In a guest post for OJB, cross-posted from her blog, Franzi Baehrle reviews a new German TV show which operates across broadcast, web and mobile.

There’s a big experiment going on in German television. And I have to admit that I was slightly surprised that the rather conservative “Bayerischer Rundfunk” (BR, a public service broadcaster in Bavaria), would be the one to start it.

Blogger and journalist Richard Gutjahr was approached by BR to develop a format merging internet and TV. On Monday night the “Rundshow” was aired for the first time at 11pm German time, and will be running Mondays-Thursdays for the next four weeks.

Before going live on air, you could follow the team’s afternoon meeting in a live stream, and be part of it via Google+ hangout. You were informed about the show’s topic (“15M and success/fail of the occupy movement”) and the development of its research on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. And until the big day of the first show, you could also follow the preparations on those social networks and bring in your own ideas.

The team were explicitly asking for the audience’s opinion (and also at this stage invited them to hangouts). Moreover, they developed an app with which you can send comments, upload videos or pictures, respond to polls (the results then being included in the show) and rate the show live.

Obviously, the show wasn’t only broadcast on TV, but also via live stream on the web.

You could also join a hangout during the show, with  participants included in the show and interviewed (as well as experts via Skype). Comments and tweets were  also shown on screen.

The live stream started a few minutes before the show and also lasted longer than the TV broadcast.

A few minutes after the start, #rundshow was already the trending topic on Twitter Germany.

Did it work?

Bottom line: I really liked watching it. It was interesting to follow the discussion (even people from Spain and Greece joined the hangout and actually talked more than the German guys there), and the aired videos. A few of them explained the show itself, which was nice for the first episode, but I would have liked to see more topic-related content.

Moreover, the talks with the Google hangout group became even more interesting after the broadcast ended.

Some people were ranting about the show on Twitter. And yes, it wasn’t perfect. But it’s a huge experiment and no one can expect it to be perfect from the start (it would actually be odd if it was).

If it’s further developed and continued after those four weeks, it could become a milestone (if it isn’t already one).

I simply love the interactivity here: the audience is not an audience anymore, but a part of the show, even before it starts (Axel Bruns’ term “produser” would definitely fit here I think). You’re not just switching on the TV or clicking the play button in your browser, you can interact before, during and after the show, help to shape and develop it, share your opinion and content and even easily be on the show.

It’s great that Richard Gutjahr and his team took the step to develop a format like that, and I’m already looking forward to tonight’s episode.

The first night’s show can we watched here.

PHP Freelancer

With local elections looming this is a great 20-30 minute project for any journalist wanting to create an interactive Google map of council ward boundaries.

For this you will need:

• A Google account with Docs
• A Scraperwiki account
• Access to webspace to host an html file

Firstly we want to scrape the council ward geometry data held by MaPit by mysociety.org and spit it out into a CSV file format that is compatible with Google’s mapping tools.

Getting the ID for the council ward

Go to the MaPit homepage and use the postcode search for a point in the town/city you want the ward data for. In the example I’ve searched using a Preston postcode.

Then in the results page find the council you want data for and note down the id number next to it.

Adapting a scraper to scrape that council ward’s geometry

Now login to your Scraperwiki and visit this page for reclosedev’s council ward scraper. Click ‘Copy’ and you’ll be taken to a code editor page.

On Line 10 of the code you should see:

10: PARENT_ID = 2366  # Preston City Council

Change the 2366 value to the MaPit id of your council and change Preston City Council (anything after # is a comment and isn’t important to the code but it is useful to keep track of what you’re scraping).

Once you’d done this hit ‘Save Scraper’  the ‘Back to scraper overview’. This will take you to your own Scraperwiki page where the scraper is saved. It would be useful at this point to click on the pen symbol next to the scraper name and rename it ‘Your Council Ward geometry data’.

Then click RUN (or CTRL+R) to run your scraper, and wait a while for it to complete (usually no more than a couple of minutes).

When it has completed running, click Back to scraper overview (upper right) and on the section titled This scraper’s datastore click the swdata tab and you should see something similar to this:

The first column contains the shape/geometry data of the council ward and the third column contains its name. Does it look right? Then hit download (in the upper right of this image) and choose CSV as the format.

CSV or comma separate values is an open table format readable by Excel, OpenOffice and Google Docs and any text editor.

We’re going to use Google Fusion Tables to convert the data to a map.

Mapping the data

Head over to your Google Docs account (or Drive if you’ve been switched over) and hit Create > Table. When it asks you to import a new table choose and upload the CSV file you downloaded. On the next page you’ll be asked to specify the columns to import, leave this page as default and click Next.

On the next page name your table and attribute the data to the MaPit. Click Finish. We’re nearly there!

Under the Visualize menu item click Map and you’ll probably see a red blob similar to this.

If you want to make it prettier you can style this clicking ‘Configure styles’  and changing the settings for ‘Polygons‘.

When you’re happy with the settings for that click inside one of your council wards. You should get a window like this:

Not all that informative is it? To make it a bit more useful click ‘Configure info window’ then select the ‘Custom’ tab, delete what’s there and enter this code.

<div class='googft-info-window' style='font-family: sans-serif'>
 <h2><a href="http://mapit.mysociety.org/area/{id}.html" target="_blank">{name}</a></h2><br>
 </div>

Which will give you a link to the MapIt within the information box:

The final step is to embed this map in your webpage.

First click ‘Share‘ in the top right corner of the table page (not the Google+ sharebox) and change to either Public or Unlisted. Then hit File > About and note down the Numeric ID.

Go to the FusionTables LayerWizard and enter this id in the first box. For location column select ‘kml‘ then hit ‘Put layer on map‘.

Optional: Click ‘Add a search feature‘ and ‘select based search‘. For ‘Select Label‘ enter Search by ward name and for ‘Column to query‘ select ‘name’. Then add. What this allows you to do is to easily select the ward you want to view.

Zoom in to the Preview map to how you want the map displayed. Then copy and paste the code generated below into an html editor or plain text editor of your choice.

Replace lines 4-6

<style>
 #map-canvas { width:500px; height:400px; }
 </style>

with this

<style type="text/css">
 html { height: 100% }
 body { height: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0 }
 #map-canvas { height: 100% }
 </style>

Then cut line 43

<div id="map-canvas"></div>

and paste it at the end of the page between </div> and </body> like so…

Save the file with the .html extension and try opening it in your browser. It should look a little like this.

Upload this page to your webspace. Now you can either link to it or embed it in an iframe. This sample code should work for most purposes.

<iframe id="ifrm" src="http://your.map.page/here.html" width="NUMBEROFPIXELS" height="NUMBER OF PIXELS">Your browser does not support iframes.</iframe>

Ta da!

This is really just scratching the surface of what Scraperwiki and Fusion Tables can do but I hope it served as an easy-ish introduction to them both. If this tutorial did not work for you or if you have any questions then leave a comment and I’ll help out as much I can.

PHP Freelancer

In a guest post for OJB, cross-posted from Putney Debater, Michael Chanan explores his experiences of video blogging for the New Statesman and how it differs from conventional documentary.

Being written for presentation at ‘Marx at the Movies’, these notes address the topic from an angle which is rarely treated in film and video scholarship, that of the peculiar labour process and mode of production involved. 

When I started video blogging on the New Statesman, I don’t know if either the NS or myself quite knew what to expect. The main reason for not knowing: it was December 2010, it was clear that something momentous going on, that the protest movement was building, and the idea I had, which the NS agreed to go with, was simple enough: to go out and film stuff that was happening from a sympathetic point of view, and thus, almost week by week, build up a kind of ongoing documentary record of the events. I was thinking in terms of Glauber Rocha’s formula for Cinema Novo in Brazil—to go and make films with a camera in the hand and an idea in the head. I also had the idea from the outset of bringing these blogs together sometime later into a single long documentary (which duly appeared as Chronicle of Protest).

The process was to be rather different from more conventional documentary shooting. Making documentaries is always a largely open-ended affair because, in brief, you have to respond to the unforeseen. Nevertheless you research and you plan, then you shoot and then you come back and edit. A crucial part of editing is finding the film’s ending within what you’ve shot, and thus shaping retrospectively the trajectory that gets you there. What I was now proposing was a kind of participant reportage where you didn’t need research (beyond deciding what to film and getting access if necessary) and you could hardly even plan. And almost by definition there was no ending—no conclusion to be drawn, even provisional—because you’re in the middle of something ongoing. You’re editing episode by episode while the events unfold. Three months along, when it came to the big demo on 26th March last year, I realised that as well as constituting a video blog on its own, this would make for a good final sequence to the long film, and so it turned out.

This plan also meant that I couldn’t do what I’d done on a couple of previous occasions, and apply for academic funding, because even if I could have found an appropriate way of framing it as a piece of research-as-practice, there simply wasn’t the time available for the rigamarole required.(Perhaps a collaboration with the NS ought to count under the rubric of ‘impact’ beyond the academy—except not of the kind they’re looking for, because it’s unquantifiable and non-commercial.) In any case, being in a university meant I enjoyed academic freedom.

From the NS’s point of view, the idea of hosting a video blog was a natural enough extension of running a website that expanded what is possible to do in print format. Although the magazine runs on a very tight budget (hence they didn’t pay production costs, and this was a zero-budget project),  I was told that their publisher was keen on developing the magazine’s web presence, and newspapers like the Guardian were already engaged in video journalism.

For my part, I was happy with the arrangement for a couple of reasons. First, because posting on the NS gave the videos a different profile than an academic blog: a political identity within the independent left, and a potentially more broad-based audience. Second, because the locus of a current affairs magazine also has useful legal implications, since current affairs is legally exempt from certain copyright requirements; in particular, it allows the fair use of footage taken from sources like television without prior clearance. (Of course among video activists it’s good practice to make arrangements to share material when you can.) The use of this kind of found material was part of my strategy—and perfectly acceptable to the NS—from the outset, not just to plug narrative gaps but also to contrast the mainstream media representation with what it didn’t show. At all events, when the University agreed to pay the costs of the DVD edition, due diligence required that they didn’t take the word of their own Professor of Film, but sought legal opinion. The lawyers viewed the film and replied that yes, the film fell under fair dealing, adding, to my amusement, that it would remain so until ‘the austerity measures are no longer a matter of public debate’.

A second reason for not knowing what to expect is that video blogging is a term without a precise meaning. The point of calling someting a blog is to flag it as the work of an individual, but like written blogs, video blogs cover a huge range of subjects, styles, genres, and purposes. Practically the only guideline we agreed on was not to exceed a length of about 15mns at most—and that’s already pretty long for watching video on the web. The other main parameter was fast turnover: one or two days filming, one or two days editing, so that each blog would be up within a week or less of the events portrayed, rough edges included.

Another difference from conventional documentary which this mode of production implies is in the labour process—a topic almost totally neglected by academic film studies because the field has little appreciation of the questions of political economy. (It was, however, the subject of my own first published work of film scholarship—a history of trade unionism in the British film industry.) The labour process of the individual video blogger contrasts starkly with both the conventional mode of documentary production and also the more egalitarian collective practices of political film-making thirty or forty years ago. Both involved small crews and a given, although flexible division of labour, combining specialism with creative collaboration. The video blogger, thanks to digital technology, is able to work alone at all stages of production. This gets very close to the concept of the‘caméra-stylo’ introduced in the late 1940s by the French avant-garde film-maker Alexandre Astruc, the idea of the camera as a tool to write with—indeed twice over, first when you shoot and then when you write the film on the timeline. But this solitude also becomes a liability, because it deprives you of the creative feedback that goes with teamwork. Added to which, when you work alone you also tend to work unsocial hours and to take as long as it needs to do the job without bothering to count the hours. Think of it as the epitome of aesthetic labour, which is essentially unquantifiable: there is no rule that says how long it should take to write a poem or a song—and no determinable relation to the exchange value, if any, eventually earned. (Just don’t give up your day job.)

I wasn’t always working alone. On a few occasions, there were two or three of us out on the streets filming, each independently but sharing an implicit sense of the shooting style needed for the results to be amalgamated. Editing was governed by a single basic principle: no commentary, no voice on the soundtrack, first person or otherwise, but a form of reportage without a reporter interpreting the events. The camera functions as a witness, the interpretation of its images becomes a function of editing and montage. The words and the discourse are to be those of the participants, speaking to others or to the camera. There is no pretence to some kind of specious objectivity. The problem with the norms of the mainstream media is that their assumed objectivity operates as a block on the unsanctioned discourses of the street, the opinions and positions of the protestors themselves. These (and not my personal evaluation of them) were what I wanted to represent, and not just in sound bites of a few seconds but something a little more sustained, like a paragraph. The reward of this approach is the discovery that lots of people are very articulate.

The idea of the camera as witness and documentary as testimony is as old as political documentary. What is perhaps distinctive about it in the new context of street video lies in the relationship between the videographer, the situation, and their place within it as perceived by those in front of the camera. This relationship has been altered by a change that has taken place over the last decade and more, as video cameras have become commonplace and acquired multiple forms, especially their incorporation into mobile phones and the concomitant rise of citizen journalism. The collectivity brings about a potential space of disalienation in the relationship between the subject and the person filming them. The citizen journalist is not objectifying but sharing an experience, an event, an attitude. This is not unlike the family video diarist of the 1990s, say, but here projected into a big public arena. One thing that struck me from the very first time I went out shooting (the Turner Prize Teach-In on 6th December 2010) was that at public events like these, my camera was always only one of many—and most were not professional photographers or television crews. Protestors fully accepted, even welcomed our presence, and didn’t worry about their image being captured by a camera they regarded as one of theirs. (Out on the streets, it could even be an insurance if a camera caught something happening to you.) Sometimes, for example at one of the libraries protests, people invited the camera to let them speak their piece. They wanted to be represented.

In short, there has been a great deal of participant observation going on, a new version of Mass Observation transposed into a novel digital arena of instant sharing. The converse of the multiplicity of cameras is that you can quickly see what other people have made of the same event you filmed, because the results are rapidly posted on the web. This is fascinating—the society of the spectacle being subjected to a prismatic reality check, which has the effect of placing any individual version in question (including of course one’s own). This is less of a problem, however, than the peculiarly asocial nature of the so-called social media, which both connects people and disconnects them, as they become fixated on their screens even in the midst of hurly burly. The virtual audience is highly atomised, dissolved into the the virtual soup of the web.

The blogger nervously checks the number of hits they get (which are never that many), and is left starving for real unmediated eyeball to eyeball human contact. This, however, you can only get by returning to the mode of cinema, that is, projection in front of an audience, and reviving the practice of political film groups of earlier times, of discussion with the audience at the end of the screening. The politics have changed but this practice is not anachronistic. Judging by the numerous small venues up and down the country where this is now happening, it isn’t just the blogger who has this hunger. For my part, taking Chronicle of Protest on the road over a three month period was a fruitful experience because of the debates, which became pointedly more reflective as the events receded without political resolution. The experience also served as a corrective to one of the myths about the web’s universal powers. A video doesn’t need to go viral to be efficacious (and numerous viral videos are empty-headed) but you need a moment or two of dialogue with a live audience to see it working.

PHP Freelancer

Several people have tried to work out how many people are paying to get into the pawalled Times website. My estimate (first published here) is: 46,154 a day. Update: Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of the Times, says in the comments on the original that this figure “*spectacularly* underestimates” the actual number of visitors to the new site.

To come up with this figure, I compared how many people commented on two stories – one on the Times site (now paywalled) and one on the Guardian. The screenshot, below, taken at 1.45pm yesterday, shows the Times with 4 comments in 2 hours. The Guardian, on a similar but slightly later story, had 117 comments in 90 minutes.

So if we multiply the number of readers of the Guardian’s website – 1.8 million a day according to the ABCes – by 4/117 (the ratio of comments on each story) and by 90/120 (because the Times story had been online longer) we get:

1,800,000 x (4/117) x (90/120) = 46,154 readers.

Assumptions …

Obviously, 46,154 is a slightly spurious level of accuracy …

Propensity to comment

It’s unlikely that the same proportion of readers comment on Times stories as Guardian ones. But as the Times seems to have deleted comments from its old pre-paywall stories, I couldn’t see how many comments Times stories got pre-paywall compared to the Guardian.

Growth of comments over time

Comments probably don’t increase in a linear way over time – but comparing stories after 90 minutes and 2 hours seems close enough.

Comment bait

The stories aren’t exactly the same so may not have motivated people to comment in the same proportions.

But it’s not easy to find stories with the same sort of angle published at the same sort of time and which allow comments. These were the most comparable stories I could find.

Comparing this figure with other estimates

15,000 paying subscribers

This figure of 46,154 is higher than the 15,000 paying subscribers since the paywall went up that Beehivecity claimed over the weekend – but you’d expect this as existing Times+ subscribers (ie those who joined Times+ before the paywall went up) can also access the site. They will count towards daily unique visitors –  but won’t count as extra paying subscribers.

I can’t find a figure for Times+ subscribers, but I have this vague memory of about 60,000-odd of those. This story, from October 2009, claims Culture+, a version of TImes+, “has attracted 90,000 active members” (whatever “active members” means).

Either way,  if you subscribe to The Times newspaper 7 days a week, you get free access to the websites. So all this would explain why there are more than 15,000 daily viewers of The Times paywalled sites – because  people are getting it free as part of their other subscription packages.

2/3 drop

The FT, on the other hand, reported at the weekend that:

Visits to The Times’ website have dropped by two-thirds in the weeks since News International, the media group controlled by Rupert Murdoch, began to implement its paywall strategy, according to new data.

However, the decline has been gentler than the 90 per cent fall in traffic some researchers expected.

Now, 1.2 million readers used Times Online a day according to the last ABCes before it pulled out – so if its traffic had dropped by 90% it would be looking at 120,000 a day.

But even this figures sound too high to me, knowing what else we know. And Hitwise’s figures seem a bit odd – the last lot in particular failed to distinguish between home page traffic and those that gone any further beyond the paywall.

So what do you think? I wrote once that, if anyone can charge for content, Murdoch can. But maybe even he can’t ..,

PHP Freelancer

In a guest post, blogger Tim Kevan explains why he resigned from The Times over the paywall

Back in early 2007 I had been practising as a lawyer for some nine years. But I’d always dreamt of living by the sea and the surf and maybe even writing a novel. I just couldn’t quite see how it could be done.When I finally sat down to write a legal thriller what popped out instead was a legal comedy about a fictional young barrister doing pupillage.

I called him BabyBarista which was a play on words based on his first impression being that his coffee-making skills were probably as important to that year as any forensic legal abilities he may have. I wrote it as a blog and was hopeful it might raise a few smiles but in my wildest dreams I hadn’t imagined quite the extraordinary set of circumstances which then unfolded with The Times offering to host the blog and Bloomsbury Publishing of Harry Potter fame offering to make it into a book.

Since then the first book came out last August and was originally called BabyBarista and the Art of War. It is being re-issued in August under the new title Law and Disorder and the sequel is due out next May.

I was also continuing to publish my blog on The Times until May this year when it became clear that even blogs were going to go behind their new paywall.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no problem with the decision to start charging. They can do what they like. But I didn’t start my blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it.

So I decided to resign from The Times, a decision I made with regret and despite continuing to be grateful for their having hosted my blog for three years.

The problem was that I simply didn’t think many people would have read my blog stuck not only behind a registration wall but also with a fee for entrance on top of that. I also think that it could have been avoided since there are so many innovative ways of making cash online and the decision to plump for an across-the-board blanket subscription over the whole of their content makes them look like a big lumbering giant, unable to cope with the diversification of the media brought about by online content, blogging, Facebook, Twitter – the list is endless. Canute-like in their determination to stop the tide of free content and using a top down strategy which for the moment at least appears to lack any flexibility.

A more sophisticated approach might have been to keep the existing platform and content free but to start charging for different types of premium versions such as iPhone or iPad apps or more in depth and specialist content. This would have maintained the all-important traffic whilst at the same time allowing tem to charge those who had no problem with paying.

But even beyond the unlikelihood of people paying for news that they can get elsewhere, the other more general problem is that in my view many writers are not simply driven by money. They are bright enough to earn more elsewhere. They write to get things off their chest, to entertain and to influence. To be a part of the debate. In the game and definitely not sitting on the sidelines failing to be heard. Maybe not quite the vain, power-hungry ego-maniacs that some would have us believe. But they want a voice. They write an article they want people emailing it to their friends, posting it on Facebook or Twitter or linking to it on their blog. Of course people can still put links now. But it seems unlikely they’ll do it so readily when they know that they’re likely to leave many people feeling frustrated at not being able to access the content in one click and for free.

As for me, I set up my own site for the blog and have also been taken on by The Guardian. With over thirty million users a month, not only do they have what I consider to be the most vibrant and innovative online presence of any of the national newspapers but also what in my view is now the very best law section in the country.

I’m also particularly impressed by the way they have introduced the idea of partnering with bloggers such as myself whereby I can retain my own website and identity as well working directly with them. It’s a paradigm-shift away from the old-school need for ownership and exclusivity and is definitely the way forward for traditional media to harness the power and energy of the web’s creative forces.

PHP Freelancer

Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on how crowdsourcing experiments in journalism need to learn from their commercial counterparts – and how the end results could bring financial rewards for everyone.

The crowd has done a great deal for journalism: it has counted the number of SUVs on the streets of New York City, determined Bill Clinton’s financial impact on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and offered valuable suggestions to transform an impoverished Ugandan village.

Ever since journalism jumped on the crowdsourcing bandwagon following innovative business models in T-shirt designing and problem solving, it has been baffled by the intensity of crowd response. Consequently, the media’s implementation of it has lacked the selection process that is essential to use crowdsourcing to its fullest potential.

There are only so many T-shirts that Threadless can make and sell; there are only so many solutions to Innocentive’s complex problems; and there are only so many photographs that iStockphoto consumers will purchase.

But when the News-Press in Southwest Florida turned to its citizens for help with investigating the rising costs of local public utilities, much of the voluminous response – amounting to 6,500 pieces of user-generated stories – was published in six weeks following the investigation.

The difference lies in the ultimate goal. A company that aims to create a product is merely looking for the best idea to create one, and one that is looking to solve a problem is looking for the best solution. Journalism, on the other hand, while seeking the best stories, is also hoping to mobilize the maximum number of civilians and fulfill the ideals of democracy.

Stimulating citizen participation is, and should, in fact be, an important goal of crowdsourced journalism.

However, when it comes at the price of quality, as any cursory glance at citizen journalism sites would reveal, it not only compromises the media’s role in society, but also belittles the effectiveness of civilian engagement.

Not surprisingly, there is now an increasing desire for more reliable information on the Web, as seen from the popularity of sites such as BigThink and Mahalo, which rely on expert and professional sources rather than random, large groups of people.

The aim of crowdsourcing is to effectively enhance the quality of journalism because of crowd contributions, not despite them. And that is why distilling the best ideas, and thereby their utilization, becomes important.

Selecting for the top contributions and contributors is not new to citizen journalism. Establishing a community of dynamic civilians that a news organization can tap into on a regular basis is an important objective for most crowdsourced journalism projects.

The citizen journalists who established their credibility through productive efforts in Off the Bus have been largely retained to help report on the parent news site, the Huffington Post.

The investigative journalism site, Propublica, hopes to build a similar community of citizen journalists through its recently announced pro-am project.

The News-Press’s Team Watchdog went one step further and implemented a rigorous screening process that involved resumes and interviews to select twenty citizen volunteers from the Fort Myers community.

While such organization is essential for the success of open-source projects, news entities should be careful so as not to replicate the top-down hierarchy that still prevails in conventional media. This could defy the tenets of decentralization and independence that are essential to James Surowiecki’s concept of crowd wisdom.

It also ends up reinforcing the digital, intellectual, and economic divide that crowdsourcing already perpetuates.

The pharmaceutical company, Innocentive, has used a less conventional approach to seek out experts. Its website posts open calls to solve complex chemical problems to its large global community. While many of the 160,000 registered members of Innocentive are from highly specialized fields with advanced degrees (over a third have doctorates), almost anyone can register and take a crack at a problem.

Little surprise, then, that the company has turned up some unlikely problem-solvers in the form of patent attorneys and college students. Hence, real-world degrees and professional experience may not be the defining parameters for expertise, a finding that is reinforced by research from Harvard University.

The open-source technical support site, Experts-exchange.com has the luxury of using a more democratic approach to source “experts” from the crowd. The best solutions to technical problems are voted on by users, and the higher a contributor’s rating, the higher his authority and credibility in the community.

While the idea of allowing communities to choose their own experts would be desirable to citizen journalism, this form of user rating does not appear to work in more subjective areas.

While quantifiable answers to technical support questions are easier to rate, crowd wisdom is less reliable in judging more creative fields such as art and journalism. We all know that sensationalism would sooner get a Digg story on the home page or make an Internet video go viral than high-quality journalism would.

Hence, it would probably be in the best interest of news organizations to make these determinations at the editorial level.

In addition to improving the quality of content, such a strategy would promote better submissions from users. Crowdsourcing ventures like iStockphoto and Innocentive have shown that providng rewards – in the form of fame or bounty – works. As Jeff Howe, who coined the very term that all the fuss is about, has learned, community standing and recognition might be the key motivators in crowdsourced operations.

If you are one among thousands of people and don’t get recognition for your particular effort, there is little motivation for you to come back and participate.

If the more deserving contributors are acknowledged, and given special access privileges (such as being able to post content without moderation, for instance), it would encourage them to contribute more, and urge other contributors to compete at a higher level.

The unique, creditable, and more attractive content that would result from such moderation will eventually lead to higher site traffic, increased number of unique visitors, and hence, more advertising revenue. This might legitimize charging for content, thus allowing greater profits for news organizations, and possibly payment of individual contributors.

With contributors specifically chosen for the merit of their submissions, news organizations could finally explore the possibility of compensating the crowd for the product it creates. The opportunity to make money has been shown to be the most popular reason to participate in crowdsourcing projects.

Three years ago, when crowdsourcing first made a splash in the world of business and journalism, its democratic, freewheeling ideal was intriguing in all its novelty. But now, critics – and contributors themselves – have begun to question the legitimacy of a concept that puts people to work for little or no monetary gain while holding complete ownership over the product. “Is crowdsourcing evil?” asks Howe in Wired this week, detailing a backlash that is brewing in the design community.

It may be argued that the weeding out of contributors goes against the grain of grassroots citizen journalism. However, it is important to remember that news organizations are also entities that offer a service to people, and it behooves them to perform this service well.

In the field of business and innovation, companies are implementing a division of labor – specialized tasks are sourced to “experts,” while more general assignments are sourced to crowds. It is tempting to speculate that such a practice would work well for journalism.

Seeking ideas for stories from general readers, as well as involving them in the debate and discussion would fulfill the core purposes of journalism. On the other hand, the knowledge and skills of more prolific contributors could be utilized for specialized reporting. This would ensure the dissemination of quality content while still utilizing crowd diversity.

PHP Freelancer

This was published as a guest post on Shane Richmond’s Daily Telegraph Technology blog:

Media organisations are still barely getting their heads around social media. They look at a conversation and see ‘vox pops’; they look at a community and see a market. They ask for ‘Your pictures’ and then complain when they get 1000 images of a mild snowfall.

They ghettoise viewers into 60 second slots at the end of the news bulletin, or ‘Have Your Say’ sections on the website. They can see the use of blogs and Twitter when they can’t access a disaster area and are desperate for news, but the rest of the time complain that they’re ‘only for geeks’ or ‘full of rumour’. And they advertise, when they should socialise.

So my first wish for 2009 is that media organisations stop complaining and start building the frameworks for a genuine participatory media. If they want good quality blogs, then show people how to blog. If they want to be able to spot breaking news, then show people how to Twitter. If they want user generated content then provide training.

The rewards are clear: if you teach a man to fish, they not only eat for a lifetime, but you’ve just created a market for fishing rods, bait and angling magazines. When the story breaks, they come to you. And if news organisations are hoping to replace the thousands of journalists they’re losing with user generated content, they need to be investing in that or that ‘workforce’ will go elsewhere.

So here’s my second wish: go offline.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned about social media and online communities is that meeting someone in person is a more effective way of building relationships than any other. Online, the interesting stories will find me. The really interesting stories are offline, in the places where people don’t blog, and in 2009 I’d like to see those stories in a place where people can search for them.

There are some encouraging signs: in the Midlands, Trinity Mirror is giving multimedia reporters a web-enabled mobile phone and wifi laptop and sending them out of the office, reversing the office-bound trend of recent decades. Reuters and Gannett have been experimenting with similar forms of mobile phone journalism. And I’ve been working on a project – Help Me Investigate.com – which aims to give an online presence – and power – to offline voices.

My sister has never owned a computer, doesn’t work with one, and has no interest in technology. This week I found out she is social networking via her mobile phone. For me that is more significant than any number of stories about Twitter and the Mumbai attacks. We are barely at the start of an enormous change in how we communicate as a society, a change which is already meeting resistance from entrenched powers.

My 3rd wish is that 2009 sees that change take a proactive move in a democratic direction. Conversation is good, but if I’m always listening to the same people, I’ll never learn anything.

PHP Freelancer