The News is Now Public: How a Citizen Journalism Network Informs Us All
When everyone is on the scene and reporting
Maurice Cardinal interviews Michael Tippett in person, May 9th, 2007
Photo Courtesy of Flickr user KKMichael Tippett is decisive -- in a laid back kind of way. He is also the CMO and co-founder of NowPublic.com, one of the largest aggregators of crowdsourced news in the world. All of NowPublic's content is user-generated and crowdsourced, including the constantly changing list of topic headings on its home page.
We have been conditioned by mainstream news media to believe everything we read. Michael Tippet and his company NowPublic challenge this belief daily. They DO NOT want you to sit back and read the news. They want you to contribute.
Edited for clarity [When you see copy inserted between square brackets [like this], it means I (the interviewer) added information for clarity, or to briefly expand upon an issue to give it a frame of reference.]
Maurice Cardinal: Why does the mainstream news industry have such a challenge getting people who comment on their articles to remain civil?
Michael Tippett: I was just at a conference in Seattle, put on by the Seattle PI (Post Intelligencer newspaper), other local media, plus MSNBC, and bloggers. There were people on both sides of the fence, and they were saying the same thing, “the comments we get in an official capacity as a PI writer, reporter, are much more hostile.”
I think it’s this idea that if you represent an institution, a news organization, to some degree you have to dehumanize the news. You have to be objective and right down the middle - you’re not subjective. You’re not taking it from a personal perspective. If you read “The Economist” for instance, they don’t even tell you who wrote it. It’s just “The Economist” and a set of facts from “The Economist,” and uh . . . it’s true. So people believe that they’re dealing with an institution when they’re dealing with a news organization. You can’t hurt an institution’s feelings so you can be more vitriolic and more vicious. While if it’s a blog, it’s someone with a point of view and they’re taking time and putting their personality on the line. So people treat them with a little more civility because they’re dealing with a human being and not dealing with a big bureaucracy.
There is an institutional challenge. Institutions just move slowly. The companies that move fast are small, and they’ve got the Internet. Smaller companies are more nimble and there are many more of them. The reality is that because of the Internet and the kind of period we’re entering, many of the assumptions we have about basic human motivations are being challenged. This whole notion of Web 2.0 where people are willing to share freely doesn’t fit with the old model so companies like NowPublic, Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace rely on having people involved for reasons other than money. And it’s always a little bit tricky to get it right.
In many cases it’s the detail of the execution that makes you a success or a failure, and in many ways it’s an experimental approach that has to be done by many people in a sort of reckless fashion where you throw something at it to see if it works. So the whole committee approach where you have a strategy and a mission statement, and you define goals, plan things out and work things over, and have things approved by a different layer, it just doesn’t work.
The audience will tell you what they like and dislike. NowPublic is a perfect example. It was started from many points of view. My partner, Leonard Brody, is a lawyer. His family has been involved with CanWest [broadcast and print media company] for a long time so he sees it as something that impacts the news media. He’s grown up on the fringes of that business and that’s why he’s interested in NowPublic. He sees the newspaper industry and what’s happening there.
Q: Does the mainstream news media industry regard you as competition?
A: I think they’re wary. Two years ago they didn’t take us seriously. Now they are in a state of mild panic because they see the readership moving online. They see younger news consumers disappearing. Every time someone dies of old age the newspaper business goes greener. The younger generation is going to Facebook, Flickr, NowPublic and YouTube. It happens through social networks. It doesn’t happen through large institutions so they’re panicked on the readership side because readership will obviously take ad dollars away. They’re also concerned on the production side because the cost of producing it is extremely expensive if you’re doing it professionally. Whereas if you’re crowdsourcing it you’re using bits and pieces from people who were there, and who aren’t trained journalists, but who saw something and have a point of view. If you can corral or wrangle those points of view into something that is coherent then you’ve got something at a fraction of the price and in a format people are going to read. So the news organizations are looking at this and thinking, we’ve got to embrace this or it’s going to take over the industry.
Q: Have you identified what NowPublic does that mainstream news can’t or won’t do?
A: Yeah. I think we do a couple of things really well. We have a network of almost 90,000 people all over the world who have things like camera phones and are accustomed to sharing. Mainstream media, when they try and get into that stuff often fail because people are used to dealing with mainstream media as an audience member and a recipient of received information, and with us, from the get go we’ve always been about participating and being involved and contributing. So we have a cultural benefit that can be difficult for them to overcome.
Q: Why do people [news contributors] become a part of NowPublic? Why does the individual want to do it? What drives them? Who are you looking for?
A: There are as many motivations as there are members. Some people are interested in financial gains. If you talk to someone in the traditional news business and tell them you aren’t going to pay people - how’s that going to work? There’s a small subset of people who are storm chasers, or they’re documentary filmmakers, or they have some kind of existing media practice that they’d like to have people aware of. If you’re a storm chaser you’re out there doing citizen weather reports. Use our site to promote what you do and we’ll group it all together and serve up the best stuff.
We had this guy send in all these amazing tornadoes [early May ‘07] two days ahead of CNN and fifty yards away from a tornado. He does this for a living and watermarks the videos for his site. It’s good for him because we’re like a distribution network and if AP [Associated Press] picks it up they pay him. We’ve got CNN looking at our site daily to see what’s bubbling up. So if you want to make money on the site you can do that. It’s also for those who want to see their name in lights, and for a lot of people that’s important, it’s an ego trip. It’s a way of having their point of view out there. They’ve got something to say and here’s a way of getting in front of a larger audience we’ve [NP] built. They can tap into without having to build it from scratch.
There’s a third group of people who use news as a form of coping with a situation or coming to terms with something. During Katrina we had 2,000 people. They weren’t in it for money or fame. Many were looking for information or loved ones, or things that had gone missing, and other people just wanted to talk about it. If you look at the London bombing, a lot of people who were blogging about it did it because they were on the bus. And look at Virginia Tech. Some of the parents and some of the victims were actually writing stories telling people how they felt about it. There was a really touching eulogy one of the parents wrote about their kid. In many cases it’s therapeutic. People want to get it off their shoulders. The motivation is the same as for a conversation. Conversations take a lot of effort and there’s risk and you might say something that you regret, but you do it because you’ve got something to say. It’s just human nature to want to exchange ideas. We’re kind of like an online conversation and we just try to focus the conversation on things that are newsworthy and have import to a larger group of people.
Q: I’ve been trying to understand how you’re going to compete with newspapers that have been around forever, but you don’t have to. What you just described has nothing to do with what they do, but you’ll be able to attract thousands and thousands of eyeballs and offer them something new.
A: Right. We have a direct relationship to the subjects of the news. Virginia Tech was a perfect example. Everyone was trying to get all the people who were there to tell their story. NBC was talking to the friends of the victims. And many of them contacted us, phoning, emailing and saying, “Look I’m being badgered by the media. I don’t want to talk to them. I want to use your system to tell people how I feel. I don’t want to put it through some [mainstream news] filter and package it up, and you know, turn it into some consumable piece of media. I want to reach people and tell them my story personally.”
We’re unpackaged. We’re direct. We’re to the source. We’re real.
Q: Out of these three groups you’ve just described (and your answer could change tomorrow) who do you see coming to the surface?
A: Today, it’s been a pretty even combination of all those three groups.
Q: Is anyone pulling ahead?
A: No, but I would expect, and we’ve seen a few signs, that people who are emotionally engaged in a subject [could rise to the surface]. They were in New Orleans during Katrina. They have a personal reaction to the news. A lot of this blogging stuff happened after 9/11. Traumatic events force people to confront what they think are important issues and to do something about it - often doing something like telling the world how they feel about it. And aggregating with people who are either like-minded or differently minded who they want to get a different perspective on. So moving forward it’s going to be people who are personally and directly engaged with breaking news events. And that’s not necessarily the people who are trying to make money, but they will be there as well.
Q: Newspapers are starting to realize that articles that connect with people personally on a micro level attract the most comments. [Debbie Kornmiller, an editor and Reader Advocate of the Arizona Star’s StarNet.com also agrees with this statement. I interviewed her a week previous for Assignment Zero]
A: Yeah. Look at the way a news story is constructed. If there is a shooting on the street BCTV will come down and interview eyewitnesses. “Did you see this? What did you see?” And that person [being interviewed] would say, “Oh, he ran out of the store. He shot him.” And they’d do that two or three times and then interview the cop. Then they’d package it all up, summarize, and broadcast it.
We’re doing the same thing in some ways, but instead of giving you a microphone we give you a computer and “you” can write something, and “you” can write something, and “you” can write something. And there’s no bill.
Q: Are you getting rid of the middleman?
A: We’re helping the middleman.
Q: How did you pick the topic headings [channels] on your homepage?
A: Actually, there’s an issue on the site that’s a bit of a navigational design flaw. We have a larger group of categories [you only see six or seven at a time on the homepage] that include “major channels” that appear as a result of popularity [in the navigation bar].
Q: So, they change dynamically?
A: Right . . .we’re “crowdsourcing the categories” too. And we’re going to build something so it’s easier to find the ones that get less eyeballs.
Q: How popular is Health on NowPublic?
A: It’s not as popular as Weather, Politics or Culture.
Culture and Politics are the two big ones.
Q: What is your demographic?
A: It’s younger, 18-35 and skewing on 25-35. People get into news after they graduate.
Q: I don’t see Real Estate, Finances, Auto - the big moneymakers for newspapers.
A: I think you’ll start to see that emerge over time. Early adopters on any site are going to be the ones who are most passionate about things. They tend to be culturally and politically based subjects, but there’s no reason to think that car enthusiasts and health professionals are not going to come later on.
Our view is to be as hands off as possible.
Q: Your main navigational links to channels are generated dynamically, dependant on how often a viewer interacts with a subject. Algorithms process the traffic and place a heading on each page based on popularity. Does this mean that people are not being lead, but are being drawn by their own interests?
A: Right. Our homepage [regarding channels] is not 100% obvious. We’re building an algorithm that accurately reflects what people think is newsworthy. Two things define the homepage. One is popularity, and the other is a flagging system [everyone gets to vote]. And we have “wranglers.” They corral information and have a weighted vote. The homepage is made up of the best stuff, and the best is defined by the amount of votes you get, plus the number of page views. So we’re not showing viewers totally obscure stuff, unless people think it’s good and voted for it [another alternative goes mainstream]. And we’re not just showing you the popular stuff. It’s a mix of the two.
We crowdsource the news gathering by having people who eyewitness it send stuff in, and then we crowdsource the editorial by having people able to affect the order of the stories by their behaviors and votes and interests.
It’s true for all the channels. They are all defined that way.
How do you educate your contributors so they have freedom to do what they want, and still remain civil?
Well, we’re being laissez faire about comments. We don’t’ censor people or delete stuff. We really don’t have to. The level of civility is very high on our site. And part of it is because we have people who come here that are a little more high-minded than they would be elsewhere.
The biggest problem we’ve had in terms of expectations is that people want others to be “more” serious. A lot of people are news junkies. They’re people who are very engaged in what is happening in the news business and they’re disenchanted with mainstream media so they come to our site.
Q: Have you done research or studies?
A: We haven’t had to because our users tell us. There are studies, the PEW institute, that have done a lot of research. It’s an opportunity for us, because that’s what news organizations are. Institutions are built on trust, and once they lose the trust, well, that’s their only currency right.
Q: Does mainstream news media create a closed-loop news system to keep driving their readers past their advertisers?
A: Right. Like a hotel casino. You always have to go through the casino to get to your room.
Q: Just like Safeway [grocer]. The milk is at the back of the store. NowPublic does almost the exact opposite. You are off-linking and leading people away. You’re managing the aggregation, and processing the traffic through your hub.
A: We’re like Google that way.
Q: How do you monetize it? What will play out in the next year?
A: The reason we do that, is because it’s what people want. They don’t want pop-ups and framed stuff. They don’t want the walled garden. So by providing a better service to people they’ll come back to us more often and then we can sell them ads. Advertising is part of our revenue plans moving forward. It’ll subsidize the operation to some degree. I think where we’ll make most of our money is as a brokerage service to mainstream media. We have a deal with the AP where we’ll be working with their bureaus in the states to supply stories and footage from people who are there. They know we’re way ahead of them on that so they’re looking at us and saying, “If you get good stuff send it our way.” And of course, as is the case with anyone who sends stuff to AP you get paid, and we’ll get a percentage. We’ve become a news gathering service for mainstream media who in some ways will do a better job of analyzing that stuff when it comes in, but is not in a position to collect it as well as we can. We provide a huge service by taking a major line out of their news gathering production.
Q: Are you privately funded?
A: Yeah. I started this in the garage two years ago and look at how big it is now, and this quickly. I knew the opportunity was going to be over in eighteen months. I was ahead of the curve. I was too early and should have waited. Two years ago when I told people about the concept they were kind of puzzled and they didn’t really get it, but now, post YouTube, post blogging, post Flickr, post all of these worlds, everyone gets it. We’re at the point now where we can see, just in terms of the market place acceptance, that the tide has turned dramatically. The audience knows it. If you listen to the endless calls, or if you talk to newspaper professionals they recognize it now. It’s a burning issue for them.
Q: When you see something so progressive happen so quickly it makes it easier for the average person to get onboard too when they realize that, “a new president walked into the White House, and she used crowdsourcing and citizen journalism to help make it happen.” It’s amazing how Barack Obama is leveraging YouTube. He’s everywhere online. Oprah for President isn’t so far-fetched when you consider the market she already manages.]
A: There’s a think tank in DC called the Bivings Institute. They predicted NowPublic is going to be one of the companies that will impact the U.S. election, and I think they’re right. We’ll certainly have some impact. We’re actually in the midst of, and I’d like to tell you all the details about this because we’re going to launch in the next week. We’re working with a group of citizen journalists in Washington DC alone. These are people who work in the Justice Department, who work in every branch of government.
We’re going to have a huge presence in DC. There’s not a story that can’t be covered with that many people. The group that we are working with is the Cleveland Park Listserve. Bill Adler is the guy behind it. We will be launching our "Crowdsourcing the Capital" project next week by kicking off our first meeting in a DC bookstore.”
Adler moderates the Washington DC-based listserve, which according to his Web site is the largest neighborhood email list in the country – as of May 24, 2007 they have 5,232 members
By having people in this power center, as well as people in the Heartland and various other places where politics has a personal affect on their lives, and tying all these stories together, you really can start to build political momentum. When you think about how important the news is to political organizations – if they control the news they control personal outcome. Well, the news is now public. Nobody controls it anymore, so it’s bound to become more democratic.
Excerpt from The Bivings Institute website . . .
“But in the last few years we've seen a number of websites launch that specialize in aggregating user generated news stories. These sites include NowPublic, Our Media, NewsAssignment.net and OhMyNews and each has developed its own network of citizen reporters.I expect one of these networked news sites (or one that hasn't launched yet) to emerge in the next few years as a leader. And I think stories these sites break about the 2008 Presidential election could be the catalyst for this breakthrough.”
Q: Crowdsourcing and citizen journalism will especially impact mainstream news companies because traditional new media operate “between” industry, politicians, and the public. Crowdsource networks break down walls and provide transparency. When you do that, truth comes out. Will companies like NowPublic redefine the definition of truth?
A: Yeah, I think to some degree. I had a conversation last week with a news executive in Seattle about nineteen year old kids who often come to Canada to drink because the drinking age in the U.S. is twenty-one. The newsperson said, what’s our angle on this? Are we writing from the perspective of parents and saying, “Watch out. Your kids are going to get drunk in Canada,” or are we writing from the kid’s perspective and saying “Heh, go north of the border and you can go clubbing where it’s legal?”
I said [to the news executive], “You know it’s funny, because you’ve basically pulled the rug out from under the whole objective argument. Your newspaper is not objective. Your newspaper has a voice that is a subjective voice. It’s just official subjectivity. [You’re saying] “We’re the conservative voice, we’re the liberal voice, we’re the voice of concern, or the voice of the younger generation.”
[However,] it’s not objective. It’s a certain set of facts that you’ve [traditional media] chosen to write about because it’s interesting to a group of people you’re serving. So what has passed for objective truth is not objective, it’s a point of view. When you have multiple points of view you start to see things in a more complete way.
Q: So you put all the information out there and let the visitor to the site make up there own mind?
A: Yeah, and contribute and disagree and bring in their own expertise. They’ll often know more than an editor. Think of the monumental task of an editor. They get parachuted into a story they know nothing about, and in half an hour become an expert. It’s impossible. Whereas if you just have the people who are involved in the story, describe it, there’s no learning curve.
Q: What will happen when core contributors to NowPublic get bored while waiting for news to spontaneously combust?
A: We have multiple roles on the site. You can contribute current or breaking news, and you can also be a wrangler, and corral others. Read through the site, and find something that is great, and flag it, or if you see something that looks fishy use our crowdsourcing tool to construct stories that you think are important. You can also alert us to things you’ve seen on the web that you think deserve more coverage. Our relationship with AP lets us send them stories. So if you see something that is amazing, and no one is writing about, you can use our tools to create a network, and the network will focus more people on the story who can contribute.
Q: So this is a process that has never existed at any time in history?
A: I don’t think it has. The technology never existed.
Q: Does it have serious social significance? Will it change the way people think and live?
A: Yeah. We’re in a knowledge creation business. If you were a philosophy professor you’d call it an episteme. It’s a systemalogical framework - the way knowledge is understood, and differentiated from belief. We are changing the way knowledge is constructed. History is the basis for which all rational thought is based.
