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June 22, 2006
Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: My Session at BloggerCon IV, June 23It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?(Related post… Case Study for an Unconference: Ken Sands brings spokesmanreview.com to BloggerCon IV.) Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do Journalism Dan Gillmor’s famous insight, “readers know more than I do,” makes great intuitive sense. But making sense is not enough. In fact it’s not clear yet how we can take ideas and developments like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am production, decentralized newsgathering, we media… and turn them into actual investigations, published reports that draw attention because they reveal what was previously unknown— you know, news. In this session (here’s the BloggerCon IV schedule and the participants) we are going to figure out how we can use the Net to actually do readers-know-more-than-we-do reporting (also known as open source journalism) and break news with it. Because if users really do know more than “we” do; if it really is possible to tap that kind of distributed knowledge and inform a larger public with it, then we should be able to do stories with these methods that would elude more traditional forms of reporting… Right? But how? I mean exactly how? That will be my question. By attending you affirm that you may have part of the answer. It doesn’t have to be a big national ground-shaking story right off the mark. We need more demos, interesting little projects. They can be modest as long as they’re real. They might begin with local stories or matters of interest to a specialized public. The first story ever described as open source journalism (see Andrew Leonard’s 1999 article for Salon) was about cyber-terrorism. It was published in Jane’s Intelligence Review, the “international journal of threat analysis.” But first it was Slash-dotted and improved; therein lies the tale. The readers knew more than Jane’s did, and the editors decided that was a good thing. Bingo. Seven years later we’re still trying to collect for having bingo back then. I’m the discussion leader for this one. If you come, don’t expect to debate whether it’s desirable or possible to do reporting in the “distributed” style. John Dvorak can stay home. We’ll assume that it is desirable (because we need better journalism) and it is possible (or why did god give us the Internet?) Then we will tap the intelligence in the room and try to advance the ball on how users-know-more-than-journalists reporting can start to payoff in the currency of news. That means asking:
I see it as a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. So come to this session if you want in on that. Now in no way am I suggesting that open source journalism is untried, a “new” idea or that it’s tabula rasa out there. There are cases on record. If you have one that’s illuminating, let’s hear it. Right now the need is for more trials, more fire, and many more collaborations going on so we can see what difference social networks make in the art and science of investigative reporting. Any given BloggerCon is about advancing the art and science of weblogs. Poo-bah Dave Winer says the theme for this is “empowering the users.” In October 2005 I tried to imagine a project that would demonstrate how big the potential gains were, if you could empowers users. My blue-sky, not-entirely-original proposal then: “A blog-organized, red-blue, 50-state coalition of citizen volunteers who would read and attempt to decipher every word of every bill Congress votes on and passes next year.” And of course tell the nation what’s really in its laws. No news organization has ever done it. I don’t think anyone outside the industry knows how… yet. On Friday we just wanna advance the ball. As usual with the BloggerCon “unconference” format: no experts, no panels, no speeches, no lecturn. (Dave Winer explains: “First, you take the people who used to be the audience and give them a promotion. They’re now participants. Their job is to participate, not just to listen and at the end to ask questions. Then you ask everyone who was on stage to take a seat in what used to be the audience…”) Going to be at BloggerCon? Introduce yourself here, please. And if you’ll be there and want to help out, great, e-mail me. If you have ideas, suggestions (links to look at) but cannot be there, that’s why god invented comments. More next week…. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links… See the case study for the BloggerCon discussion. It’s from the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, an innovative newspaper that wants to do more. Online director Ken Sands wrote it. Wanna listen? Here’s the MP3 file for the BloggerCon discussion. (1 hour 12 minutes.) Amy Grahan at Poynter’s E-media blog gives it a thumbs-up review (July 14): “I just got around to listening to the podcast of the Bloggercon IV session on citizen journalism, held June 23 in San Francisco. Wow! If you want your mind blown in a ‘what is journalism’ way, definitely [have] a listen.” Also see the comments to Amy’s post. The editors at Washingtonpost.com asked me to look across ten years of Net journalism. The results were posted June 19: Web Users Open the Gates. Newspaper, radio, television … Web! It made sense at the time. But in the 10 years following the birth of washingtonpost.com, the Net and its publishing platform, the World Wide Web, have proved harder to master, scarier to get wrong and more thrilling to get right than expected. Wilder, and discontinuous with the past in a way those coming out of traditional journalism never could have imagined. Among the items covered: the “re-purposing content” error in the mid-90s, the effect of all sites being equi-distant from the reader, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the power shift from producers to users, the huge expansion in press criticism, Andrew Heyward’s “end of omniscience,” Mark Cuban’s blog, Washingtonpost.com’s live chats and the Tsunami coverage. Plus: “If the unthinkable cannot be ignored, professional correctness loses its power.” Read. There’s also A Brief History of washingtonpost.com, part of the same package marking the Post site’s tenth birthday, along with As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed by Post staff writer Patricia Sullivan. They said forever. From the BBC’s Kevin Anderson, writing at journalism.co.uk: “The London bombings of 7 July 2005 were a watershed moment for ‘user-generated content’.” It’s important to note that most so-called citizen journalists don’t consider themselves journalists, just members of social networks that share information of interest amongst themselves. See also Anderson’s post responding to this one at Corante, “We used to talk about broadcast networks, but the future is obviously in social networks. What is the role of the journalist in the age of social networks?” And a further follow-up from K.A.: Technical and cultural issues for ‘Networked Journalism’ Part I. “Networked journalism” is the term Jeff Jarvis says should replace “citizen journalism.” Read why: “Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. Amy Gahran at Poynter: When I talk to people about citizen journalism and other kinds of participatory media, often people who are above the age of 40 or who are print or broadcast media veterans contend, “Well, most people don’t care about participatory media, so it doesn’t matter. You’re talking about a very small world.” Good reply to something I also hear. Susan Crawford—new media law professor and blogger—heard Jim Lehrer of the PBS Newshour on “On Point.” She also read this post. Suppose we asked him the question: “Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks… and put them to work to break news?” Crawford: Jim Lehrer’s answer would be, “No way.” No such thing. Professionals gather news and assess what’s a story and what isn’t. Just a small matter of finding a sustainable business model, but we’re not leaving. More Susan channeling Lehrer: “There will always be a demand for high-quality, professional news reporting. And so therefore it will always exist. Yes, people fire off emails and bloggers do their posts, but what they’re all doing is reacting to the news — and where did the news come from? From professional reporters.” I’ve heard it too many times to even listen any more. But I’m glad Susan is. Dan Gillmor, head of the Center for Citizens Media, in the comments: What we’re discussing here are projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole. It’ll almost always require some folks at the center. We used to call them editors. Right. Lex Alexander of the News & Record in Greensboro, NC reacts in the comments: “At the local level, we’re still struggling to find a way to do this. Leading a group of nonprofessionals in an investigative project for the N&R and participants’ respective blogs is my dream gig at this point.” Mark Howard of News Corpse raises a problem in comments: “Once an investigative project is put on line in an open forum (in order to exploit the knowledge of a broad community), the story is also revealed and can be either usurped by other ‘reporters’ or pre-debunked by partisan opponents.” It’s an issue. But there are answers to that. See Paul Lukasiak’s reply. In Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media (Sep. 29, 2005) I discussed an example of “distributed reporting” and what happened when traditional news professionals reacted to it. In November of 2004, Josh Marshall got mad when Republicans voted to change ethics rules to benefit their Majority Leader Tom DeLay: (“There was a vote. It wasn’t recorded. There’s no official tally. But everyone who was there was asked to say yea or nea. Why shouldn’t they be willing tell their constituents what they said?”) So he asked readers of his blog who live in Republican districts to call their Congressperson, as a constituent, and try to get an answer: was it yea or nea on the rules change? If you get a reply or a clear refusal to say, e-mail us, Josh says. We’ll make a list and tell everyone else. And by such means—distributed fact-collection—he and his readers tried to get the vote recorded. Still do. Josh Marshall is recruiting readers to help track “where various politicians stand on the Net Neutrality bill making its way through the Senate.” See the list. I was a guest on Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source June 14, discussing whether “truth with edge” reporting, a construction of NPR’s ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, was an adequate formula for the press as it struggles to get beyond “balance” and he said, she said logic. Other guests were Dvorkin, Brent Cunningham of CJR, and William Powers of National Journal. “The truth telling system has been overwhelmed by the party in power, people understand that,” said I. “How much innovation has there been in the news business in the art of telling complex stories?”
Posted by Jay Rosen at June 22, 2006 1:06 PM
Comments
Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo.com has used his readership to compile and track congresscritters' positions on such issues as Social Security privatization, 'Net neutrality and the so-called DeLay rule (Do indicted 'critters have to give up leadership positions until charges are resolved?). With his large, national readership, it's a natural fit. At the local level, we're still struggling to find a way to do this. Leading a group of nonprofessionals in an investigative project for the N&R AND participants' respective blogs is my dream gig at this point. If I'm reading you right, some of this is starting to happen. Little of it is truly open source, and none of it can get around digital divide issues, but, in addition to WikiNews, there's OrangePolitics, which is seeking to move the Chapel Hill-Carrboro, N.C., region along, and Advance Internet (disclaimer: I work for them) is testing a new project that hopefully will roll out to all their sites. It seems to be pretty popular at the Massachusetts affiliate. Posted by: Josh Shear at June 17, 2006 4:01 PM | Permalink I worry that Josh Marshall's methodology mentioned above is an example of 'sweatshop journalism', an online version of the unpaid internship by which many media organisations get their hands dirty. I think the operative word in the phrase 'citizen journalist' should be the former, not the latter. The citizen journalist can provide highly location specific, niche news, that the professionals do not have the time (or the readership/viewing figures) to cover for their print articles or TV shows. Does it matter if your readership is only 1000, 100, or one? If information from elsewhere stregthens family, community relations, or local business operations, then you've been a proactive citizen. This is a wonderful idea, and so preferable to the endless, barking blogs which only rehash MSM news, much like rabble rousers. The citation of Josh Marshall is a good one, as his kind of reporting, using the energies of his readers, led to squashing the social security "privitization" nonsense, in my opinion. Also, do I detect a little "dig" at the YearlyKos convention crowd when you say there won't be panels and speeches? That sounds like a genuine democracy, and I applaude it. Wish I were a young geek with access to information. I'd be right there, with you! Posted by: margaret at June 17, 2006 6:10 PM | Permalink Jay, What do you mean by "break news with it"? If you mean "citizen journalism finding its way into the mainstream media", then from where I sit, its been happening for at least two years now -- to both good and ill effect. But it wasn't happening six years ago. I'm talking about, of course, my pet project "The AWOL Project". When I published my first piece in the series, I mentioned it at Salon.com's "Tabletalk" group devoted to the subject of Bush's military service. This was noted by blogger Dave Niewart at Orcinus. Professor Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami, who reads Niewart's blog, wrote about it on his own blog, Discourse.net. Froomkin, as it turns out, is the brother of WP blogger extraordinaire, Dan Froomkin, who wrote about it in his blog. Eric Alterman at MSNBC.com subsequently picked it up as well (once Froomkin wrote about it, it was picked up by the major "liberal" bloggers like Drum and Marshall, so I don't know where Alterman saw it first.) That's major media penetration, IMHO, and it happened slightly over two years ago. As I continued to publish, I began to receive calls/emails from other media outlets. It never became a "huge" story for two reasons -- first, the "media" in general thought the whole "AWOL" story was over, second was my refusal to promote the work in a personal fashion. While I was willing to explain what I had written to journalists, I was unwilling to be quoted about it. My position was that I am "just some guy from Philadelphia" who did some digging and came up with some facts -- I presented those facts, and wanted them reported as facts, and not as the theories of "some guy in Philadelphia". (For instance, I turned down an offer to appear on Alan Colmes radio show.) Most reporters are so stuck in the he said/she said narrative that they seem unable to do what I wanted them to do -- verify the accuracy of the facts I had dug up, and then write about it themselves. Without the he said/she said framework, most journalists seem at a loss for what to do with facts. If there is are lessons to be learned from my experience, they are these 1) Co-operative research work. During the research phase of my work, one of my correspondents was Col. Jerry Lechliter. While Jerry and I differ on some of the details of our conclusions, our correspondence sharpened both our understanding of the documents and their relationship to contemporaneous law and military regulation. Lechliter published his own analysis, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, and was extensively quoted by the LA Times (and, IIRC, US News) in articles on Bush's military service. 2) "Celebrity" matters. When this question was raised by Glen Greenwald at (I think) YKos, someone answered that Greenwald had to accept and promote his status as a "expert" and "celebrity" -- and be willing to promote himself as vigorously as he worked on his extremely insightful analyses of national security issues. 3) Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. Slogging through my writing was hard work -- I'm a lousy writer to begin with, and I tried to make the presentation of facts as accurate and precise as possible so I used the specific military "jargon", while simultaneously "pre-rebutting" counter-arguments. The result was prose that is practically unreadable, and that requires a great deal of commitment to get through. That guy at Little Green Footballs sat down at a typewriter, created a document that looked similar to the Killian memos, told a few lies (like proportionate spacing was unavailable on typewriters in 1972) and screamed "FORGERY!" -- and the media picked up the story almost immediately. I guess what I'm saying here is that, while my "exposure" in the "mainstream" media may simply have been the result of a happy accident (the Froomkin relationship), in the past two years the expansion of the blogosphere, and its "connectedness" and "viral" nature, has made it possible if not inevitable that "newsworthy" information will get noticed, and written about -- and that when the mainstream media ignores a story about which the blogosphere is buzzing, they will hear from blog readers. (e.g. the Downing Street Memo story -- it wasn't "broken" by the blogs, but the mainstream media ignored it at first, under the bloggers and their readers started screaming about it. correction... the above should read "That guy at Little Green Footballs sat down at a computer," not "typewriter".... although most of you doubtless read it the way it was intended ;) While the concept of developing stories via a distributed knowledge base is appealing and even romantic, I'm not sure how it can be used to break a story. Part of the impact of breaking news is its immediacy and exclusivity. But once an investigative project is put on line in an open forum (in order to exploit the knowledge of a broad community), the story is also revealed and can be either usurped by other "reporters" or pre-debunked by partisan opponents. My concern boils down to: How do you author a breaking story if anyone and everyone has access to your research and notes while the story is still being developed? Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 18, 2006 1:57 AM | Permalink As a practicioner I find I identify with so little of what's written about "distributed journalism," perhaps because the scale of the place I write about is too small -- 30k people in four square miles -- to really make distributed journalism neccessary. The whole place can be walked about in an afternoon, like that planet the protagonist discovers in The Little Prince. I'm starting to get weird, itchy, expansionist feelings about the town next door, maybe a prelude to a little blog imperialism. I have this idea -- maybe false -- about how newsrooms work. Around ten in the morning reporters and editors caffeine levels rise enough to allow them to begin ambling around and discussing Story Ideas, and eventually one of these solidifies into an Assignment. I have no story ideas, and I have no assignments. I certainly have no Assignment Desk, unless Asking Really Nicely qualifies. The internal organization of H2otown isn't like the inside of (my imagined) newsroom. It's a lot more like the inside of an ice-fishing shack (also imagined). A bunch of us are sitting in a structure that no one will confuse with either a commercial business or a pillar of the community doing something that's easy to satirize. We've got some lines down through a hole in the ice. For a long time, nothing happens. Every once in awhile, we catch a fish. Then we go back to shooting the shit. Blog = fish caught+stories told while not catching fish. Most citizen journalists I know whose beat is a geographical area depend heavily on publically available resources, like the lake under the fishermen. Public documents, local access cable, local blogs, police scanners, Just Walking Around. Better = more lines in the water in more places + increased knowledge about where to drop lines in the water. Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 18, 2006 2:11 AM | Permalink Generally speaking, what we're discussing here are projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole. It'll almost always require some folks at the center. We used to call them editors. Reading all the laws is a great project, but I think it's too big to chew on except as a long-term goal. I'd suggest paring it down to something smaller and much more essential: The next time Congress gets ready to pass an appropriations bill of any sort, we need an army of lawyers and others who understand legislative language to parse it *before* it's passed. This may not be possible, of course, given the leadership's increasing tendency to force members to vote on bills they haven't had time to read, and after injecting last-second stuff that no one except a few staffers and lawmakers knows about. The way to experiment with this is to take it down a level, to the state legislature. Pick a state that's relatively uncorrupt and do roughly the same thing. The project will be more manageable, though you'll probably find less, if much at all, of the material that turns into headlines. Last fall, by the way, I proposed that major media organizations bring in the citizens for a project on the Katrina reconstruction. No takers, unfortunately, but I still think it was a good idea. (One organization is still thinking about doing this but hasn't acted.) I also, more recently, suggested that the Wall Street Journal expand its brilliant coverage of the stock-options scandal and do a thorough, citizen-driven database of how widely (or not) this sleaze has spread. Stay tuned on this one. As to the question of whether it's a good idea to tell your competition what you're working on, this depends on what you want to accomplish and whether it matters if the thing is done in full view in the first place. Is the goal to do good journalism, to serve the public? Or is it a professional scoop? Wouldn't someone "stealing" the idea be seen as a thief, if he/she used the material gathered under your wing without credit? And aren't there many kinds of investigations where it's just fine to let the targets know they're being investigated? I don't expect Seymour Hersh to tell us ahead of time precisely what he's working on. But many, many kinds of investigations are better done in the sunlight. Some -- like the ones we're talking about here, where there's no way to do them without massive help from the community -- should be done that way. Posted by: Dan Gillmor at June 18, 2006 6:44 AM | Permalink My concern boils down to: How do you author a breaking story if anyone and everyone has access to your research and notes while the story is still being developed? I think the pursuit of the "Jeff Gannon" story is instructive here. Gannon caught the attention of the liberal blogosphere when he lobbed an ideologically biased softball question during a Bush press conference. A couple of people at DKos started looking into the mysterious, and pseudononymous, Mr Gannon and his employer, Talon News. As they found out more and more about Talon and who was involved in it, and published their info in Daily Kos diaries, more people got involved in doing research -- and as Dan suggests, an ad hoc organization was created with someone functioning as an "editor" keeping track of who was investigating what aspect of the story. The story "broke" when someone discovered pictures of "Gannon" promoting himself as a male prostitute. While the mainstream media paid no attention to real story (How did someone with no background in journalism, working for a "Potemkin" news service, gain access to the White House?), it couldn't ignore the "scandal" of a male prostitute with easy and frequent White House access. (It should be noted that, once the effort became organized, not all "knowledge" was available to the general public. You had to sign up with the ad hoc organization to gain access to their resources.) So, in this case, you "break" a story by finding a titillating tidbit that can't be ignored. I think that Mark's concern is misplaced -- people involved in this kind of "citizens journalism" are not looking for a by-line on a scoop, they are looking for exposure of information. These "citizen-journalists" are first, and foremost "citizens". The people involved in the Gannon investigation would have been delighted if some major media organization had "stolen" what they had dug up about Talon news and its political connections and used it as the basis for a story. You can't "steal" what people are trying to give away. ************* The webcast has always been the hardest part of BloggerCon, it's an expensive proposition to do right, we thought we had it covered this time, but I found out late this afternoon that we don't. ...and, imho, needs wider exposure if there is to be a webcast. (I hope I'm not violating any rules by using the comments section to post a plea for money/resources jay. And I wouldn't have done it were it not directly related to the topic at hand.) [[I worry that Josh Marshall's methodology mentioned above is an example of 'sweatshop journalism', an online version of the unpaid internship by which many media organisations get their hands dirty.]] I could be wrong, but I don't think so. Josh is basically a self-employed blogger who enlists other bloggers to do reporting that the national media should do but won't. My own organization has been accused of the same thing, and my response has been: No, we're not asking people to do for free the stories we otherwise would have to pay someone to do. We're asking people to do for free the stories that otherwise, because of a lack of resources on our part, we couldn't do at all. In both cases, the dynamic is not the news organization getting something for free that it otherwise would have to pay for. The dynamic is news consumers getting news they otherwise simply wouldn't get. (And we pay our interns, by the way.) This topic is of great interest to me, but I think to accomplish your goals, Jay, we're going to have to step back even further. I find that defining terms is absolutely necessary to have this kind of intellectually creative conversation, for one's concept of "citizen journalism" is very often different than another's. Even the use of the term "story" is problematic in this discussion, and perhaps we need to be thinking about another term for the output of such a decentralized and collaborate effort. In our world, we end up on "sides," because, well, there really are (at least) two sides to every story. It's often written that the victor in war gets to write the history, and anybody who's ever been through a divorce knows well and good that there are two sides in that "story." So I think that we have to get past this in order to truly come to a place where the wisdom of the crowd is presented. Frankly, if we accomplished nothing more than this, it would be better than what we have today. I'm quite excited about the possibility of telling the nation what’s really in its laws, but along with that, I think the nation needs to know who makes the laws and how those laws usually help the status quo within which the lawMAKERS exist. And while we're at it, the nation also needs to know that "case law" was never a part of the separation of powers, and that the citizenry has little control over those who make this kind of law. We have terrible problems in the West, and it's going to take all of us working together to fix them. Modernism and its institutions have failed. What comes next? See you all Friday. Posted by: Terry Heaton at June 18, 2006 9:34 AM | Permalink Maybe we don't need "to figure out how we can use the Net to actually do readers-know-more-than-we-do reporting (also known as open source journalism) and break news with it" -- maybe we just need to encourage more use of the Net -- period! -- for original and enterprise reporting. I blogged today about a Reporter's Notebook item in the NYT that describes how journalists are using the online work of unaffiliated observers who monitor a variety of terrorist Web sites and publish translations, etc., online. Journalists don't need to sit around waiting for readers to throw them a bone or e-mail a tip. The readers are already posting their tips on blogs and Web sites outside the traditional news channels. Reporters need to learn how to find and monitor those sources. Posted by: Mindy McAdams at June 18, 2006 10:50 AM | Permalink Thanks to all for some really good comments. Just to clarify: In this session (and this post) I am not talking about "citizen journalism" in some general way. I welcome the idea that amateurs and independents have a lot to contribute, and it's true they are doing just that in a variety of ways today. At BloggerCon we're going to focus only on one kind of citizen journalism, one idea for how to tap its potential. It's the distributed knowledge and collective effort part. Dan Gillmor put it well: "Projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole." That's what I call users-know-more-than-we-do journalism. Lisa is right that it isn't needed at the scale she is working on. She might have added that it doesn't apply to all stories, and often can't be done without money, or professional expertise being involved somehow. Paul's personal labors in the AWOL project are not an example, but the DailyKos investigation of Jeff Gannon is. Mark Howard asked: "How do you author a breaking story if anyone and everyone has access to your research and notes while the story is still being developed?" This is one of the most common objections I have heard to "open source" reporting projects. Dan, Lex and Paul had, I thought, good answers, especially: "You can't 'steal' what people are trying to give away." But the Howard question is going to keep coming up. It's interesting that when I disuss these ideas with professional journalists, one of the things they keep stumbling over is their mistrust of amateurs who clearly have political commitments or strong feelings about an issue. They are convinced that TPM users and redstate.com users alike would cook the books, and so if you ask them to do some knowledge collection the knowledge you get back will be unreliable. Jay, I detailed the biggest points in these two recent posts: Iterative Media: Treating Collaborative Media Like Open Source Code & Building a Theory of Collaborative Sensemaking As far as tools, I demonstrated a prototype for my collaborative film editing workflow in the second half of my Vloggercon presentation last week. Here's a quicktime & flash version of the 9-minute presentation. In a nutshell, I'm segmenting interview source material with experts into sound bites, matching it up with the transcript, assigning them to a unique URL within Drupal so that users can collectively rate the quality, declare whether they agree or disagree with the substance, categorize it with tags, and then playlist into sequences. I'm essentially combining: All of this user contributed metadata is adding context and meaning to the source material towards the goal of collectively editing a documentary film. It is also helping create links and associations between the facts and helping bring order to the complexity of the interview material -- which is focusing on the pre-war performance of the mainstream media. I think that this type of methodology can be applied to other open source journalism projects in a scalable way. It's interesting that when I disuss these ideas with professional journalists, one of the things they keep stumbling over is their mistrust of amateurs who clearly have political commitments or strong feelings about an issue. They are convinced that TPM users and redstate.com users alike would cook the books, and so if you ask them to do some knowledge collection the knowledge you get back will be unreliable. This sounds to be like a red herring -- the answer is that you don't trust it, as a professional journalist you treat it as a credible rumor, and verify it and (if it is true) write about it. Currently, Josh Marshall is using his readers to determine the position of each Senator on the "net neutrality" bill. A jounalist working on that story can go to Marshall's website, see which Senators are listed as taking which positions, and call their offices to verify the information. ************** I think there are two separate and distinct issues here...the first is how do you do "distributive knowledge jounalism" (i.e. distinct from "citizens journalism" which would include the kind of stuff I did which is outside the subject), the second is "how do you get the results of distributive knowledge journalism widely distributed." To the first issue, there appears to be three models... 1) The "ad hoc" effort (e.g. the Gannon story) 2) The "leader" effort (e.g. Marshall's involvement of his readers) 3) the "pre-organized" effort (what Dan is proposing, and what it sounds like Lex is doing.) This category should be broken down further into "internet based" (basically, a "wiki" approach to investigative journalism) and "traditional media based" (Dan's proposal) All three efforts have their advantages and disadvantages, and IMHO should all be considered acceptable "models" for distributive knowledge journalism" The second question is, for me, more intriguing? How do you "break" a story in a way that will have an impact? The right wing seems to have this one solved --- a "network" that includes mainstream media types that will tranmit the results of citizen's "journalism" to a wider audience (via right wing talk radio, Fox News, etc.) to the point where the "traditional media" can't ignore the story. (e.g. the Killian memos thing.) So to me, the real question is "How do people excluded from the right-wing network get their efforts noticed by the traditional media"? I have a hunch that there is great promise in Gillmor's concept of "projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole." But I also have no idea how it would play out in practice. Consider this: In the spring of 1989, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, then of the Philadelphia Inquirer, were awarded the Pulitzer prize for national reporting for their 15-month investigation of "rifle shot" provisions in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The series essentially exposed the "reform" act as just one more giveaway to politically connected individuals and businesses, and it aroused such widespread public outcry that Congress ended up remanding most of the sweetheart tax breaks. That happened because Barlett and Steele were the only two reporters in the land who were willing to undertake the drudgery of actually reading the 900 pages of footnotes and appendixes to the falsely-named "tax reform" act. And then they went out and tracked down the recipients of each and every special tax treatment, one by one by one. That is tedious, tedious detail work, and that is why it took all of 15 months for two reporters and a researcher to compile the whole sordid story. I'm trying to imagine what would unfold if, Josh Marshall-style, 900, or 90, or even 9 citizen journalists had been set loose on the same task. Would they have come up with the same incriminating data ? If they had, would they have had the patience to hold their fire until they had the whole jigsaw puzzle put together ? Or would they have offered up the evidence piecemeal, laying out individual cases for the mainstream media to pursue -- or to not pursue ? And how would that have played out ? I have no idea what the answers to those questions might be. But I'm real interested to find out.
Posted by: Steve Lovelady at June 18, 2006 9:24 PM | Permalink pluk... You might try focusing on a story idea that hasn't been done to death already, has some relevance or timeliness, and doesn't rely on false postulates, such as the one that holds that an absence must be an AWOL. Troops are absent from drills all the time, for a variety of reasons. If they clear it with the chain of command ahead of time, or if there's a legit reason (generally beyond the soldiers' or airman's control), there's no AWOL. More specifically, there's no UA. Furthermore, units generally don't document reasons. I just have the First Sergeant code the guy "Absent" on the 1379 and have done with it. If there were a problem, then it's up to the unit commander to pursue an Article 15 under the TCMJ. No article 15, no problem. You've been jousting at that windmill for a long time. We get it. We just don't care, outside of a few fringebats. I think the reporters are smart enough to recognize you as a fringebat. Hence the lack of interest. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 18, 2006 9:26 PM | Permalink Jason.... Insofar as Jay has already stated that my experience as a "citizen journalist" is not relevant to the topic, I'm not sure what purpose your little screed serves here. But insofar as any explanation will be even more off-topic, please don't make the effort to explain. Thanx. ***************** Thanks, Paul. Steve: In my imagination of it, the "projects that can be broken down into little pieces" approach has the most promise, not as an alternative means of doing what Bartlett and Steele do, but as a way to get done stories that just weren't doable before. I don't see "users know more than we do" journalism as a replacement method, but a new game entirely. What's more likely to be the breakthrough method is some young team of Bartlett and Steeles working closely with a gang of motivated citizen journalists to find stuff that could never be found by two reporters, no matter how good they are. One thing sorely lacking in MSM reports is subject matter knowledge. Reporters appear to have zero knowledge of scientific facts, the methodology of science, engineering, medicine, epidemiology, statistics and for that matter the difference between science and engineering (as an engineer, I get really tired of constant reports that "scientists developed..." when engineers, not scientists, are the people who normally develop things). There are lots and lots of people out in blog land who have this knowledge, in as much depth as one could desire. But we end up criticizing, after the fact, the appallingly bad reporting on subjects involving these areas - whether it is "global warming," the association between and , or the latest report on "bird flu". On military subjects, reporters, who seem to be proud of their total lack of knowledge of all the related subjects, could easily tap the net for answers (although they might not like what they learn). This, by the way, was one of the biggest problems with the pathetic reporting on personal military history of the presidential candidates in 2004. Based on the results, the MSM lacked even the most rudimentary understanding of how our military operates (the clear bias is a separate damning characteristic). I don't know if this fits into "projects that can be broken down..." but there is certainly a horribly large gap between what reporters and editors know about almost everything, and what is known by the vast and diverse community of bloggers. Posted by: John Moore at June 18, 2006 11:56 PM | Permalink Jay, I asked you a number of complex questions during my interview with you, and told me afterwards, "I'm not sure how you're going to edit this." And to be honest, I wasn't completely sure how I was going edit it either. I was trying to show how the media failed to handle complexity leading up to the Iraq war, and so it has been a process of trying to figure out the best way to communicate these uncovered complexities. Needless to say, I quickly ran into the limitations of the linear storytelling paradigm after realizing that many of the answers that I was receiving from you and others indeed cannot fit within the constraints of a 90-minute film or traditional news story. This is what drove me towards investigating collaborative post-production possibilities that could engage the audience with these complexities in a more interactive way. And since the build-up to the war in Iraq is a controversial topic, I also wanted to tap into the collective wisdom of a diverse group of collaborators in order to incorporate and account for many different perspectives and interpretations of the source material. So I had to not only figure out how to collect such a body of data from participants, but also think about out how to digest, synthesize and make sense of this type of feedback. Here's a dilemma to think about: I believe that innovations around telling complex stories requires a number of paradigm shifts that can't be fully comprehended until a working proof of concept of them exist. I think that I have a potential solution that I've been trying to describe and communicate for a while now, but it hasn't been until I have a prototype demonstration that people are now just starting to really intuitively understand how rating, tagging and playlisting can be combined to break complex problems into component parts and to start connecting the dots between them. And I don't expect people to really understand it until they can participate and see it working firsthand, which I hope to have ready within the next month or two. But my approach can go beyond collaborative film editing and can be expanded to collaboratively implement intelligence analysis techniques such as Richards Heuer's Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. So methodologies exist for handling complexity, but they first need to be implemented with tools that have an intuitive and self-explanatory user interface. And then there needs to be compelling complex content that creates a desire for people to want to participate. Did some more thinking about this today. One thing to consider is that the end product of distributed journalism might not end up looking like anything anyone might recognize as "journalism." For instance: Problem: It's very difficult to know whether or not the things we buy or eat contain things we don't want, or are produced in ways we find objectionable, or support causes we disagree with. Individual examples of this phenomenon have been the cause of gazillions of news stories, from fundamentalist Christians threatening to boycott Disneyland over "Gay Days," to stories about factory farming and prisoner labor. But these individual stories are such a patchwork that what shoppers take into stores is little more than wallet-based superstitions whose expression have little market or political power. What would be nice: If your cellphone could scan the barcode and match it with a profile you've created of everything from your dietary needs to your values. The accuracy standard of the underlying data would be like that of Wikipedia -- that is, not written on stone tablets, and not from the producers of the goods. Why it hasn't been done: It's a massive data challenge -- perhaps a problem that could *only* be solved by hundreds of thousands of people. Is that journalism? Is Chicagocrime.org journalism? No, not really: it's a substrate for journalism. Revealing the data would inevitably reveal trends and create trends. How will journalism help annotate the planet? Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 19, 2006 2:03 AM | Permalink Oh. A box score for Congress. How the data is presented matters. The fact is, Ye Average Jane and Joe take in plenty of complex data when we consider that they read box scores, play fantasy baseball, and maybe have a 401k. Another thing: People fail to appreciate complexity in simple ways. Frequently the ways involve passage of time, scale of place, and large numbers. There's a good, if depressingly titled book by a guy named Dorner called The Logic of Failure. It contains case studies of big, human-error disasters like Chernobyl. He does an experiment: he leads people into a walk-in freezer that's been allowed to rise to a temperature of 60 degrees. He tells them, "the point is to lower the temperature to 45 degrees and keep it at 45 for two minutes. The first person to do it wins." Every subject of the experiment -- except one -- failed in the exact same way. They cranked the temperature down to freezing and then yoyoed up and down over and under 45 degrees for many minutes. The one who won lowered the temperature gauge to 45 and did nothing but wait. People misjudge even simple phenomena that change over time. Maybe the journalists of the future should be animators, to show us things like How Social Security Gets Funded, or How Death Tolls Change In The War. (I'm just a bill/here on Capitol Hill...) Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 19, 2006 2:12 AM | Permalink OK. Clearly there are projects that lend themselves well to the collaborative journalism model. The Jeff Gannon affair is a good example of one that does. But Steve Lovelady's example of the Tax Reform Act story is one that possibly would have been harmed by this model. Dan Gillmor and Plukasiak both raised good points in response to my concern about ongoing investigations being public, saying that the payoff is not having a scoop, but serving the public interest via good journalism. But that only addressed half of my concern which also included the fact that the subject of a story would have access to it as well. Jay, your point that many journalists would be worried about the reliability of the contributed data is key. In Josh Marshall's project to put House members on the record re: the DeLay rule change, if Josh had to verify the accuracy of every citizen-supplied answer, would there have been any benefit at all to having outsourced the work to citizens? Perhaps a solution would be to have a hierarchical structure with a citizen populated first tier, an appointed group of trusted citizen editors/fact checkers on the second tier, and the project's author/administrator on top. Whether or not collaborative journalism is a good idea, collaborative discussions about it (like the one in this thread) are awesome. I want to thank Kent Bye whose Echo Chamber Project looks fascinating. I plan to take a closer look in the next few days. All the ideas discussed here truly represent a new frontier in media. Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 19, 2006 3:06 AM | Permalink I think Lisa is right that some of the fruits of this kind of work would not necessarily look like "journalism." But they would be useful public information, and that's what counts. Kent: I think you are doing heroic work by plunging into the details of linearity, complexity and collaborative editing. I don't always understand it fully, but I understand the questions you are asking very well. I want to make one distinction. There is value in citizen participation in media, and I am all for it. I have spent much of my career arguing with journalists about that. However, here I am concerned not with the good of citizen (amateur) involvement per se, but only with those cases where a distributed, open source, wisdom of the crowd approach is better, and more likely to bring results than traditional reporting methods. The real gains are going to be in stories that weren't even doable before the Net. Mark: I had an answer to those professional journalists would be worried about the reliability of the contributed data. It's in my post, Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses from Big Media: ...They insisted that Josh's callers would be less reliable than journalists. Blog readers wouldn't know when they were being fed a line. Because they're partisans suspicious of DeLay, they would hear only what they wanted to hear. Dan Gillmor tried to inform them that Talking Points Memo was widely read on Capital Hill. Staffers for a Republican Congressman would know if Marshall had screwed up. They'd fire off an e-mail right away to correct the record. This information made no visible dent. Big Media was adamant. One could not trust information gathered by amateurs. Point is, Marshall had a way to verify (and correct) the information. Therefore he didn't have to verify the bona fides of every contributor. Of course, Marshall doesn't care that much if his chart is wrong for half a day and he gets a call from Congressman Schmutz's office correcting him. He's still met his goal. The New York Times cares very much about being wrong for part of the day. On the washingtonpost.com today, I have a piece about ten years of the Net disrupting journalism: Web Users Open the Gates. Here's how it ends: On the day the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers positioned around the world, according to the firm's chief executive, Tom Glocer. But none of them were on the beaches to witness the disaster, he told the Online Publishing Association. There's also A Brief History of washingtonpost.com, part of the same package celebrating the Post site's ten year mark. Marshall doesn't care that much if his chart is wrong for half a day...The New York Times cares very much about being wrong for part of the day. You've put me in the uncomfortable position of defending the NYT. If the standard for citizen journalism is that it is only wrong for relatively short periods of time, that doesn't exactly build confidence in it. I still like my idea that uses pre-screened citizen editors. The nature of the Internet makes it possible to have a couple hundred of them and still be manageable. As for Big Media's assertion that, "One could not trust information gathered by amateurs..." I would simply add: "...any more (or less) than they trust professionals." The pro's work still has to be reviewed by editors and the amateurs could go through the same process. Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 19, 2006 12:20 PM | Permalink My main comment is this: the idea of an "opposition press" is hardly new or a product of the internet. In many countries, an opposition press has long been the standard model. This was cetainly the case in New Zealand, where I lived for a number of years in the 1980s and early 90s. There, the press (print, radio, and television) prides itself on being an irreverent gadfly to whatever government is in power. Posted by: Roald Euller at June 19, 2006 12:37 PM | Permalink As a Systems Analyst designing reporting systems the question of simplyfing complex activities is very important. In the Business Intelligence community we have solved this by classifying our customers into different Business User Profiles. These profiles (Explorers, Miners, Tourists, Operators and farmers). Each profile has different needs for information and are comforable in accessing in different ways. In the world of Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism an Explorer or Miner Profile does not care whether the information is wrong for 6 hours because they would rather have the incomplete information first to verify (Web Blog, user input, etc). On the other hand, a Operator or Farmer would rather have complete accurate information that it be wrong too early(Newspaper). One mode of information delivery does not adequately cover all the different User Profiles. This has led us to the problem of who get to see what when. Certain groups need to see the preliminary information to make more educated decisions. However, other groups, expecially outside groups such as governments and other regulators can only be shown information that have been verified by management. Jay asks: What are "the cases where a distributed, open source, wisdom of the crowd approach is better, and more likely to bring results than traditional reporting methods?" * Stories that involve combing through the public record Award-winning investigative journalist Jonathan Landay says that, "A lot of the most important stories I've done haven't relied on secret sources or leaked documents. There's a lot out there in the public domain that merely needs to be scrubbed and read over." Landay has proven that dots can be connected without secret sources or official statements, and there is already an overload of official information that needs to be put into context and honestly evaluated by an equally representative group. So is there an Open Question that could be answered if only a bipartisan group of participants were willing to comb through the public record? Phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation is supposed to be looking into "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information." There have been already been a number of independent efforts to answer this question by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Congressman Henry Waxman's Commitee on Government Reform, and National Security Researcher John Prados. There is classified information involved, but the above investigations indicate that most of what is needed to answer this question may already be declassified into the public record. But these independent investigations never gained broader traction within the political dialogue because they were never endorsed or vetted by the Republican party. So they became one-day stories and quickly forgotten. Mainstream journalists have shown that they have neither the time nor resources to adequately or convincingly investigate and answer this type of question. They see that official Congressional investigations the only possible that it could be answered -- maybe because they've learned that such a news story would fail to "bring results" either politically or to their bottom line. If this is true, then what if Pat Roberts keeps delaying the official investigation and it never happens? What if a bipartisan group of citizen journalists decided to take on this question, then what would it take for their results to be peer reviewed and legitimized by a mainstream news organization? Or what if the results didn't serve the interests of either the Republicans or Democrats, then would they have the power to delegitimize the results by either ignoring them or attacking the process? From your WAPO commentary... The charges made against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, claiming that his medals were undeserved, could have been held out of circulation by newsroom gatekeepers, pre-Internet. By 2004, it was impossible to keep such a story quiet, and editors knew it. This, of course, didn't prevent them from trying. The SVPT press conference was held on May 4, 2004 and their message was the recipient of a near-universal MSM blackout. In fact, it wasn't until th WAPO Michael Dobbs felt compelled to address the particulars (which you linked to) that MSM was dragged, kicking and screaming, to the, in hindsight, momentous issue. Want more? How 'bout the reticence of the NY Times to even provide a review of a 6 week best-seller that had topped their own list for some 3 weeks? Jay, any true student of journalism needs to acknowledge and understand the MSM treatment of the Swift Boat Vets story as a watershed moment in the evolution of the "new journalism". You will, after all, be teaching it before the decade is out. Posted by: Bingo at June 19, 2006 1:41 PM | Permalink "And of course tell the nation what’s really in its laws. No news organization has ever done it." Well, Bartlett and Steele did it for the Inquirer some time ago, a multi-part, massive presentation over several days that explained in entertaining style how the odd language used in some laws ("subsidy shall apply only to maritime corporations with gross tonnage of xxxx operating from any port of 36 berths", for instance) really meant that ABC Shipping of Galveston, and only ABC Shipping of Galveston, got a special tax break on its new hulls. And that it got that break because it made a key contribution, or outright bribe, to the right member of Congress. But the did it by connecting more dots over more time than anyone else in the world had time to do. Sometimes takes a massive amount of plain old hard work to dependably generate an accurate story that will stand up to challenges. Is that possible in these new models? Posted by: Bill Watson at June 19, 2006 1:49 PM | Permalink Bill: I meant no news organization had ever tried to read and decipher all the legislation and proposed legislation in a given year of a U.S. Congress. Others have tried to tell the nation what's in its laws, of course. Bingo: If I included the Swift Boat Vets in my overview of ten years of Net disruptions in journalism (Web Users Open the Gates, June 19th) you can be pretty confident that I see it as a seminal event. Of course my view of what happened in that episode would be different from yours, but for purposes of my Post piece that does not matter. There, I tried to describe what happened from what Wikipedia calls a "neutral point of view." Here, my interest in re-fighting the facts of that case is zero. I did write about it once: Swift Boat Story a Sad Chord. Kent: I think many journalists and others would be surprised how much could be "discovered" just by working with the public record-- available facts that no one has ever run down, totalled up and put together. Massive comb-throughs and collating operations that try to answer big questions might just work. On Chris Lyndon's Open Source last week, I suggested that the big national news organizations should try to take on some of the big controversial questions hanging over the Bush years, and dig into them so that they can come out with an answer: Yes, we were misled into war. No, we weren't. (For example.) Or... Okay, who had responsibility for the screw ups in Katrina and after? How much (in percent, but also via a narrative) for the feds, how much for the state, how much for the city, and how much to the gods of fate. I said they should come to some conclusions, and take the heat for them (since someone will be pissed off...) Rather than abandon balance, they could practice "serial" balance by publishing rebuttals to their reports a few days later, where warranted. Even better (I didn't mention this on air) they could publish a few weeks later a corrected and clarified version taking into account what was learned after publication, including from critics of the work. By not trying to take on more difficult feats of truthtelling with bigger payoffs for the public record, the national press is hurting its reputation for category leadership. Where's the innovation? Program note: I get my first taste of Washington Post Radio tommorow, with Michael Moss and Jim Brady, 9:10 or so. I will be curious to find out what it's like. Regarding Bartlett & Steele, they were great investigators, but Gene Roberts also fought for them to be isolated to work on such long projects. It's a matter of allocating resources. (Not to say that any 2 journalist could spend two years on a story and produce similar work.) At smaller papers, reporters -- from my past experience -- are cranking out more than a story a day. There is no time to work on a longer weekend story, much less something on the Bartlett and Steele level. Open Source journalism can be a great collaborative resource, if someone can figure out how to harness the power of readers, (hence Jay's session at BloggerConIV.) We've seen open source software, such as Linux, arguably a better operating system, but Windows still dominates. Software may not be a good analogy for journalism, but people seem to trust an inferior product that is more known and paid for, rather than a superior product that's free. Hue says, "Open Source journalism can be a great collaborative resource, if someone can figure out how to harness the power of readers." The way that traditional open source projects are structured is that they have submitters and committers. The submitters provide small patches and add-on modules, while the committers evaluate the patches within the larger context of the core project. So for journalism, I think that the goal is to create a system that allows citizens to drop by and participate for 5 to 10-minute intervals, and still be able to productively contribute to the collective wisdom of the overall project. There also needs to be a core team who is interpretting and analyzing all of the user contributed metadata, and helping draw the bigger-picture conclusions. So there needs to be a broad spectrum of activities that people can do to participate -- the higher the threshold of participation, then the more context and meaning that is added to the ecosystem. Ross Mayfield describes this spectrum as the Power Law of Participation, and for my approach it includes the following activities: observing, declaring favorite, rating relevance and credibility, commenting, tagging and playlisting. For my collaborative film, participants are adding their metadata to sound bites and visual clips for the goal of creating edited sequences. For journalism projects, users would be adding their feedback on facts for the goal of evaluating them in the context of a hypothesis or theory that adequately explains the set of facts. More open source parallels are detailed here. My collaborative workflow is demonstrated in the second half of this video. "Regarding Bartlett & Steele, they were great investigators, but Gene Roberts also fought for them to be isolated to work on such long projects. It's a matter of allocating resources. (Not to say that any 2 journalist could spend two years on a story and produce similar work.) At smaller papers, reporters -- from my past experience -- are cranking out more than a story a day. There is no time to work on a longer weekend story, much less something on the Bartlett and Steele level."-- Hue It's a question of wanting to do it. Here's one reporter, two years: http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=NEWS0920 And this is a little newspaper by anyone's standards. Here's the thing, though: Who else cares enough about something like this to spend the time sifting through intentionally confusing public records, reconciling conflicting accounts from dozens of participants, and trying to sort out this kind of mess? It has enormous local implications -- try refinancing your home when you can't legally describe what you own -- but there were no dispasionate third parties here except the newspaper, which took on this project as part of its contract with readers to figure out how this part of the world works and explain it. Everyone else is either culpable for the mess and eager to point the finger elsewhere, or else a victim in search of revenge or some other commodity. Not quite sure how this gets handled in any new model. Posted by: Bill Watson at June 19, 2006 4:45 PM | Permalink Are unpaid amateurs and citizen volunteers willing to slog through what reporters slog through is not the right question, I would argue. And I don't believe, Bill, that there necessarily is a "new model" way of handling those things that professional journalists are doing now in investigative reporting. Most of the time, there probably isn't, and people employed as reporters are going to continue to be needed for that reason. But that leaves a lot of other stuff that isn't being done, and interconnected smart mobs might be capable of investigations that are impossible for even the most dedicated reporters. Bill, that's a great story, and in my current field. Sorry that last post was mine. I'm using my real name instead of that pseudonym. Jay is right. If open source can work, it would be stories that reporters can't do, grunt work requiring a lot of eyes, the Killian memo and Gannon. Bill, all of those houses should be classified as condos (not townhomes) since the lots were not divided. None of the mortgages were properly recorded, which is odd for the judge to allow foreclosure. Instead of cluttering up the thread, you can send me an email by clicking on my name if you want to discuss that story further. This is a title issue, and the title company would incur all the legal expenses if those homeowners bought owners' policies. God I love this thread. First, let me amplify something Lisa Williams and others here have touched on: the results of distributed journalism might not look like what we think of as journalism today. By this I mean: if you ask a 40-something newspaper guy to imagine a positive outcome of a big distributed journalism project, he's likely to describe something that looks like a Sunday 1A package or a three-day series. Dramatic, grabber leads. Killer graphics. Emotive photography. Because that what we DO. But what if the output of such a project wasn't narrative at all? What if it produced, say, an authoritative, carefully sourced, currated database? Data is cheap. Cleaning data and organizing data is expensive. And besides: Is narrative always the best way of communicating every bit of information? I don't think so: Last year I produced a package on global warming that replaced the idea of a "mainbar" with a comparative grid. Second, the organizations that might be best at producing these kinds of projects might not look anything like traditional media. Look at our assumptions here: narrative structures; editors; government stories. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but is this what we can expect lots of people to jump up en masse and volunteer to do? Some time back, Jay wrote about how some of the best blog-based journalism was occurring in those places where people are truly interested in and excited about the subject. I remember that he talked about this in terms of "being in the groove." That stuck with me. Find the grooves. One form of spontaneous distributed project might be the kinds that form around these grooves. For instance: Millions of people play games like World of Warcraft, but because these communities aren't geographic, traditional media don't cover them. But if somebody started some kind of WoW wiki, you can bet that thousands of people around the world would pitch in to cover their online community and solve problems that interested them. Third, it's natural for those of us in the business to imagine this as a way of accomplishing things we might not otherwise be able to do. Who else is likely to have the organizing resources necessary to pull off such a project? But is a media-based organization the best way organize distributed projects, or it is just t |
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