There’s a comprehensive journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing at the Online Journalism Review. It offers a useful primer for reporters struggling to work out what is the difference between citizen journalism and crowdsourcing.
The OJR’s definition:
Crowdsourcing, in journalism, is the use of a large group of readers to report a news story. It differs from traditional reporting in that the information collected is gathered not manually, by a reporter or team of reporters, but through some automated agent, such as a website.
One important issue is to recognise how crowdsourcing differs from citizen journalism. OJR calls it a “fork” in the citizen journalism movement:
Unlike more traditional notions of “citizen journalism,” crowdsourcing does not ask readers to become anything more than what they’ve always been: eyewitnesses to their daily lives. They need not learn advanced reporting skills, journalism ethics or how to be a better writer. It doesn’t ask readers to commit hours of their lives in work for a publisher with little or no financial compensation. Nor does it allow any one reader’s work to stand its own, without the context of many additional points of view.
This is a key point and it is a distinction that a site like NowPublic.com makes. Its founders don’t use the term citizen journalism, preferring instead to called the “crowd-powered news.”
Given the collapse of citizen journalism sites like Backfence.com, does crowdsourcing offer a better model for bringing in the public into journalism?
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