Storyful journalist Joe Galvin recently looked at some of the incidents that the company has helped either debunk or verify over the past year — including a fake tweet from the official account of the Associated Press about explosions at the White House (which sent the Dow Jones index plummeting before it was corrected), a claim from Russian authorities that a chemical attack in Syria had been pre-meditated, and a report from investigative journalist Seymour Hersh about the same attack that questioned whether the government had been involved.

Debunking some of these kinds of claims can be relatively straightforward, Galvin notes: in the case of AP’s tweet, for example (which was the result of a hack), a simple check of other sources should have made it easy to dismiss:

“The tweet was non-AP style, Storyful’s White House Twitter list contained no corroborating reports, and livestreams from the White House showed no evidence of an attack. Within minutes, we were able to advise clients to be cautious in reporting the information.”

Crowdsourcing is a key journalistic tool

Similarly, the Russian claim — which was based on the allegation that videos of the chemical attack appeared to have been posted before the attack even occurred — was fairly easy to debunk once Storyful confirmed with YouTube that all videos are posted with a time-stamp that shows Pacific Time, and therefore the clips in question were clearly posted after the fact.

The piece from Seymour Hersh was somewhat more problematic, Galvin says, in part because he is a famous investigative journalist with a long and distinguished track record of reporting on incidents such as the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war. Hersh’s article in the London Review of Books questioned whether the Syrian government would have used the type of weapons that were seen during the attack, and also argued that the army wasn’t even within range.

Eventually, however, Hersh’s claims were rebutted by an overwhelming number of reports from multiple sources — including Eliot Higgins, the blogger known as Brown Moses, whose speciality is verifying videos posted to YouTube about Syria and who is also an active participant in Storyful’s “open newsroom,” which is based on Google+ (and is apparently planning to launch his own investigative journalism network). As Higgins noted in his piece for Foreign Policy magazine:

“Open-source information may become even more important for understanding hard-to-access conflict zones, and learning how to use it effectively should become a key skill for any investigative journalist.”

Reddit shows how to aggregate breaking news

Reddit, meanwhile, has been conducting some “open newsroom”-style experiments of its own around a number of news events, including the Syrian civil war. The site has come under fire in the past for some of those efforts — including the attempt to identify the bombers in the Boston bombings case, which went badly awry — but the Syrian thread in particular is a good example of how a smart aggregator can make sense of an ongoing news event.

In a recent post at a site called Dissected News, one of the moderators behind the /r/SyrianCivilWar sub-Reddit — a 22-year-old law student named Christopher Kingdon (or “uptodatepronto” as he is known on the site) — wrote about his experiences with the forum, which is trying to be a broadly objective source for breaking news and information about the conflict. Kingdon says he decided to start the sub-Reddit after reading some of the other coverage on the site:

“I was determined to create an alternative forum where standards for sources and conversation would be enforced to combat this vitriolic debate. The ultimate goal of our moderating team continues to be to create an online forum that ‘fosters an informed and civil discussion of the facts.’”

Some of what the moderators do in the forum is similar to the kind of verification that Storyful or the BBC’s “user-generated content desk” do — checking photos and video for obvious signs of fakery and hoaxes. But Kingdon also describes how much effort his team of volunteers puts into ensuring that the sub-Reddit doesn’t degenerate into trolling or flame-wars. Strict rules are enforced “to prevent personal attacks, offensive and violent language and racism” and the moderators favor posts that “utilize sources, background information and a dash of common sense.”

As always when I read about what Storyful or Brown Moses or even Reddit are doing when it comes to crowdsourcing, I wonder why mainstream news organizations don’t do more of this kind of thing themselves. As Eliot Higgins notes, these tools are becoming increasingly important — and learning how to use them effectively is a crucial skill in an age of real-time news.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / donskarpo and Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

Obviously it would be nice if more media outlets checked such reports before they repeated them. But are reporters and bloggers the only ones with any broader ethical responsibility? What about those who engage in hoaxes? What is their responsibility as members of what Yochai Benkler — of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society — has called a “networked fourth estate?”

A responsibility to correct the record

Elan Gale, a producer of the “reality” TV show The Bachelor, was the architect of the hoax conversation involving a woman theoretically named Diane, to whom he allegedly wrote passive-aggressive notes on airplane napkins as he live-tweeted the entire episode. In a Twitter debate on Monday night that included Tow Center fellow Alex Howard and me, Gale argued that he had no responsibility whatsoever to correct the record once he realized that some people believed his story was true.

In a nutshell, Gale said he is just a fun-loving writer who enjoys playing Twitter pranks and/or creating what he called “performance art” like the airplane incident, and it’s not his job to point out when people — or media outlets — are taking his words seriously rather than dismissing them as satire. Gale said he assumes that his Twitter followers know he routinely makes things up, and therefore they are “in on the joke.” And what about those who aren’t? They’re on their own.

There’s no question that — as Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab put it in the New York Times piece — the fast pace of online media often means outlets wind up simply pointing to things instead of actively trying to determine whether they are true (another reason why I wish someone would expand Snopes into a full-fledged media entity). And it should be noted that it’s not just new media like BuzzFeed: the New York Times itself mentioned the Gale incident on its travel blog, although that post appears to have been deleted.

We are all media now

BuzzFeed says it tried to reach Gale via Twitter to confirm the story, and updated it as soon as it had more information. And there is undoubtedly pressure on such sites to run a salacious piece first rather than waiting to check, since the traffic rewards can be remarkable — as Gawker’s “viral content” specialist Neetzan Zimmerman pointed out during a recent debate with founder Nick Denton on the merits of checking stories rather than just running with them.

But I would argue (and did argue during my Twitter debate with Gale) that since each of us is effectively a member of the media now, whether we like it or not, it’s incumbent on the sources of such erroneous reports to point out that they are engaging in fiction, rather than leaving everyone to their own devices.

Josh Stearns of Free Press pointed out recently that the rise of networked journalism requires a new ethical approach, one that applies not just to journalists but to anyone involved in what Om has called the “democratization of distribution.” Part of Gale’s argument is that he is just a joker, and no one was harmed by his story, and that’s true — a fictitious conversation on airplane isn’t a world-changing event, and likely no one’s life was altered by his hoax. But that’s hardly the point.

The larger point is that we are all in this thing together now, this distributed and networked media ecosystem, and we should act like it. That means checking things before you retweet them, and not going off on witch hunts if you are on Reddit after a bombing, and other things as well. But blaming “the media” for getting it wrong is no solution either any more. We are all the media.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Don Skarpo

To describe someone in that way would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago: how could a 34-year-old unemployed man sitting in the front room of his British flat — with no prior training in weaponry, no experience in the Middle East, and no command of Arabic languages — become an expert in that kind of specialized intelligence?

And yet, as two recent feature pieces on Brown Moses (whose real name is Eliot Higgins) describe, that is exactly what he has done (Higgins mentioned on Twitter that he has been employed for much of the time he has been doing the blog, and did his work in his spare time). According to the New Yorker:

“It’s very incongruous, this high-intensity conflict being monitored by a guy in Leicester,” Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer in London, told me. “He’s probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.”

A journalist by any other name

One of the most fascinating things about Brown Moses from a journalistic point of view is that he is completely self-taught, and gets no income from what he does — he appears to be motivated purely by curiosity, and a desire to get the truth out where everyone can see it, something that is a fundamentally journalistic impulse. And yet he has no training as a journalist, and probably wouldn’t qualify as one even under the broadest interpretation of a recent U.S. “shield law” aimed at protecting journalists.

Higgins also talks at length about how one of his guiding principles is that his work must be done in the open, and be as transparent and collaborative as possible — an approach that I would argue too few traditional media outlets take towards their journalism. As the New Yorker describes it:

“Rather than make rivals of other bloggers analyzing Syrian videos, Higgins linked to their work. He used Storyful, an ‘open newsroom’ tool that enables multiple contributors to conduct an investigation based on evidence gleaned from social media, and drew on the knowledge of munitions experts, chemical-weapons inspectors, and civilian opposition activists inside Syria.”

A kind of role-playing game

As described in both the New Yorker and a similar feature at Huffington Post, Higgins started out as a commenter on various news sites who became fascinated by the violence in the Middle East, and started a blog partly because he wanted to win arguments with his fellow commenters. A somewhat obsessive man who used to spend hundreds of hours playing various online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, Higgins soon turned that energy towards identifying weapons in videos posted to YouTube.

Within about 18 months, after viewing several hundred videos a day posted by various rebel groups and other sources — which he verifies through a combination of first-hand research in Jane’s Digest and other publications, along with a growing network of experts, both in the Middle East and elsewhere — Brown Moses had become an indispensable resource for everyone from aid groups to New York Times writer and former Marine CJ Chivers. As the Huffington Post piece describes it:

“I saw the U.N. got the Nobel Prize for Syria,” says one expert, referring to the United Nations-backed Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, who declined to be named on account of his own work with the international body. “I think Eliot has done a lot more for Syria than the U.N.”

A model of crowdsourced journalism?

Kristyan Benedict, the campaign manager of Amnesty International, told the New Yorker that her organization has staff members monitoring videos from Syria, but said Higgins “just gets there quicker than a lot of established research outlets have been able to.” And all of this is done from the front room of his flat in Leicester, which doubles as his young daughter’s playroom: the New Yorker described lace curtains, toys stacked against a wall and a gold-foil balloon from his young daughter’s recent birthday.

Moses — who took his name from an old Frank Zappa song, and used to use a portrait by Francis Bacon of Pope Innocent X as his Twitter avatar — has had a series of part-time jobs, working as a data-entry clerk at Barclays bank and managing inventory for a company selling women’s underwear. He set up a crowdfunding campaign earlier this year that raised about $10,000 in less than a month, but apart from that he derives no income from his work (something his wife seems to think is more than a little unfair, given how much other organizations and media outlets rely on his research).

Could Higgins be a model of what crowdsourced journalism, or at least crowdsourced verification, looks like? Many see him as just that — Yasmin Green of Google told the New Yorker that she and her colleagues have been “having discussions about how you scale Brown Moses.” For his part, Higgins says he thinks others can be taught to do what he does: “I played a lot of role-player games. Believe me, there are a lot of obsessive people out there who could probably put their passions to a more productive use.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Facebook / Brown Moses and Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

Does this mean crowdsourced media sources like Reddit are better than traditional outlets? Not really — but the opposite is also true. If we’ve learned anything about the news-reporting process in an age of real-time tools like Twitter and YouTube, it’s that it is even more chaotic than it has ever been, but as more than one person has pointed out, accuracy was a problem as long ago as the John F. Kennedy shootings and the sinking of the Titanic. Breaking news is an error-prone event and likely always will be.

Traditional media is good at certain things

Commercial or “professional” news outlets like CNN and the New York Times are good at certain things when it comes to a breaking news story, such as:

Getting through to official sources: This reliance on official spokespeople can also turn out to be a bad thing, however, as we saw in the Navy Yard shootings. According to one report, the mis-identification occurred because a “law enforcement source” assumed that a piece of ID found at the scene came from the shooter.

Aggregating verified information: Most newsrooms have access to an almost overwhelming number of wire services and other tools that produce both background information and breaking-news updates, and filtering through these performs a real service for readers during a crisis.

Crowdsourced media entities like Reddit and Twitter, meanwhile, are typically not very good at reaching official sources, although in many cases they are a popular place for insiders to post information that they don’t want to state publicly. But they are very good good at other things, including distributing (and in many cases fact-checking) eyewitness reports from the scene. This is something that traditional news outlets often give short shrift to, beyond sticking a camera in someone’s face or interviewing random passers-by for their thoughts.

Sites like Reddit and tools like Twitter can tap into a far broader range of sources about a news story, including people who work at the location or know the individual who is suspected of the crime. The problem, as with any such breaking-news incident, is verifying that information. And sites like Reddit are also good — perhaps even better than traditional news outlets — at pulling information together quickly from multiple sources, both official and unofficial.

Crowdsourced media has other strengths

Reddit in particular did this during the Navy Yard incident as well as the Aurora shootings, and during other breaking-news events too, such as a mass shooting in Toronto. In many cases, this consists of an individual starting a thread and then aggregating links to all the available sources of information in one place, whether they are news stories or blogs or other crowdsourced reports.

This is something that is clearly a journalistic skill, regardless of whether professional journalists want to admit it — just as someone like Brown Moses, the British blogger who has become a key source of information about terrorist weaponry in Syria, is performing a journalistic skill regardless of the fact that he has no training as a journalist.

What would be nice is if more mainstream or traditional news outlets not only made use of sites like Reddit by plundering them for information, but tried to actually help the process by contributing their knowledge to forums and threads — in other words, working together with crowdsourced resources to create a kind of new ecosystem of news, instead of just competing to see who can be the most wrong in the shortest amount of time.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Yan-Arief Purwanto, as well as Slate magazine Shutterstock / wellphoto

As the site Journalism.co.uk described in a recent post on the project, the Open Newsroom consists of a Google+ page with a relatively small membership — about 200 at the moment — made up of users who have volunteered to help verify photos, videos and other content that comes in through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Storyful managing editor Markham Nolan says the company deliberately limited the number of members to try and keep down the noise within the group. As the description says:

“We are operating an open newsroom, available to journalists and experts who share our aims. This will be a real-time community of news professionals working together to establish the maximum clarity and context around the big stories of the day. Our objective is to debunk, fact-check, clarify, credit and source. It is a work in progress.”

Verification is better done in public

Storyful’s main line of work is identifying and verifying news-related photos and video for a roster of media clients, including major players like ABC News and Bloomberg. The company has also branched out into representing the producers of that user-generated content in their negotiations with media companies to license their photos and video, and founder Mark Little has also lobbied for a “public license” that would provide credit for such citizen journalists.

Even before it launched the Open Newsroom, the company had been expanding the way it verifies social-media content to take advantage of the abilities of the crowd: it used to have a private Twitter account called Storyful Pro where it collected and distributed much of its verified content, but last fall Little decided to open up that process and make the account public, because he said that he believed crowdsourcing was the best way to approach that kind of verification.

The Google+ newsroom isn’t terribly complicated — it is simply a group that focuses on photos or video that have come from a social-media source, such as videos of a rocket attack in Syria, and tries to crowdsource as much information about them as possible. Nolan told Journalism.co.uk that the group has already been fairly successful in a number of cases, including doing some real-time verification of videos that were coming from Egypt recently:

“Pulling in people with local knowledge, and some good independent journalists, we were able to pool skills in the Open Newsroom and get to the bottom of the situation… Using a second video, and input from two other collaborators who had further contacts on the ground, this dramatic piece of footage was verified as close as is possible without physically accompanying the cameraman onto the street.”

In one recent incident, the Storyful newsroom even got a submission from Brown Moses, the pseudonymous British blogger who has become something of a celebrity within social-media-powered news circles for his skill in verifying information about weapons in Syria — a skill he has developed more or less on his own by watching thousands of YouTube videos and checking public databases of information about military weaponry.

Building a crowdsourced newsroom

What Brown Moses has shown by developing that kind of expertise — expertise that has been celebrated by professional journalists like New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers, a former Marine — is that citizen journalists or even just intelligent bystanders can contribute to the reporting around a conflict like Syria, and that’s what Storyful’s open newsroom idea is based on. It’s like a crowdsourced version of the BBC’s “user-generated content” desk, which does exactly the same thing inside the British broadcaster’s newsroom.

In many ways, it’s also the same approach that NPR’s Andy Carvin took when he started reporting on the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia: reaching out to a group of reliable Twitter followers from the region — which he says he came to think of as his newsroom — in order to verify photos of victims, videos of bombed-out buildings and other content. In some cases, Carvin was able to identify buildings and events well in advance of mainstream news organizations.

Many media organizations are happy to take photos and video from social-media sources and use them in their reporting, but few are using the features of those massive distributed platforms to actually verify that content or to put it in context — or to give credit to those who produced it. At least Storyful and a few others are showing what is possible when we stop thinking of a newsroom a specific place and start thinking of it as an open process.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Juerg Vollmer, and Shutterstock / wellphoto

Dorsey, who famously sketched out the idea for Twitter in 2000, talked to CNBC as part of the network’s recent documentary entitled “The Twitter Revolution,” and described it as the moment when the world started looking at the service as a potential news source rather than just a tech startup with a funny name. “It just changed everything,” he said. “Suddenly the world turned its attention (to us), because we were the source of news — but it wasn’t us, it was this person in the boat, using the service, which was even more amazing.” You can hear more from Dorsey about creating the experience of Twitter at our RoadMap conference in November in San Francisco.

A sea change in the way the news works

Those comments from Dorsey resonated with me personally, because the landing of US Airways Flight 1549 was definitely a turning point in the way that Twitter was perceived by the traditional newspaper journalists I was working with at the time. Some of us had already begun to see the service as a powerful way of connecting with readers around our work, but few had seen the potential for Twitter to become an actual source of news — a way for the “sources to go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has put it.

Even before the Hudson landing, there had already been a few incidents where Twitter had shown a glimpse of that potential: a rash of fires in California, an earthquake in China, and so on. But for whatever reason, the airplane rescue captured the imagination of many more people — journalists and otherwise — perhaps in part because it was such a miraculous event. And the photographer who took the iconic photo, Janis Krums, inadvertently became the prototype of the Twitter-enabled “citizen journalist.”

Over the next two years, Twitter became a larger and larger force not just in the delivery of traditional news but the actual creation of news — in the sense of those “random acts of journalism” that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has talked about, like the one in which a computer programmer in Pakistan live-tweeted the U.S. special forces attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And by 2011, Carvin would be using Twitter as a crowdsourced real-time newsroom to report on the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere (he has given the Smithsonian the iPhone that he used to do a lot of his Twitter curation).

A megaphone for the world to use

To reinforce that point, in another clip from the CNBC special, Bahraini activist Maryam Al-Khawaja talks about how Twitter has changed the way that dissidents in her country and elsewhere in the Arab world get their message out and connect with others who can help them or who are fighting similar battles:

The CNBC documentary has other segments as well, including one that follows Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to the gym for his workout, and a look at how social media affected the environment around a high-profile rape case in Torrington, Conn. — but for me, the comments from Jack Dorsey about Twitter’s role in the media just reinforced how far we have come in such a short time.

In many ways, the transformation that was triggered by that photo of Flight 1549 is still underway. Twitter is struggling to figure out what that means for it as a company, and also how it will deal with the conflicts between its own interests in doing business around the world and the restrictions that some countries want to place on the freedom of speech that it allows. But there is no question that, for better or worse, it has changed the way the news works forever.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Shutterstock / Vlad Star

ProPublica launched the campaign at the end of May, and set a goal of raising $22,000 by the end of June. The campaign ends on Thursday, but as of mid-day Wednesday it had already exceeded the goal by several thousand dollars, which it had raised from more than 675 individual backers. As the Kickstarter page describes, the site plans to investigate the “emerging intern economy” in the U.S., so it decided to hire an intern to help.

As with most Kickstarter projects, ProPublica had to come up with different tiers of rewards to offer those who donated to the campaign, so it made some T-shirts and tote bags with the icon of an “Eager Beaver” on it — a graphic that was designed specifically for the intern investigation — and added some special features to try and entice larger bids: one person donated more than $1,000 and now gets to have “a private training workshop on social media and community-building for your organization led by ProPublica’s engagement team.”

Crowdfunding takes a lot of work

That kind of effort reinforces one of the main points that ProPublica made in the blog post about its campaign: namely, that running a crowdfunding project is a lot of work — “close to a full-time job,” as Blair Hickman of the media outlet’s community team put it.

“We sent a minimum of one, if not two project updates via our social media accounts every day. We emailed all of our existing listservs, crafted project updates for our Kickstarter backers and emailed organizations with an interest in the issue asking if they might be willing to share our project with their listservs. In short: Marketing a Kickstarter is a close to full-time job, so make sure to budget the time.”

Some of ProPublica’s other tips included defining the scope of the project that you have in mind as clearly as possible, since as the company points out, one of the biggest hurdles for journalistic entities planning to use crowdfunding is that “campaigns work best for concrete, defined projects – a documentary, another season of a podcast or a new level of a video game. But investigative journalists often don’t know what their reporting will yield.” Focusing on a specific story like internships helped, it said.

Define the project as much as possible

For much the same reason, when National Public Radio decided to crowdfund a project, it picked a specific documentary it wanted to produce about tracking the production of a T-shirt all the way from the cotton fields to the storefront — and wound up raising over $300,000. Other successful journalistic projects include the 99% Invisible podcast and a longform science-writing platform called Matter that was ultimately bought by Medium.

Coming up with creative rewards is also key to getting a good response, Hickman said in her ProPublica post — and in that sense, the lessons from crowdfunding are very similar to the lessons that the company drew from its foray into crowdsourcing when it put together the “Free The Files” project during the election: in order to get as broad a response as possible, members of the crowd who participate have to feel as though they are having fun or being rewarded in some way, however small:

“The best rewards make backers feel like they’ve benefited from a project they helped make possible. For journalism projects, this could include access to the editorial process, tote bags or t-shirts with custom project designs or special, real-time updates on the reporting.”

It’s probably not surprising that ProPublica and NPR are among the first media organizations to experiment with crowdfunding platforms, since donations from the audience and/or prominent supporters are the foundation of their business model already. It would be nice to see some more traditional media outlets apply some of these lessons to their own crowdfunding experiments.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz

There’s no question that the layoffs were a hugely painful event, not just for the Chicago media but for many fans of photo-journalism. John White, one of those who was laid off — after a 44-year career at the Sun-Times that included a Pulitzer Prize win — said it was like the newspaper “pushed a button and deleted a whole culture of photo-journalism.” (Some speculated that the Sun-Times might have an ulterior motive: in 2008 Newsday fired all 20 staff photographers and later rehired some as multimedia editors).

A dedicated photo desk is a luxury

The cuts were widely criticized as a knee-jerk reaction to financial pressures by newspaper managers who don’t understand or don’t care about journalism: A photo-journalist at the competing Chicago Tribune (which has suffered through some challenges of its own related to outsourcing aspects of its journalism) called the paper’s move “idiocy,” and said the idea that freelancers and reporters with iPhones could replace a staff of professional photographers “idiotic at worst, and hopelessly uninformed at best.”

The New York Times said that before the layoffs the paper had a staff of professionals with the hard-earned ability to tell stories with pictures and now it has “some freelancers and reporters toting cheap cameras with their notebooks and pens.” The writer went on to paraphrase the viewpoint of the Sun-Times presumably: “Who cares about news judgment, composition, story-telling, impact, beauty or whether an image is even in focus? Photos are just something bright and colorful to wrap the text and ads around.”

This is clearly hyperbole, of course. As emotional a moment as it might be when so many jobs are lost — and so much obvious talent — a common theme in much of the coverage of the Sun-Times layoffs is what seems like a deep mistrust of the whole idea of using freelance photographers, or the idea that iPhones used by reporters might suffice in some (not all) cases. But this is misguided: the reality is that almost every newspaper, magazine and wire service uses freelance photo-journalists, many take award-winning photos.

It’s also obviously the case that iPhone or handheld photos are often just as good — or even better, from a real-time, breaking news point of view — than a professional picture. And to denigrate “user-generated content” simply because it comes from potentially (although not always) untrained photographers is to miss the exact same point that the rest of the media industry has been missing about the value of “citizen journalism” or whatever we choose to call it.

Outsourcing and crowdsourcing works

That’s not to say the Sun-Times handled this particular transition well, because it clearly didn’t. Jeff Jarvis says the paper was both right and wrong — right in the sense that there are more photographers and potentially newsworthy photos available everywhere, since everyone has a powerful camera in their pocket, but wrong in the way they handled the change. Instead of letting them all go, he says they should have redefined the job so that photographers would become curators of crowdsourced photos as well as creators.

It would be nice to think the Sun-Times — or any other newspaper — could convince its existing photographers to do that. And maybe some will be able to. But many professional photo-journalists would find that transition difficult if not impossible, just as many professional journalists of all kinds find it hard to admit that at least some aspects of what we call journalism can now be practiced by anyone with a functioning brain-stem, a sense of curiosity and the luck to be close to a breaking news event.

The Sun-Times, like every other newspaper, is having to confront two painful realities: one is that journalism of all kinds is no longer the exclusive purview of a newspaper and its staff — anyone can, and will, practice it, and readers will seek it out elsewhere for a host of reasons, both good and bad. And the second reality is that the cost structure of many mid-size metropolitan newspapers simply doesn’t work any more, and outsourcing is one way of handling that problem — not just for the photo desk, but potentially for copy editing and other functions as well. That is the future, whether we like it or not.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Shutterstock / Lightpoet

Mark Little, founder and CEO of social-media platform Storyful, thinks that we do. At the recent International Journalism Festival in Italy — where the former foreign correspondent and news anchor discussed the idea with me over breakfast — Little said that he had floated the idea of a “Perugia Declaration” (named after the city where the conference was held) as a way of trying to formalize how media outlets of all kinds should deal with user-generated content.

Giving credit where credit is due

Little expanded on this idea in a recent post at the Storyful blog, where he described how the current process of using videos from “citizen journalists” is chaotic at best: while some outlets do their best to link to the original source — or at the very least the original uploader — other sites don’t give any at all, or provide a tiny credit line that says “Credit: YouTube,” which Little says is like putting “Credit: Telephone” on a newspaper report.

“In an age when every member of your audience is also a potential reporter, the old rules no longer apply – but the new rules either don’t yet exist or are not enforced. Most major news organizations have some basic guidelines governing the use of user content and some, like the BBC, have dedicated UGC units. Consistently applied standards are, however, the exception. Even as the news industry grows increasingly dependent on user-generated content it remains chronically confused by it.”

Helping to track down and confirm the original sources of “user-generated content” was one of the goals behind creating Storyful, and many media outlets now use the service as a way of getting access to verified content during a breaking news event. The service also recently started helping to represent creators of “viral videos” and other user-generated content in their dealings with publishers — in effect, becoming an agent for them, and taking a cut of the proceeds in return for its efforts.

But Little sees news-related content as a different animal entirely — almost as a public good, he said — and he wants media organizations to agree on a kind of Creative Commons-style format for giving credit to the original uploaders or citizen journalists who capture that kind of content.

“Eyewitness video of a tragic but important event – natural disaster, conflict, plane crash or terror attack – clearly has immediate value. But does it have a price? Should it be sold as a commodity? I would argue that the value of this exceptional content takes the form of a public utility. It may generate secondary commercial value, but it should not be privatized.”

A “public service video licence”

In effect, the Storyful founder is suggesting that media outlets collaborate on the creation of a Public Service Video License, which would guarantee that video content would be credited to the original rights-holder (provided the rights-holder wanted to be publicly identified), and that any media entities using it would be required to give credit in a specific manner — and would only be granted a limited sub-licence to re-use the content.

Little adds that such a system would also have to prevent “scraping” or unauthorized duplication of content somehow, either through watermarking or something like YouTube’s Content ID system.

Would an approach like the one Little is suggesting work? While I sympathize with his viewpoint, I’m not sure it would. Preventing scraping or duplication, for example, would be almost impossible or prohibitively expensive — as the music and movie industries have discovered. And if all the system does is provide credit to the original source, Creative Commons and/or the “fair use” principle of U.S. copyright law would seem to already cover most of that territory.

That said, however, I think the goal is a positive one: namely, to get media companies to make providing this kind of credit part of what they do in a semi-formal way. For too long now, social-media platforms have been seen by many as a place where you can take content for your own purposes without having to provide credit to anyone. If a Perugia Declaration is what it takes to jump-start such a process, then maybe it’s an idea worth exploring.

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

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