Journalism gets Crowdsourced

Polling Place Photo Project - emails from Bill Drenttel

Anna Haynes — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:40:38 -0400

Polling Place Photo Project - emails from Bill Drenttel

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May 18 email:

> "...how many people contributed photos"

I think the rough answer is 600 people contributed photographs with almost every state being represented.

By the way, the photos are going to be featured in the next issue of Aperture -- another form of street photography making their way into mainstream photography news.

This is a separate piece I wrote based on the photographs from the project:
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/020627.html

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June 2 email and followup:

I would simply add the following comments to you.

1. Factors affecting participation. I think late start was a bigger factor than linking to existing AIGA social network. In fact, we reached far beyond AIGA, and pollingplacephotoproject.org has close to 300 links tracked by Technorati, including large public sites like MetaFilter, Gothamist and FlickrBlog.

> "when was this..."

I first blogged it 11/1/06, so that must have been launch date.. Just a week before the election. Jay blogged it on Huffington post on 11/3, just 4 days before the election.

2. I want to emphasis how wrong I think David Weinberger is about having done this simply in Flickr. On Flickr, "voting" turns up 39,548 pictures, but I can't find pictures from my town or neighborhood unless they are tagged correctly. This is a case of the large number of photos (the success of crowdsourcing) leading to almost meaningless filler: too much data. In fact tags against this volume of pictures are virtually useless, they are so generic: polling, place, vote, voting, election, pollingplace, mypollingplace, decision2006. Voting does not get you vote. decision2006 leads to primarily one photographer, a Canadian.

3. One other success is that the project has lead to some other journalism. My article on voting in religious places on Design Observer. An article in Aperture's [upcoming] Fall issue with 27 photos used.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

A contributor's perspective on crowdsourced journalism

Anna Haynes — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:53:07 -0400

In which a member of crowdsourced journalism's "working class" shares a ground-level view of the motivations, the frustrations, and the potential of this movement

It's true that crowdsourcing can bring new life to journalism: through replacement, with pro-am collaborations replacing coverage lost to newsroom cuts; through exploitation, with newspaper execs "harvesting" the wisdom of their community; or through bypass, with the "people formerly known as the audience" banding together to tackle investigations that - for varied reasons - the mainstream press is less eager to address.

But fundamentally, crowdsourced journalism's promise must be realized by the crowd; if a project doesn't suit the "users", it won't fly. So hearing from - and listening to - these users is key.

The most-heard voices on crowdsourced journalism come from those at the top: for Assignment Zero we've interviewed such leaders as NOLA.com's Jon Donley, the NorthWest Voice's Mary Lou Fulton * and NOWPUBLIC's Michael Tippett; evangelists Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis; CPA-wielding TPM Cafe warrior Mrs. Panstreppon and Daily Kos leader-rallier SusanG.

As a common worker bee from within the "crowd", I can offer a different perspective - on how it's been to forage for information on these projects; on why and where we want to contribute; and on where crowdsourced journalism's potential - part existing, part unexplored - may lie.

Before Assignment Zero, I worked, or tried to work, on six crowdsourced journalism projects. They were of widely varying scope, and aren't composed of the usual suspects; in a sense, I've been laboring in crowdsourced journalism's "long tail".
(These six projects are covered in a companion article.)

The results of my efforts were mixed. Some parts were rewarding: I enjoyed digging to uncover lobbyist connections to earmarked appropriations in the Earmarks Project, plus there's a certain satisfaction in publicly exposing stonewalling*, and a different satisfaction in finally getting an answer*.

But I contribute to crowdsourced journalism because I want my work to yield a high "social good" return, and by that metric, overall, the experience has been frustrating. With some of these projects I ended up with nothing to show for the time I put in - either from being unable to get or enter the data, or from not following through where I probably would have, had there been support. (Support is crucial: if not for my editor's encouragement at a bleak moment, you wouldn't be reading this now.) And in the projects where I did contribute, my work had no visible effect - because of no followup or no publicity, or because what I provided just wasn't very significant. All in all, I likely could have spent the time more productively at home on my own weblog.

In short: There was plenty of room for improvement.

So, why bother?

Answer: Because there is plenty of room for improvement. I did it, and will continue doing it, for the same reason that you keep going out on dates even though the first six guys didn't measure up - you know there's potential to the form, you want that potential to be realized, and you're pretty sure that, if you keep plugging away and you put the word out, in time that potential will blossom.

What does this blooming potential look like, from the contributors' perspective?

For some people - for most people - it'll take the form of the political activist crowdsourced journalism that goes on at sites like TPM Muckraker and Daily Kos; as SusanG noted, sometimes it'll be as "many eyes", poring over documents; other times as "many ears and voices", reaching out to our representatives, asking them questions, and bringing this information back to the hive; and still other times as "swarm journalism", attacking the varied pieces of a story in a ravening piranha horde.

This form of crowdsourced journalism has been wildly successful in attracting motivated contributors, and for good reason: it's easy to feel that what you're doing has value, when what you're doing is defending your country.

Others will gravitate toward a group endeavor with individual appeal, such as taking part in a project to question some of the web's most interesting people, as Assignment Zero's 75+ interviews now show.

And for those of us who wish to shine the light more locally, I'd like to believe a third crowdsourcing model has yet to emerge: it would employ crowdsourcing's "group" strengths to help citizens tackle the watchdog journalism that cries to be done in their own communities. A support organization for geographically distributed local watchdogging, it would offer editorial services, reporting advice, training in analyzing budgets and the like, discussion with peers, access to tools, and a "home away from home" to showcase and critique the work. The projects could be coordinated, with each participant running the same analysis on their own city or town.

There's clearly a need for the reportorial product; from the NYC Indypendent's Chris Anderson:

"I would like to see crowdsourcing reach deep down into the bowels of local city governments...[The suburbs] need good investigative journalism as much as anywhere else. More probably. There's a lot of corruption in those places, and the mainstream press is dropping the ball."

Citizen journalist nonpareil Mrs. Panstreppon agrees:

"I think local crowdsourcing is an excellent idea... we are suffering from a lack of news about local and state government because [the local paper] has been undergoing severe budget cuts..."

And ordinary citizens agree too; from the Arizona Star's Debbie Kornmiller:

"the people I hear from think the government is corrupt - local, national. ... And where the criticism is, is that we don’t do enough to uncover that corruption."

To tackle this reporting, we'll need support services: without this support, citizen journalists up against entrenched power structures will likely end up at best nowhere, at worst toast. We'll need purely practical support too; for example, those who don't share Mrs. P.'s accounting background could sorely use help interpreting financial documents.

This support doesn't yet exist. Current citizen journalism training sites like New Voices, NewsU, and the community news self-help portal Knight Citizen News Network don't cover watchdogging, they're designed for a different job. They give lessons in basic journalism - offering helpful tips on writing for a community website, where a friendly community holds sway. Where citizen muckrakers need a one-on-one with Machiavelli, they offer Scouting merit badges.

"Real journalism consists of what someone doesn't want published, all the rest is public relations." - George Orwell
"Never, never, never let them intimidate you." - David Halberstam
"There ain't nothin' for testicular enhancement like having [a group] behind you." - Harriet Edwards*

I want to report news, not PR. I want the powers that be to quiver at my approach, not the other way around. I want to cover the stories that won't be covered by a tame local press, but I know I'll get nowhere by going it alone; I need a network to teach me what I need, to support me in these efforts, to look at what I'm doing and tell me where I'm going wrong, to suggest angles worth pursuing.

Chris Anderson questioned whether citizen journalism that's not overtly political yields enough psychic reward to thrive:

"politics are a passion of the bloodstream, and the gut. These other things [good journalism, objective knowledge] are a little more ... abstract maybe?"

But truth can be a passion of the bloodstream and gut as well. A journalist once told me "[Investigative] reporting is like crack." He's right; I've tried it*.

I want more.

But to go there, I need backup.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

Editor's Notes for Anna's Essay

vivian.martin — Thu, 31 May 2007 21:37:25 -0400

ANNA, I have put notes in CAPS. Main Issue is the need to smooth out and put more punch into a nut graph(s). The nut graph holds a piece together; it’s the gravity around which the essay moves. It hints at what the piece is about—and it sets parameters…You will be able to have a cleaner, clearer nut graph by reconciling the three approaches section (Observe, Experiment, an ASK) with the section where you explain the companion piece. You need to integrate these sections, which will clear up the awkward transition…see notes…
I also make comments and raise questions in other sections of the piece, the most significant being at the end of this piece. The question: why settle for doing this as a hobby if you want to work at the level you express? Just being the devil’s advocate here, but I do think the presentation , particularly quotes about investigative reporting etc., begs the question. I will email this to you as well.

You can email questions to me as well.

Vivian

A contributor's perspective on Crowdsourced journalism
"If you look around the web you realize there is an incredible number of people with too much time on their hands."
- H.E.
(weak intro:)
It used to be that people engaged their spare cycles in offline hobbies - the model train in the basement, the wall lined floor to ceiling with matchbook covers, the ???(it must be an Axis of Hobbies). Now those of us with time to spare have the option to use it differently, for civic good. ARE YOU WEDDED TO THE LEAD….IF NOT< YOU COULD START WITH THE NEXT SENTENCE
The enthusiasm over crowdsourced journalism's promise stems from the hope that it may help to save journalism - that perhaps, through collaboration with pros, the amateurs can replace coverage lost in newsroom cuts; or that (in news execs' view) the media can "harvest" the collective wisdom of the community; or that "the people formerly known as the audience" can band together to tackle investigations that the mainstream press is reluctant to address.
Up until now most of the writing on crowdsourced journalism has come from thinkers and doers at the top; we've heard much less from the practitioners themselves. Here with Assignment Zero, we've had the good fortune to be able to hear from some who've been in the trenches, SusanG[A.Z. link] and Mrs. Panstreppon[A.Z. link], and get their perspectives on the potential of crowdsourced journalism; now, as a participant in six crowdsourced journalism projects before A.Z., I'd like to share my views on how to explore the potential of crowdsourced journalism, on where this potential likely lies, and on a promising avenue that's as yet unexplored.
For any crowdsourced journalism project to succeed, the most important factor is its ability to attract motivated users - without the users, it won't fly. This requirement mirrors Paul Graham's advice on startups:
"In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product."
Glenn Reynolds made a similar point:
"...the secret to getting ahead in the 21st century is capitalizing on people doing what they want to do."*
So exploring the potential of crowdsourced journalism consists largely of finding out what kind of crowdsourced journalism people want to do.
AS I NOTED EARLIER, I DON’T FIND THESE THREE APPROACHES TO BE MEATY OR INSIGHTFUL..WHEN YOU EXPLAINED (IN A PREVIOUS POST) WHAT YOU WERE TRYIMNG TO DO. IT ALL MADE SENSE..I THINK YOU NEED TO INCORPORATE THAT HERE IN A PARAGRAHP OR TWO –WHAT WE CALL A NUT GRAPH – TO HOLD PIECE TOGETHER. I DON’ THINK THIS DOES IT AS WELL AS CAN BE. ANOTHER WAY TO APPROACH IT IS TO I TEGRATE THE NUT GRAPH WITH THE SECTION YOU CAN FRANKENSTENIAN…AFTER NOTIND THE COMPANION PIECE, YOU CAN GIVE A PAGRAPH OR TWO ABOUT THE MAIN POINT OF WHAT YOU HAVE LEARN..THEN GO INTO THE WHY BOTHER? THIS WOULD SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF THE SECTION BELOW (OBSERVE, EXPERIMENT, ASK) THAT IS NOT SPECIFIC ENOUGH AND PERHAPS NOT WELL PLACED >AND BETTER INTEGRATE THE TRANSITION INTO THE DISCUSSIOON OF WHY PEOPLE BOTHER…

We can take three approaches to this:
1. Observe: look at what sorts of projects have and have not attracted wide participation. Paul Graham describes history as "all the data we have so far"; what do the data show us?
The advantages of this approach are that it costs nothing, and that can indeed tell you a lot about what types of projects attract what levels of participation, of those types that have already been tried. The disadvantage is that it tells you nothing about types of projects that have not already been tried.
2. Experiment: come up with some ideas for crowdsourced journalism projects, and run with the projects that you can get funded - throw them out into the world, and see what sticks.
Here you can learn something about a type of project that hasn't already been tried. But since your funders are the ones deciding which projects see the light of day, the projects that emerge will inherently be less promising than the ones that'd run if you were to...
3. Ask: meet with your lead users early on, tell them what you have in mind, and get their input and feedback. Checking in with users is standard practice in industry when designing a new product; it serves as a low-cost navigational aid to keep you out of blind alleys and on the right track. To quote Paul Graham again, "...there's someone you can ask for advice: your users. If you're thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, it's probably a good bet."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[ begin Frankensteinian seam]
As a contributor, I participate in crowdsourced journalism because I'm looking to leverage my investment of time into a high "social good" return;
I want that investment to be used efficiently.
As a crowdsourced journalism "user" and veteran of six such projects before Assignment Zero, I've developed personal experience and opinions that I'd like to share when it's still early enough that they can make a difference. I'm doing crowdsourced journalism because I want
(However, I am just one user, and likely not typical, so it's worth taking them with salt.)
[ end Frankensteinian seam]
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The companion piece[A.Z. link] to this essay recounts my experience with the six earlier crowdsourced journalism projects. As a whole, the experience was not successful; it might have been better to have just invested the time on my own weblog.
In other words, from this user's perspective, existing crowdsourced journalism projects have left plenty of room for improvement.
So why bother?
Answer: because there's plenty of room for improvement. I did it, and will continue doing it, for the same reason that you keep going out on dates even though the first six guys didn't measure up - you know there's potential to the form, you want that potential to be realized, and you're pretty sure that, if you keep plugging away and you put the word out, in time you'll get it right.
What does "getting it right" look like, from the contributors' perspective?
For some people - for most people - the potential of participating in crowdsourced journalism will likely be realized in the political crowdsourcing that's done on sites like TPM Muckraker and Daily Kos, as noted by SusanG [A.Z. link] - sometimes as "many eyes", poring over documents; other times as "many ears and voices", reaching out to our representatives, asking them questions, and bringing this information back to the hive; and still other times as "swarm journalism", attacking the varied parts of a political story in a ravening piranha horde. This form of crowdsourced journalism has been wildly successful at attracting motivated contributors, particularly at this time, when the stakes for our country are high.
Others may gravitate toward a group endeavor with individual appeal, such as taking part in a project to question some of the web's most interesting people, as A.Z.'s 70+ interviews [A.Z. link] now show.
And for those of us who wish to shine the light more locally, I'd like to believe a third crowdsourcing model that has yet to emerge: it would employ crowdsourcing's "group" strengths to help citizens tackle the watchdog journalism that's crying to be done in their own communities. A support organization for geographically distributed local watchdogging, it could offer editorial services,reporting advice, training in analyzing budgets and the like, discussion with peers, access to tools, and a "home away from home" to showcase and critique the work. Perhaps the projects would be coordinated, with each participant running the same analysis on their own town.
There's clearly a need for the reportorial product; the NYC Indypendent's Chris Anderson observed [A.Z. link]:
"I would like to see crowdsourcing reach deep down into the bowels of local city governments...[The suburbs] 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."
In an email, Mrs. Panstreppon agrees:
"I think local crowdsourcing is an excellent idea... we are suffering from a lack of news about local and state government because [the local newspaper] has been undergoing severe budget cuts and original reporting has been substantially reduced."
And to grow the product, there's a need for support services: without support, citizen journalists up against entrenched power structures will likely end up at best nowhere, at worst toast. And those who lack Mrs. Panstreppon's accounting background will otherwise be at sea when faced with financial documents.
[...]
THE QUOTESMIGHT BE OVERDONE HERE> I WILL GIVE IT SOME THOUGHT..
"Real journalism consists of what someone doesn't want published, all the rest is public relations." - George Orwell
"Never, never, never let them intimidate you." - David Halberstam
"There ain't nothin' for testicular enhancement like having [a group] behind you." - H.E.
I want to report news, not PR. I want the powers that be to quiver at my approach, not the other way around. I want to cover the stories that wouldn't get covered by a tame local press, but I know I'll get nowhere by taking it on alone; I need a network to teach me what I need, to support me in these efforts, to look at what I'm doing and tell me where I'm going wrong, to suggest angles worth pursuing.
[...]
Chris Anderson [A.Z. link again] questioned whether citizen journalism that's not overtly political yields enough psychic rewards to thrive:
"politics are a passion of the bloodstream, and the gut. These other things [good journalism, objective knowledge] are a little more ... abstract maybe?"
I HEARD ANDERSON GIVE A PAPER AT ICA LAST WEEK..HE WAS NOT AS DEVELOPED AS OTHERS ON THE PANEL, BUT IT WAS INTERESTING..HE SPOKE ABOUT tHE LINE BETWEEN EXPERTS AND EXPERTISE IN THE CONTEXT OF DISCUSSING JOURNALISM AS A CRAFT
But truth can be a passion of the bloodstream and gut as well.
“TRUTH” – ANNA, I THOUGHT YOU WERE MORE POSTMODERN THAN THAT 
A journalist once told me "[Investigative] reporting is like crack." I've tried it*; he's right. I want more. But I'd feel a lot better about going there if I had support. IN SOME WAYS, THIS COMMENT AND THE PARAGRAPHS RIGHT BEFORE IT RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE EXPECTATIONS OF SOME CITIZEN JOURNALISTS. IT SEEMS AS IF YOU COVET THETRADITIONAL JOURNALIST’S PERCH BUT DON’T WANT TO BUCKLE UNDER ITS DISCIPLINE. ARE CITIZEN JOURNALISTS BEING OVERLY IDEALISTIC? IF THETY ARE HOBBYISTS< AS YOU HAVE CHARACTERIZED THEM BEGINNING WITH YOUR LAED< HOW SERIOUS DO YOU THINK THEY SHOULD BE TAKEN? JUST THROWING OUT RECTIONS THAT MAY/MAY NOT HELP.

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On May 31st, 2007 Anna Haynes says:

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I am going to re-read postmodertems tonight. I found myself scrolling to try to see the high/low points of them all without having to read them closely. That suggests a need to tighten

Tmp draft - intro to the postmortems
On May 31st, 2007 Anna Haynes says:
Prior to Assignment Zero, I'd invested roughly 40 hours participating or trying to participate in six crowdsourced journalism projects . Overall, the results have not met expectations.
The projects are of widely varying scope, and the set is by no means well-rounded: it lacks many high-profile (and highly successful) investigations, containing no document dumps, male escorts or Munchausen by Internet cases. But it does have variety, and each project gives us a little more empirical data on what does and doesn't work.
With some of these projects I ended up with nothing to show for the time invested - due to inability to get or enter the data, or due (in part) to lack of support in creating content. In the projects where I was able to make a contribution, it had no visible effect - due to no followup, or no real significance, or no publicity.
Here I offer postmortems on the projects, offering my views of their strengths and weaknesses, and an overall subjective impression for each project itself.
(The postmortems are already in Filed Reporting, here.)

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

Six crowdsourced journalism projects

Anna Haynes — Mon, 28 May 2007 02:12:04 -0400

I've worked on, or tried to work on, six crowdsourced journalism projects prior to Assignment Zero. Here are brief accounts of these projects, along with my evaluations of their strengths and weaknesses and an overall evaluation for each.

(This assemblage is by no means well-rounded; it contains no high-profile - and highly successful - investigations involving Department of Justice document dumps, male escorts or Munchausen by Internet cases.)

1. DeLay Rule Exit Poll
2. DeLay Rule Exit Poll Sequel
3. Bayosphere
4. Polling Place Photo Project
5. Earmarks Project
6. No More Blather *

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1. The DeLay Rule Exit Poll
November 2004

The DeLay Rule Exit Poll project was perhaps the first crowdsourced journalism project instigated by a popular blogger. After the House Republican Caucus had decided - via a voice vote, thus circumventing accountability - to change their rules in order to permit the Speaker of the House to keep his post even if indicted*, Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo asked his readers to help compile a record of how their congressmembers had voted on this change; he asked them to contact their Republican representative's office, ask how the Rep. had voted, and report back, either by email or here at the Daily Delay.

This was a straightforward, clearly specified, easily 'chunked' project, with a clear, accountability-enhancing goal: exposing which representatives had taken a questionable action, one characterized by Rep John Dingell (D-MI) as facilitating "a work release program for the ethically challenged." *

Marshall's readers responded in droves, and the collected results were compiled into a database; information was registered from contacts with 170 Republican congressmen, of which 86 were willing to give straight yes-or-no answers.

What went well:
As the Daily DeLay Exit Poll post's 138 comments make clear, this project engaged readers, who held Congressmembers' feet to the fire and put on the record valuable information that would otherwise have remained hidden.

What didn't:
* Data gathering was low tech and potentially haphazard: results were apparently gathered from email, from comments at the Daily Delay, and from comments at Daily Kos.

* The data "scoring" in the results was not fully consistent: my congressman's vote was scored as "unknown" rather than "refused", although his office had reportedly been unwilling to give an answer.

* The accumulated results ended up on three different webpages at three different URLs: a defunct page at PC Action Fund, and two pages still functional as of May 2007, at USDLogic.com and CampaignMoney.org.

* It's not clear whether or how one can add newly acquired data to the results.
(But updating would become a can of worms if, as seems likely, each site contains its own copy of the data.)

Factors likely affecting participation:
Plus: This project had:
* a clear, desirable goal with partisan, ethics-enhancing consequences;
* clear and simple steps to contribute;
* a clear way to report contributions.

How the project could have been better:
Archiving the results at a site with a curator and continued maintenance; any project involving gathering information for posterity becomes more valuable when it:
* enables continued data gathering, if the results are currently incomplete
* ensures that a permalink to the results won't undergo linkrot; the data should remain available at that URL.

What I didn't contribute:
When my congressman finally revealed his vote in February of this year*, I wanted to add it to the database but could not find a way to do so.

Overall outcome: Success

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2. The DeLay Rule Exit Poll - The Sequel
April 2006

Sixteen months after his original DeLay Rule Exit Poll, Marshall proposed a sequel project, revisiting the DeLay Rule and tacking on some questions regarding the Ethics Committee purge*:

"Over at TPMmuckraker.com, we're going to be posting links to which members of the House GOP caucus voted for the DeLay Rule. We're also going to be posting constituent letters various members of Congress wrote supporting the DeLay Rule and seeing whether they still stick by what they said.
...Relatedly, there's the purge of the Ethics Committee and the change in the ethics rules (both to protect DeLay).
Where does your Republican member of Congress stand on those questions now?
Don't know? Why not give them a call?
Did they support the purge of the ethics committee in January 2005?
Did they vote for the DeLay Rule in November 2004? ...
We've got a list of what they told their constituents then. What are they saying now?
Join in. You can play from home."

What went well:
* It was an interesting idea, building on a previous successful project.

What didn't:
* To my knowledge, results were not published.

Factors likely affecting participation:
Minus: Insufficiently clear specifications - both for collecting the data, and for reporting it.

How the project could have been better:
* More clarity
* Follow-up posting of the results, and perhaps memory-jogging reminders/requests for readers to help, might have increased participation and the value created by participating.

What I didn't contribute:
* Inability to get answers from my congressman's office made it difficult to participate in this project.

Overall outcome: Learning experience

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3. Bayosphere
Spring 2005

Bayosphere was designed as a different type of crowdsourced journalism project: a venue, not a coordinated effort. It was to be a site for citizen journalist reports on subjects "of, by and for the Bay Area" and for discussing related topics with others.

What went well:
The idea was fresh and new; it blazed new ground.

What didn't:
* The site was unfocused and the content unedited; while the content was billed as journalism relating to the Bay Area, in practice it was all over the map, both in geography and in quality.
* The participants were largely left without guidance; questions about doing journalism often went unanswered.
* Content was unedited.

Factors likely affecting participation:
Minus: There was no real benefit to joining the site; it was basically a blogging platform and discussion forum only.

How the project could have been better:
More structure, a narrower focus, and more editorial support for contributors.
(also see Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere postmortem, and an excellent followup by Hillary Johnson.)

What I didn't contribute:
I had wanted to write up a story on a partisan talk radio show host's faulty reliance on a partisan-funded magazine's misrepresentation of physicist Douglas Osheroff's views regarding the shuttle foam issues on space shuttle Columbia, but did not follow through with it. Had Bayosphere had an editor who I could consult with, I likely would have gone forward with the story.

Overall outcome: Learning experience

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4. The Polling Place Photo Project
November 2006

Last fall's Polling Place Photo project was a pilot crowdsourced journalism project initiated by William Drenttel of Design Observer. Sponsored by AIGA, Design for Democracy and NewAssignment.net, and promoted on PressThink, it enlisted the 'crowd' to post photos of their polling place, and fill out survey questions about their voting place and experience.

When introducing the Polling Place Photo Project at the Huffington Post, Jay Rosen laid out NewAssignment.net's role in this project:

"...we're not executing it; AIGA and Drenttel are. We're consulting on it, and it's testing a part of our model. NewAssignment will help explain the project, and follow up by getting a journalist--a writer or critic--to assess the results."

What went well:
People posted photos and filled out the survey. In February Drenttel wrote "the site has...become a valuable archive of visual and documentary evidence", and in May he reported via email that "[roughly] 600 people contributed photographs with almost every state being represented".

[In a recent email he added:

"...the project has led to some other journalism[:]
My article on voting in religious places on Design Observer.
An article in Aperture's [upcoming] Fall issue with 27 photos used.

]

What didn't:
Presumably due to a time crunch imposed by the impending election, the site design had some issues; submitting photos was awkward, the survey questions weren't always up to describing reality adequately, and there didn't seem to be a way to get a "big picture" view of the results.

Rosen reports that the intended followup assessment of this project has not yet occurred.

Factors likely affecting participation:
Plus: Rather than trying to pull people in completely "from scratch", the project enlisted members of an existing social network, the design professionals of AIGA. Apparently it worked well: the report of 600 contributors is impressive.

[William Drenttel isn't so sure that the "existing social network" aspect was significant: "In fact, we reached far beyond AIGA, and pollingplacephotoproject.org has close to 300 links tracked by Technorati."]

Minus: The project had a late start; Drenttel reports that it was launched only a week before the election, and didn't make the Huffington Post for until four days before the election.

Minus: Due to competing demands on people's attention, it's likely the project didn't get the "outside" publicity it would have received under more typical conditions.

How the project could have been better:

* A more user-friendly interface for submissions

* David Weinberger had suggested that much of the site's value could - at least in theory - have been obtained with less effort by leveraging off of Flickr, with its existing huge pool of contributors. Had this been possible, it would likely have ensured wider participation and perhaps made it easier for a visitor to get a feel for the "big picture" results. But apparently it was't possible: at the time William Drenttel had reported, "Yes, this could have been done at Flickr, and we reached out to them to collaborate and heard nothing back." He also cited a design consideration: "Ultimately, tags are not the same as data. We wanted to know zip code, time of day, length of time waiting, etc. A basic data set offers a better way to research photos than random tags."

[In a recent email Drenttel added:

"I want to emphasize how wrong I think David Weinberger is about having done this simply in Flickr. On Flickr, "voting" turns up 39,548 pictures, but I can't find pictures from my town or neighborhood unless they are tagged correctly. This is a case of the large number of photos (the success of crowdsourcing) leading to almost meaningless filler: too much data. In fact tags against this volume of pictures are virtually useless, they are so generic: polling, place, vote, voting, election, pollingplace, mypollingplace, decision2006. Voting does not get you vote. decision2006 leads to primarily one photographer, a Canadian."

]

What I contributed:
Photos of my polling place and of absentee voting.

Overall outcome: Mixed

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5. Earmarks project
Summer/Fall 2006

A brainchild of Porkbusters, the goal of the Earmarks Project was to find out as much as possible about who and what was behind the earmarks in the 2006 Health and Human Services appropriations bill - who had sponsored them, who they were going to, and what sort of lobbying or other connections they were associated with. This project was well publicized and supported; PressThink lists the other Earmarks Project partners as "the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Porkbusters, and the Examiner Newspapers, along with Club for Growth, Human Events Online, The Heritage Foundation, Tapscott’s Copy Desk - and you, should you choose to be involved."

What went well:
The collaboration among sites with diverse readership set the stage for people of all political perspectives to join in.

Some participants - most notably "Mrs. Panstreppon" - uncovered and posted intriguing connections.

What didn't:
Participation was low.

From what Mrs. Panstreppon and I could see, people of all political perspectives did not join in; conservatives seemed to be occupied elsewhere.

The findings sat unused; while the Examiner had asked its readers to report their findings by email, and the Sunlight Foundation had provided a comments section for their readers' raw reports from the field, at no point was there any visible follow-up about the bill or the earmark reports, nor aggregation of the findings.
Mrs Panstreppon termed this project "a good idea but poorly executed."

Factors likely affecting participation:
Minus: At least one congressman's office staff was not forthcoming with answers when asked about earmarks he had sponsored; other citizen journalists probably would have encountered this problem as well, particularly given the recent Examiner report of getting the runaround when trying to find who had sponsored earmarks from the recently released OMB-compiled database of Congressional earmarks for 2005.

Minus: This crowdsourcing project likely cut against the motivations of its natural pool of participants. Empirically, the online subgroup most motivated to participate in an organized crowdsource project seems typically to be those individuals who would most support Health and Human Services spending; so asking them to expose expenditures and potentially harm the lawmakers who'd requested them, shortly before a pivotal election, was asking a lot.

Minus: Even had the project's goal not gone "against the grain" of its constituents, it still wasn't compelling relative to its competition: protecting our wallets seems lackluster when compared to protecting our democracy.

How the project could have been better:
The pre-election timing, while uncontrollable, was unfortunate.
While the low participation was likely unavoidable, perhaps the project could then have been scaled down into a model pilot project, and then given top-notch support, namely:
* support for contributors, particularly when they ran up against difficulties like stonewalling legislators;
* leveraging contributors' efforts by compiling and following up on their findings; which in turn would encourage future participation. As it was, Earmarks Project standout Mrs. Panstreppon was surprised to find that "no one seemed to actually want to do something about the boondoggle".

What I contributed:
Two earmarks probably sponsored by my congressman, with their associated lobbyists.

Overall outcome: Learning experience

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6. No More Blather - Submit tough questions for politicians
October 2006

No More Blather received a plug from NewAssignment.net's David Cohn last fall; this website provided a venue for publicizing questions sidestepped by our elected officials, to increase the questions' visibility in the hope that someone - perhaps the submitter, perhaps someone else - who got the opportunity would ask them.

What went well:
The goal was a noble one; and the website is still online.

What didn't:
This site apparently got little publicity, and has received few contributions.

Factors likely affecting participation:
* Minus: Lack of publicity

* Minus: It's also possible that there truly isn't much demand for this functionality; perhaps the vast majority of citizens want to tell their representatives, not ask them.

How the project could have been better:

It might not have needed its own website, if the functionality could be implemented in distributed fashion using Don Marti's "Questions for" tags (which ideally would then be followed by "Interview with" tags...)

What I contributed:
Two questions for my congressman.
(I have not attempted to pursue getting answers to these questions.)

Overall outcome: Learning experience
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Journalism gets Crowdsourced

Q on pro-am collaborations

Anna Haynes — Wed, 23 May 2007 18:23:32 -0400

Q: Do you think pro-am collaborations with the mainstream press will be the way of the future? (in reality, in what ways would such collaborations work, and in what ways would they not?)

A: Yes, probably some model will be one of the dominant ones in the future. But the ground is really shifting, access to information is really shifting, and I think what we'll see is many more types of models being viable, with no one model the only dominant one. I think we won't know which ones work, and where, and why, and what topics they're covering, until we try. I think one thing that hinders experimentation in this country is the idea that we only try stuff we are pretty certain of succeeding before it's even attempted. I think we need to try different things, and tell ourselves that eliminating models that don't work well under certain circumstances is important information to know as we move forward. The process of elimination is often undervalued. What's wrong with trying something, assessing, and taking it as positive information that this particular model doesn't work? That's not failure. That's important information. This country is too obsessed with one definition of "success," and I think it freezes up people who otherwise would propose efforts that are off-the-wall and creative that actually could provide some important insight into different processes.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

Defining partisanship - another Q from SusanG email Q&A exchange

Anna Haynes — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:51:02 -0400

Sorry, this one had slipped through the cracks...

AZ: What defines partisanship?

SG: I guess party identification defines it in the simplest terms. But there seems to be a real underground shift going on right now. Disgusted Republicans are becoming independent because they perceive true conservative beliefs betrayed by the GOP leaders. Democrats are losing faith in their party's leaders to form a strong oppositional voice to perceived governmental overreach.

To tell the truth, I don't even know what partisan is anymore. Daily Kos gets as much heat these days from criticizing entrenched establishment Democrats as it does from criticizing Republicans. People I'd long thought of as die-hard conservatives -- Andrew Sullivan, John Cole of Balloon Juice -- are loud, proud and acidic in their criticisms of the Republican Party. On any given day, you could grab a post from Daily Kos and grab a post from Sullivan or Cole and not be able to tell which was coming from a purported conservative and which was coming from a purported liberal.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

More Qs from SusanG

Anna Haynes — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:02:24 -0400

I had a lot of trouble deciding how to order the SusanG Qs; here are the extras that didn't fit into the order I ended up using.

AZ: Leonard Witt listed required roles to be filled in a crowdsourced cit-j organization - any comments on his suggestions?

SG: After a quick initial look, he seems to be headed in the right direction. I think there may be a few too many categories that could be collapsed together, and I'm not sure of his categorization of pro/am ... I think some of the pro stuff could be shouldered by an "amateur" that was serious about following journalistic guidelines.

A.Z.: Do you think a citizen journalism support organization similar to IRE(Investigative Reporters and Editors; membership not open to most citizen journalists) would be useful?

SG: I think there are enough online guidelines for standards and links to useful tools available that if citizen journalists aren't invited to the table, they can set up their own. It certainly would be useful, I would think.

AZ: What should we (today) as citizen journalists take as our model and as our values?

I think we are creating a new model, but we should embrace the traditional values of idealized journalism -- get your facts straight, write clearly and directly, offer corrections quickly and immediately if you get it wrong, back up your analysis with evidence, clearly label opinion as separate from news (and keep opinion OUT of news as much as you humanly can). Really, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. What draws people to journalism in the first place is curiosity, and the "crusade" aspect, and a kind of heroic belief that we are better citizens when better informed. Just because the press has never lived up to its ideal in this country doesn't mean it's not a worthy aspiration in and of itself. I think citizen journalism groups should welcome the fact that there are pretty lofty standards out there already encoded for professionals. Why not make use of them?

AZ: How can citizen journalism get recognition and readership to the point that it's no longer dependent on the mainstream press for spreading the word?

SG: I'm not sure that's the ideal model ... it strikes me as a last resort. But I think if it does end up moving toward independence, the information market will help mold the model. More people will seek out nitty-gritty stories as the population takes to the web for more meat. More readership will gradually (I would think) drive more advertising dollars or more subscriptions or more donor money to supporting such citizen-based enterprises.

AZ: What's the ethical and behavioral difference between an "opposition journalist" and an opposition researcher? between a mainstream journalist and an opposition journalist?

SG: My own belief is that those terms are somewhat misleading in and of themselves. I happen to think that reporting -- whether by professionals or amateurs, those in opposition or those in agreement -- should have a healthy dose of skepticism when covering anyone or any organization that's entrenched in power. What is the old saying? "The job of the newspaper is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted?" That's basically my view: Bring to the attention of citizens injustices and overlooked inequities, examine those in power and hold them accountable.

If a news organization, whether professional or amateur, sticks to facts and presents stories with reasonable caveats (give the "accused" a chance to respond or explain, at least try to present other sides of the argument or another interpretation of facts), then things will sort themselves out. If a group forms that does nothing but take on Republicans, I'm sure one will arise to do nothing but examine Democrats. And if both sides are actually treating what they DO investigate fully and fairly in their individual presentations (and only discriminating about what politicians/activists/parties they choose to *cover*), then we would probably all be better off in the long run.

I've actually long been intrigued by the notion that journalists in America aspire to be objective (impossible on the face of it), while those in the UK have a vigorous opposition-style press. When you get the Guardian, you know you're getting an interpretation of facts from the liberal viewpoint. When you read the Times of London, you know you're pretty much getting a fairly conservative presentation of facts. Because readers know this, because there is no pretense of "objectivity" in the packaging, readers can judge the "spin" element by double-checking back and forth between the two viewpoints.

Here, on the other hand, when you get such things as Fox News declaring itself "fair and balanced," people can be lulled into thinking what they're viewing really is an objective analysis of events.

AZ: On the double-edged sword of visibility - a high-profile crowdsourced investigative journalism project will attract more participants, but is likely to face the same "scrubbing of websites" problem that the Jeff Gannon investigation ran into. For this reason, EPM's investigations aren't done "in public" on a webpage anyone can view. Has taking the investigations private ameliorated the "scrubbing" problem, or is it still an issue?

SG: With the caveat that I haven't been involved with the group for the past year or so, I'd say at least during the first year, there was very little website scrubbing done once it went private. Also, we were very aware that it had happened in the past and made a concerted effort to save the pages we ran across that had information and we made screenshots as well before ever writing about what we'd found.

AZ: What do you gain by having ePluribus Media separate from DailyKos? What do you lose?

SG: Well, first you have to understand that they're entirely different entities. Markos is the sole owner of Daily Kos, I was just a diarist there who stumbled across information that exploded into the Gannon story through joint research. He didn't even notice it was going on until long after it had made news across the blogosphere and even made it into the MSM. Ironically, his first front page notice about it was a link to Atrios, which was commenting on it, but was linking back to his own site. I don't think he even clicked the link Atrios was referencing, because it took him a while to notice it was about something breaking on his own site.

The limits of the Daily Kos set-up for research were apparent within a few days. People were loading scads of information into the comments of the diaries; diaries were spinning off from that (often because I asked people who found some information to look into it further). The search engine sucks and you couldn't search comments (IIRC). This really became apparent as a problem once the whole thing was over. In reviewing the diaries and comments in a kind of after-report, we actually found his real name and address had been provided in a very early diary by one smart commenter. But it was lost amidst hundreds of other names and addresses provided by other commenters. The most active researchers, some of whom were techies, suggested another, more friendly platform be created, so we moved over there. Then we still would post stories at the research site and cross-post them at Daily Kos.

Daily Kos thus became an outlet, while the epluribus site (then called Propagannon) was the research hive.

Legally, epluribus was set up by Brian Keeler and me as a 501c4. This had nothing to do with Daily Kos; markos didn't have any role at all in it.

The obvious advantage to cross-posting at Daily Kos is that it's the biggest political blog in the world. But it simply isn't able to handle a massive collaborative research project as well. Perhaps smaller ones, very tightly focused, it can handle in a diary series with fewer pieces of information and researchers. But the scale we were thinking of for epluribus -- basically investigating all aspects of the right-wing machine? Not a chance.

AZ: How did you manage to do all this with four children?

SG: Well, only two of them were still at home, and they were teenagers. So it wasn't like I was changing diapers or anything. And ironically, during the initial Gannon thing, weather was horrible and our road got cut off due to storms ... for a couple of weeks, the kids were staying down the hill with friends who got them to school because we were cut off from civilization. Funny how things work ... I'm not sure if I would have been able to put in the hours without the intervention of horrible rainstorms.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

We're 125,000 Strong

Anna Haynes — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:49:02 -0400

Reflections from SusanG, a Daily Kos' editor and co-founder of ePluribus Media

Anna Haynes interviews SusanG over email, May 15-21.

When it comes to hands-on crowdsourced journalism, Susan Gardner - better known online as SusanG of Daily Kos - has seen and done it all. Her offhand invitation to the Daily Kos community to join in "useless speculation as to what this complicated crapola means" triggered the Daily Kos investigative avalanche (1,2,3,4) that exposed White House reporter "Jeff Gannon'"s career trajectory as "a modern-day fairy tale on steroids." She went on to co-found ePluribus Media, an organization for "citizen journalism, of the people, for the people," investigating propaganda, corruption, and other issues of public concern. Today, she's a contributing editor at Daily Kos.

Having lived crowdsourced journalism for years now, SusanG has a wealth of wisdom to impart. In this interview she talks about her experiences, why people do crowdsourced journalism, the movement's strengths and weaknesses, its relations to the traditional press, her thoughts on "partisanship" today, and more.

Anna Haynes: What do you think motivates contributors to participate in Daily Kos and ePluribus Media?

SusanG: Certainly not money. Part of it might be, in some cases, a desire to get a name for one's self in a pretty small pond. But mostly, I think it's a frustration with the media, which has served the country poorly during this administration. I know a lot of people feel a responsibility for getting to the truth of the matter. They no longer trust the media to do that. And I also think the fellowship that comes with collaboration in a country where many feel isolated and cut off from the truth is a motivation. There is something inherently ennobling about joining with others in a cause greater than just promoting the narrow interests of your life (and America is grounded in that tradition). I think it's also a revival of the notion of participatory democracy. Those who are gifted with analysis, research and interpretive skills feel they're giving something back to the country by exposing corruption. It's grounded in idealism, I think, that people have been embarrassed for a long time are putting themselves to a practical end: gathering information to make us all better citizens.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

The News is Now Public: How a Citizen Journalism Network Informs Us All

Maurice — Mon, 21 May 2007 20:51:28 -0400

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.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

Power Brokering A New Media Democracy

Sabaink — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:52:05 -0400

Associated Content thinks the crowd should benefit, too

Saba Kennedy Washington interviews Luke Beatty, founder of Associated Content

The Denver-based media company Associated Content solicits and publishes knowledge-driven content from its users. Associated Content pays its producers, on average, between $3 and $20 for the news, essays and opinions the site accepts, plus royalties based on the number of page views the content generates. Some of the content is also syndicated to the company's partners, but the site mostly relies on advertising for revenue.

Luke Beatty, the founder and CEO of the company, told the Denver alternative weekly newspaper Westword that Associated Content was not yet making money, but it has expanded to 20 full-time employees and approximately 55,000 content producers since its 2004 founding. In May, 2007, Westword reported that Associated Content now "regularly pummels operations associated with the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News and other big boys."

The site stirred up some controversy when one of its content producers posted a doctored newspaper story in which the Associated Content contributor changed some facts and added phony quotes. The changed story was picked up as fact by other news organizations, who treated it as fact and caused a brief uproar. Associated Content has since hired a full-time news director.

Saba Kennedy Washington interviewed Beatty, who was on his way to the airport for a business trip.

Saba Washington: How did your working for the search taxonomy company Wand, and your time in education fuel the concept of Associated Content?

Luke Beatty: Well, I certainly came from a world of search, discovery, directories, and it occurred to me that people have the ability to scour information on the web all day long without any real content. I realized that consumers were looking for information and we needed to build the tools to help them find that information. The whole premise behind AC is that the public can provide information it needs. If we could make a dent in the content base, we could build one big library with everyone dumping into the bucket what they know. My "aha!" moment happened in my office in Silicon Valley.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

NOLA.com gives home for grief and relief after Hurricane Katrina

melissawmetzger — Mon, 21 May 2007 06:30:49 -0400

Jon Donley, editor of the New Orleans-based Web site, talks about community and online conversations

Melissa Metzger interviews Jon Donley

Jon Donley is the founding editor of NOLA.com, exclusive online outlet of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. During Hurricane Katrina, Jon covered the storm from The Times-Picayune's hurricane bunker and worked to keep uninterrupted news coverage online after the loss of the newspaper's printing and delivery capability. He also directed NOLA.com’s expansion of forums, blogs and other user-generated features to guide search and rescue efforts, reunite scattered hurricane victims, and facilitate grassroots reporting and citizen journalism in the aftermath of the storm. A longtime newspaperman before going digital, Jon was part of the team of journalists awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for public service and breaking news.

Melissa Metzger: For a little background, describe the chain of events during Katrina that led to the self-publishing component of the site becoming so important?

Jon Donley: It's important to understand this didn’t just happen on the fly. I took over NOLA.com 10 years ago. Then, in 1998, we had a brush with Hurricane Georges, and that was the first time there had ever been a major evacuation of the New Orleans area during a hurricane. ... We thought, “Our audience is gone. We are not going to be very busy. We’ll just have fun and cover what we cover."

But we had rolled out our community forums about six months earlier. And to our surprise, people got to where they were evacuating to and they came back onto the Web site, and started communicating with each other asking questions like, “Is the evacuation over, can we come back, does my neighborhood have power?” The kind of things you need to know before you pack the kids up and drive 500 miles back. We were pretty amazed by the amount of traffic we were getting by people who were not even here.

The Times-Picayune’s reaction [to Georges] was to create a hurricane bunker within the interior of The Times-Picayune and prepare it so they wouldn’t lose power and lose the ability to cover the news. Our reaction was, “Huh. We better create ways that people can communicate even better during the next storm.” ... Over the time between Georges and Katrina we had built up over 100 forums for various usage, a quarter of those were neighborhood or geographically based.

When there was a storm, we would roll out a hurricane- or storm-centric home page and promote those forums where there was the ability to keep up with the breaking news and contribute to the breaking news. That’s been a part of our model for storms for the past 10 years.

This is 2004. We had a full roll of blogs now that complemented our forums, several of which readers could contribute to. So by the time we got around to Katrina we had a pretty good set of tools at our disposal. But, more than that, we spent the last 10 years educating people that if something big happened we welcomed their input, and we wanted them to send us their photos and storm stories. That’s important as I tell this story because if we had just rolled out blogs, forums without the public knowing we were there, it would not have worked. A big thing with citizen journalism or crowdsourcing, it has to do with letting the people know you respect their input. So the first thing I started doing when I got into the Internet was get into forums and reach out to the same people who wrote letters to the editor. Now they get published all the time. Building up that relationship is a big deal. I’ve written letters to The New York Times before, but I’ve never gotten one published. [Laughs] My image is, when I send a letter to The New York Times, it has to go through a barricade of some very crusty Ivy League elite people.

Q: Guys in tweed?

A: [Laughs] Yeah. But the Internet gives me a chance to get my voice heard. And I’m the guy that votes. A lot of those guys in tweed don’t even vote.

Q: Why do you respect the reader-contributor so highly?

A: Our system of government is based on everyone voting and everyone voting in an informed way. That might not be the way it works, but that’s what it’s supposed to do. I believe in voter education. … But I’ve always found — and maybe I am just a human-interest reporter on my print side — but I just want to hear people’s stories. I want to hear their experiences. And I want to hear it without it being filtered. During the storm we had great journalists from all over doing the best job they could writing about the storm and shooting pictures, but the fact was they weren’t up to their necks. They weren’t watching people drown. They didn’t carry their kids into the attic chased by the water. Getting those stories second-hand is never as authentic as getting them first-hand. And that’s a dramatic example, but it applies to things like Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras, also.

The Times-Picayune has a very — jaded isn’t the right word — dignified view of Mardi Gras because it happens every year. It's like summer and winter. They have been covering it for 175 years now, and [laughs] they’ve got a set agenda. Nothing they do, nothing these professional reporters do, conveys the joy and the human face of Jazz Fest or Mardi Gras the way that the people who are actually in the middle of it do. In traditional journalism, the way you try to capture that is to send reporters out and to try to pry it out of people and then you put as much of it into a story as you can, and then you write a story that hopefully reflects it. But most reporters, and I am definitely one of them, wherever I am, I am observing. If I go to a party, I stand in the corner and observe like an objective reporter. That’s just training. I’m not even sure I have fun [laughs]. But you know, it's what we do. ... On the lighter side, we just finished Jazz Fest. And it’s a huge event and we cover it. And The Times-Picayune treats it like huge event, but actually getting across the simple joy and the feeling that is Jazz Fest is something that a journalist very rarely can do. So we ask people, “Tell us about your Jazz Fest. Tell us what it means to you.” And it is especially important now because we are trying to recapture and reclaim things that were lost during the hurricane. A journalist could maybe philosophically convey that, but other than that they are covering it as a big music event. Everybody in the crowd has the tools of journalism in their hands. If they’ve got a cell phone, they’ve got a camera, they’ve got a voice recorder, they’ve probably got the ability to send emails. And we’ve trained these people that we are a platform that loves them and wants to hear from them.

Q: What do you think motivated people to write in? I understand why during Katrina people would write in about missing family members, but what motivates people to write in during something like Jazz Fest—when they are not getting paid?

A: Well, everyone wants to tell their story. That’s one of the foundational rules of journalism. That’s why you can walk up as a human-interest reporter into a crowd and come out with a story if you are a good journalist because honestly everyone wants to tell their story. It's human nature.

Q: But is there a difference in the motivation of the person who will volunteer their story when asked, and the person who takes the extra initiative to log on and write something or upload pictures?

A: If you go to a small town with a healthy newspaper, you see that the paper becomes the forum where the voice of the community is expressed. And in NOLA’s case on the Internet, we are by far the leading site, but a huge part of the traffic is derived by the content we get from readers. And we have — at least since the hurricane — established ourselves as the place where the voice of the community can be expressed. The community wants to tell its own story. It’s an organic being. For centuries journalists have stood in the place of the people. They’ve represented the people. They didn’t have a printing press. They didn’t have the ability to go from town to town. We were their representatives like elected representatives. But now it has been democratized to the point where the people have the capability — and of course they can go start their own Web site or go start a blog on Blogger — but there is an extra added motivation for people to have their views heard on their hometown newspaper or Web site.

Q: So then as a professional how do you do your job and how do you think professionals should be involved in this new environment?

A: If you were a print reporter and you wanted to find the soul of Jazz Fest, you’d go there, eat some Crawfish Monica, and talk to dozens of people. Get a bunch of quotes, and try to form a picture in your mind to get a hold of that soul in everybody’s comments. Then you’d go back and try to distill it, hopefully accurately. What we do is not that much different. What we do though is let our readers read everything people have to say and see all the pictures, and then The Times-Picayune or we or both distill it. The Times-Picayune often writes at least parts of stories from what people have said or uses what people have said as a starting point for more analytical stories. In other words, the people each tell a small viewpoint story, and it’s a limited viewpoint. For example, you can see what’s happening on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras on our webcam, but if you have a network of webcams all over the city, you have a lot of little windows you can look out of to get the big picture.

Q: So the metaphor is that the professional can take look at all of the different “webcams” — meaning people’s opinions — to get an idea of the big picture?

A: Yes, they can see trends. Trends are pretty clear. We were locked away in The Times-Picayune and we had a few reporters get out a short distance and two photographers con their way onto rescue boats. And those people came back with very gripping, graphic descriptions, but our disaster was so widespread that, even if we had every reporter out in boats, we would not have been able to tell the story of New Orleans. So, during the storm we got a package of pictures from a guy who was in his house in Chalmette and he pulled out his camera and started shooting the water rising up his living room window outside the house. He shot pictures as he was climbing into his attic, and then when he broke a hole to get on the roof. He sent me 83 pictures of that very gripping first-hand experience. This isn’t a professional photographer. This is a guy who is shooting pictures while he is having his house torn up. There are houses floating by. Shingles being ripped off and nails sticking up from the plywood. It was just powerful. There’s no way anyone could tell that story second-hand. ... It's much more gripping when you are hearing it from a coherent witness who is personally involved.

We got the news first that there were hundreds of people trapped in St. Mary’s Vietnamese Church from our forums. A guy with a BlackBerry was SMSing messages to us. He was saying, “We’ve got about 300 people here in the church and the water is getting deeper and deeper.” I think he sent about a dozen messages. And the last one was, “We’ve got a lot of old people in here and the water is up to our chests and the old people are losing the strength to hold up their heads.” That was right out of the center of the flood and that type of story happened over and over and over again. We troll our forums and our blogs constantly for story ideas.

The doctor and two nurses from Memorial Hospital who were charged with euthanasia. One thing we do all the time now is a feature we call “In Your Own Words” where we ask people to post on a blog about whatever the big topic of the day is. Well, we were asking people what they thought about these charges, and there was just an overwhelming amount of support for these medical people and criticism of the attorney general. One woman wrote in, “I was there. I was in the middle of this and I support them.” So on our little patrol [for story ideas], a little red flag went off. I contacted her and said, "Why don’t you tell your story?" She said, “Okay and I have pictures.” “Oh Yeah?” “And I have video.” “Oh Yeah?” So I went in and interviewed her. And she had about 30 video clips and hundreds of photos she had taken with her digital camera. And her father had died the day before in the hospital, and the family was there in a family apartment across the street. They just happened to be there when the storm hit, and this woman just started taking pictures. She said, “I didn’t see any reporters around. I thought it was important this story got out.” We’ve all heard how horrible it was there. You know, nurses fanning patients with chunks of cardboard. Trying to push gurneys up steep garage ramps to get them to the top to be pulled off by helicopter. She had video of all this, and we did a video feature on it. She deliberately said to herself, “This needs to be reported.” And that’s the attitude we’ve been working ever since the hurricane.

Q: Do you get a sense of the demographic of people writing in or would you say it’s a pretty diverse crowd?

A: Statistically speaking, our city is so screwed up here I don’t want to make any judgments. I think it was at the American Press Institute someone asked, “Isn’t it an elitist white medium? You are doing okay getting to the well-off white folks, but isn’t this creating a distance?” Well, when we were getting cries for help, we were getting them from every area of the city. It has been my experience working in the French Quarter with a lot of the service people that even the kids that tap dance on the street, they all have MySpace pages. They are very computer literate. Same with gang members. They may not have a computer, but they have a cell-phone, they can send text messages because that’s how it was being done [when we were receiving pleas for help]. I don’t really have an opinion about that at the moment. I will say that the NAACP of St. Tammany Parish has a blog on our site. The president of the NAACP has been very active. But The North Shore is so exceedingly white and well-off you can’t draw any conclusions from it. It is the most Republican parish. But Jefferson parish is our next target for this [blogger feature], and they are in the other direction. More 50/50. More of a range.

Q: What has surprised you most?

A: I’m trying to think if I’ve had any surprises. The same spirit and energy that motivates people to get involved is exactly the same thing we ran into in my career as the op-ed editor with letters to the editor.

Q: What about fact-checking? As an editor there’s no way you can fact-check everything that comes in?

A: [Laughs] Let’s just say that as someone who has trained young reporters, I will tell you young reporters have no special skills over a decently educated American citizen. We hold ourselves to be experts in covering news, but if you take a newspaper and look through it, the overwhelming majority of what is in a paper could have been done by a monkey. I’ve been interested in the guy who has been hiring people in India to cover the city council meetings in this small town. They are doing it by watching the video, the Web screen of the city council meeting, and they are writing stories. Your first instinct: “Come on.” But remember, when a reporter goes to cover a city council meeting, when you are talking about the suburbs, that is probably going to be one of your most junior reporters. They haven’t paid their dues yet. That’s why they are sitting there. You are trusting that reporter to sit through the meeting. ... You have to trust that reporter to come back and say, “This is the most important thing that happened.” If I have a blogger cover it, that blogger is obviously going to be from that town, so whatever is happening is going to personally affect that blogger more than it is the junior reporter. Sometimes The Times-Picayune reporter and the blogger are at the same meeting and holding them up side by side generally the blogger tells a better story. Because he has more background on the situation and — if they are talking about drainage for example — he can backfill with details about the flooded yard and roads and what’s happened since they cleared that big field for a housing development. That’s his life.

But to me the important thing is how you label it, just like everything else. We don’t expect editorials to be totally objective. We hope someone at some point has really rationally considered both sides, but we label it very clearly as editorial for exactly this reason. We are not putting a stamp on this saying, “This is true.” We are saying, “This is how people feel.” So in all of our user-submitted stuff, we make very clear to say, “These are our users. This is their stuff.” You take it for what it is. There is an active philosophy out there among the online journalism geeks from [Jeff] Jarvis to whoever that there is a thing out there called The Wisdom of Crowds. That is, if you take a camera and take pictures all over the city and stick ‘em up on the wall like a mosaic, you are going to get a fairly accurate picture of what’s out there, a fairly authentic idea of what that city is. And it works the same way with users. We take all of the user content that we’ve gotten during and after Katrina and you get a very authentic, accurate view of what life is like here.

Q: So does the wisdom of a crowd come from its numbers, that it's able to accomplish more than any professional group could?

A: It’s a scientific principle. If you do one test on one test tube, it will come out one way or the other, but it doesn’t necessarily prove your case. If you do ten thousand tests on ten thousand test tubes, and 70 percent of the test are the same, then you know 70 percent of the time the medicine is going to work. That’s the scientific principle. You do lots of experiments on lots of subjects and then you come out with a general view of the way things are mostly. One of the problems with journalism, and a problem a lot of people have with journalists, is that they have the idea that they are smarter than the average person. They’re not. There are some journalists who may have become very expert in their field, but as a general rule, journalists are people who have been trained to stand back and observe and tell a story.

The Times-Picayune has 20 photographers. I like to tell them, “You all have 20 photographers. I have twenty thousand.” [Laughs] A lot of those photos may not be worth the digital space they are taking up, but a lot of them are good, too. There are times where The Times-Picayune has back-published some of their [users’] photos. And that’s one of the goals of the company. It was a big issue last year with the story of all the people who got tattoos after Katrina. And this is on the lighter side. Rather than having a reporter look into this, The Times-Picayune had us put a solicitation on our front page: If you felt strongly enough about Katrina to get a tattoo, send us a picture and your story. ... We got hundreds and hundreds of photos you couldn’t imagine. And they did a front-page story from it. There were maybe two 'graphs by a reporter to lead it off, and from there on out it was just the voice of the public.

Q: So then The Times-Picayune, as an example, is making money from advertisers and these people are basically working for them for free. Are there any ethical issues with that?

A: NOLA has a lot of ads. We have so many ads, we have to turn them away. You have to be on a waiting list to advertise on NOLA. That’s a good thing. That means five years from now we’ll still be here for people to do that. We are fulfilling a basic human need. And we are making money to allow me to get my paycheck and for me to feed my family, and for the fairly significant cost it takes to produce this. ... Certainly I am not going to apologize for the fact that all life is about supporting yourself and getting your family fed. And anyone who thinks that journalism or what we do can be done for free is fooling themselves. One thing is, who is going to do good old-fashioned investigative reporting when the papers fail? Even television can’t support that kind of staff. Only newspapers and news magazines can do that. So that’s a good question because we are getting close to the tipping point for newspapers because you have to have this much advertising and this much circulation to put out a paper at all. It’s not a question of how many people are in the newsroom.

Q: Do you think that crowdsourcing could fill that role?

A: Well, that’s one thing we are trying to find out. I’m very interested in Assignment Zero because some very smart people are trying to find an answer to that question. We don’t know the answer yet. But if we can’t ... If anyone has the idea, that the general public is going to pay for investigative journalists, they’re wrong.

As a matter of fact, investigative journalists are often unpopular. Woodward and Bernstein were unpopular with the public. They brought down a presidency and set an example of what the fourth estate really could be. But the fact is when they were doing that, the public hated them. This is the same public that voted Nixon into his second term in [one of] the most overwhelming landslide[s] in American history. If the public doesn’t support you, they’re not going to pay for you. Woodward and Bernstein — that could only have been done by a paper who said, “Screw what’s popular. We want to do what’s right.” And doing what’s right rarely pays off. And anyone who thinks part of the public is going to pay for that very important part of journalism is fooling themselves. If it paid, then TV would be doing it. We’ve got to figure this out before newspapers die. The public can fill in a lot of these places with crowdsourcing journalists, but in the end someone’s got to pay a very high-level talented reporter for months — sometimes years — of investigating a single story. That takes money. Whatever your opinion is on corporations, corporations have provided the only investigative journalism that has ever been done in this country. I’m hoping someone comes up with a better model, but it isn’t going to be done with Marxist rhetoric. And, by the way, the Soviet Union never had investigative reporters and they don’t now. If they try, they get taken somewhere. [Laughs]

Q: Any thoughts of where this trend may be going, what the future could look like?

A: There’s always a danger that even sites like NOLA could become irrelevant unless we tap into our communities. We’ve got a window right now because of our connection with the newspapers and their traditional links to the community. With so many tools coming out, and people being able to do things socially on the Internet, there’s every possibility for a localized Google or a more in-depth Craig’s List to take our place, so we have to reach out, and we have to reach out actively. I’m very much against the idea that if you build it, they will come. I have not had that experience. All of our success has been due to active missionary work in the community before and after Katrina. A lot of time people don’t get involved because they don’t feel like anyone is paying attention to them. And naturally people want other people to pay attention to them. That’s a natural thing. And that’s what we’re banking on. Just real, natural human needs.

(Edited by Jeremy Verdusco)

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

Comments and Unruly Crowds

Maurice — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:32:06 -0400

When opening up too much leads to chaos

Maurice Cardinal interviews Debbie Kornmiller from the Arizona Star via telephone, May 18th, 2007

Debbie Kornmiller has been in the news business professionally since 1981 – 26 years. She is currently responsible for the “comments” section, which as she describes, is regarded by her employer, the Arizona Star, as “customer service.”

Her official title is “Reader Advocate.”

How did it come about that you are in the position of being responsible for the “commenting” segments?

The customer service position has been in existence on and off at the Star newspaper since the 70’s, and during times of “budget cuts,” it is the first department to be retired and then brought back when the economy looks rosier. Ms. Kornmiller feels that their readers need to be heard in the newsroom in a consistent fashion and that nothing makes them madder than when they are ping ponged through the system and no one listens. She is the one stop shop. As she explained, her role is to “listen and help, and either fix it, have it fixed, or explain why it will never be fixed.”

She held this “customer service” position way before online commenting on articles came into existence. Although not personally responsible for setting policy, Kornmiller has spent considerable time deciding what to do with online comments, how to monitor people who comment, and how to give them freedom of the Web while maintaining decorum and remaining civil, which of late has been a challenge for her newspaper. For clarity, others within the organization set policy and monitor the comments sections while Ms. Kornmiller manages operational responsibilities.

Q: How long has the Arizona Star been involved in “commenting?”

The Arizona Star newspaper launched online commenting in 1995, but dropped it in 2000 due to civility challenges. They resurrected it in 2005, when, as Ms. Kornmiller describes, “it became fashionable again.” They brought it back as “unmonitored conversation,” which again quickly grew out of control.

Journalism gets Crowdsourced

This Watchdog Bites

Anna Haynes — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:50:35 -0400

A citizen journalist from TPMCafe stands up

Anna Haynes interviews "Mrs. Panstreppon" of TPM Cafe via email, May 11-21, 2007

In her TPM Cafe profile, Mrs. Panstreppon describes herself as a "retired brain surgeon," but her true background in accounting serves the citizen journalism community far more effectively than brain surgery could ever do.

Named after the prescient aunt of Saki's short story Hyacinth, Mrs. Panstreppon has investigated such political figures as Grover Norquist and former Rep. Curt Weldon among many others.

She keeps us up-to-date on those investigations on her TPM Cafe blog.

Mrs. Panstreppon has worked alone, in collaboration with one other person, and in crowdsourcing projects such as the Earmarks Project and TPM Muckraker's DOJ Document Dump.

Anna Haynes: What do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Have we hit its true potential?

"Mrs Panstreppon": I'd like to see crowdsourcing become more organized and take advantage of on-the-spot reporting. For example, property records here on Long Island are not available online but if someone needed property records for an investigation, I might volunteer to visit the county clerk's office.