I’m a city boy. I love crowds. I believe in crowds.
But let’s get serious about the usefulness of crowdsourced hard-news reporting at the local level.
Every example of how Twitter, etc., is theoretically changing journalism seems to rely on extremely unusual tragedies, disasters or sensations.
I don’t know about your hometown paper, but in the one I work for, almost all of what you’d call “breaking news” (aside from the sports and arts coverage) falls into one of four areas:
- Cops and courts — situations known only to a tiny group of private, deeply interested and unreliable individuals.
- Political actions — city and county governments doing stuff, known only to a handful of deeply interested and unreliable people present.
- Studies, findings and reports — released by governments, nonprofits and businesses.
- Pseudo-events — announced press conferences, etc.
It’s hard to imagine “social journalism” being at all reliable in (1) or (2), and it’s hard to imagine it being much more effective in (3) or (4) than simply picking up the phone, firing up the Internet or going to the damn press event.
In situations like document dumps or earnings reports, putting many eyes on the problem can be an effective way of finding hidden gems or coming up with provocative questions.
But in almost every other local reporting situation, what’s really happening is that a reporter is composing a hypothesis, testing it with facts that haven’t yet been brought to light or widely shared, then explaining why they’re important. Though the social Web can be a tool for soliciting predefined information — “have you relocated because of the recession?” — composing hypotheses is not a task crowds do well.
Anybody who thinks floods, fires and ferry accidents are what local reporting is all about should look more often at his or her local newspaper.
Update 7/28: I’ve added links to Scott Karp’s related post at Publish2. I’ve been a Karp fan for years, and I’ve got mad respect for his whole team, but today they make useful villains.
Great point, Michael. That said, maybe we should engage more with the “crowd” on Twitter to find out if it could provide useful tips on sources of information we haven’t unearthed or maybe an angle we haven’t thought of pursuing. I’m definitely wary of the so-called power of Twitter and/or crowdsourcing but I do believe in the power of engaging with the crowd. Twitter allows reporters to do the latter without leaving their desk, something management seems to favor so they can maximize reporters’ time (in other words, produce as much copy as possible to feed the print beast, which means less driving around the community and more time on the phone and on email). I guess I’d like to see smaller papers like ours at least give Twitter a twy.
Hey, John! I don’t know how you found me, but welcome to the blogroll.
I agree — lots of papers, ours included, could be using Twitter more than they are now. I’m just questioning the general rush to immanentize the eschaton.
I found you through a mention of your blog via PDX Journalism Camp. Didn’t realize you’d be speaking there. Actually, I didn’t realize there was an agenda at all until the other day when I finally realized I hadn’t RSVP’d. Looks cool.
As for the rush to create heaven on Earth, I totally agree. I actually go back and forth on the true value of social media. It’s a tool, nothing less. I get irritated with people who insist Twitter or other tools will save us from ourselves.
I’m not sure I fully understand the point you’re trying to make, but I know in my experience — we have a pretty lively and well informed community adding content to our site. While I do most of the original reporting, the community, the crowd, often adds more facts or perspective or insight no one reporter could possibly bring to bear on any of the four items you list above. I never go so far as to call it “crowdsourcing.” to me, it’s just community conversation, but the feedback I get from fans of The Batavian is that people find it very useful and informative more often that not.
Good point about it being a conversation. That is a more apt description of it, and I think we all agree that there’s value in engaging with the community. I think the point was just that there’s a lot of hyperbole out there about the value of social media and that maybe we should treat it with cautious respect. Not sure if that helps clarify things or not. By the way, I like your hyperlocal Batavian site.
The potholes in the road argument is a good one. The big question however is how closely in line are local newspapers with government. Does the local paper challenge the establishment? In most markets there is a monopoly and newspapers are less challenging and more lawyered than they have ever been.
As a former small-town newspaper editor, I agree entirely. Good & fair reporting in general won’t be reported by volunteers on a regular basis.
Hi Michael — Ryan Sholin here, Director of News Innovation at Publish2.
Here are four answers for your four categories:
1. Cops & Courts: One of my favorite reporters when I worked at the Santa Cruz Sentinel was the cops reporter. She maintained profiles in places like MySpace and Facebook — on her own, because she wanted to — and because she was a real person there, and not an organization or a reporter just signing up to search for something, she was able to win the trust of “a tiny group of private, deeply interested and unreliable individuals” as you say, then use the information she reported there to fill in the details of her story, go back to the PIO with solid questions, and generally improve her reporting.
2. Political actions: Here’s a basic instruction manual for befriending and getting to know anyone in any position of power: Hang out where they hang out and communicate how they communicate. Over a drink at the bar? I’ve heard of a few reporters doing that. Want to get inside the county comptroller’s head? Follow him in social media channels, make friends, and quietly ask questions. Like a telephone, but different, with a lower barrier to entry and a lower barrier to creating a relationship.
3. Studies, findings and reports: This seems pretty simple: Use social media channels to find color, anecdotes, and local flavor to fill out a wire story. Quickly. The recent stories on texting seem like a surefire win. “Does your kid text and drive?” etc. Instant feedback, new connections, expanded network for your next question.
4. Pseudo-events: Well, if you’re still covering these, chances are you’ll want pictures, but you don’t necessarily have a shooter to send or a spare camera for your reporter. But if there’s anything visual going on, I bet there will be plenty of folks snapping pictures and posting them to their Facebook accounts and elsewhere.
Now, does that make Social Journalism any more reliable, efficient, or effective in category 3 and 4? Reliability is a wash, it’s usually more efficient, and how effective it is will depend on the reporter and their skill at moving in these spaces.
But you’re asking good questions.
Anecdotal information-whenver I have been involved with a local event, be it government or social based, there are multiple participants with various points of view. An interest group does not limit opinions/arguments in a city hall meeting. Facts can be gleaned from the arguments that are made and it does further discovery of information. I don’t think that professional journalists reported the financial situation before the “crash” and political reporters have their own spin on what they report. Professionals struggle with objective reporting from their own point of view and the agenda of their parent company=profits. I think its a toss-up depending on who is doing the fact finding/reporting. Analysis of the “crowd” is where hypotheses are constructed. Information is not just there for journalists. Individuals can construct their own theories. After all, an educated informed citizen is the best thing for democracy. Journalists have an ax to grind with this issue-their jobs/self esteem.
Don’t focus on the “news” event or story. What’s important is citizens actively participating in civic debate & discussion. Some of what they’ll generate will constitute worthy journalism; a lot won’t.
Citizens talking on social media like Twitter constitute active networks; they are crucial to a healthy community. The more robust the networks, the healthier the community.
Media’s role should be to enhance, build, filter, challenge those networks.
If you focus just on getting the story, you’re driving into the past.
Two thoughts:
(1) Eric Schwartz writes, “Good & fair reporting in general won’t be reported by volunteers on a regular basis.” I agree completely that there is very much a valid, important role for professional reporters — and I think the four areas named in the original post are great examples. (Disclaimer: I went to school with the author.)
However, this argument only applies when professional reporters are actually doing what they’re supposed to. The rise of cheap distribution platforms and social media means that if you’re a reporter who’s just been coasting — repeating what people tell you, writing “he-said, she-said” stories that make no effort to go beyond the point-counterpoint, basically engaging in glorified stenography — that isn’t going to cut it anymore.
When professional reporters enjoyed a monopoly on the news thanks to being employed by the only business in town that owned a printing press, they could afford to be lazy. No more.
(2) On social/unbundled/grassroots/”new” media vs. traditional/bundled/top-down/”old” media: There does not need to be a “versus.” This is not an either/or proposition! I’m increasingly of the opinion that there is a valid, important and long-lasting role for BOTH models — that each offers different things to different people, and are best viewed as two complementary ways of approaching the same goal.
Thanks for the compliment, John.
On the paid vs. volunteer question, it needs to be pointed out that there are a number of gradients between the two opposites.
Today, the barrier to entry to become a local news reporter are practically zero, pennies, or even fractions of pennies, on the dollar compared to big-iron newspapers.
That means any number of different people with different motivations and interest can rise up to either fill a niche and pursue a passion.
As The Batavian is showing, you can make a living without a newspaper to back you up. But I could see many of the same principles applied by the hobbyist, the partisan, the recent j-school grad, the out-of-work journalist or the community activist.
The point is, the paid-professional reporter shouldn’t just yet start feeling warm and comfortable that “you can’t do with out me.” That may simply not be true any longer.
With The Batavian, we cover a lot of ground by working hard, leveraging cheap tools and access, confining ourselves to a small coverage area and the relationships we build with readers and sources, who make significant contributions to our ability to get by with a small staff.
And now we have volunteer correspondents, too, who are making more and more contributions.
Twitter is always helpful in severe weather, which is hardly an unusual news situation in much of the country, including where I live. It was helpful this past weekend when I was driving home in a storm.
Since Ryan Sholin’s response addressed examples of the usefulness of social media in each of the four examples you suggested, I won’t do that (but could easily with different examples from the ones Ryan used).
But I’d like to make this point: What useful tool is useful in every story? I can think of a lot of stories where I haven’t used spreadsheets or cell phones. But I wouldn’t be likely to hire a reporter who doesn’t recognize their value and know how and where to use them.
I think Steve Buttry hits on an extremely important concept, and one that ties in well with what Doug Fisher recently wrote about the danger of assuming that everything has to be pigeonholed into a conventional news story.
For every topic, every thing that happens, every issue to explore, and every piece of data we encounter, there are any number of ways to use it. Whenever we encounter an issue, a piece of news or a nugget of information, we need to run through an internal checklist that looks something like this:
If this needs to be dealt with, which platforms and “content types” are appropriate methods for packaging and/or distributing it? (Check all that apply.)
__ Conventional news story
__ One paragraph in a conventional news story
__ Video clip
__ Larger-scale video presentation
__ Audio clip
__ Database
__ Spreadsheet
__ Blog post
__ Tweet
__ Wiki-style entry
__ Etc., etc., etc.
What tools will I use in the pursuit of distributing whatever comes out of this?
__ Phone calls
__ E-mails
__ Facebook
__ Twitter
__ Publish2
__ My Web site
__ Someone else’s Web site
__ Public records
__ Databases
__ Spreadsheets
__ Still camera
__ Video camera
__ Tape recorder
__ Etc., etc., etc.
We have more and more tools and distribution modes at our disposal. We need to resist both anyone who insists that the old, comfortable tools are better in every situation and anyone who insists that the old tools are archaic and dead.
Every tool and every mode of distribution is going to have its own strengths and weaknesses that will make it either more or less suited to whatever situation you’re looking at. The trick is becoming familiar with and adept at using enough of them that you’ll always be able to choose the right set for the job.
Good points, all — though I don’t agree 100 percent with all of you. Thank you very much for the thoughtful responses.
First of all, I’m certainly not arguing that reporters (amateurs and pros alike) should avoid electronic tools.
I’m simply arguing that although crowds can flesh out hard-news reporting, they can’t build its initial skeleton.
Both the pieces linked in my third paragraph (especially the first one) seemed to imply that crowds can report the bony facts of breaking local news. This isn’t true.
The problem isn’t that volunteers can’t be trusted to report facts. It’s that in non-catastrophic local reporting, there just aren’t enough hands on the job. And there won’t be.
My grandiose use of the phrase “social media” may have been the source of some confusion. (Sorry, Howard. You’re on my longtime-fan-of list, too, by the way.)
Finally, I *love* Erik’s checklist. (Disclaimer: I went to school with Erik.) The newsroom he describes isn’t going to be one of the ones where alternative workflows go to die.
I should add that Jeff Fobes offers a neat summary of a theme that runs through several of your comments: “news” is less important than newsosaurs think, and “conversation” is more important than newsosaurs think.
I find it very persuasive.
Thanks, Michael for the props. Here’s my line of thought, slightly amplified:
The press earns its protection only because the Constitution says it has a role in U.S. citizens’ freedom of speech. And until recently to speak of the “press” was to speak of the media, because the media had the exclusive role of transmitting news and information.
But now that the tools of publication have left the building, the constitutionally protected role of the “press” no longer only applies to just the media. Arguably, the constitutional term “press” needs to be extended to every citizen who uses social media tools.
In other words: The media used to control the “press” pipeline for free speech; but the Internet puts the tools of publication in EVERYONE’s hands.
So, what privileged roles are left for the media, in terms of freedom of speech? As long as media operations have some revenue stream, they can pay professional reporters and editors, and will likely continue those are historic roles.
But the media is now challenged by the Internet and its social media applications to see itself working with citizens and their groups — who themselves are taking on many of the roles of the traditional “press.”
The media, in its new role, should recognize that the press corps now contains important new (and constitutionally protected) members — the citizens — and work to promote, enhance and protect the activities of these citizen-journalists and their networks. While the media will remain an important PURVEYOR of free speech, it must now work alongside its new partners, the citizens and their diverse groups, to ORGANIZE, FILTER and CURATE the free speech that citizens generate and publish through their own means.