I witness news (and so do you)
Posted: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 10:59 AM by Will Femia
I found myself in another discussion yesterday about last week's Wired article about Gannett newspapers turning to crowdsourcing.
To some degree the announcement is pretty unimpressive since in some ways it amounts to "we're going to start reading our e-mail." But in the end I think it'll mean better local news for the public and hopefully a waning of the cries of "newspapers are dead!" from certain quarters of the new media evangelical movement.
It's funny that this item breaks now because just a few weeks ago I was joking that anyone wanting to know about citizen journalism ideas should get in a time machine and go back to 2004 when everyone cared about it. More recently, however, a colleague was leaving MSNBC.com to work for a local news outfit in the Midwest. Talking to him at his farewell party I found I was really excited for him, and I listed all the local news sites I enjoy online whose strategies he would have the opportunity to employ at his new site. (Gothamist's crime map, Curbed's New York City real estate and restaurant news, Brooklyn Record's neighborhood events, the local photoblogger community...)
There are so many online tools available to local news organization to make their coverage more relevant and more engaging for their users, I can't imagine a more fun or exciting time to be involved in local news.
I've never been a newspaper employee, so some of the cultural issues elude me. I don't understand the predictions of resistance in the news room. Reporters always interview eye witnesses and principle players in a news story. Why is a first hand account less reliable if the reporter isn't standing there with a notepad in hand?
I will say that the article's example of asking people to "weigh in" on message boards with their opinions about the murder of a 3-year-old foster child completely misses the point of crowdsourcing news and will only confirm some people's worst fears about what such a switch will mean. The Web might be handy for gathering opinions, but that doesn't make them news (or worth reading).
I think the concern about conspiracies to skew the news resonates the most, but this whole idea of crowdsourcing the news relies on the news outlet actually knowing what they're doing and executing the ideas in a conscientious manner. If they turn their entire news operation into a big open message board, then yes, disaster will ensue, but if they're smart about how they employ these new principles, then being attentive to possible corruption in the system is part of the process. For that matter, having 20 do-gooder citizen reporters chasing the police scanner and showing up at every crime scene would probably also be a bad situation. And further, it would be a shame if local news didn't live up to its civic responsibilities because no one volunteered to cover the boring local politics meetings. Still, a news-minded decision maker in charge should be able to address these vulnerabilities.
One aspect that I don't see mentioned here is competition. What if there are two local newspapers conducting these crowdsourcing operations? How will the available pool of participation be split and/or shared? How soon before news agencies are poaching citizen reporters?
Further clicking:
This entry is a little long, so I'll post this and put up the rest of today's link in a separate entry.
