New York University professor Jay Rosen has spent almost 15 years working on this idea, work that has included projects like NewAssignment.net in 2006 and a joint venture with The Huffington Post called OffTheBus, which originally launched in 2008 and had at least one spectacular success). More recently, he has built a kind of real-time journalism lab at NYU called Studio 20, and is helping his students not only develop new ideas for networked reporting, but work with a number of media companies to actually implement those ideas.

The shock of inclusion is not as severe

Rosen isn’t just leaving this to his students: he himself is also working on a joint venture with Quartz, the business site that is part of Atlantic Media, to explore the best ways to do “networked journalism” in real time — a venture he launched on Monday night. In a somewhat unusual partnership that seems more like a consulting arrangement than a typical journalism-school role, Rosen asked Quartz for the “specs” of what they were looking for, and then tried to meet them.

Sort of like a consultancy that gets paid in puzzles. My idea of journalism research: these "specs" from @qz editors. studio20nyu.tumblr.com/post/503459375…—
Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 14, 2013

In the specifications, Quartz says it wants “to put together a suite of tools and techniques for quickly booting up a network around a fast-moving, ongoing global news story that cuts across traditional beat boundaries.” Gideon Lichfield, the site’s global news editor, has written in the past about how Quartz sees its reporters and writers as indulging in or exploring “obsessions” rather than typical beats, and Rosen said it saw the need for new tools to do that.

In an IM interview (which is embedded in full below, with edits made for clarity) Rosen said that he believes the cultural barriers to seeing the crowd as having something to contribute to journalism — what media theorist Clay Shirky has called the “shock of inclusion” — have been lowered somewhat, so there is less of a sales job for journalists who want to experiment with these approaches.

“That is less of a factor than it was years ago. There are enough people who know what ‘readers know more than I do’ means, and they have experience with the reality of it.”

Remember the 90-percent rule

Rosen also said that there are enough journalists and others even in traditional newsrooms and media entities who are interested in new ways of reaching out to what Rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience,” and are just looking for help. So Studio 20 has partnerships with outlets as varied as the Wall Street Journal, ProPublica and Mashable in which students work with the partner to develop and implement new tools and methods.

In terms of what media outlets need to know before they begin this process, Rosen said one important factor is knowing that whatever they do will be governed by the “90-percent rule” — a rule of thumb in social media that suggests most crowdsourcing projects will see about 1 percent of the participants contribute heavily and 9 percent contribute somewhat, with 90 percent just “lurking.”

“90 percent will never participate, so what do we have for them? 10 percent might engage, but you have to have the right ask, the right incentives, the right UI. One percent are your core contributors, but you have to find them, deeply engage them, compensate them. That is way harder than ‘let’s crowdsource this!’”

Sources can now go direct

In some cases, compensation might be monetary, Rosen says — or it might take the form of other rewards (The Guardian and ProPublica have both talked about their experiments with crowdsourcing projects in the past, and what they have learned about how to structure them so that people are encouraged to participate). Mayhill Fowler eventually left the Huffington Post project in part because she wasn’t compensated for her work.

Rosen also said that crowdsourcing doesn’t always have to involve building tools: for example, two of his students used Reddit threads (called sub-Reddits) and extracted information about specific topics that later turned into stories for Mashable.

The NYU journalism professor agreed that good beat reporters have always used some form of crowdsourcing in their work, but says it is much easier now to reach out and find high-quality sources of information in real time. And he added that there is one major difference between now and then: namely, that sources can publish themselves and “go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it, and that changes the balance of power for journalists. If anything, he says, this makes the need for effective crowdsourcing even more acute.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Jan Arief Purwanto

Some of the commentary about Reddit and the bombings has made it seem as though all of Reddit was engaged in a massive “witch hunt” to find the identity of the suspects in Boston. But the reality is that other parts of Reddit were doing things that were much more valuable, and I think we shouldn’t lose sight of that. So here are a few things that I think Reddit got right:

• It collected verified information: There were multiple Reddit threads that did nothing but curate or aggregate information about the bombings, including links to police reports, news articles and other sources. These threads also helped collect photos and video clips of the Boston marathon that might have contained useful information — and asked anyone with that information to also send those photos and clips to the authorities.
• It helped people who wanted to help: A number of the threads early on in the aftermath contained lists of all the things that users could do if they wanted to assist not just the investigation but the people who had been injured — from links to Google’s Person Finder and the Red Cross help line to information on where to pick up bags left at the scene, or airlines who had changed their policies on cancelling flights as a result of the attacks.
• It helped to verify facts: In most of the information-gathering threads, there is real-time verification of the info occurring, as users challenge other users to prove their claims. It is almost identical to the discussion that occurs on a Wikipedia “talk” page, in which editors try to verify the information that is being posted to an entry. Multiple updates occur within minutes of each other, and each one is marked with the time and any edits that took place.

Is Reddit capable of journalism? Yes

Even Reddit itself posted a disclaimer on one of its threads that said it isn’t trying to be a media entity, and that what it does isn’t journalism. And the user who created the “Find Boston Bombers” sub-Reddit or thread told The Atlantic that he doesn’t think of it as journalism either, and that no one should ever rely on such threads as a source because there is so much conflicting information flying around. He also admitted that the attempt to identify the bombers from photos was “a disaster.”

So if even Reddit itself doesn’t claim to be producing journalism, why do I keep saying it is? Because I think Reddit and Twitter and other social tools are broadening the concept of journalism. Some, like my friend Raju Narisetti from News Corp., believe that we should call this kind of thing something else — like that horrible term “user-generated content” — and leave the term journalism for things that are produced by professionals who are held to standards (although some might question whether the New York Post fits that description).

@mathewi you should fear. Find a new definition for non-journalism and use it. Why call ugc, crowds as journalism. It isnt.—
Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) April 22, 2013

In a nutshell, I believe that journalism is being atomized — that is, broken down into its component parts. One of those is the news-gathering function, whether it’s from eyewitnesses or just on-the-ground observation. This part of journalism can and is being done by anyone, thanks to what Om has called the “democratization of distribution,” and it can be hugely valuable. And the verification function has also been outsourced, so that people like Eliot Higgins can play a key role in identifying Syria weapons without leaving their apartment.

Reddit may have failed badly in one specific thread, and that is unfortunate. But other parts of the site have and continue to perform valuable functions that I see as part of the broader landscape or ecosystem of networked journalism. Instead of focusing just on the downside of that community, we should be thinking about how to take advantage of it — how to turn a negative feedback loop into a positive one.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto K

Within hours of the explosions in Boston, members of the Reddit community had created a thread (or sub-Reddit) about the incident, in an attempt to identify potential suspects. Users posted photos that had been published online or submitted by onlookers and analyzed video clips, piecing together clues like a specific kind of zipper that was used on a backpack found at the scene. Eventually, two potential suspects were identified — including one who posted a message on Facebook about his innocence.

Plenty of mistakes to go around

After some more investigation and crowdsourced information gathering, users on the Reddit thread seemed more or less convinced that the two were not likely to be the actual bombers, and eventually declared them “cleared.” Meanwhile, the New York Post identified the same two people as potential suspects and published their photos on the front page (both suspects have now been identified — one was reportedly shot by police on Friday and as of mid-afternoon on Friday the other was said to be on the run).

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic wrote that the process taking place on Reddit amounted to “vigilantism,” and was reprehensible, and warned against encouraging untrained people to try and determine the validity of forensic evidence after such an event. But is what happened on Reddit so bad? And is it any worse than what the traditional media have done in similar situations? I’m not convinced.

Yes, users of Reddit made mistakes — plenty of them, including identifying the wrong person as a suspect a second time on Thursday after erroneous information emerged from police scanners and other sources, something which caused a considerable amount of grief for a young man’s family and led to an apology posted on Reddit by a moderator.

But it should be noted that CNN and the NY Post have made plenty of mistakes as well, something Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t really mention in his post about how brilliant the traditional media was and how wrong Reddit has been. The larger point is that this isn’t an either/or situation — crowdsourcing is valuable, and has been valuable for journalism and will continue to be. This is admittedly not an example of it at its finest.

Remember when we didn’t think random people putting together an encyclopedia would ever work? And yet it has — in part because it has a lot more structure than Reddit or 4chan. And those sites would probably be a lot more useful in these cases if people spent more time thinking and less time typing. But that doesn’t negate the value they can provide. The idea of using the knowledge and resources of the crowd is the whole point behind Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s “open journalism,” and it is a force we need to figure out how to tame, not dismiss as irrelevant based on one incident.

Open journalism works better

Am I calling what Reddit has been doing since the Boston bombings journalism? Yes. It may not encompass the entirety of what we know as journalism, and it is clearly flawed, but it is certainly an important aspect of it — just as Eliot Higgins, an unemployed British accountant, is performing a valuable journalistic act (one that New York Times writer C.J. Chivers has recognized) in verifying smuggled weapons in Syria by watching hundreds of hours of YouTube videos every day, even though no one is paying him to do so.

Will Oremus at Slate makes a fairly persuasive argument that Reddit has in some cases been *more* responsible in its attempts to identify the individuals than some traditional sources, including the Post. This kind of crowdsourced fact-checking and verification of evidence has been going on for years — it’s just more mainstream now. And anyone looking for evidence of someone jumping the gun and encouraging vigilantism doesn’t have to look any further than CNN.

When I wrote recently about the benefits of having journalism occur out in the open, journalism teacher Steve Fox and others said I didn’t spend enough time on the need for verification, and maybe I didn’t, but I believe this also should be done out in the open. In fact, one of the benefits to doing so is the ability to have more eyes on the information at hand — thereby making it easier to filter out the noise and find the signal, or triangulate the truth. As Jay Rosen has said, journalism gets better the more people there are doing it. And that includes Reddit.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Eva Blue and Jan-Arief Purwanto

But as we change where we get our news and turn to places like Twitter for information and verification of facts, it’s important to ask how that polarization will translate to social media – if it will at all. Several journalists discussing the future of news dissemination (something we’ll also be discussing at paidContent Live in April) tied these issues to those of crowdsourced news, particularly in the Middle East, when the tensions between accuracy and access are most apparent.

NBC correspondant Ayman Mohyeldin made an interesting argument about verification, arguing that people should be free to select the accounts they want to follow and personally decide whether to trust that information or not, just as they tune into particular cable shows in the United States and apply their own sense of skepticism to Maddow and Hannity.

“You ultimately choose which channels to watch,” he said. “There’s no reason that should be different in who you follow.”

The argument puts a good deal of trust in the user’s judgement and takes some pressure off journalists or random people on Twitter to present accurate information, but it’s an idea that fellow panelist Andy Carvin has popularized to much controversy recently. The idea came under fire during the spread of misinformation on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, and certainly has its detractors:

The end user is responsible for deciding who they trust, @AymanM says. True, but most don't have the expertise to decide. #nextnews #sxsw—
Eric Carvin (@EricCarvin) March 10, 2013

But it’s a good reminder that even if we think of cable news as being particularly polarizing right now, news consumption and opinions on Twitter might not be all that different.

The project is called Avicii x You, and on its website, you can listen to and download the basic chord progression for the song’s planned melody. Starting on Wednesday, the site will begin accepting submissions (the process is still a bit vague) for audio samples of a fully developed melody using the chord layout, pitch and key Avicii has indicated. Over the next two months, the site will begin accepting submissions for the song’s bassline, effects, rhythms and vocals. The finished single will be released as a single on Feb. 26, coinciding with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

It’s not clear whether participants will have any say in the samples used for the various tracks or any other input on composition beyond their initial submissions. But it looks like Avicii will have the final say on the finished single. In that sense, the crowd isn’t so much composing the song as providing a huge repository of raw audio materials.

Ericsson is spearheading the project with the help of Avicii’s label Universal Music Sweden as part of its Networked Society initiative, which aims to discover new means for industries, institutions and people to interact through real-time broadband communications. According to Ericsson, the music industry has already embraced the digital network as a means of distributing music and connecting to fans. The project will explore whether the network can be used as means of producing music as well.

In the not-so-distant past, CNN would have been the first place most people went for information about an event like Sandy, since it more or less invented real-time news for the television age. But if Twitter was criticized for distributing fake news reports, CNN didn’t get away scot free on that front either: the news channel reported Monday night that the New York Stock Exchange was under three feet of water, but later had to retract that information when video evidence from the NYSE showed no water at all. It turned out that CNN had reported something that was mentioned in a National Weather Service discussion forum, without checking to see whether it was actually true.

A half hour of CNN watching provides less information than reading a good set of Twitter feeds for 5 minutes.

—
  (@tedfrank) October 30, 2012

In many cases, coverage from CNN and other news channels amounted to reading reports from Twitter, and interviewing their own news reporters standing hip-deep in the water in places like Atlantic City or Battery Park. Meanwhile, Instagram was providing a much more effective real-time visual feed of the damage caused by the hurricane — thanks in part to some innovative tools like Instacane, which pulled in photos of the storm automatically (the site was originally created to do the same thing during Hurricane Irene last year). Within minutes of a power substation exploding in Manhattan, the video was available on YouTube and was circulating through Twitter, as were other compelling scenes.

Real-time verification of news via social networks

Not surprisingly, many of the photos being shared the most were fakes — some of which, like the shark swimming down what someone claimed was a street in New Jersey, were just being re-used from the last hurricane with a different name. But at the same time, Twitter users and journalists at several news outlets were busy sorting out what was real and what wasn’t, using their social networks as a crowdsourcing tool.

Alexis Madrigal and his team at The Atlantic, for example, quickly set up a blog Monday night to try and separate fact from fiction as far as the photos of Sandy’s damage were concerned — a blog that Madrigal called a “Insta-Snopes,” as a tribute to the veteran rumor-debunking site Snopes.com. For each photo, the team tried to find the original source, or at least enough information about the shot to determine whether it was real or fake. In some cases, like the stranded carousel in Dumbo, the picture seemed almost too good to be true and yet turned out to be real. And the site put large “real” and “fake” logos on each, so that if they were shared it would be obvious what they were.

Meanwhile, others were doing fundamentally the same thing in different ways: Katie Rogers and a team from The Guardian — which has built a big part of its business on the concept of “open journalism” — were using Storify to aggregate and curate photos and debunk fakes, and a Tumblr blog called “Is Twitter Wrong?” was also working hard to separate fact from fiction.

Twitter as self-healing reporting? Lots of rumours, unfounded reports and bogus images, but quick fact-checks, corrections and updates.

—
Mark_Hamilton (@gmarkham) October 30, 2012

As John Hermann of BuzzFeed pointed out in a post on his Tumblr blog (since BuzzFeed was still down due to the power outage), it’s easy to focus on the fake news that gets circulated on Twitter during such events, but there is just as much reason to be optimistic about the speed with which it gets corrected. Some of those who saw the original fake report may not see the correction — and Craig Silverman of Regret The Error has noted that the original tweet often travels much farther than any subsequent update — but the fact is that it occurs, and often faster than mainstream news gets corrected.

Twitter as a “self-cleaning oven”

New Yorker writer Sasha Frere-Jones has described Twitter as a “self-cleaning oven” because of the way that it self-corrects when there is bad information, something media writer David Carr referred to during a recent debate in Toronto about the value of digital media compared to traditional media. And there is a whole new process of real-time verification that is being developed to handle these kinds of events, one that is a great example of what Jeff Jarvis has called “networked journalism.”

In some cases, that involves individuals like Andy Carvin of NPR, who pioneered the use of Twitter as a kind of crowdsourced newsroom during the Arab Spring; it also involves new services like Storyful, which does real-time verification of videos for both mainstream media outlets and news consumers in general. And then there are players like The Atlantic and The Guardian, which make use of their skills to do their own real-time fact-checking — and hybrid services like the BBC’s “user-generated content” desk, which tries to verify photos and reports from social media.

As I’ve tried to argue before, the point is not that Twitter or Facebook or social networks in general are replacing mainstream media or mainstream journalism, but that the ecosystem of news is expanding to include a wide range of other sources — including “citizen” journalism. Smart news outlets are trying to make use of these new tools to expand what they do, and events like Hurricane Sandy are a great example of what can happen when that process starts to work in real-time.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Instagram user andjelicaaa

Enright started the event, which was put on by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, by asking Carr what he thought about the coverage of the U.S. presidential campaign, and how he would handle it as a journalist if he was reporting on a speech by a politician like Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and he heard something that was obviously a lie. Would he challenge that claim in print? Although Carr didn’t say specifically what he would do in such a situation, he said that in his view the internet and social media in general do a pretty good job of correcting mistakes and false information, and used a metaphor coined by New Yorker writer Sasha Frere-Jones:

"we're living in a golden age where the internet is kind of self-cleaning oven" and the truth eventually comes out says @carr2n #cjfjtalk

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 13, 2012

Carr talked about the impact that “citizen journalists” have had during events like the Arab Spring, where live reports from Egypt and elsewhere were available to anyone — and were verified in real time by people like Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who became the go-to source for information about the revolutions — and Enright asked whether citizen journalism wasn’t a little like “citizen dentistry,” a common criticism levelled by anti-social media types. Carr scoffed at this idea, however, and argued that if Enright were living in a place without dentists and had a toothache, he might not be so scornful of having a neighbor down the street who was “pretty handy with the pliers.”

The New York Times writer and author of the memoir “Night of the Gun” said that he wasn’t predicting some kind of utopian future where professional journalists were replaced by the crowd, since he expected society would always need someone to make the phone calls and put a little “shoe leather” into their reporting — something that not everyone would want to do, especially for free. But Carr added that alternative media and digital-native media were adopting the attributes of traditional media (such as investigative reporting and fact-checking) a lot faster than the mainstream was adapting to digital, and that a kind of hybrid of both seemed to be emerging.

“Old media isn’t adapting to the new tools of the insurgency”

"old media isn't adapting to the new tools of the insurgency and using them -- we're moving toward a hybrid media" @carr2n #cjfjtalk

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 14, 2012

Carr, who once reported from the red carpet during the Oscars and has also tried to do his own video broadcasts in the past, said that one of the most promising aspects of digital media is that almost anything is possible — and it doesn’t hurt to “give things a whirl.” This kind of approach doesn’t work for the print version of the newspaper, he said, but the best quality of digital is that it is always “iterate, iterate, iterate.” The videos he recorded in his basement didn’t really work, Carr said, so they killed them and moved on to something else that his audience might want more.

Carr also talked about how so much of the news that traditional media outlets used to rely on as their bread-and-butter, such as the death of someone famous or news about a disaster, has become a commodity. When his children mention that they heard or learned something newsworthy, Carr said, he has no idea where they got that information — whether it was from a news crawl on a screen in Times Square, or from Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or from a text message or a Digg headline. One of the biggest threats to the traditional media business, he said, is that “most people don’t really care where the news comes from.”

"this whole burbling atmosphere of news that's like an ionized atmosphere we all move through -- it's a commodity" @carr2n #cjfjtalk

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 14, 2012

Both during his interview and in a discussion afterwards with local journalists such as the former publisher of the Toronto Star, the NYT writer also described the painful transition that many newspapers — particularly the medium-sized metropolitan papers — are having to go through as their print advertising revenue declines and digital fails to make up the difference. He said that more papers will likely have to restructure themselves the way that Digital First Media has with the Journal Register Co. (which recently filed for bankruptcy for the second time), in part because of their looming pension obligations, which he said even the NYT is wrestling with.

The future looks fairly bright for smaller newspapers that are intimately connected with their communities, Carr argued: If someone wanted to buy a newspaper company, the best way to figure out which one to buy would be to ask whether “a picture of some kid’s football team would make it to the front page,” he said. If the answer was yes, then the paper would likely do well, simply because the connection between a newspaper and the lives of small town residents is much tighter than for larger newspapers. And while major international brands like the New York Times might prosper thanks in part to paywalls, he said, “the whole middle of the newspaper business is just gone.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Petteri Sulonen

That’s why Storyful, a service that partners with media companies to aggregate and verify news from social networks, says it has decided to open up its formerly private Twitter account to help crowdsource the distribution and verification of breaking news reports.

Before he started the company in 2010, Storyful’s founder Mark Little was a foreign correspondent for a number of outlets such as Ireland’s Raidió Teilifís Éireann — much like Burt Herman, a former Associated Press reporter who started a company with a somewhat similar name: Storify. But while Storify is designed as a tool that anyone can use to pull together or “curate” a social-media stream from sources like Twitter and Flickr, the idea behind Storyful was to build a professional service staffed by journalists who could track breaking news reports through social networks and help media companies verify them. The company has a staff of 33 editors working in dozens of countries, and works with a number of outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters.

Collaboration is becoming a key journalistic skill

As part of its service, Storyful had a private Twitter account called StoryfulPro, which collected and distributed breaking news reports from both its own team and the various sources they monitored within their countries or their fields of expertise — including both professional journalists and citizen reporters, or what the company likes to call “networked journalists.” The primary audience for the account was over 1,000 professional journalists that Storyful had worked with before. On Tuesday, Little announced that the service had decided to make the Pro account public, allowing anyone to use or contribute to the process.

In a blog post, the Storyful founder said he decided to do this because he believes crowdsourcing is the best way to determine the truth of a breaking news report as quickly as possible. As he puts it:

“Storyful believes the key skill for journalists in a social age is collaboration. There really is no alternative to working with others in the Golden Hour. If a newsroom decides to go it alone, the chance you will be consistently first is nonexistent. The chance that you will often be wrong is 100 percent.”

As we’ve seen in a number of recent cases — including the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. and the death by suicide of director Tony Scott — the pressure on media outlets of all kinds to break news first can result in a profusion of incorrect reports, which then get redistributed through Twitter and other social networks faster than any correction or clarification can match. Little’s phrase “the golden hour” refers to the first hour after a news event occurs, which Storyful believes is the most crucial period for fact-checking, and he says one of the most important contributions that can be made is when someone — either a professional journalist or reliable source — kills a false report before it can spread. Says Little:

“Breaking news now emerges in a ‘Golden Hour’, when skilled intervention is most valuable, when a celebrity death starts to trend on Twitter or an explosive video goes viral on YouTube. In this Golden Hour, the best journalists are often the ones who STOP a story, not start it.”

Crowdsourced news verification is almost always better

Storyful isn’t the only company or media-related startup that is trying to bring some kind of professional rigor to the process of real-time news verification: the NBC project Breaking News, which started as a Twitter account, also has a growing team that curates and distributes real-time news it has verified, and Sulia develops Twitter lists of credible sources (both professional and amateur) around various topics and breaking news events. Some media outlets also have their own internal teams that do this, such as the BBC’s “user-generated content desk,” which verifies reports from social media for use by BBC reporters.

I’ve argued before that one of the most compelling examples of crowdsourced news verification is the way that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio used his Twitter account as a real-time newswire — or what he prefers to call a public newsroom — to filter and verify reports coming out of Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, something other media outlets should emulate. And in a recent post, I also tried to make the case that this kind of verification or fact-checking is almost always better when it is done in public (although many readers seem to disagree with me on that).

One of the reasons for that is the amount of knowledge that can exist in what journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience.” Little says in his post that the company’s golden rule is that there is always someone closer to the story — and in many cases that person is not a traditional journalist or mainstream news source:

“Often, the closest person is still the wire reporter or networked journalist. But rarely do we rank the key source on the basis of authority and power. Authority has been replaced by authenticity as the currency of social journalism.”

Little says the closed nature of the Storyful Pro account always troubled him, because of his belief that crowdsourcing is almost always a better route to take for fact-checking the news (something he has written about in the past for the Nieman Foundation) and that’s why the decision was made to open it up. I’m glad the company decided to do so as well, because the more services and networks and media outlets there are trying to do this — whether it’s Storyful or Sulia or Breaking News or even Wikipedia — the better off we will all be as news consumers.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Petteri Sulonen

Just to recap for those who haven’t been following the drama, Ferguson — a professor of history at Harvard and the author of several books — wrote a cover story for Newsweek (which merged with Tina Brown’s online entity the Daily Beast in 2010) in which he argued that President Obama has failed to fulfill a number of promises related to the U.S. economy and therefore doesn’t deserve to be supported for reelection. The piece triggered an outpouring of criticism from a number of observers and complaints that Ferguson’s argument was based on faulty numbers and deliberate misinterpretations of the evidence.

Why is it wrong to outsource fact-checking?

Politico writer Dylan Byers has been one of those holding Ferguson’s feet to the fire for the story, saying the writer used a flawed argument based on skewed figures and arguing that Newsweek should never have let the piece see the light of day. As Byers put it:

“Newsweek has stayed silent on the controversy, choosing instead to ‘monitor the debate’ as if the editor and publisher bear no responsibility for what appears in their pages.”

Coates, meanwhile, said in his Atlantic tribute to fact-checkers that what the magazine had really done was “unwittingly outsourced its fact-checking to the web.” But is that such a bad thing? The Ferguson piece has been thoroughly fact-checked, debunked and otherwise dismantled by Byers and a host of others, including Krugman — and the Atlantic, which does a line-by-line critique of the piece and the flaws in the historian’s logic — as well as Andrew Sullivan at Newsweek’s sister publication the Daily Beast and Matthew Yglesias at Slate.

My point is this: Isn’t it better to have those criticisms and counterarguments out where readers can see them and inform themselves if they wish? And if Ferguson is the type of academic who plays fast and loose with the truth in order to make his argument, as Atlantic writer James Fallows seems to suggest he might be, isn’t it better that we know that by seeing his arguments in as clear a light as possible? If those errors or logical inconsistencies had been fixed by nameless fact-checkers at Newsweek, all we would really know is that the magazine has a good fact-checking department.

One of the most controversial aspects of the idea of “news as a process” is that in some cases it involves distributing information before the truth of that information is fully known, something I have written about before as it applied to what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio was doing during the revolutions of the Arab Spring: Carvin says he used his Twitter followers as a kind of “public newsroom” that helped him confirm and verify information coming from Egypt and elsewhere. In a similar way, Reddit and Twitter have been used as public fact-checking engines and have shown they can be very effective.

It’s valuable to see errors made and corrected

Some, including former Poynter writer Steve Myers, have made the argument that some kinds of news — such as the shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colo., where the gunman was initially linked to the Tea Party political group — shouldn’t be treated as a process, because of the risk of making serious mistakes. And others have argued that an ABC News report this week about director Tony Scott (who committed suicide) having an inoperable brain tumor should never have made it to air, because it turned out not to be true.

Obviously, no one wants publishers or media companies of any kind to just print, air or distribute information they know to be wrong. But in cases like the Aurora shooting and the revolutions in Egypt, the reality is that the availability of “true” information is in a constant state of flux. And in cases like Ferguson’s Newsweek piece, the validity of an argument like the one he is trying to make is also open to interpretation, as Krugman himself admits. So why shouldn’t that interpretation be exposed and debated in public instead of behind closed doors in some editorial office?

One point some critics have made about such an approach — including during a Twitter debate I touched off a few months ago when I asked why we need editors — is that not everyone will see or read the corrections to a report or will have the time to follow up on the allegations about a piece like Ferguson’s, and that is undoubtedly true. That is why it’s almost as important to have places that collect those kinds of things, whether it’s “Regret the Error” author Craig Silverman’s column at Poynter or next to the source of the original report, as with the Daily Beast’s list of criticisms and outlets debunking Ferguson’s piece.

In his post, Krugman describes how when he writes a column for the New York Times, he has to submit a list of links and sources for the claims he makes, which an editor then uses to test his arguments. In an ideal world, I think we’d be better off if the columnist just added those links to his column and let his readers fact-check the validity of his claims — and if others did the same. To paraphrase Jeff Jarvis: “Do your best, and let the internet do the rest.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hans Gerwitz and Shutterstock/Swellphotography

In its Measuring Cup online poll, the cooking site found that 35 percent of online cooks used smartphones to look up recipes. While recipe research was by far the most common smartphone activity, cooks are using the handheld gadgets to do a lot more inside and outside the kitchen: 29 percent said they have used their phones to photograph finished dishes, 18 percent created digital shopping lists with apps like Grocery IQ and Ziplist, 16 percent redeemed digital coupons at the grocery store and 12 percent used the phone to share a recipe on a social media site.

The number of people using smartphones to watch cooking videos is still small at just 15 percent, but on the PC and tablet, streamed video has exploded among women (Many of the poll results only include women since not enough men responded to form a suitable statistical sample).  Allrecipe’s first Measuring Cup report in 1999 found that 45 percent of women watched cooking videos online. In 2012, that number increased to 74 percent. Furthermore, nearly half of respondent believed that in 15 years how-to videos would become the primary media for conveying culinary knowledge – replacing Mom.

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the report:

• The most popular digital culinary resources weren’t cooking portals like Allrecipes or Food Network, but search engines, according to 43 percent of online cooks. Recipe sites were a close second, though, at 42 percent. The number one search term, you guessed it, was “chicken”.
• Digital cuisine is a big business: citing eMarketer, Allrecipes said consumer packaged good advertising spend online is increasing from $134 million in 200 to a projected $3.6 billion in 2012.
• Allrecipes found that mindshare in online cooking is drifting to more general social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter. One third of female cooks polled said it was important that cooking portals keep up by integrating with those big social networks.
• Expectations are high that more of the shopping and meal planning process will become digital: a majority of respondents stated that in 15 years the paper coupon will become extinct, the digital wallet will replace the leather billfold and that groceries will be ordered online and delivered to the home.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the report, however, is its more subtle findings on how the digital media have changed our views of the hallowed recipe and cookbook. Paradoxically the internet has made finding recipes far easier but it’s also destroyed our faith in the recipe itself.

Forty-four percent of men and women polled named Cooking websites as their preferred cooking resource, compared to 19 percent who said cookbooks and 9 percent who said their parents. However, confidence in the recipe has degraded. In 1999, Allrecipe’s poll found that 73 percent of online cooks said recipes made cooking easier. In 2012, only 35 percent returned the same response.

The Internet may be democratizing cooking – anyone can circulate a recipe widely and anyone can publish a cookbook. But let’s face it, there are a lot of bad recipes out there, and there’s growing trend to emphasize the aesthetics of food over the quality of the recipes behind them (The study found that the top reason for sharing recipes online was “attractive photos”). Sites like Pinterest have made cooking an artfully presented aspirational pursuit, but in many ways it’s turned the internet into a gigantic coffee table cookbook – a collection of pretty pictures and lush descriptions backed up by unvetted, incomplete and often awful recipes.

As always, though, the internet will adapt. Not only have sophisticated online review engines helped distinguish good recipes from bad, many sites such as Food52 have emerged that take crowdsourced approaches to testing and refining recipes. Allrecipes itself has long allowed its community to customize any recipe submitted to the site, and in many cases those customized recipes have become more popular than the originals, according to an Allrecipes spokesperson. Maybe we can have our democracy, but also a little bit of quality control as well.

Allrecipes, which was recently acquired by Meredith, polled roughly 2,200 people, about half of which were Allrecipes members and the other half online panelists taken from other, often non-cooking, sites. Very few men participated in the poll, so on questions where more than 200 men participated, their results were included, the spokesperson said.

All graphics courtesy of Allrecipes.com