The third part of this draft book chapter (read part one here and part two here) looks at how blogs have changed the sourcing practices of journalists - in particular the rise of crowdsourcing - and provided opportunities for increased engagement. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.
Sourcing material
While the opportunity that blogs provide for anyone to publish has undoubtedly led to a proliferation of new sources and leads - particularly “Insider” blogs produced by experts and gossips working within particular industries (Henry, 2007) and even ‘YouTube whistleblowers’ (Witte, 2006) - it is the very conversational, interactive and networked nature of blogs which has led journalists to explore completely new ways of newsgathering.
One of the biggest changes that blogging and new media have brought to journalism is the rise of ‘crowdsourcing’, whereby individual elements of a particular project are spread (or ‘outsourced’) between members of a particular community. Typically these take one of two forms: tapping into a range of experience and expertise; or simply tapping into distributed manpower.
Borrowing from the open source movement, attempts to tap into the ‘wisdom of crowds’ draw on blogs, wikis, social networking and mailing lists enabling journalists to tap into a wider range of knowledge - or manpower - than exists in the newsroom - and pursue stories that might otherwise not have been covered, or which would have taken longer to cover.
Talking Points Memo, one of the most successful investigative journalism blogs, frequently draws on its readership to pursue big stories. In December 2006 the blog posted a brief piece about the firing of an Arkansas US attorney and, noting that several other US attorneys were being replaced, asked its readers if they knew of anything similar happening in their area. As the blog, along with sister blog TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country the rolling story led to the resignation of a senior Justice Department official and the cause being taken up by Democrat politicians.
In a different story, owner Josh Marshall asked readers to survey their own members of Congress on the issue of the proposed privatisation of Social Security. Marshall says that:
“Hundreds of people out there send clips and other tips … There is some real information out there, some real expertise. If you’re not in politics and you know something, you’re not going to call David Broder. With the blog, you develop an intimacy with people. Some of it is perceived, but some of it is real.” (McDermott, 2007)
Similar approaches have been adopted by Porkbusters.org - which invited readers to identify wasteful spending in their state or district, blog about it, and link to it from the Porkbusters site (Reynolds, 2005) - while in another example, bloggers and readers mobilised to cover a story about the contamination of pet food ingredients exported from China which they felt was being overlooked by the mainstream news media. Blogs such as The Pet Connection, PetFoodTracker.com and ThePetFoodList.com provided information ranging from symptoms of poisoning and safe foods, to the latest news on the issue, as well as acting as focal points for pet owners, lawyers, industry groups and reporters. One site, Itchmo.com, became so popular that it was banned in China (Weise, 2007).
Hurricane Katrina has acted as a particular focal point for crowdsourcing initiatives, with a number of online operations, including TPM, drawing on reader input to compile ‘timelines’ for the events leading up to, during and after Hurricane Katrina. One of the best examples came from the ePluribus Media community, who gathered information on over 500 events, fact-checked and sourced, documenting “the devastation, the political shenanigans, and the struggles of the people living on the Gulf Coast.” (ePluribus Media, 2006) These range from a 26-year-old report about weak soil under the levee to an article 11 months after the levees broke documenting a tripling in suicide rates.
Once the online world had proved the approach could work, mainstream media began experimenting. And when in May 2006 Florida’s News-Press received calls from readers complaining about high prices being charged to connect newly constructed homes to water and sewer lines, Kate Marymont, the News-Press‘ editor in chief, decided that,
“”Rather than start a long investigation and come out months later in the paper with our findings we asked our readers to help us find out why the cost was so exorbitant … We weren’t prepared for the volume, and we had to throw a lot more firepower just to handle the phone calls and e-mails.” … Readers spontaneously organized their own investigations: Retired engineers analyzed blueprints, accountants pored over balance sheets, and an inside whistle-blower leaked documents showing evidence of bid-rigging. “We had people from all over the world helping us,” said Marymont. For six weeks the News-Press generated more traffic to its website than “ever before, excepting hurricanes.” In the end, the city cut the utility fees by more than 30 percent, one official resigned, and the fees have become the driving issue in an upcoming city council special election.” (Howe, 2006a).
In a further example from the Fort Myers News-Press in Florida, the newspaper put information online on which citizens had received government help after Hurricane Katrina, and encouraged readers to look through it. “Within 24 hours, there were 60,000 searches from readers, who then told News-Press journalists about neighbours with wrecked homes who had not received aid. The readers did the investigating and the paper then reported the stories.” (Beckett, 2007)
But there are reservations about using crowdsourcing for covering particular issues - in particular concerning legal issues such as libel and contempt of court, as well as the effect on newspaper staffing, and the potential for abuse.
Gregory Korte, an investigative journalist with the Cincinnati Enquirer who has been working to implement Gannett’s crowdsourcing policy, says crowdsourcing holds “a great deal of promise for certain “pocketbook” issues, like the sewage scandal in Fort Myers”, but that it will take time and work to discover the best ways of using it. “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.”" (Howe, 2006a). Greg Yardley at Yardley.ca, meanwhile, illustrates the danges of stories being hijacked by political groups and agendas, asking what would happen if he organised ten friends to call the paper, asking for an investigation into the local ‘Demolican’ councilman. “Can I influence the news? Now imagine the local Demolican party gets wind of this, and they start paying some inclined members to counteract this with their own stories and investigations. How much could they in turn influence the news?” (Howe 2006c)
The News-Press examples highlight not just how newsgathering is being changed by new media technologies, but also news consumption and - specifically - engagement. Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s Vice President for new media content, notes that, “We’ve learned that no one wants to read a 400-column-inch investigative feature online. But when you make them a part of the process they get incredibly engaged.” (Howe, 2006a). Guardian investigative journalist David Leigh also notes that multimedia elements of the web such as graphics, video and audio can bring stories to life:
“The problem with all these bribery and corruption stories is they are often quite complicated, financial and dry. Because of the legal problems, of which there are many, you have to be quite roundabout with the things you say. But to find ways of doing it online that can bring it alive for people and give them a handle on it is a really exciting thing. You’ve seen these stories which say ‘Complex web of financial transactions’, and people’s eyes glaze over. This is about trying to find a way past that.” (Smith, 2007)
This point is echoed by filmmakers Journeyman Pictures, who state on their website: “Multimedia developments offer diverse and different broadcast potential in a way never possible before. They offer new platforms to a niche previously too small to justify much airplay on terrestrial TV. … A combination of the web’s interactivity, a powerful publicity machine and a topical sales focus means films remain easy to discover, and continually on offer” (Journeyman Pictures, 2007).
Added to this potential for increased engagement is a perceived opportunity to revitalise the fourth estate, as the ‘unfinished’ and conversational nature of blogs has opened opportunities for journalists to test their work in public, fine-tune it for errors, and invite additional information. When science policy blogger Nick Anthis proposed to write about the NASA public affairs staffer George C. Deutsch, for instance, it was one of his readers who suggested that he might not have graduated (Revkin, 2006). After confirming this was the case, Anthis published, and the story led to Deutsch’s resignation.
Afghanistan-based video journalist Vaughan Smith also posts regular updates to YouTube, mini-blogging tool Twitter, and a blog, providing a number of spaces for readers to contribute. Colleague Graham Holliday notes: “A lot of what Vaughan is doing is likely background stuff for longer features including interviews and suchlike. I think he’ll be putting that together when he gets back to London, making a longer feature or features.” (Jones, 2007)
Journalists who don’t post their ‘rough drafts’ online in the new media age, meanwhile, run the risk of being fact-checked and ‘outed’ after final publication or broadcast, by bloggers with a keen eye for detail or specialist expertise. The most famous example is ‘Memogate’ or ‘Rathergate’, when in 2004 CBS broadcast a programme about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service, and bloggers raised questions about the memos on which the story was based.
“On 7 September, the day prior to [the] broadcast … [the] left of centre blog Talking Points Memo [posted] news that the programme was set to present ‘documents that shed light on Bush’s guard service or lack thereof’. Blogs of all political descriptions were promptly stirred into action in anticipation of the broadcast, especially those on the political right [...] Nineteen minutes into the broadcast, the first post calling into question the integrity of the memos appeared on the right-wing blog FreeRepublic.com. Four hours later the documents under scrutiny were decried as a hoax again.” (Allan, 2006: 95)
One blogger in particular, Minneapolis lawyer Scott Johnson, posted an email from a reader to that effect, and returned from work to find “50 emails from experts of all kinds around the country, supplying additional information. And we kept updating our post with that information through the day.” (in Allan, 2006: 95).
Read the next part - on publishing - here.
Have I missed something? Included an error? If you want to make changes directly, this section is available as a wiki at http://blogsinvestigativejournalism.pbwiki.com/sourcingmaterial. Click on ‘Edit page’ and log on with the password ‘bij‘.
October 26th, 2007
In the first part of my model for the 21st century newsroom I looked at how a story might move through a number of stages from initial alert through to customisation. In part two I want to look at sourcing stories, and the role of journalism in a new media world.
The last century has seen three important changes for the news industry. It has moved…
- from a world of information scarcity to information overload,
- from a world where commercial and government bodies needed the news industry to disseminate information, to one where they can disseminate information themselves.
- from a world where members of the public needed the news industry for information, to one where they can access - and produce - it themselves
In this environment the professional journalist can no longer justify a role simply processing content from source to consumer.
Instead, the modern journalist’s role needs to move above the content.
What does this mean? It means two things:
- Readers can access commercial and official sources online. Some journalists, then, need to collate , synthesise and verify reaction from the blogosphere and other sources. They need to interrogate sources more, to challenge assertions more, and to investigate stories that are going unreported.
- Readers can produce opinion, analysis and reporting online. Some journalists, then, need to develop a community management role, to manage content - to bring together bloggers and sources, to set up aggregation, submission and collaboration systems, and to crowdsource stories that would otherwise be impossible to cover.
A large part of both involves what I would call distributed journalism.
Distributed journalism
Distributed journalism means letting go of one asset - content - to build another: community. It means cultivating contacts, not just a contacts book. It means understanding communities, and sometimes being led by them. And it means creating tools and systems as often as creating stories.
Here’s the graphic - note that it is not top-down or hierarchical:
The distributed journalist uses a number of technologies to manage different ‘types’ of contributors. For the ‘brain’, the ‘voice’ and the ‘ear’ tools are central to monitoring and identifying the best ones; for the accidental journalist, the ‘value adder’, the technician and the crowd, systems are more important.
Tool-monitored contributors
- The brain: journalists already use experts extensively. Traditionally these have been accessed through professional bodies and ‘ivory tower’ academic institutions. But this often means these sources are part of a narrow, political elite, which can have vested interests. New media forms allow people outside of those circles to publish - and develop - their own expertise, and develop their own reputations based on that. In this space, an ‘expert’ is not always officially denoted as such by an institution or organisation, but may demonstrate expertise through hands-on experience or through well supported arguments. The distributed journalist monitors those experts, subscribes to their RSS feeds, quotes when relevant and commissions when they need analysis. There is also an argument for leading by example: a distributed journalist who blogs is demonstrating they want to be part of the conversation, while employing an ‘enthusiast-in-chief’ who brings a reputation with them to lead a UGC site is a proven way to attract contributors.
- The voice: New media forms allow anyone to publish their opinion, which stands or falls by its own qualities. Separate to the expert, the voice writes well, compellingly, often wittily or in an entertaining fashion, whether or not they have expertise or personal experience - much as the traditional columnist does. Or they produce compelling imagery, video or audio. The distributed journalist identifies the blogger with a voice, brings them into the news organisation when they can, and links to them when they cannot. There is also a strong argument here for integration with other services - if you can allow users to tick a box that publishes their material to Flickr or add their RSS feed to your system, etc. then you are saving them time and effort, and showing you’re not just stealing their content.
- The ear: someone, somewhere, knows what’s going on in a particular community of space or interest. They may filter that to their blog, or Twitter account, or mailing list - or they may simply note what they see in a social bookmarking account. The distributed journalist subscribes to the RSS feeds or mailing list, becomes ‘Facebook friends’, and supports and encourages this filtering by linking and contributing when they can.
- And don’t forget the silent population: not everyone has internet access; not everyone has time to do these things. The distributed journalist must make an effort to give a voice to those people too. Partnering with groups who are in contact with those people is one good idea.
System-facilitated contributors
- The accidental journalist: this is the person who stumbles upon a news story - the archetypal citizen journalist - and captures it on a mobile phone, camcorder, or simply with their eyes. You cannot cultivate the accidental journalist in the same way as habitual producers - but news organisations have the biggest advantage in attracting them: their brand, reputation and reach. This is important: when the Cutty Sark catches fire, you want to be the news organisation the citizen journalist sends their pictures to.
So what can the news organisation do? Be available, be a trusted name, and have a budget to pay if you need to. Set up channels of access - include journalists’ emails in their reports; provide simple uploading facilities on your website; and invest resources in monitoring submissions both to your own site and to other user generated content sites like YouTube and Flickr - because the accidental journalist will not always know they have a story. Finally, get involved in media training with your community, so that a) they can spot a story; b) they produce something of decent quality; and c) they think of you first, because you’re the one who taught them to do a) and b).
- The value adder: the value adder is hot on facts, hot on grammar, hot on spelling (but not on style or legal issues, which is one reason why you still need in-house subs). They pick up the mistakes, and they clean up vandalism. They annotate, adding bits of information - comments, useful links, tags (internally if you have a tagging system for users and externally if they use services like Delicious or Digg), or votes on whether a story is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
Again, systems are key here - a responsive system for corrections; a commenting facility; tagging and bookmarking. And a culture of openness where feedback is welcomed and value adders thanked or recognised.
- The technician: this is the person who takes your stories, classifieds or raw data and maps them with Google Maps; who creates a comparison between your editorial agenda and what people are actually reading; who creates a Facebook app or a specialist RSS feed; or simply suggests an idea. The technician can add genuine creativity and value to content - but for them to do that you need to open up your systems - APIs, databases - so that they can mash them up with others, or make tweaks and improvements. You need to make the attributes of your story (location, age, score) available. And you need to provide support where you can.
- The crowd: the former audience is not just a group of people who can now talk to you. A conversation can only achieve so much. Crowdsourcing offers a way to cover issues and investigate stories that traditional journalism cannot match, by making users part of the newsgathering process.
It seems to me that there are two main types of crowdsourcing project: one taps into a diversity of expertise (the engineer, the insider, the accountant) or experience; the other taps into sheer manpower - lots of people doing a small task each, like sifting through one part of a large amount of information, making a request for information, or conducting one interview. Systems that facilitate that process - like wikis, content management sytems, or even simple online forms - are important, but so is developing support structures and identifying the one percent of users who are regular contributors.
Naturally these categories are not exclusive - the brain may have a good voice (so to speak); the ‘ear’ may add value; being part of a crowd may lead someone to think of filming a newsworthy event when they stumble upon it. Investment in any of these areas should lead to feedback in others, not to mention knock-on effects on circulation, an issue I’ll deal with in part 4.
Read part three of this model: Five W’s and a H that should come after every story
October 2nd, 2007
On Thursday I’ll be presenting my paper on wiki journalism at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff. As previously reported, the full paper is available as a wiki online for anyone to add to or edit. You can also download a PDF of the ‘official’ version.
Based on a review of a number of case studies, and some literature on wikis, the paper proposes a taxonomy of wiki journalism, and outlines the opportunities and weaknesses of the form. The following is the edited highlights:
A taxonomy of wiki journalism
There are key qualities that must be identified when examining the use of wikis in journalism:
- Whether the topic is defined by an editor, or a user
- Whether the first draft is produced by a journalist paid to do so, or by a user
- Whether the material could have been produced without using wiki technology
- Whether the timescale is finite (‘frozen’ for print publication), or infinite (ongoing)
- Whether the wiki draft is professionally edited further for ‘final’ publication (in contrast to those which are edited solely by users)
Based on variations in the above, we can identify five broad types of wiki journalism:
- ‘Second draft’ wikis: a ‘second stage’ piece of journalism, during which readers can edit an article produced in-house (Wired article, Esquire, LA Times wikitorial)
- Crowdsourcing wiki: a means of covering material which could not have been produced in-house (probably for logistical reasons), but which becomes possible through wiki technology (San Diego Tribune’s AmpliPedia; Wired How To Wiki)
- Supplementary wiki: a supplement to a piece of original journalism, an ‘add-on’: “A tab to a story that says: Create a wiki for related stories” (Francisco, 2006) (CNET’s India Tech Wiki; parts of the Wired How To Wiki)
- Open wiki: an open space, whose subject matter is decided by the user, and where material may be produced that would not otherwise have been commissioned (Wikinews)
- Logistical wiki: a wiki limited to in-house contributors which enables multiple authorship, and may also facilitate transparency, and/or an ongoing nature (Dewey Answers; N&Opedia)
This taxonomy can be mapped out as follows:
| |
User-defined topic? |
User-created draft? |
Impossible without wiki? |
Infinite? |
Unedited? |
| Second-draft |
NO |
NO |
NO |
NO |
NO |
| Crowdsourcing |
NO |
NO |
YES |
MAYBE |
NO |
| Supplementary |
NO |
YES |
YES |
YES |
YES |
| Open |
YES |
YES |
YES |
YES |
YES |
| Logistical |
YES |
YES |
YES |
MAYBE |
NO |
This taxonomy is not definitive, but indicative: it is possible, for example, to have a second-draft wiki that was ongoing (infinite), but the suggestion is that this would be atypical. The taxonomy aims to provide a conceptual framework through which to analyse examples of wiki journalism. It highlights the range of types of wiki journalism in their relation to ‘pure’ wiki-ness: Open wiki journalism, for example, has all the qualities that could be argued are inherent in the form; whereas Second-Draft wiki journalism has none. The taxonomy also highlights the closeness of certain types of wiki journalism: Second-Draft and Crowdsourcing types, for instance, are almost identical save for the fact that a piece of Second-Draft wiki journalism does not need the audience in the same way.
Strengths of wiki journalism
Wikis allow news operations to effectively cover issues on which there is a range of information so broad that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to summarise effectively in one article, or by one journalist, alone. Examples might include local transport problems, experiences of a large event such as a music festival or protest march, guides to local restaurants or shops, or advice.
Jay Rosen (2006) explains it as follows:
“A professional newsroom can’t easily do this kind of reporting; it’s a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls. That’s the system’s strength. The weakness is the organization knows only what its own people know. Which wasn’t much of a weakness until the Internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize their informational strengths.”
Internally, wikis also allow news operations to coordinate and manage a complex story which involves a number of contributors. News organisations interested in transparency might also publish the wiki ‘live’ as it develops, so readers can view as it develops, and look at previous versions, while the discussion space which accompanies each entry also has the potential to create a productive dialogue with users.
Wikis offer a way for news websites to increase their reach, while also increasing the time that users spend on their website, a key factor in attracting advertisers: user generated content has proved hugely successful in attracting readers, accounting for 60% of pageviews on some websites. When successful, a wiki can engender community. And a useful side-effect of community for a news organisation is reader loyalty.
Economically, wikis appear to offer the attractions of free “user generated” content, and, in the case of published articles, free subediting. But these attractions are misleading: the disadvantages of the form mean costs elsewhere, in maintenance and monitoring. Talking about wiki operations in general, Andrew Frank, a research director at technology consulting firm the Gartner Group, is quoted as suggesting (PDF) ”The assertion that these sites are cheap to run is questionable. For example, to sell a substantial amount of advertising, wiki sites might have to filter for objectionable content”. Jeff Howe also argues “Attempting to use crowdsourcing simply as a cost-saving measure [doesn’t work]. Communities must be cultivated, respected and deftly managed if they are to come together to create economic value. This takes talented staff, and a set of skills not taught in journalism or business schools.”
Weaknesses of wiki journalism
Shane Richmond identifies two obstacles that could slow down the adoption of wikis: inaccuracy and vandalism, “Particularly in the UK, where one libellous remark could lead to the publisher of the wiki being sued, rather than the author of the libel. Meanwhile, the question of authority is the biggest obstacle to acceptance by a mainstream audience.”
Vandalism, a problem known as ”trolling”, is a recurring issue in wiki technology. Wikis such as Wikipedia have generally taken a “soft security” approach, making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent its occurence in the first place:
“When vandals learn than someone will repair their damage within minutes, and therefore prevent the damage from being visible to the world, the bad guys tend to give up and move along to more vulnerable places.” (Gillmor, 2004: 149)
The author of the Wired experiment also feels there is a need for an editorial presence, but for narrative reasons: “in storytelling, there’s still a place for a mediator who knows when to subsume a detail for the sake of the story, and is accustomed to balancing the competing claims and interests of companies and people represented in a story.”
A further complication for news organisations used to the deadlines and production cycles of print and broadcast is the long timescales involved in building a successful wiki and the communities needed to maintain it. Wikinews contributor Erik Moll notes the reduced incentive for readers to contribute to articles with a short shelf life: “Wikinews articles are short-lived, so there is a reduced feeling of contributing to a knowledge base that will last a lifetime”
Issues around authorship and remuneration also need addressing, although models do exist, including the Creative Commons initiative, and the system used by OhMyNews, which shares copyright and insists contributors disclose bank account details for payment.
Finally, one of the biggest disadvantages may be readers’ lack of awareness of what a wiki even is: only 2% of Internet users even know what a wiki is, although similar statistics were once applicable to blogs.
Conclusions
So far the most highly publicised experiments with the form (the ‘Wikitorial’; Wired’s wiki article; the Esquire Wikipedia article) have been of the ‘Second draft’ variety, relinquishing the least amount of control over content, and incorporating wiki technology into pre-existing work processes: the subject of the article is still chosen by editors, the first draft is written by a journalist, and only then does the wiki community take control, taking a role as a second journalist/editor in the process.
In these cases the article has also been ‘frozen’ at some point for publication, often only days after first being published online, something which could be seen as ‘unnatural’ for a wiki. Furthermore, freezing wikis reduces the opportunity to allow vandalism to be cleaned up over time, underexploits the ability to look at various ‘edits’ of an article/topic/event as it develops over a long period of time, and removes the opportunity to build an online community.
In contrast, outside of traditional news operations, Wikinews and Wikipedia have adopted an ‘Open’ model, relinquishing almost all control, with huge success for Wikipedia, but less for Wikinews, perhaps because of the inclusion of ’short-shelf-life’ material.
Timescale appears to be a key variable in the success of wiki journalism as, between these two types on the wiki journalism continuum, the most successful models of wiki journalism have involved subject matter with a long shelf life, that builds, and taps into, a community that is wiki-literate and willing to contribute.
Community
This community, and the management of community, are crucial to the shape that wiki journalism takes. But creating a community is difficult and, once created, that community may not act in ways the wiki owner wants them to:
“Real community is a self-creating thing, with some magic spark, easy to recognize after the fact but impossible to produce on demand, that draws people together. Once those people have formed a community, however, they will act in the interests of the community, even if those aren’t your interests. You need to be prepared for this. [T]hey may well treat you, the owner of the site, as an external perturbation. Another surprise is that they will treat growth as a perturbation as well, and they will spontaneously erect barriers to that growth if they feel threatened by it.[...] Many of the expectations you make about the size, composition, and behavior of audiences when you are in a broadcast mode are actually damaging to community growth. To create an environment conducive to real community, you will have to operate more like a gardener than an architect.” (Shirky, 2002)
But investment made in building this community can produce significant results. Scott B. Anderson, director of shared content for the Tribune Co.’s interactive unit, says “This is a way that a newspaper can let its audience take part in its core mission: investigation”, and there are increasing examples of ‘crowdsourcing’ methods, of which wikis are just one, being used to build journalism projects that would otherwise not have taken place.
This inevitably raises issues of access, and the proportion and type of user who will contribute to a wiki. Nielsen’s research on participation inequality found a ‘90-9-1′ rule whereby 90% of users are “lurkers” who do not contribute, 9% “contribute a little”, and 1% account for “almost all the action”, while McCawley (2007) notes: “there were more major contributors to the 1911 Britannica than there are to Wikipedia and the front page of Digg is controlled by fewer people than the front page of the New York Times.”
But Alex Bruns also argues that “In itself this does not undermine the project of open news any more than the fact that not everyone is a software programmer undermines the project of open source: even those who do not engage with the deliberations taking place within open news can still benefit from their outcomes as they emerge.” (2005: 74), while Pavlik asks: “Is the knowledge gap reason enough to resist the development and growth of online journalism? Definitely not. Although some segments of society are likely to benefit more rapidly than others, all groups will eventually gain. Moreover, even the classical media are subject to the same knowledge-gap effect [and] if anything, new media present a possible reversal of the knowledge gap by eliminating the barriers to entry into the journalism marketplace.” (2001: 144)
It could also be argued that the ‘90% lurkers’ statistic is misleading, focused as it is on any one site, where most people are going to be ‘passing through’. In contrast, when the focus moves to individual people, the figures change dramatically: a Pew study in 2003 found that 44% of adult American internet users had contributed content online (PDF). Even with 10% of users contributing, the case can be made that a local newspaper with 40,000 print readers would not have previously expected to tap into an army of around 4,000 contributors.
Even so, the skills to manage a community and give a ‘voice to the voiceless’ become important, and to that end an increasing number of news organisations are creating ‘Community Editor’ roles. The case of the BBC’s ‘user generated content’ unit is worth noting here: the team of over two dozen staff not only manages incoming contributions, but also looks to balance proactive voices by physically seeking out others who may not have access to communication technologies.
Blogs 2.0
The Telegraph are planning an internal wiki as a precursor to public experiments with the technology. The BBC has been using wikis internally for some time, particularly for product development and distributed team working within BBC Future Media & Technology, while a straw poll of senior media professionals shows enthusiasm about the potential of the technology in organisations including Channel 4, BSKYB, and FT.com.
Even of those opposed to, or unaware of, the use of wikis in journalism, Gahran notes that “Most [had] used, shared documents via services such as Google Docs or Zoho [...] Once they get used to the idea of collaborating on a document (any document, really) via the Web, wikis start to look more appealing and make more sense.”
A number of projects in 2007 indicate that we may be seeing a new stage in the evolution of wiki journalism. In terms of Rushkoff’s (PDF) three stages of development in the growth of participatory media - deconstruction of content, demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or participatory authorship - it could be suggested that some publications, in particular the San Diego Tribune AmpliPedia and Wired’s How-To Wiki, are emerging from the first stage of deconstruction of content and that, if wiki journalism is to become part of the online journalist’s toolbox, the next challenge is further demystification of wiki technology, with time and money invested in facilitating participation.
Wikis are blogs 2.0: like blogs, they provide an arena for readers to critique and correct, to self-publish, and to form communities. But while they share many characteristics with blogs and older technologies such as discussion forums, the significance of wikis lies in the way they move away from the linear call-response communication models that those technologies reflected. If blogs are a distributed discussion (PDF), then wikis offer a single place for that discussion to reach (ongoing) concensus.
The range of voices editing each other tends to result in a fact-based piece of work that represents the ‘Neutral Point Of View’ (NPOV) formalised by Wikipedia, and which, potentially, avoids some of the biases inherent in individual, commercial journalism. The networked nature of wiki technology allows for genuine collaboration and community, as well as holding enormous potential for transparency and a more impartial concensus. Whether this potential is realised depends on the investment and understanding that is brought to any wiki project.
In other words, wiki journalism will only flourish if as much time and care is invested in wikis as are invested in traditional journalism. Weaknesses such as vandalism and inaccuracy can be addressed if staff are assigned to monitor and facilitate the wiki - to prevent legal issues, to attract A-List contributors (and monitors), and build genuine online communities. This will involve a new skills set for those involved, and it will involve a fresh look at copyright, legal and ethical issues. Hardest of all, it will involve relinquishing control over what has traditionally been a news organisation’s biggest asset - content - in order to rebuild another that has recently been neglected: the community that may be key to journalism’s future both editorially and economically.
September 10th, 2007
