connecting*the*dots

Blogger gal vs. Newspaper guy!

Well, not quite, but it makes a great lede, eh?

Sue, Lex and I met over lunch yesterday to discuss potential strategies for evolving the News & Record’s citizen journalism efforts. And no, we didn’t have a stare off.

Man… Lex is in a tough position; he’s completely open to forward-thinking ideas (I mean, his title is Citizen Journalism Coordinator), but he also seems to be up against a bottom line business that’s very adverse to risk. Apparently, changing the approach to meeting a historically profitable bottom line is a tough sell, even within an industry that’s on shaky ground.

It’s amazing how palpable sand can become to the heads of industry during innovative times.

That’s not to say that the N&R hasn’t been progressive with their citizen journalism efforts to date — they have — but Lex knows that in just a few years the N&R (both print and online) will have to directly compete with new forms of dynamic, community-based, participatory, online news applications (e.g. Newsvine), which will be free of legacy organizational overhead and be able to react with agility.

And you can’t forget those pesky bloggers.

The N&R needs to step up their game.

So we chatted. And ate. And chatted some more. And by the time our conversation came to a close, we had a number of interesting ideas on the table:

• Personal Relationships - Lex is looking to develop relationships with members of the Greensboro community, offering them the opportunity to use N&R resources (legal, photography, journalist feedback, etc.) to craft substantive citizen journalism. To me, this approach perfectly fits the future of print newspapers, as time-based news is dead on paper. They’ll have to compete as daily magazines (more depth, less coverage).

• Real-time Blogging Input - I suggested promoting a tagging schema that matched the classification structure of both the paper and the site:

  For example, identify and promote a unique set of “greensboro[xxxx]” tags, for anyone to use on blog posts, flickr images, etc. when generating Greensboro specific news, events, opinions, etc.

  Internally, the N&R editorial staff would then set up RSS aggregators with subscriptions of each tag search result.

  The real-time input of potential stories and assets would increase exponentially, while the N&R would continue to have editorial control, as the aggregator would serve as the queue into the publishing process

• Representation Across The Community - Sue focused on the concept of encouraging participation along the lines of community diversity (her connections with Uplifter is right along the lines of my focus with The People, Yes!). We talked about ideas ranging from developing blogging 101 material to share with a non-computer literate demographic to grass roots representation within sub-communities (e.g. school board meetings) to encourage live-blogging with the unique tag identifiers

An interesting start, but there’s still one major component that we’re skirting: Revenue incentives.

Lex made it clear that creating a participatory revenue model doesn’t fall under his charge, but the N&R is open to ideas. My perspective is that without incentive, participation will be lighter, with less quality and dedication. Any revenue generated out of these relationships should be viewed as found money, so share and share alike:

• To tap into the wisdom of the blogosphere by republishing the original post or an edited version, a buisness needs to develop a revenue model that fairly represents such a relationship.
• To partner with individuals from the community to generate community-based journalism, a business needs to develop a revenue model to encourage such a partnership.

It comes down to this: Pony up or we, the citizens, will simply get together and form collaborative blogs, creating relevant identities, gain a better footprint in Google over a 3 month period of time and, eventually, sign up with BlogAds to support our own voice.

That’s not a threat. ;-) I’m looking forward to our next conversation, folks.

UPDATE: Six months after the fact, in the NORG session at ConvergeSouth, Ed Cone backs up my philosophy regarding partnering with local bloggers/writers in a revenue share program.

James Surowiecki, staff writer at the New Yorker, speaks about the future of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd

- Making a horseracing analogy to the wisdom of the crowds. As the odds go, so do the results. The idea is that based on the varied expertise of the crowds, the odds begin to stack up in order.

- The stock market taps into the wisdom of the crowd as well. 10 year periods, money managers - individuals - can’t beat the wisdom of the investment crowd. Forecasting works to a certain degree.

Wisdom of the crowds seems to be more about tapping into people to forecast results (in his mind). Interesting conversation, but it’s very much about capitalizing on people. So far…

Now James is talking about tapping into diversity, and how groups of less intelligent people up the solution factor when they’re introduced into a crowd of experts. They make the group smarter — which only seems to make sense based on each of our individual perspectives and life experiences. I mean, how do you quantify knowledge?

“It’s a mistake to try to seek out the one or two experts to find a solution to your problem; experts don’t have a keen sence to the limits of their knowledge.” Well said, James. He’s heading in a direction that matches up with the thesis of Kent Bye at the Echo Chamber Project.

Diversity reduces the ills of homogenous thinking.

Diversity automatically moves the role of the Devil’s Advocate about, keeping the viewpoint fresh.

Independence is about people making judgements upon their own knowledge, not piggybacking peer pressures. Group decisions can be madness (lynchings) or mediocre (business meeting); “we often put too much of a premium on consensus.” Instead of tapping into the intelligence of the people in the group, they go the opposite way. What we want is for people to act independent in the group, so those viewpoints can be culled for a greater knowledge; not the opposite.

Great analogy to opposite side of the street parking, where immitation works. If no one moves their car, street cleaning being suspended is the correct assumption.

But immitation is problematic if groups follow each other, nothing stands out as knowledge. Independence is problematic because people want to appear credible. Absolutely.

The transition to the internet…

He states that the problem of the internet is that it breaks down independence. “People get locked into relatively small worlds.” This is good for community, bad for collective intelligence. Circular mills are the result of such interactions; following the ant in front of each other to our own demise. One strength of the net is to randomize connections and sources of information. This is the fundamental lesson of collective intelligence on the net.

Ebb and flow; the iteration of input and output.

– Interesting Q&A thought on how the wisdom of the crowd created the internet bubble burst, as fundamentals were thrown out the window in the stead of people’s perspectives. There needs to be balance to tap into the collective intelligence.

– How many people to make a crowd? James says over 50, but research has shown that even in small groups, the collective intelligence surpasses the wisdom of larger crowds. It takes more work to tap into small groups, as diversity needs to be structured (in a sense).

– Hierarchy is good for getting things done; it is not good for figuring out what to get done and how.

Closing statement: “We are living in a society that feels the need for individual power, leadership etc. Too much information diffused between people is ‘bad.’ The mix of bottom up knowledge with these top down constraints creates interesting times.”

Disclaimer: This is live blogging; all quotes are paraphrases.