Thing of the past ...
Rocky Mt. News composing room typesetting linotype machines
Title: History Colorado, Buckwalter collection ; no. 1055
Creator: Buckwalter, Harry H.
Men work at at linotype machines in the composing room of the Rocky Mountain News newspaper building in Denver, Colorado. A supervisor looks on. Date: [between 1890 and 1910?] History Colorado
Crowd sourcing and journalism
Note: This article first appeared in the trade publication Newspapers and Technology in mid-2007.
By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com
A reporter working for a local newspaper asked me recently
if it was Ok to quote Wikipedia as a source. It depends on context I thought,
but realized that if they did, they really needed to attribute many sources. The
online encyclopedia is developed by contributor input.
James
Surowiecki’s ‘wisdom of crowds’,
or as Howard Rheingold noted in “Smart Mobs: The Next Revolution,” is an
emerging trend for group behavior based on new technologies like the Internet,
wireless devices, PDAs and digital phones. It holds that the network-connected
group behaves intelligently and/or in an efficient manner because of the
network.
The new buzz in journalism, as a result, is crowd sourcing,
citizen journalism and transfer of power to the blogosphere for hyper local
news.
But is that happening because the bloggers are doing a
better job than traditional journalist?
Tish Grier, writing to me about a recent column I wrote on
who qualifies as a journalist, says people are not necessarily looking for news
reports from bloggers.
“I don't
know where folks in the press get the impression that bloggers are reporting
the news--or that bloggers ‘want’ to report the news. Actually, I think this is something that's
been hyped by folks like Jeff Jarvis and other insider/media pundit types. It's the same way that there's a boatload of
hype that ‘people’ are ‘clamoring’ for citizen journalism (not really, they'd
just like their local papers to do a better job, but if somebody else gives
them a better product, they'll take it).”
Grier blogs
for Constant Observer and Assignment Zero. Assignment Zero is an attempt to
bring journalists and the public together in the fashion of the open-source
movement of software development. NewAssignment.Net, Wired and other
participants are collaborating on the project.
“Seriously,
when it comes down to it, it's really insiders in journalism who are trying to
upset journalism's applecart--not ‘bloggers’ or ‘people’ or ‘citizen
journalists.’ When most bloggers get
press creds, we're simply writing our impressions of a scene, not doing hard
and fast reporting. We know that, our readers know that--the only people who
don't know that are the press. If most of us wanted to be reporters, we'd
become journalists (however that's accomplished--there seems to be conflicting
schools of thought on that one.)”
Jay Rosen,
who is executive editor of Assignment Zero, says we should take advantage of
the possibilities provided for us by the new technology.
“An
outstanding fact of the Net era is that costs for people to find each other,
share information, and work together are falling rapidly. This should have
consequences for reporting big, moving stories where the truth is distributed
around. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of
journalists and volunteer users should be able to find out things that the
larger public needs to know,” he wrote in a letter to participants of
Assignment Zero.
Grier,
however, holds that it is really two different things.
“It will
never cease to amaze me how the press can't seem to get with the concept that
most blogs--and most bloggers--are having conversations, not reporting. We put stuff out there to get people to talk
‘to’ us or ‘about’ what we said. It's
not about reporting at all. And maybe if
we get credentialed to go into the hallowed halls of Congress--well, maybe it's
to provide a little bit of fly-on-the-wall observation and transparency to the
whole process.”
Yes, and maybe
the whole process can stand to be more open and subject to the give and take of
what news consumers want. I think we are likely to find that out.
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