March 22 Thought Leader Crowdsourcing Call

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Crowdsourcing Call Notes – 3-22-10
IVOH Thought Leaders and Jeff Howe

Participants: Maryalice Quinn, Michael Skoler, Roberta Baskin, An Duong, Eric LeReste, J. Carl Ganter, Victor Merina, Raul Ramirez.

Skoler:  Crowdsourcing and partnership with the audience is crucial to journalism in order to make the facts matter again.  No one trusts journalists.  The crisis in journalism is fundamentally that the truth and facts don’t seem to have much impact on public policy debates.  I think crowdsourcing is more than just a way to collect information and story ideas.  It can also help engage the audience in uncovering the truth and thus make journalism more relevant to people

Jeff is here, coined term and wrote the book on crowdsourcing.  He’ll explain how prevalent crowdsourcing is in the world today and then how it might apply to journalism.

Jeff:  Explains how he coined term from “wisdom of crowd” and “outsourcing to crowd.”  Earliest examples of crowdsourcing in journalism was sports journalism.  Then VH1, then Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – which functioned like SETI project, using unused time on computers to analyze signals from space searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.  Mechanical Turk using unused human time to do mechanical tasks.  Jeff used this process to log his interviews for his book at 10% of cost if he hired professionals.

Best example is iStockPhoto – Website started in 2000, which offered portfolio space for amateur photographers and then licenses their photos for use at about $1 for a small image.  These model completed overturned the professional stock photo industry which charged much more for these generic photos.

Examples in industries from graphic design to advertising to product development to solving scientific problems. 

Roberta:  Offers example that government is going to offer people bounties to uncover Medicare fraud, trying to lure accountants to help find fraud with a percent of the money recovered.

Michael:  Journalism has not really adopted crowdsourcing.  Every field that has benefited from crowdsourcing started with skeptics saying that non-professionals couldn’t possibly help.  Citizen Journalism is really not crowdsourcing – it is mainly a ghetto-ized space where journalists “allow” citizens to add material.

Jeff:  iReport is a pretty good example of crowdsourcing.  Gives Virginia Tech as another example:  Wikipedia page on Virginia Tech became the focal point for reporting on the shooting.  People updated that page in minutes and fact-checked and kept it accurate as the story developed.

Roberta:  I have reached out to folks when I was looking for facts or victims for a story I was doing.  Still worried about who are you going to trust?  How do you know if material is trustworthy?

Jeff:  I think you fact-check it. 

Roberta:  So you keep the editor role.

Jeff:  First crowd-sourced article was a project on Wired.com called Assignment Zero.  It was on crowdsourcing.  We expected crowd to gather – and it did – and then do interviews and write it up in a journalistic way.  That didn’t happen.  We realized that we needed organization to help the project move along.  Once we provided the organization, we got some great interviews, because people knew a lot.  But you don’t just hand over the keys.

Raul:  We at KQED have played at the edges of crowdsourcing.  We are launching 2 projects, one on health care and one on the failure of governance in California.  We will be asking people to tell us how the failure of governance is affecting people’s lives.

Jeff:  Jay Rosen helped us figure out that we set the bar too high with our project.  Jimmy Wales said that the reason Wikipedia worked is that everyone knows what an encyclopedia entry is like.  Our mistake was that we expected people to write and most people don’t like writing.  But everyone liked sitting down with someone they respect to have an interesting conversation.

You can’t ask people to do something they don’t want to do.  That is dead on arrival. 

Example – Fort Myers Press in Cape Coral, Florida asked people to tell them what they were paying for sewer hookups.   Led to stories on bid rigging, evidence of government malfeasance and officials getting kicked out of office.  It was the highest traffic project outside of a hurricane.  It wasn’t that the crowd took over, but it aided an investigation.

Jim Colgan, who is now at the Takeaway, helped Brian Lehrer show of WNYC to do crowdsourcing.  One example – prices of  beer, milk and eggs at delis/convenience stores to see the differences.  They made mistake of not fact-checking the crowd information and got some fake data from people who wanted to hurt their local stores.  Unless you deal with national audience, the crowd won’t necessarily be self-correcting.  As you get into smaller numbers, you get a thin market where you don’t get self-correction.

Roberta:  How do you create a crowd, say around an investigation of drug prices?

Jeff:  If you are a media group, you have a megaphone to attract people.  You need buy in from the highest level.  If this is a skunkworks plan, it will die on the vine.  And it has to be fun.  It can’t be spiniach.

Michael:  It needs to be creamed spinach – which is how my kids eat spinach.

Raul:  How do you reach out to people who aren’t a natural part of your audience?

Michael:  We learned through Public Insight Journalism that we needed to make direct contact with people beyond our airwaves or Web site, so we worked with organizations that already had trust with these groups and we partnered with them.  In essence, we borrowed their trust to reach people.  We also did a lot of face-to-face meetings, often with partners who helped to set that up for us.  Also, think of building long-term relationships, not just getting one-off input for a story.

Raul:  But California is a big state and that poses a challenge to us.

Jeff:  Ideastorm is a project of Michael Dell to invite the audience to provide suggestions for new features.  Customers should feel ownership of the product and that can’t help but strengthen your brand.

We made a mistake by shutting down our crowdsourcing project with Assignment Zero, after we had these people geared up, experienced and ready to continue helping.  Needed to continue to really harness the learning and energy.

Roberta:  Sending around a Malcolm Gladwell piece on 6 degrees of separation that is a bit dated (from 1999) but still very relevant.

Eric:  My investigative news show tried a project but got people with strong agendas.  Playing the editor was also time-consuming.  We did investigation on construction industry and we ended up getting people on forum who wanted to win their public war, such as unions.  We also don’t want to reveal the story we are working on by crowdsourcing it.

Michael:  Sometimes you want to crowdsource directly with people, say through e-mail, rather than creating a public forum.  Without a public forum, there is no war to win and interest groups can only try to influence you.  Journalists can quickly pick out and dismiss comments from people with agendas.  And of course, you need to fact check anything you get, just as you would with any source for any story.  So sometimes you should crowdsource without a public forum.

Second, you can write questions in an open-ended way that won’t reveal your angle on the story.  This also helps because you want information that will surprise you.  If you aren’t careful about how you write the questions, you’ll unconsciously prejudice the answers in your wording and you’ll only get what you already expect to hear.  With Public Insight Journalism, we developed a technique for helping us write open-ended questions that would yield surprise.  I’ll try to send around a copy of our training document on that.

Thanks to everyone for participating and thanks to Jeff for sharing his experience and wisdom.