the top of Groundreport brings up streaming video of whatever Rachel has recorded most recently from her laptop. She said she hopes to eventually let any of Groundreport's contributors publicize their own channels and aggregate these together on the TV tab.

In case you're wondering, Mogulus is in beta right now and you have to be approved to use it, but they plan to open it up to anyone in the future when their tools are just right. If you're interested in doing something like Rachael has done, just ask her -- or ask me and I'll pass your info on to her. Once you have a channel you simply embed it on your page, and the Mogulus tools do the rest.

Rachel says her next step will be to let anyone in any city create their own "publication", although they'll be entirely online. If you ask me, the combination of Rachel Sterne's ideas around instant geographically-focused citizen news sites and Martin Huber's instant print products would be the ultimate in citizen media. That's what's great about these kinds of conferences. You see how people in different parts of the world are solving the same problems, sometimes the same way and sometimes in different ways. If we can all just share a little more and try to control a little less (not just in terms of what we let the "citizens" do, but how we limit each other for fear of competition), I think we'll be better off. People in small communities certainly will.

netj, myheimat, groundreport, rachel sterne