I strongly believe crowdsourcing will be the solution to any transitional problem caused by the death of traditional journalism.
Crowdsourcing is taking a job that is normally done by a paid person and sending it out “to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call,” as stated in the above-linked Wikipedia entry.
The clearest and most controversial form of this is happening in blogging. Every columnist and editor for every major newspaper can be heard saying, “What, are you going to just have bloggers do our job?”
As I see it, there are three primary arguments traditional media offer in defense of their institutions.
- People Will Confine Themselves to a Walled Garden: They say things like, “If people just rely on bloggers they won’t ever be exposed to differing views.”
- Lack of Oversight Online: Their concern is that there is no oversight. There is no professionalism. How can you truly trust a blogger?
- Investigative Journalism Will Die: They feel that the true investigations that go on now will no longer exist without them. Good investigations can only come from paid and trained journalists.
These defenses are the last soldiers shouldering the castle gates as the public takes one last thrust with their battering ram.
It’s just not enough.
On The Walled Garden
I have been really into economist’s views of what’s going on in the world financially. I happen to really like Paul Krugman from the New York Times.
But that isn’t enough for me. I realize that he has a very specific view on things. He wants more intervention, not less. I get it.
I am curious to know the other side of the argument. There are other Nobel Prize winning economists that don’t agree with Paul.
So, I’ve put together a social bookmark list of all the renowned economists who give me the complete picture. You can see my list here. These are the smartest people in America. These are Nobel Prize winners blogging.
In the New York Times I just have Paul Krugman. In the blogosphere I have everyone. It’s impossible for The New York Times to get all of those people on the payroll.
In the blogosphere I have access to the most influential, intelligent people for any specialization I’m curious about.
Anyone who truly cares about a topic will listen to, and seek out, all sides. Unthinking zealots are the only people who will close themselves off in their own comfortable world.
Neoconservatives are not subscribing to the New York Times and extremist Liberals are not clambering to listen to Sean Hannity. The Walled Garden for these people already exists. The death of newspapers isn’t going to make this worse.
On Oversight
I believe the audience will serve as a much greater oversight committee than anything a traditional media could offer.
We see this all the time in the social media landscape where the audience has their strongest voice.
The Motrin Moms debacle is a good example of this. Motrin put out a video that was to coincide with International Baby Wearing Week that quickly turned into a PR disaster. Twitter users highly chastised the video and many swore off ever using Motrin again.
In every election cycle we now see bloggers rising to the the top of the heap because their posts have been linked to and commented on thousands of times because the blogger uncovered something new and interesting.
On top of all this, we find that there is a large disparity between what traditional media outlets want us to know about and what we truly want to know about. Take a look at the home page of Digg, a site that democratizes the news people are most interested in. It shows that people love the bizarre, human interest stories. These rarely make it to the evening news.
Digg also typically does a better job at uncovering the behind-the-scenes information of important news topics. These too also make it to the front page of Digg.
It very well might be that the oversight traditional media is offering isn’t the oversight we want anyway.
As a blogger myself, I know that I am very careful to report and comment about details accurately. The reason for this is because I know first hand what it’s like to make a factual mistake in the social media space.
In 2006, I put a video on YouTube entitled, Jackson Pollack is a Dick.
My point of the video was that Pollack not only killed himself in a drunken driving accident, he also killed another person and seriously injured his mistress. This was the last day of the “first great American artist.”
The problem with my video was that I got the years wrong of when he was sober and when he died.
I was new to video and was mostly making them for my friends at the time. I honestly didn’t think anybody was going to watch the video besides my friends and family.
To this day I get creamed for that video.
I should have gotten my dates correct.
I leave that video online as a reminder to myself to not take social media casually.
People are listening and they will call you out if they think you are wrong.
Fortunately, I’m not an art critic. That video doesn’t hurt me too much.
A much worse mistake would be if I reported something incorrectly in the Web marketing space. Then everyone would know that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
The Death of Investigative Journalism
Crowdsourcing has the potential of making current day investigative journalism look weak and incomplete.
Again, as a personal example, yesterday I was working at my local coffee shop.
As luck would have it, I was sitting right next to a group of people that were having a regional meeting for Chipotle. It was all the store managers for a bunch of the local restaurants. I found out a lot of interesting things:
- Avocados are a huge expense… there is a huge amount of loss in this area.
- Under portioning is not an approved Chipolte cost savings strategy.
- Brown shirts are coming to the new area stores.
I also overheard some things that Chipotle might not have felt comfortable with me hearing… and reporting. They probably aren’t too happy I’m reporting the things I am.
Everyone with a cell phone and a Twitter account becomes a reporter with instant coverage. This includes pictures and video.
I use Twitpic to instantly upload pictures to my Twitter account. And I use Qik to stream live video from my phone that then gets disseminated to my Twitter account and my YouTube account automatically.
If there is news happening it will be covered.
Don’t forget the Saddam Hussein hanging.
The arguments put up by traditional news journalists are merely a defense mechanism to help them not have to figure out how they are going to make a living now.
I assure you, the good ones will do just fine. They might end up actually doing better.
Picture from: Was ist Crowdsourcing? on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
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On Oversight and Reach:
Did you know that according to a Lightspeed Research survey, almost 90 percent of women had never even seen the Motrin ad? Of those who did, around 45 percent actually liked it, 41 percent had no feelings about it, and only about 15 percent didn’t like it. Most notably, even fewer (8 percent) said it had a negative impact on their feelings about the brand, and 32 percent said it made them like the brand more!
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. So… based on that, can we determine if it was a net negative or net positive for motrin?