The Bottom Line Of CrowdSourcing
Wired News
Gannett to Crowdsource News
By Jeff Howe
[…]
According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”
The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.
“This is a huge restructuring for us,” said Michael Maness, the VP for strategic planning of news and one of the chief architects of the project. According to an e-mail sent Thursday to Gannett news staff by CEO Craig Dubow, the restructuring has been tested in 11 locations throughout the United States, but will be in place throughout all of Gannett’s newspapers by May. “Implementing the (Information) Center quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett.”
[…]
Well, it looks like Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net isn’t as much R&D as he and many others have thought.
Sure, Jay will have tons more room to explore the creation of a collaborative news model with value for the reader, the participants and the domain alike, but with this news from Gannett, it’s obvious that the owners of these newspapers are finally getting that change is an eventuality.
My question: Is their approach to CrowdSourcing as pure as Jay’s?
As Jay tells it, NewAssignment will evolve over time (without the pressures of a bottom line, as it’s root is based in academia), discovering and iterating different methods of collaboration with citizens who are willing to put time and effort into a story because it absolutely concerns them from either a personal or community perspective.
No matter how much Gannett, the organization, talks that talk, their institutional and primary shareholders will not allow them to walk that exact walk. This is not an egalitarian shift in operating procedures; this is a shift based purely on industry competition and the potential loss of capital.
The motivations of editors and journalists within these organizations align much more with the drivers behind NewAssignment, but the bottom line for their careers is that they are at the mercy of the business drivers of the Gannetts of the world. So when an organization decides to run in this direction, I can only imagine the types of conversations to be found at the water-cooler.
The Future Of CrowdSourcing
My net takeaway of this announcement from Gannett is positive, but only in as much as their organizational methodology doesn’t attempt to leverage the free output of people as a mechanism for reaching a bottom-line. For if people’s creativity, perspectives and thesis’ are tapped into — beyond the aforementioned proactive participation of watchdogging, whistle-blowing and researching — then we’re heading down a path that isn’t progressive; it’s a reversion to the underpinnings of the industrial revolution and techniques of mass production, only now within the information age.
This isn’t an easy subject to take a position because technology isn’t a static delivery platform. Take the search industry as an example:
When a search engine (corporation) indexes billions of web pages (other people’s work) and returns search results with advertising affixed, that search engine is essentially CrowdSourcing to establish their bottom-line. Now, because the vast majority of people and organizations whose web sites, blogs, services, applications, etc. receive a huge benefit of consistent exposure from such an arrangement, the search industry is considered to be a benefit rather than exploitation.
But a particular news organization does not fall into the same sphere as a search engine.
A search engine indexes everything, from the base domain to the most granular content found within. If/when news organizations venture beyond working the wisdom of the crowd in a participatory fashion, and begin to algorithmically tap into the meta-data of external amateur output — whether it be blog posts, video, photography, podcasts, etc. — the fine line between collaboration and exploitation will be crossed in order to impact a bottom-line.
Other people, afar and local, are thinking about these issues as well:
- Chris Messina is a tireless advocate for community and open-source, so his perspective on CrowdSourcing goes even deeper into the fundamental drivers of our capitalistic society. This interview is an interesting conversation along these lines.
- Local blogger, The Shu, posted his meandering thoughts along the lines of this very same issue early last year — particular to the announcement that the Greensboro News & Record planned on creating a “Town Square” with the participation of local bloggers — and was painted by journalists and many local bloggers in the comment thread as being everything but a conspiracy theorist.
In numerous circles, the term information age is considered synonymous with the term information revolution, but that association is tenuous at best in my mind.
Are we going to let the revolutionary aspects of technology explicitly serve the capital masters of the world, turning our personal expertise, opinions and creativity into the equivalent of a virtual assembly line of mass media production?
Tags: Adam Smith Problem, change, Chris Messina, citizen media, CrowdSourcing, Gannett, Jay Rosen, journalism, NewAssignment, News and Record, NORG, The Shu, World 2.0.
8 Responses to “The Bottom Line Of CrowdSourcing”
- 1 Pingback on Mar 25th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
- 2 Pingback on Oct 23rd, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Search
No Tweets RSS feedLatest Posts
- grateful for the silence while…
- getting back to the basics: me…
- can’t sleep. in a bad way…
- singing words of wisdom… let…
- i finally understand the conce…
- thinking about painting my bed…
- getting to know the morning ci…
- what a ride this week has been…
- 37 years is what it took for m…
- i’ve got the 9:22 blues… tim…
What I Write About (see all)
- 9 11 accountability activism Adam Smith Problem advertising America antiwar artsy fartsy blogging business capitalism change citizen media community Congress corporation corruption creativity disturbing experience design film funny George Bush government graffiti Greensboro Hip hop humanity information architecture innovation inspiration internet Iraq War journalism lyrics media music New World Order New York City North Carolina personal philosophy photography poetry politics reality Republican Party terrorism video World 2.0
Thanks for the mention, Sean. This is exactly the kind of development I’m worried about… when it’s more about lowering costs than lowering your position to the level of the community (or raising yourself up, depending on your perspective), I have my concerns.
I mean, I’m all about forging good relationships between industry and individuals, but when we go back to heyday industrialism exploitation, I reaffirm my belief that this struggle can’t happen within the confines of our current economy, but instead has to rise, as most movements do, as an outside system that checks and balances the existing system grown stale and obsolete.
Come to the table on our terms and we’ll be happy to host you; come to the table expecting us to grovel at your feet and pay homage to the great things you’re doing for us and we’ll be sure to give you a taste of the revolution we’re already becoming familiar and accustomed to. We know that we deserve more; more importantly, we know that we can also provide for ourselves.
heh. you tell ‘em, chris.
the thing is, there are firms that “get it” and are tapping deeper into the crowd and community, yet providing a slice of the “found money” action:
so if old money newspapers are now moving towards hiring programmers and people like us to drag a huge fishing net behind their domains, scraping the web for contextual content, all they need to do to stay in our good graces (IMHO) is create fair revenue-share models for this stream of found traffic and credibility.
if they don’t, well, i’m with you dude. we can iterate quicker than they can turn the cruiseship.
In fairness, both what TheShu posted and the comments from journalists in response (myself and others) were almost completely about what the N&R specifically, rather than the newspaper industry generally, might have been planning to do. And inasmuch as we had no plans of any kind at that point, I don’t think that our pointing that fact out can fairly be characterized as criticism (fair or unfair) of TheShu. That’s certainly not how I intended *my* comments, anyway.
That said, at first glance this Gannett initiative strikes me as similar to so many top-down initiatives I’ve watched that chain push over the years on a wide variety of subjects that affect the newsroom, from increasing staff diversity to widening its news operations’ source pool: They get the words in a big way, but they’re not hearing the music. I guess we’ll see.
from TheShu, in his comment thread:
TheShu might have begun with the N&R, but he dug deeper and attempted to further a discussion about the very issues that are now surfacing with crowdsourcing. The result? No one else seemed to want to explore those issues; instead it was suggested that he try to make money writing or that if he didn’t want people to link to his stuff then he shouldn’t publish it in the first place, etc.
Regarding Gannett, well, further into the article, there’s a telling quote of where this is all heading: “The newspaper of the future is going to need more programmers than copy editors, and we’re going to have to figure out how to make that transition.”
That isn’t referring to the staff programmer ilk at the N&R; it’s referring to information architects and algorithmic minds that script dynamic solutions to be presented in a static interface. And this is a positive direction, but only if the returned content hasn’t been stolen.
If news sources pay for AP feeds, they had better pony up for authentic media sources. And if the only difference in that equation is a middle-man entity of the AP… well, I guess someone has an opportunity to corral authentic media and pimp it out with a share price for all…
There’s also a quote from an anonymous midlevel Gannett newspaper editor to the effect that they’re going to have to have a lot of meetings to implement this. I read that as: God, we’ve got to stall until we can find a way to kill this thing. But, never actually having worked for Gannett, I could be misreading. :-)
heh. that’s the water cooler talk i was hoping to get a sense of… well, i guess time will tell. non-legacy news domains must look like they’re moving at the speed of light from your position, lex. as soon as they add the human element to the experience in a more profound manner… goodnight, irene.