The penultimate session in my 10-class module in Online Journalism from last year covered a range of areas. There’s a little bit on audio slideshows, a lot on community, and related to that, I covered wikis too. I’ve split them into 3 presentations for ease of use. This year (the module starts again on Monday) I’ll probably take an axe to all of this…

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Part four of this five-part series looks at how interactivity forms the basis of true online journalism, and explores ways to think about interactivity in practice. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

In his 2001 book Online Journalism, Jim Hall argues that, in the age of the web, interactivity could be added to impartiality, objectivity and truth as a core value of journalism. It is that important.

Interactivity is central to how journalism has been changed by the arrival of the internet. Whereas the news industries of print, radio and TV placed control firmly in the hands of the publishers and journalists, online you try to control people at your peril.

It is important to remember that people use the web on devices – whether a computer, mobile phone or PDA – with cultural histories of usefulness or utility, very different to the cultural histories of television, radio or even print.

People go online to do something. Companies that help with that process tend to prosper online. Those that attempt to curtail users’ ability to do things with their content often find themselves on the end of a backlash.

News is, of course, a service. But up until now news organisations have been under the mistaken impression that it is a product. The web is reminding them otherwise.

What is interactivity?

Interactivity is not video, or ‘multimedia’; it is not flashy bells and whistles. At its core, it is about giving the user control.

One way of conceptualising this is to identify the types of control that users might have. In doing this, I would suggest two dimensions along which interactivity operates.

Firstly, time and space; secondly input and output.

Control over time and space

Where broadcast required the user to be present at a particular time, and print to wait for the next edition, technologies such as Video On Demand (VOD), personal video recorders (PVR) such as Sky+ and TiVo, podcasts, mobile phones and websites allow the audience to consume at a time convenient to them. The PDF newspaper is another less successful development that also allows readers to avoid the dependence on print and distribution cycles.

Similarly, whereas television has normally required the user to be physically present in front of a static set, the spread of mobile phones, mp3 players and portable mpeg players and wifi laptops allow the audience to consume in a space convenient to them. Portable radio and portable newspapers have always had this advantage.

In mapping these it becomes clear that control over time and space tends to centre on hardware, and miniaturisation.

Control over input and output

With linear media such as TV, radio and print, the consumer relies on the ability of the producer, editor, etc. to structure how content is presented – in other words, the output. New media allows the audience to take some of that control. Examples include:

• At a basic level, hyperlinks allow the reader to dictate their experience of ‘content’ through their choice of clicks.
• With online video and audio, the user can pause, fast-forward, etc. – and if it has been split into ‘chunks’, the user can choose which bit of a longer video or audio piece they experience.
• RSS allows users to create their own media product, combining feeds from newspapers, broadcasters, bloggers, and even del.icio.us tags or Google News search terms.
• Database-driven content allows the user to shape output based on their input – e.g. by entering their postcode they can read content specific to their area. At a general level search engines provide a similar service.
• And Flash interactives allow the user to influence output in a range of ways. This may be as simple as selecting from a range of audio, video, text and still image options. It may be playing a game or quiz, where their interaction (e.g. what answers they get right, how they perform) shapes the output they experience.

In terms of input, again, the old media model was one that relied on the producer, editor, etc. to decide on the editorial agenda, and create the products. The audience may have had certain avenues of communication – the letter to the editor; the radio phone-in; the ‘Points of View‘, but the staging, shaping, editing and distribution of that was still up to professional media producers.

The new media model, as Dan Gillmor points out, is one that moves from a lecture to a conversation. So:

• Blogs, podcasts, vlogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. allow the audience to publish their own media
• Forums, message boards, chatrooms and comments on mainstream media blogs allow the audience to discuss and influence the content of mainstream media, as well as engaging with each other, bypassing the media
• Live chats with interviewees and media staff do the same.
• User generated content/citizen journalism sees mainstream publishers actively seeking out input from consumers, from emails and texts to mobile phone images, video and audio.
• Wikis allow the audience to create their own collaborative content, which may be facilitated by mainstream media
• Social recommendation software like del.icio.us, Digg, etc. allow users to influence the ‘headline’ webpages through bookmarking and tags.
• A similar but separate example is how page view statistics can be used by publishers to rank content by popularity (often displayed side by side with the editorial view of what are the ‘top stories’)
• I hesitate to add the last example but I will anyway: email. Although we could always, in theory, contact producers and editors by telephone, they didn’t publish their numbers on the ten o’clock news. Email addresses, however, are printed at the end of articles; displayed on screen alongside news reports; read out on radio; and of course displayed online.

In mapping these examples you might argue that this second dimension of interactivity is more about software: from email clients, web browsers and hyperlinks through to content management systems such as blogs, wikis and forums, and more recently web-based services like social bookmarking sites, website statistics and social networking.

What does this mean for journalists?

For journalists, the rise of interactivity means thinking about how you can give control to your readers – who are now, of course, users.That means giving control over the time and place they use it – so, making content downloadable, for example, or bookmarkable, or emailable, or bloggable. Allowing them to put it on their social networking page. Allowing them to sign up for email or text or RSS updates.

It means putting your content where the user is, not the other way: which means thinking of places like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, and Flickr – in turn, driving new traffic back to your own site.

And it means giving control over the input and output – ‘calling out’ for contributions when you first start working on a story (usually via your blog or Twitter account); allowing comments on what you’ve written; creating a space for further development and discussion via a forum or wiki or chatroom. Making your raw material available so others can build on it, or even point out corrections.

It means thinking, when relevant, not of linear products like a 500 word article or 3-minute package, but packages of information that the user can navigate in their own way, from a mix of audio, video, text and animation to database-driven packages that deliver specific results to specific enquiries.

It means thinking of ways to engage the user: could we do a game about this? A quiz? Create a tool? Invite users to pose the questions to our interviewee? Involve them in the investigation from the start?

And it means realising that the process is not one-way (broadcast), or even two-way (between journalist and user, i.e. feedback), but three-way (between journalist and user, and between user and user), which is the subject of the final part of this BASIC Principles series: Community and Conversation.

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Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.

“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.

And bloody hell was he right.

The first thing that strikes you about the site is the bar chart across the top of the page, replacing the traditional masthead. This is a newsriver:

Down the outside column is a list of articles from the past hour:

That’s culture shift number 1.

At the bottom of the page you will find recent images, social bookmark sites, most commented articles from the past 24 hours, most important and most viewed.

Culture shift number 2 is the list of incoming links to this article – something built into the very fabric of blogs (pingback) but so far either anathema to mainstream publishers (“send our readers elsewhere?”), or difficult with current content management systems.

And with one simple move the site demonstrates it’s part of the conversation.

The ‘most important’ list is also worth looking at. How did they decide what was “most important?” I asked.

“We are using around ten variables to decide what’s important news. The variables we’re using right now are pageviews, visits from external websites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (4 options) and the press agency urgency variable (3 options; normal, high, very high).

“By showing it next to the most viewed we can easily see how it works and adjust the settings to make it better. It’s not perfect yet, but it already works remarkably well.

“We could extend this even further (tags, edits, tag removals) or skip some. All the variables are connected to points, we can set a default amount of points to a variable and define or redefine the value for the website.

“We also made a tag sniffer at http://www.skitch.com/wilbertbaan/8733/en-tag-sniffing – it scans the text on certain names and auto tags the article.”

Wilbert’s next step is building a community that can contribute to make this website better with ideas or criticism. The newspaper is already conducting a conversation with readers on a NING social network where users can contribute new ideas and discuss the website (in Dutch), but clearly this is just the start.

“For example we could connect a popular social network to the website and use what your network reads to alter the presentation of the news. Or make section pages, or a frontpage?

And all this is possible because of a Holovaty-esque focus on the power of databases.

“The most important object is the database,” he writes on his blog. “We designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with the data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization.”
And this means they can do “Almost everything. We can make mash-ups, feeds, aggregated pages. Hook in to social networks, extend the wiki functionality, and more. Technically everything is possible.”

Keep an eye on this one.

UPDATE: Wilbert writes: “We have added feeds for every tag, latest news and breaking news. We have also added a personal feed that can be created by selecting the tags you like or don’t like. Very rudimentary, but it is a first experiment with personalization (My feed: http://en.nl/en/my_rss.php?editorId=3) and you can take it anywhere you want.

“With these feeds we are encouraging developers to experiment with news sorting and make their own interface or mash-up.”

Read more posts about future newspapers here

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Charlotte Dunckley is a final year journalism degree students who has already launched a fanzine and is in the process of turning it into a commercially viable magazine – Things.

She recently popped in for an ad hoc tutorial and I asked her about her web strategy.

“I don’t have a website,” she replied.

“But you have a blog?”

“Yes.”

“Facebook?”

“Yes. And a MySpace page. With 800 friends.”

“So you do have a web strategy.”

Charlotte had been worried about her technical limitations and the lack of a website. Instead, she quickly realised that this wasn’t important – it wasn’t about building a big solid brick house, but about taking a bunch of caravans on tour, to where her audience lived online.

And crucially, this was backed up by her research – which is worth reading for any news executive or editor who wants to know how consumption of information is changing online.

Here’s what she wrote about her 15-30-year-old audience:

“When asked which four websites they visit most often, a whopping 67% of them included Myspace, with an equally large number – 65% – listing Facebook. The next greatest number was Ebay at just 20%. Other popular answers, surprisingly, but much lower, were Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr and Dont Stay In. Other websites were mentioned barely twice – the research gathered long lists of obscure websites.

“Evidently my target age group lean heavily towards using websites with some kind of social networking element. Another common trend were blogs (yay) – Trash Menagerie, Perez Hilton and Fluokids, to name but a few.

“So – getting exposure via a good web presence, in Birmingham, to our target age group, is perfectly achievable without a website.

“We have the top three most visited websites for our target audience covered – Myspace, Facebook and E-bay… a Flickr account has been set up and is awaiting content – I’m thinking well tagged page layouts, our original photography (where the photographer lets us use them) and images from our events and associated events. Similarly there will be no problem uploading event content from Youtube. We could even look into recording snippets of face to face interviews in future too. I presume a Wiki would be equally simple to set up? And of course, we have a blog – here. Commenting on other blogs is a way to create networks of readers. Blogs like the award winning Created in Birmingham would be our best bet.”

She demonstrates the concept of a distributed web strategy further by looking at how Fluokids works:

“Fluokids is a collective of young French bloggers who comment on music and events. Dazed and Confused (incidentally the most popular magazine purchased by our target group, according to our research) describes it as:

more than a blog but a youth movement – an internet and musical revolution whereby enthusiasts and DJs alike can download the newest and most wanted music coming out of Europe. By constantly posting remixes, these Gallic laptop maestros are pushing what people will like tomorrow. Teaming up with labels like Edbanger, Kitsune and Modular, the Parisian crew of seven regularly DJ all over Europe, and by their own admission are “nerds with an ultra-developed social life – as much on cyber platforms like MySpace as in real life.”

“Googling Fluokids yields the following first page (in correct order): Fluokids blog, Fluokids Myspace, that Dazed Digital article, Fluokids on Virb.com, Fluokids at Last.fm, Fluokids on Flickr, a couple of old event flyers and finally Fluokids on Technorati.

“The fact that their entire blog is French, and is still reasonably popular with my target audience, says a lot for the ‘cool’ status they have accumulated through placing the right content in the right channels.”

Now, she’s going viral too.

And Charlotte is not alone (although she is very, very good – and if you have a business in Birmingham you should buy some advertising from her). I have other students using the same channels to the same entrepreneurial effect. I notice that students’ first instinct when set a task is to… set up a Facebook group. To connect with people they don’t know. Now how many journalists have the same instinct?

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In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

The adaptable journalist

A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:

• (Hyper)Text
• Audio
• Video
• Still images
• Audio slideshows
• Animation
• Flash interactivity
• Database-driven elements
• Blogs
• Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
• Community elements – forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
• Live chats
• Mapping
• Mashups

This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:

• ‘That story would have real impact on video’;
• or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
• or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
• or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’.

The person who eventually films the video, or creates the Flash element, may be someone else, particularly as news organisations begin to understand that no single journalist can do all these things, or identify individuals and teams who produce the podcast, the video packages, or the Flash interactives, or who manage the community elements. But the ideas should come from every member connected with the online newsroom. And ideas always come first.

Skills come after, but the online journalist should have laid some foundations in a range of areas.

• They should be able to write well, succinctly, and quickly – for more than one medium, if possible.
• They should be able to find accurate information and reliable sources online and offline, quickly, and they should have a collection of RSS feeds keeping them in touch with their area.
• They should understand some basic principles of video, audio and still images.
• They should have played with editing software.
• They should have played around with examples of journalistic interactivity and web-based databases.
• They should understand online communities like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or their own sector of the blogosphere – if possible, they should already be a productive member of one.

Some of these foundations only require some very light background reading, some just involve exploring good examples of online journalism, or tinkering on free software. The one area that does need time, attention and practice, are the core skills of newsgathering and news production.

The adaptable content

It is not only the journalist who benefits from being adaptable. In the new media age, information needs to be adaptable as well.

Adrian Holovaty, in his article ‘A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change‘, points out that much of what journalists gather is structured information that has the potential to be repurposed by either the reader or another journalist – his examples include:

• “An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.
• “A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.
• “A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.
• “A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.
• “Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.
• “Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.”

Once this information is made adaptable – for example, by inclusion in a database – it can be presented in a range of ways. A level results can be plotted on a map, for instance; sports stats can be displayed graphically; news can be displayed specific to the reader’s own location; or journalists can check to see how many crimes have occurred around a certain location.

The first way an online journalist should be making information adaptable is to tag it. For newsgathering, a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us is essential. These allow you to ‘bookmark’ any online source with a series of tags, enabling them to be quickly found when required (and that’s not touching on the ‘social’ element, which allows you to see who else has bookmarked the same page, and what else they are bookmarking, which can lead to some useful leads).

For news publishing, blogging services like WordPress and Blogger have a tagging (or ‘keywords’) facility built in; so do photo-sharing site Flickr and video-sharing site YouTube. And newspapers like the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo are starting to incorporate tagging in all stories.

You might also be working with a content management system that allows metatagging or mapping. These amount to the same thing: information about the story.

Beyond tagging there are a number of other ways to make information adaptable. Databases and spreadsheets are obvious ways. Managing the information on a big story using a spreadsheet can prove useful if you need to make that information public at some point, or need to hand it over to someone else who can work magic with it. In general, it’s just good practice that makes your life easier.

RSS is another way to make information adaptable. If your stories, a subject section or a search is available as a feed others can more easily combine it with other tools (e.g. mapping), aggregate it, filter it and do other things with it.

And of course the simple act of making your content downloadable or embeddable makes it more adaptable. The choice to stream video, for example, prevents users from doing potentially interesting things with it. Allowing a full download – even in different formats – opens up potential for all sorts of creativity from users and other journalists. All of which, ultimately, should drive more people back to your site and your stories.

Part three: S is for Scannability can be found here.

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Last semester (Nov 2007), as part of a module I teach called Magazine Design, I asked students to contribute to a wiki looking at magazines’ new media ventures. Each student was assigned a particular magazine sector (e.g. B2B or computing) and had to explore the websites, find information etc.

Some will think me cruel for making students look at the websites of the likes of Uniforms Magazine and Mailing Systems Technology.

Anyway, the students have since moved on, but the wiki remains. The sections worth viewing in particular are fashion and music, while Trade and professional includes a summary of each site’s privacy policy, if that floats your boat. Generally, most of the useful stuff is at the end, where students have put analysis and conclusions.

If you’re a journalism educator and like the idea, I’d be hugely happy if you wanted to use the same wiki and allow students to build on and update the existing content. The password is ‘nmm‘. The original assignment brief, if it helps, is here.

And regardless of whether you’re an educator or not, if you want to contribute to it anyway, that would be great too.

PS: Some interesting notes from the process:

• The wiki was split by magazine genre; students were given broad instructions on what to cover, but the form was up to them. Despite that, they seem to have converged on a ‘format’ – introduction; site-by-site overview; concluding analysis. Was this because they copied what each other was doing?
• Students found the wiki process productive – the ability to see how other students were approaching the task was helpful, while a competitive element emerged, too.
• This obviously creates legacy material for future students to build on, while the public nature of it (and the fact I told students I would publish the address on my blog) helped with motivation.

If you have your own experiences with wikis in education or journalism, I’d love to hear them.

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Interesting use of wikis for journalism over at ProductWiki: from TechCrunch:

“The idea behind ProductWiki is to create collaborative product reviews that boil all the judgments about a product into one single review. It avoids revision wars by requiring every reviewer to list both pros and cons, and then every other ProductWiki reader can vote on each pro and each con until a consensus emerges.

“Last week, the site turned on three new features which Ismail hopes will allow him to create the ultimate “product graph” (this is like a social graph for products, showing how products are related or connected to one another). Reviewers can now identify competing or related products, and vote on which ones they like better in a head-to-head, A-B fashion. The third feature is a product rank derived from the first two features. For instance, based on 15 votes, the iRex iLiad beats out both the Kindle and the Sony Reader in the e-book category (so far).”

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Part four of this draft book chapter looks at how blogs have changed the publishing of journalism through its possibilities for transparency, potential permanence over time, limitless space, and digital distribution systems (part one is here; part two here; part three here) . I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.

Publishing

Traditionally, news has always been subject to the pressures of time and space. Today’s news is tomorrow’s proverbial ‘fish and chip paper’ – news is required to be ‘new’; stories “have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don’t catch fire in that 24 hours, there’s no second chance” (Rosen, 2004). At the same time, part of the craft of journalism in the 20th century has been the ability to distil a complex story into a particular word count or time slot, while a talent of editors is their judgement in allocating space based on the pressures of the day’s competing stories.

In the 21st century, however, new media technologies have begun to challenge the limitations of time and space that defined the news media in the 20th.

The internet provides a potentially infinite space for journalists to publish not only edited articles, but also raw material, while hyperlinks offer the potential to provide important context and background. When David Leigh and Rob Evans decided to investigate allegations of corruption in the arms trade in 2003, for example, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger suggested they think beyond a traditional book and create a website. The result, a broad and deep exploration of the allegations, the details and the figures involved, includes recent news on the investigation’s progress; a 10-part investigation into Britain’s arms trade; biographies and details on 40 people and how they are relevant to BAE payments; an interactive “global investigations map”; profiles of BAE’s weapons and planes and the company itself; photocopies of the main evidential documents; and video interviews with key figures. Leigh says that the website meant “We were able to lay everything out with no constraints of space and say ‘OK guys, here’s all the evidence’” while the website has allowed the two journalists to publish memos, faxes, emails and research passed on to them by other journalists and authors working on the story (Smith, 2007).

The ‘public draft’ possibilities of blogs can offer a more transparent way of working for journalists. At a time when public trust of journalists is low, the transparency of blogs offers a way to rebuild that trust, while Singer (Friend & Singer, 2007) notes the need for transparency as an ethical principle, allowing audiences to judge the validity of information, the process by which it was secured, and the motives and biases of the journalist providing it. Other theorists point to a need to narrow the widening gap between citizens and journalists (Gans, 2003), or to reappropriate the private discussion sphere that has been hijacked by the mass media in a way that excludes the public (Habermas 1989). “By widening the disclosure circle through information sharing,” writes Paul Andrews (2003) “blogs have contributed to the truth-finding process.”

In another example, during the case of the trial of former high-ranking Bush official Lewis “Scooter” Libby readers of the blog Firedoglake funded a team of people to ‘live blog’ the trial as it took place. The result was a transcript of what was said – too extensive for publication in print, but a resource which became essential for journalists covering the trial, and for anyone interested in reading the detail (Rosen, 2007).

In terms of raw material, The Center for Public Integrity has used databases to create a searchable website on details of government contracts awarded for post-Hurricane cleanup and reconstruction (Center for Public Integrity, 2007), while Wikileaks launched in 2007 as an attempt to use wiki technology to provide an “uncensorable system for safe mass document leaking and public analysis”. Within a year it claimed to have received over 1.2 million documents from “dissident communities and anonymous sources” (Wikileaks, 2007), while its first big story was a report on looting by ex-president Moi of Kenya — although the story has been challenged and the site ‘s sources of funding have been questioned (Norton, 2007). It has also been described as “a dumping ground for anyone to place documents that they want to see made public” with doubts raised about the security of the website:

“If a security hole is found in [the anonymity toolset] in a year’s time then it is now distinctly possible that the authorities will be able to go back through their data records and unpick the handshaking and message-passing that currently obscures the trail, and if that happens it would be very dangerous. The fact is that asking people to risk their liberty or even their lives by using software that inevitably has security flaws in it is a reckless and unjustifiable risk, one that is being taken by the posters, not the people writing the code.”(Thompson, B, 2007)

The permanence of material online over is equally significant. In perhaps the most famous example, a barely-reported speech by senator Trent Lott was picked up by bloggers and built momentum as more and more posters added detail, finding evidence of previous statements in favour of racial segregation, and expressing indignation that it had gone unreported, until it was picked up by the mainstream press.

For Rob Evans, meanwhile, it didn’t matter where the BAE story went in the paper, as long as it went online and reached a global audience. “It’s taking a very long-term view, which editors don’t normally take: you put something out there and 18 months later it will suddenly click.” (Smith, 2007).

Finally, new media technologies facilitate new forms and spheres of distribution – instantaneous, and global. RSS allows for instant and replicated distribution; reports can be ‘mirrored’ – copied and published elsewhere – to avoid being censored; and email, mailing lists and social networking services allow stories to be quickly passed on. As a result, sites like YouTube have been used in Iran to denounce state brutality, and in Zimbabwe to expose civil rights violations; and while many countries have attempted to block specific content or social networking sites in general, including Turkey and Thailand (YouTube), the United Arab Emirates, China and Iran (Flickr), users continue to find ways around this censorship, including using proxy sites and building browser extensions (Woodard Maderazo, 2007).

For Vaughan Smith, distribution technologies like Twitter allow him to update a dedicated audience, while postings on his blog are picked up by others (Tomlin, 2007), while in the example of the BAE investigation, despite being published by a British newspaper the story is now followed by journalists in dozens of countries. Leigh and Evans say they openly welcome help from journalists around the world and give it freely to anyone willing to take the story on. “We’re trying to think our way towards a new kind of journalism … The thing is, all the criminals are global now, the police forces are gradually starting to go global and now the journalists are global as well. We need to catch up.” (Smith, 2007)

Read the next part – on fundraising – here.

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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.

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How do you react to a local disaster in the new media age?

Martin Stabe:

San Diego TV station News 8 … has responded to the crisis on its patch by taking down its entire regular web site and replacing it with a rolling news blog, linking to YouTube videos of its key reports (including Himmel’s), plus

Google Maps showing the location of the fire.

There are links to practical information that their viewers will need at this time, inclduing how to contact insurance companies, how to volunteer or donate to the relief efforts, evacuation information and shelter locations.

Both the Los Angles Times and San Diego’s public broadcasting station KPBS are using Twitter to provide rapid, rolling updates of the fires. A piece on a Wired blog explains how to do it. Both are also among those tracking their fire coverage on Google Maps.

The Wikipedia entry for the fires is also becoming an impressive resource. As is becoming common in major news events, Wikipedians are pulling together the news reports from many different primary sources to produce a continuously-updated account.

Editor & Publisher:

The Los Angeles Times delivered breaking, and diverse, news … to millions of online readers in blog-like fashion, with brief dispatches from correspondents, added at the top. Many were in the human interest vein.

A box near the top of the Web site’s home page held changing numbers in large type. Around 9 p.m. they read: “429,862 acres burned…1,235 homes destroyed.”

The Hollywood Reporter:

Fox News Channel’s coverage included on-the-scene reports from Malibu and San Diego thanks to the efforts of college student journalists whose pieces for thePalestra.com have appeared on Fox News Channel and FoxNews.com

It’s the first pieces in a content partnership between Fox News and thePalestra.com, a 3-year-old Web site that, among other things, features student-produced video reports aimed at the millennial generation. The reports from more than 100 schools nationwide are sent to thePalestra’s headquarters at Ohio State University and edited there by graduate-level student journalists. The ones for Fox News are reviewed by Fox News producers.

The last piece demonstrates just how important building local partnerships is when these stories break and you need lots of people on the ground.

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