Crowdsourcing and journalism

Andy Carvin began his talk by asking the audience to think about the role that the public has played in journalism and to consider that terms like crowdsourcing are often just new words for old concepts. For example, in 1690 Publick Occurrences both Forreign and Domestick was the first independent newspaper published in the US. The printer of this broadside, Richard Pierce intentionally left the last page of this 4-page publication blank so that readers could make their own notes about what had occurred in between publish dates. Unfortunately, his publication was unlicensed and was shut down after the first issue but he was one of the early practitioners of citizen journalism and had already recognized the importance of giving the public a venue to share ideas.

Another example of an early form of crowdsourcing comes from the Charleston Daily Courier which was printed during the American Civil War. The paper regularly published ciphers using coded messages about the war and effectively (and successfully) deciphered them by crowdsourcing the task to the readers. Over 100 years later, we find yet another example of entities reaching out from local newspapers to get information when the San Francisco Chronicle uses the same technique to crack the Zodiac Killer’s coded messages. What we can learn from this is that the public can help serve the cause with media serving as middle-man.

User generated content has long been present in mainstream media in the form of:
• Traffic reports—many come directly from the public
• Weather spotters—elementary schools have been long-time partners
• Recipes—newspapers serve as a hub for sharing information
• Consumer complaints—serve as node to investigate products in the community
• Letters to the editor

But what about breaking news? Crowdsourcing is not a new phenomena here either. Consider:
•The assassination of JFK: the Zapruder film and dozens of others captured by the public provided a record of the moment
•The Hudson River plane landing rescue: Janis Krums’ “random act of journalism” in the form of a shared photo on Twitpic ended up on every front page.
•9/11: the citizen journalism that happened that day was often ahead of the media

The incredible amount of information available from the public during 9/11 often lead to false or conflicting stories which in turn were being picked up and reported by mainstream media sources. This inspired Carvin to create a Yahoo Group which used crowdsourcing to debunk rumors or raise questions about the validity of reports.

Now a platform which can raise questions that allow other journalists to prove it right or wrong is available. A group of bloggers also used this concept during the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004. Tsunami Help was manned 24 hours a day served as a hub for information and also had a big impact in debunking fake charities.

Through his work with the Digital Divide Network, Carvin began to consider that the digital divide is “more than an access issue” and whether the public has the opportunity to participate in and influence public discourse. He began an experiment using Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installation art in Central Park to test out some of the tools available at the time. His project,  The Gates at Central Parkprovided eye-witnesses to this installation an opportunity to contribute their own art criticism, both by posting on their comments or using voicemail system to record a podcast.

Six months later this experiment was replicated when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. Katrina Aftermathbecame a place for people to post their stories and experiences while the Katrina PeopleFinder Project relied on the Red Cross’ data structure to teach thousands of users to collect and aggregate information from mainstream news sources. More than 3000 people participated, collecting data manually from around the internet.

Crowdsourcing can be used as an effective form of research during natural disasters, but does not guarantee success. When Steve Fossett’s airplane went missing, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as used to search for pilot Steve Fossett. Richard Branson and Google both contributed to this crowdsourcing project which uploaded over 20,000 satellite images of the area where he disappeared. More than 50,000 volunteers got involved in the largest crowdsourcing effort to date. Despite these impressive numbers, the effort failed due to poor instructions.

Although this was a set back for the crowdsourcing movement, an important lesson was learned: we need to give people realistic tasks that they can accomplish effectively and accurately. Some crowdsourcing success stories at NPR include:

• Vox Politics (2008). NPR put out a call on Twitter for users to fact-check the presidential debates. For each debate, approximately 200 people contributed useful information and served as an amplifier to the newsroom.
• Vote Report (2008). NPR asked their listeners to help identify voting problems through Twitter, voicemail, SMS, and iPhone/Android apps. This lead to the creation of national and state level maps to rank reports on level of interest. Between 7,000-12,000 reports were boiled down to 2 dozen which were then sent to local stations and served as a useful exercise to learn about how people report.
• InaugrationReport

When asked, “What makes (people) journalists and not just sources?” Carvin replied that some are just sources but a small group of people act as journalists—conducting research, interviewing people, checking sources, etc. Some people serve only as entry point of information. We should think of them as volunteers who are conducting random acts of journalism.

This past December when people in Tunisia start talking about protests, none of the mainstream news organizations were reporting on it. By using Storify to collect ephemeral data like Facebook posts and by monitoring hash tags, hundreds of pieces of information were being shared yet the media were still not paying attention. Already three and half weeks before president fled, the conversation was happening online yet the State Department claimed that they “didn’t see this coming” because they weren’t paying attention to Twitter.

Over the course of 4 weeks, they collected hundred of artifacts which began to raise some difficult questions. An example is a graphic video of a protestor who was shot in Dout. Carvin asked the audience, “When you receive info like this, what do you do with it? What are the pros and cons of sharing this? How would you have dealt with this?” When polled on whether or not they would retweet this content, the majority of the audience said they were unsure.

Twitter and other social media platforms have now given people a choice. It’s important to accurately describe and publish this content, thus giving users a choice whether they want to look at it. It’s important to have the choice whether or not to bear witness. Consider if YouTube or Flip cams had been available during the genocide in Rwanda. Would those atrocious acts have been as wide spread?

The situation in Egypt differed from Tunisia because people learned lessons about providing context and information; a form of checks and balances emerged but this fell apart in LIbya. Only 5% of the population had internet access before the revolution and thus much of the content lacked context which was subsequently picked up by the news organizations that ended up spreading rumors.

An example of this is Al Manara, a Libyan ex-pat news service which published photographs as evidence that the Israelis were supplying weapons. Skeptical of this evidence, Carvin began tweeting. The “crowd” determined that rather than a weapon, this was a night illuminator and all were confident that they had debunked the rumor. However, Al Jazeera Arabic later picked up the original story and erroneously reported that the Israelis were supplying chemical weapons. By creating a record on Storify, each time this story is reported, ample evidence already existed which put its veracity into question. This debunking filtered up to the mainstream media but they ignored it. 

Fortunately, we are now seeing less claims of “breaking news” or “confirmed” news stories on Twitter. As a platform, Twitter becomes useful when people talk about the things that they don’t know. So that we don’t contribute to the problem, if we retweet rumors,we must do so in context and ask people to investigate. This was the case with an alleged image of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in a hospital after an attack on his compound (here’s what the Twitterverse decided). We should remember that in isolation comments don’t matter but collectively they become important in providing evidence to back up a story.

Twitter is the beginning of the process of open source, deliberative journalism. Sharing a rumor is acceptable as long as we acknowledge that it’s a rumor. We can compare this type of journalism to a live broadcast anchor report. Using Twitter, we can effectively provide anchor coverage without staff but rather with Twitter followers who do the investigative work.

When asked about the need to also influence people who watch TV (rather than just those who get their news from the internet, he replied that about 5% of his total output is used on air, so he effectively serves as a “virtual producer”. For example, an NPR reporter in Tripoli wasn’t able to get to Misurata but instead used Skype to contact local sources and get information on what had happened. While Twitter has become the public face of how this type of journalism gets produced, it is also happening across other social media channels in a complimentary process. By combining this new approach with traditional, on-the-ground reporting, perhaps we can discover the truth.

Carvin concluded by stating that this may be a new way of connecting journalism but it will not be a replacement; however, news organizations will have to begin to allow the pendulum to swing the other way. Hopefully we will begin to see more experiments in the future and discover the methods that do work.