Feb 15th, 2011
Chapter 3: Crowd-Powered Collaboration
“News reporting methods such as crowdsourcing, open-source reporting, and pro-am journalism are become the focus for more and more news operations in the United States.” – Mark Briggs
This chapter focuses on these three main areas: crowdsourcing, open-source reporting, and pro-am journalism.
1) Crowdsourcing:Focuses on how community has power on a specific project and shows how a group of individuals who are committed to something can outperform a smaller group of experienced professionals.
- Crowsourcing was a term coined by Jeff Howe in 2006.
- It allows the readers to choose what should be covered.
- It’s still an experiment in journalism.
2) Open-source reporting: The notion of using transparency in one’s reporting to provide some sort of benefit to one’s audience and in possibly get benefits in return from that audience.
- A sense of openness and collaboration within journalism.
- Welcomes the audience’s feedback.
- Removes bias away from stories and makes it more about what’s being reported.
- Beatblogging: a social network encompassed around a traditional reporting beat that bring everyone together.
3) Pro-am journalism: Unfiltered form that allows the audience publish on the same Web site that the professional journalists use when reporting their news.
- “Everyone is a media outlet.” – Clay Shirky
- Readers provide the “what” while journalists provide the “why.”
- Readers/audience contributes to a bigger network such as CNN’s iReport.
Examples of collaborative publishing: Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, craigslist, and Flickr.
All of these websites, and others, give news organizations and journalists an opportunity to collaborate with their audience and provide better information.
