Real-time verification of breaking news increasingly involves the use of crowdsourcing and other social tools, and both Storyful and Reddit’s Syrian civil war forum are good examples of how to do it properly and effectively Read more at GigaOM »
It would be nice if both traditional and new-media outlets would do a little more checking before they report on something — but how much responsibility do the perpetrators of hoaxes bear for the perpetuation of untruths? Read more at GigaOM »
From the front room of his flat in a British suburb, an unemployed man with no journalistic training named Eliot Higgins has become the go-to source for information about weapons and military activity in Syria Read more at GigaOM »
This time, Reddit was the one that avoided naming the wrong suspect, while mainstream outlets bungled the story — but the bigger picture is that both traditional media and crowdsourced media have their strengths. Read more at GigaOM »
Using a Google+ group and an open Twitter account, Storyful is trying to build a crowdsourced “open newsroom” that can help verify user-generated content in real time during events like the war in Syria. Read more at GigaOM »
The day that US Airways Flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson river was a turning point for Twitter, says co-founder Jack Dorsey — the moment when it became obvious that it would change the way the news works forever. Read more at GigaOM »
ProPublica, which just hit its fundraising goal for a Kickstarter project aimed at investigating the rise in internships in the U.S., says there are a few key strategies for producing a successful crowdfunding campaign. Read more »
The Chicago Sun-Times’ decision to lay off its entire staff of 28 photographers was widely criticized as a knee-jerk response by clueless managers, but the fact remains that newspaper cost structures are too high, and crowdsourcing works. Read more »
Social platforms like YouTube have become a rich source of “citizen journalism” about breaking news events, but media outlets don’t always provide credit. Mark Little of Storyful wants to try and change that with a public license for video news. Read more »
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says that many of the cultural barriers to doing “networked journalism” have been lowered, and he is trying to help media outlets develop smart tools and ways of making use of crowdsourcing. Read more »
While much of the attention during and after the Boston bombings focused on how one Reddit thread got things wrong, there were other important parts of the community that were doing good — and even doing something approaching journalism. Read more »
While both Twitter and Reddit have come under fire for distributing incorrect information about the Boston bombings, mainstream outlets have done so as well. In a real-time news environment, having more sources is ultimately better. Read more »
Is picking Twitter accounts to follow the same as picking which cable television host to trust? Journalists who’ve reported from the Middle East and relied on Twitter to receive their news say maybe. Read more at GigaOM »
Swedish DJ and producer Avicii has agreed to work with network builder Ericsson to experiment with a crowdsourced music composition on. Starting on Wednesday, the public will be able to submit audio tracks that could wind up in Avicii’s new single. Read more at GigaOM »
Critics of social media like to focus on how much fake news gets circulated during events like Hurricane Sandy, but Twitter and other services are also quick to correct those kinds of reports, and have become part of an expanding ecosystem of real-time news. Read more at GigaOM »
Despite all the gloom in the newspaper business, which he says will likely still have to suffer more pain and possible bankruptcies, New York Times media writer David Carr says he believes that thanks to the internet we are living in a “golden age for journalism.” Read more at GigaOM »
As more and more breaking news comes to us through social media, the task of determining what is true and what isn’t becomes exponentially harder. Storyful says that crowdsourcing is the best way to do this, and so it has opened up its professional verification process. Read more at GigaOM »
Critics of a Newsweek cover story by historian Niall Ferguson say the piece should never have been published because of the errors and flawed logic it contains. But isn’t it better if those kinds of mistakes are corrected in public view instead of behind closed doors? Read more at GigaOM »
Home cooks are using digital tools to help them cook: smartphones, video streaming, cooking apps and social media sites, according to an Allrecipes.com poll. But our increased dependence on the internet for cooking advice is also destroying our faith in the recipe itself. Read more at GigaOM »
Author tours have never been a guaranteed way to sell books, so many publishers have cut back on them. Togather, a new Brooklyn-based startup, hopes it can reinvent the author tour by guaranteeing that a certain number of books will be sold in advance. Read more »
As newspapers continue to lay off staff, one question is what will help to fill the gap that is left — where will that journalism come from? We’ve seen signs this week of one partial answer: amateur journalists making use of social media. Read more at GigaOM »
The way that communities like Reddit can come together to produce real-time reporting on incidents like the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater shows how a new form of journalism — one that blends traditional reporting and crowdsourced reports — is starting to take shape. Read more at GigaOM »
Journatic, a local-journalism aggregation startup that used to provide content to newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, has been criticized for a series of ethical lapses. But that doesn’t mean the kind of outsourcing it represents isn’t part of the future of journalism. Read more at GigaOM »
The arrival of the iPhone five years ago changed many things, but one of the most fundamental was the way that news and journalism are delivered and consumed — and at the same time, it also revolutionized the way that news content is created. Read more at GigaOM »
Kickstarter is not just a startup– it’s part of an important shift away from the industrial manufacturing era & toward the maker economy. In this wide-ranging interview, founder Perry Chen talks about how society is reaching a new ‘bursting point of creativity,’ & where Kickstarter goes from here. Read more at GigaOM »
The $50-million funding round that Quora recently closed has raised some eyebrows. Is this just another example of a bubble-style atmosphere in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, or is the crowdsourced question-and-answer site really onto something that could be a multibillion-dollar idea? Read more at GigaOM »
Stationery startup Minted, which crowdsources designs for wedding invitations, holiday cards and other correspondence, is now selling crowdsourced art prints. It is also adding Pinterest-like curation boards. Read more »
Is the web run by large corporations, or is it powered primarily by peer-to-peer networks? That’s the question behind one of the longest-running wagers of the modern web era — a six-year-old bet between author and web sceptic Nick Carr and Harvard professor Yochai Benkler. Read more at GigaOM »
Since its launch in 2009, Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have grown even more ambitious. They want to build a crowdsourced clearinghouse of culinary knowledge that cooks can access anywhere on the Web. Read more at GigaOM »
Tech giants may have their own views on what journalism should become, but some news organisations are questioning what benefits the social vision of future news can really bring at a time when they’re struggling for business survival… Read more »
