The impact of crowdsourcing on journalism

These remarks were given to a Fresh Media panel in Vancouver on 6 October 2010, an event that brought media, art and technology together, alongside Leigh Christie, executive director and co-founder of the eatART foundation, and David Ascher, then chief executive of Mozilla Messaging. The starting point was how the idea of a crowd had changed. Writing almost a century earlier, Robert Park had described the crowd as an unthinking herd, a place where individual thought and action dissolved into mob mentality. What changed was infrastructure: social software that lets geographically dispersed people with a common interest connect and collaborate without hierarchy and without a central coordinator.

For journalism that cuts against a profession built on control. The journalist decided what was news and how it would be reported, written and delivered, and the working dogma had long been “we write, you read”. Web tools let citizens and community groups perform communication functions that institutions used to hold, which flattens the arrangement of owners, producers and audiences. The newsroom response was narrower: the audience was treated as a source of raw material and of interpretation, while staying outside the process itself. The experiments were real but tended to sit around the edges of the news operation.

Crowdsourcing in news came in three layers. The first is general observation: aggregating what people notice in daily life, as when the BBC asked its audience to report bird sightings to build a map of Britain, or a Belgian newspaper had readers map the country’s cycle paths. The news organisation is borrowing the eyes and ears of its audience. The second is breaking news, where audiences send photographs, video and eye-witness accounts — established by the 2004 Asian tsunami and the July 2005 London bombings, and routine by 2010, with the CBC and the Globe and Mail folding audience material into their coverage of the G20 protests in Toronto that June. The third is investigative work, where readers analyse documents, crunch numbers and flag what matters while the journalist collates the findings: Talking Points Memo won a Polk Award after handing thousands of Justice Department documents on the firing of US attorneys to its readers, and the Guardian did the same with MPs’ expenses, publishing 458,832 pages for some 27,000 readers to work through.

All of those involve a journalist directing the crowd. The stronger cases run without direction at all — Ushahidi, built in 2008 to map citizen reports of violence after the Kenyan presidential election, and the Trafigura affair. The company, a multinational valued at some two billion dollars and accused of dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast in 2006, had been fighting the accusations through the courts for years. In October 2009 it obtained an injunction so broad that the Guardian could not report a parliamentary question, who had asked it, who might answer it or where to find it — the first time journalists had been stopped from reporting proceedings in parliament.

What followed was not organised by anyone. Alan Rusbridger tweeted that the paper was prevented from reporting parliament “for unreportable reasons” and asked whether John Wilkes had lived in vain. Strangers found the question, published links to it and to a 2009 UN report on the dumping, and made Trafigura a trending topic. The injunction was abandoned inside a day. Rusbridger’s own summary was that “a combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety”, and the mechanism worth noting is that thousands of people contributed to that outcome without being told what to do or how to do it.