All together now - collaboration and crowdsourcing

Source: http://blogs.sun.com/cphcampus/entry/crowdsourcing_or_open_sourcing RichardAM

At the Networked Journalism Summit in New York Oct 2007, American Journalist Jeff Jarvis said:

“Journalism can and must expand even as the institutions that do journalism shrink. The future is ‘pro-am journalism’, doing things together.”

Pro-am Journalism is exactly what it says on the tin – a combination of both professional and amateur contributors.

Networked journalism is where the audience contributes to the gathering of information. The public writes, photographs and researches as integral parts of the newsgathering and publishing processes. The professional journalists step back to become filters, connectors, facilitators and editors.


But networked journalism is not just about blogging. It is also about “crowdsourcing”. This is doing things conventional journalists cannot do on their own, for sheer lack of manpower.
Robert Niles explains here :

“It is the use of a large group of readers to report a news story. It differs from traditional reporting in that the information collected is gathered not manually, by a reporter or team of reporters, but through some automated agent, such as a website.”

“Unlike more traditional notions of "citizen journalism," crowdsourcing does not ask readers to become anything more than what they've always been: eyewitnesses to their daily lives. They need not learn advanced reporting skills, journalism ethics or how to be a better writer. It doesn't ask readers to commit hours of their lives in work for a publisher with little or no financial compensation. Nor does it allow any one reader's work to stand its own, without the context of many additional points of view. “


Here is a description of crowdsourcing in the discipline of business – showing how the term is similar to the outsourcing of tasks usually done by employees to a larger external group of people.

Examples scale time and space

Kate Marymount, of the Fort Myers News-Press in Florida, said that after Hurricane Katrina, they went to the courts to attempt to force the federal relief agency to disclose details of which citizens had received government help. They put the data online and encouraged readers to look through it. Within 24 hours, there were 60,000 searches from readers, who then contacted News-Press journalists telling them about neighbours with wrecked homes who had not received aid. All kinds of leads were being made, with the readers doing the investigating but the paper reporting the stories. A union between the dynamic manpower of the public and publication power of the News-Press helped to make aware of dangerous and tragic situations, save lives, and challenge the central government.


Networked journalism exists in unexpected parts of the world. The Guardian website, The BAe Files features an investigation into bribes and arms sales to Saudi Arabia. All the data is now available online, which has encouraged a network of amateur and professional investigative journalists around the world to aid in the digging.

And it is not just mainstream media that utilises this business model of crowdsourcing, the evolution of outsourcing.

In newassignment.net/ , launched in March 2007, users log on and get to find potential reporting assignments they can contribute to. They can suggest questions for the reporter to ask, conduct interviews and sometimes actually write the full story.

Other journalists had rather more down-to-earth ideas for networking their journalism. One writer for Wired magazine got readers to test out sex toys.

It is not just everyday news, but everyday valuable information, both scientific and economic that has embraced crowdsourcing.

GasBuddy.com allows readers in more than 100 communities to share real-time reports on local gas prices in America.

This earthquake mapping website from the United States Geological Survey builds detailed "shake maps"showing the intensity of earthquakes by zip code, through thousands of volunteer reports submitted online by readers.

Source: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/ Latest Earthquakes in the USA - Last 7 days
USA earthquakes with M1+ located by USGS and Contributing Agencies.


But there are some problems

But the big question is: Does it pay? Alive in Baghdad is a video blog which aims to present “real life” in today’s Iraq but it needs to look for payment to keep going. Its creatorBrian Conley said: “We have managed to sell some of our footage to major networks like Sky but we are also trying other methods to raise money, such as asking our viewers for voluntary subscriptions. We are raising money, but not enough to keep this going, let alone expand it.”


How do you know it is accurate and credible? This is one problem with all citizen journalism, and a motive for the professional journalists to apply checks and balances. One such check is requesting the reader to submit personal identification along with the report. On The Earthquake Website readers must supply a zip code, name, phone, e-mail and street address

The pros and cons of crowdsourcing are many.
Pros include:
- Community Involvement, the reporting of events commonly missed by the MSM, but of importance to nische interests and markets.
- A valuable and permanent database of content is built up if online.
Cons include:
- The risks of amateur reporting, the majority of interest, i.e. the fact stories people want to report on are prioritized over stories that may be the most important for public interest.
- User bias and prejudices or political agendas.
- Staff reporters may lose value and utility.


But finally I should say that now YOU can get involved: Try free online survey tools and mapping websites which can help you to collect and publish reader contributed data to your desired needs.

Digital Narratives of two technophobes

The above masterpiece was created by me and a fellow Journalism student Eleni Cashell in an effort to knock our technophobic hands into shape. Two gruelling three-hour sessions shooting and editing a story later, we realised it was rather easier than we thought . Unlike in our first Online Journalism workshop, we didn’t break the camera this time.

All we used were
- Still cameras on two Nokia N95 mobile phones
- Audacity sound recording program
- IMovie film editing software on AppleMac computers

Simple.
But technical shenanigans aside, our project reveals a wider issue in all the mediums of Journalism. Sure it is a little rushed, takes the easy option of shooting within crawling distance of our department, and I sound like a camp CBBC presenter, but it is an attempt to show that Journalism is about stories.

It takes its inspiration from a wildly eccentric lecture from the talented photo-journalist Daniel Meadows. He showed us a collection of photographs and video stories by both professionals and ordinary people, and passionately said: “Human beings naturally have stories inside them and want to say them over and over again”.

We saw some of the groundbreaking first black and white videos from the early twentieth century, where intrigued people could barely hold back their temptation to pose and perform.

Daniel told us about the BBC project he was a part of, Capture Wales, where he went all over Wales to run five-day workshops with normal technophobic people like myself, and taught them to make simple video stories out of still pictures and their own voiceover script, just like the one above.



We were introduced to the so called “Psycho Geography” project, where people have selected an outline on a map, and walked around the real locations on the street, reporting, photographing and documenting the changing moods, experiences and people on the streets. Murmur Toronto is one such example.

The below picture was taken by Daniel Meadows in 1974, and has been reproduced over the years time and time again in various newspapers and exhibitions.

Daniel Meadows: Portsmouth: John Payne, aged 12, with two friends and his pigeon, Chequer, 26 April 1974. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre. Copyright the artist, 2007.

It featured in an exhibiton a few years ago as an example of photographs that represented the change in British society over the 60s, 70s and 80s, under the banner of a famous Margaret Thatcher phrase:

“...society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women and there are families.”


And this, for me, I feel, perhaps sums up the point of Daniel’s eclectic collection of presentations.
Photography captures people, and individuals rather than generalisations, collectiveness or broad and vague descriptions. And this extends to Journalism as a whole. Short stories can be little windows into a bigger life, and truth is to be found from individual people, with all their delightful differences. The stories they tell will never be the same.

You can write about statistics or wide groups of society, but what really grabs people's intrest is the nitty-gritty details about one or two people in their own unique words and views.

Through my attempts to try video audio and photography, I found myself employing the same universal skill I apply to print: Journalism is about real people.

If you want to try and make a digital narrative like the one back, check out Daniel Meadow’s online tips here.