Crowdsourcing in the Street, circa 1999

How IndyMedia paved the way for the future of crowdsourced journalism

Jay Rosen interviews Christopher Anderson of the New York City Indypendent

Christopher Anderson fits the category of participant-observer. He's worked as an organizer, reporter, and editor for the New York City Independent Media Center and the New York City Indypendent since 2001. He is currently completing his PhD at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he studies journalistic authority, media history, and new media technologies. His dissertation will be on citizen journalism in an era of technological change, and it will include the story of IndyMedia. In an earlier life, Anderson was a regional director with ACORN Housing Corporation, a non-profit community organizing group working to assist low-income first time home buyers.

Anderson says it was the original act of crowdsourcing, "in a way."

Jay Rosen: How did you come to be such a close student of IndyMedia?

Christopher Anderson: Well, I was actually involved with Indymedia in New York before I went back to grad school. In fact, you could say that my involvement with Indymedia (and I still help them out a bit) helped send me back to school, rather than the other way around. I started helping out with the IMC shortly after the September 11 attacks in NYC. I thought that it sorta looked like the world was going to hell and figured I'd better do something fast.

Q: And what did you discover when you got involved?

A: Well, it was sort of amazing. By and large I found that it was made up of a group of people who had incredibly strong (and by conventional American standards, very left-wing) political views, but who managed to combine this with what I thought was a really old-fashioned and non-polemical understanding of journalism. And they combined those two things with a pretty radical view of how the Internet was changing the media and the role of citizens in reporting. When you combine those things, I thought ... well, this is something worth keeping tabs on.

Q: This "radical view" of theirs: what did it say about the Net and citizens and reporting?

A: Indymedia started in 1999 at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle-- going on eight years ago. Eight years isn't a a long time, but its about 1,000 years in Internet time. Most corporate news sites were just figuring out the World Wide Web at the time, and there weren't very many websties that made it easy for "regular folks" without html skills to just "post" their opinions up on the web for everyone to see. Amazon.com's book reviews were one of the first things like that I remember.

Q: That was pre-blogging software....

A: Absolutely, pre-blogging software. It feels like forever ago, you know? So in any case, group of media activists who had been involved in a few "anti-globalization" protests in the years before 1999 had figured out that the traditional media organizations weren't going to cover the upcoming WTO protests in a way they thought would do justice to the concerns of the organizing. A lot of these media activists were also involved in the "open source software movement," and I think they decided, well, lets set up a website where anybody who was actually AT the WTO protests and who saw stuff, or took pictures or video, can post it in public (easily, without knowing code) for everybody to see.

And thats what people did. Thousands of posts about the WTO protests, and the sum total of coverage ran rings around what the mainstream media had been trying to do. It was the original "crowdsourcing" in a way. And from a real live "crowd" -- in the most political, almost mob-like sense of the word.

Q: This was "active", the codebase that allowed anyone to upload media to an IMC website, yes? So there would not have been that code base if it has not been for the freesoftware movement?

A: Yeah, active. I think it's a fair bet to say that there wouldn't have been that codebase without the free software folks. They had a totally different mindset when it came to looking at the web than a lot of other people did at the time-- a vision based on collaboration and sharing. Plus, techies has to do the darn work, too.

Q: I never knew about that connection. You say "crowd" in the sense of a mob because these were people interested in street protests, and in taking power from the powerful?

A: Sort of, yes. The original IMC folks, and the people who made up the crowd they were "collaborating" with, were a committed group of political activists who believed (and still do) in the power of mass political action and non-violent civil disobedience to change power structures. They certainly didn't believe in objectivity in the way traditional journalists -- or even the Wikipedians do. So in some ways this is different than many of the Web 2.0 projects that are popular today, which I think are a little further away from a direct attachment to political protest.

Q: It seems that there's another forward-looking element here-- besides the blogging-before-blogging software and the "anyone can upload media" philosophy. They had an intuition that if hundreds of people are covering an event because they care about it and how it gets portrayed, this is potentially a force to rival the professional press, and that as an alternative "news net," the distributed model could put the authorities under surveillance perhaps even more effectively than the traditional news media. Plausible?

A: I think that sums it up really well. There's a later, more advanced version of this idea here-. "The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad," about the RNC protests in 2004.

Q: Is it just technology that's more advanced or is it also the social architecture or human organization?

A: Its both. The technology is part of it, but the bigger part is that 1) By 2004, notions of how to network a crowd, both for protest and for media coverage of that protest, were much more common knowledge-- more people were doing them, and 2) By 2004 there were a group of people in Indymedia and elsewhere who had been doing this for 5 years and who could really draw on their lessons from the past. I think the independent media RNC coverage of 2004 marked a high point when it comes to Indymedia's power to do this sort of coverage.

Q: There's something I don't understand about the IndyMedia "coverage plan" when they had people who converged on the scene of protest: how was this coordinated? How did people know what to do, where to go? Where did the coordination take place... from the Indy Media "center?" Or at the margin? On the web? Was it decentralized? Or did everyone just know?

I ask because one of the things that strikes me about doing this kind of journalism is that you need some way to solve the problem of mounting coordination costs as you get more people involved as contributors-- a "moment" that I believe is found in every successful open source project, and of course, in the failures too.

A: During most convergences at protests there is a convergence "center"-- an actual physical space, or a newsroom, where people can come, edit video, upload audio, use public computer terminals, etc. But in other ways, that actual physical space is peripheral. The main thing peope need is a cell phone to call in "breaking news" to whoever is monitoring the IMC website, and they need to know about the site itself. I think part of the answer goes back to your question before about having a shared common purpose and vision. In the case of protest coverage, people have a shared logistical map about what exactly to do, where the action is, and who to call and tell them about it.

Here's a story: During the RNC, there was an urban legend (that was probably true) that the NYPD was sitting at an internet cafe on the last day of the protests, reading the NYC IMC website to figure out what to do next, because it had the best intelligence of anyone in the city. There's a complicated moral there, which I'll leave to you to figure out.

Q: You mention "common knowledge." This, I think, is a hidden factor in the success of open source, crowdsourced and networked projects. Without participants who have common knowledge and some common convictions, it is difficult to succeed, even if you have the technology, the opportunity, the intent. Does your study of IMC confirm this? Or would you put it another way?

A: I used to think that it would be impossible for a group of people who didn't have strong, commong political beliefs to really pull off an "open source" journalism project. Where would their energy, their motivation come from? This is all "work," after all, even if it's also "fun." Wikipedia has shown that, well, maybe you could find enough people in the world who shared a passion for "objective knowledge" that they' be passionate about creating "objectivity." I think now, projects like your own "Assignment Zero" and other open source journalism projects are testing another hypothesis--

Q: And that is...?

A: Are there enough people in the world who care about journalism (not political journalism, or journalism motivated by politics) to create something more ... god, I hate the word "objective," but something less ... partisan? Just because they care about good journalism?

Q: Yes. Or because they care that a particular story get properly told.

A: Yeah. Its a wager, I think, and one that I really hope pans out. But politics are a passion of the bloodstream, and the gut. These other things are a little more ... abstract maybe? I think you have a harder task, Jay! But one thats just as important, and maybe revolutionary.

Q: A "shattering" event for me (in the good sense, shattering my complacency about change in media) was when I learned how Chris Allbritton, a former AP and New York Daily News reporter, became what Wired called "the Web's first independent war correspondent." As I wrote in CJR:

He did it by asking readers of his blog to send him to Iraq at their expense. Allbritton raised $14,500 from 342 donors on a simple promise: that he would send back from the war original and honest reporting, free of commercial pressures, pack thinking, and patriotic hype. He needed a plane ticket to Turkey (where he snuck over the border and found the war), a laptop, a Global Positioning Satellite unit, a rented satellite phone, a digital camera, and enough cash to move around, keep fed, and buy his way out of trouble. While some reporters were embedded with the American military, Allbritton sent himself on assignment, never even asking permission to be in the country. The Internet did the rest. On March 27, his reporting drew 23,000 users to his site (www.back-to-iraq.com), thus proving, not that anyone in the public can perhaps be a journalist, but that anyone who is a journalist can have a mini-public on the Net.

This was real journalism, foreign correspondence, without the media at all. Chris felt he was writing "for" the miniature public he has at his blog, but he was also aware of covering the war for a broader, international public. I was struck by the interaction between these two-- the more close-knit community he was writing for, and the political public he was also trying to reach. So here's my question: the IndyMedia people thought they were producing news for their community, or for the public?

A: Now that's a good question ...

Q: But we need answers, Chris!

A: I think the Indymedia people care less about reaching that broader international public than Chris Albritton did. A lot of it comes from the difference--and yes, there still is one--between the mindset of a ex/current and soon-to-be "professional" reporter like Chris and someone who is basically a protester with a video camera. But also, and maybe more importantly, there's a difference in politics here. Much of Indymedia operates from a mindset that is, basically, anarchist-- a desire to communicate with those who share ones "affinities," as it were, and to hell with the rest of them.

Now, that said there are some Indymedia projects, like the Indypendent that are different. The Indy is the newspaper of the NYC IMC. The folks who work on the Indy are much more similar in mindset, in this regard, to Chris Albritton. They want to take their reporting, which is still grounded in the world of Indymedia and the politics of that world, and still communicate to a larger audience.

Q: You're right: the hell with the rest of them is not a journalistic idea or conceit. But "the whole world's watching..." is.

A: Yeah.

Q: Maybe that's the difference between an anarchist and a hippie!

A: Thats partly why I think the Indypendent-- that project I mentioned above-- is so neat. Maybe thats a whole other interview. But the Indypendent is basically a bi-weekly newspaper that takes the crowdsourcing idea, combines it with the notion that we train new journalists, sends them out to report, draws on the web, and blogs, and everything else, writes articles in a way to make them understandable and accessible and then-- in the most insane notion of all-- prints them on real paper and distributes them off line!

Q: So in the evolution we are trying to understand here, the Indypendent expanded its ambition? What caused that to happen?

A: I think what caused the ambition to expand was that the Indypendent was started by folks who had done "real" journalism in the past (mostly in print), who were hip to the fact that journalism was changing, but who also believed in journalism strongly. Also, when you spend the money to print something up, thats going to raise your ambitions a little bit.

So, what the Indypendent wanted to do was to draw on the core Indymedia mission-- that ordinary folks can be journalists, especially if they learn how, and also simply raise the bar-- doing real reporting, communicating with the public, etc.

Q: You said earlier that when you first encountered IndyMedia people you found they had '"a really old-fashioned and non-polemical understanding of journalism." What did you mean by that and who were you referring to?

A: I was referring a lot to the folks with New York Indymedia. The NYC people have always been a little further from the street protests crowd and closer to the "we want to do journalism" crowd. And by "old fashioned" I guess I mean that they believed in going out on to the street, watching things happen, doing interviews, coming up with complicated story ideas. And even not covering protests at all! Covering things like NYC Municipal Wireless hearings, and non-sexy stuff like that.

Q: Isn't Daily Kos kind of the inheritor of, or successor organization to, IndyMedia, as well? On a much bigger, broader scale? How do you compare the two communities?

A: They're similar in a lot of ways. They're both ulitmately concerned with journalism in the service of politics-- with political victories (they define politics really differently, but thats a whole other story). In some ways I might say that Talking Points Memo is also a successor as well, in a different way. I sort of wish Kos and crew had gone down the path of doing actual "citizens journalism" a little more than they ended up doing.

Q: Susan G in her interview with us said that the investigative journalism potential in crowdsourcing was mostly in going through documents with lots of eyes. Do you agree with that?

A: Well, thats part of it. I think there's more, though. I would like to see crowdsourcing reach deep down into the bowels of local city governments-- and I don't just mean NYC, I mean Anytown, USA. And part of that can be going through documents, but part of it can be showing up at town council hearings and blogging about it, and creating a political community, a political crowd, through that blog. I grew up in the suburbs. They need good investigative journalism there as much as anywhere else. More probably. There's a lot of corruption in those places, and the mainstream press is dropping the ball.

Also, I'd like to see investigative crowdsourcing be a little less shy in directly attaching itself to political movements. Show up at an ACORN meeting (an urban community organizing group) and see what they're doing, and build an invesitgative program off that, drawing on the wisdom of ACORN members.

Q: What do you think the next phase of journalistic crowdsourcing will look like?

A: I think there's some real potential here during the next election, especially on the polling place, voter fraud and voter intimidation fronts. I know there was a little of this in 2006, and even 2004, but it hasn't been organized yet, and I think it's ripe. Especially given the way that voter registration has been so tied into the US Attorney Scandal. I think journalistic crowdsourcing is going to break a huge voting chicanery case in 2008.

Q: What do you think motivates the IndyMedia's contributors today?

A: I think that the era of big street mobilizations is behind us, and what was once known as the "anti-globalization movement" has basically died in the United States. Much of the political center of gravity these days is in electoral politics, and in pushing the Democrats to the left (and Republicans to the right). Thats pretty far from the Indymedia political center of gravity. So what I think motivates contributors these days is: The belief that everyone can be a journalist, and the need to help people get to that point, and, second, a sense that, well, if we're not going to overthrow corporate capitalism tomorrow, we can at least tackle local injustices, and, third, the sense that journalism-- again, in that old-fashioned sense-- is in trouble. And we need more of it. We have a lot of information, and not much news, and even less journalism.

Q: Do you believe that, let us say under certain conditions, there is wisdom in crowds? Could this give us a wiser journalism?

A: I do, without a doubt. Even some of the most traditional notions of journalism, the ones dearest to the core of what journalism is, can be improved by many eyes rather than few.

Q: Linus' Law according to Eric Raymond states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." which is certainly the most famous sentence in open source culture. Exit question: do you regard these as inspirational words for people who care about good journalism?

A. Yes, I do. I'd add a line, though: a good editor never hurts, either!

Q: You do because...?

A: Well, because wisdom may not come from crowds, but knowledge and information do -- more knowledge than anyone could ever get by themselves. Add a good editor to the mix, and you might just get wisdom, too.