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

The first example comes from the New York Post, which ran a photo on its front page on Tuesday of a man who had been pushed onto the subway tracks and was about to die. The response was overwhelmingly negative — and not just in newspaper columns like the one David Carr wrote for the New York Times, but on blogs and in comments on Twitter and Facebook as well.

The NY Post cover today crosses the line, IMHO. A pic of a man pushed onto a subway track right before he is struck and killed. Grim.

—
Charles Ornstein (@charlesornstein) December 04, 2012

Why does a printed photo still have so much power?

What’s interesting about this response is that dozens of photos of people who are about to die likely appear on the internet somewhere every day, whether it’s a picture that gets posted to Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or some other social network, or a news story that appears on Google News or Yahoo News or some equivalent aggregator. But would a photo of the subway victim posted on Flickr or Yfrog or even Reddit have had the same effect or gotten as much criticism as the Post picture?

One of the obvious differences with the Post photo is that it was of a man who was about to die in a way that many readers could identify with — since plenty of them presumably take the subway, and may have even experienced fear about what a mentally ill homeless person might do to them on the platform. And it was also targeted at the most likely viewers in a specific location: namely, New York City. From there, it spread throughout the internet, but as Carr noted in his piece, the sense of dread — and powerlessness — THAT many viewers felt was likely universal.

“The image is a kind of crucible of self-analysis. Never mind what the photographer did, what would we do? In that sudden moment, our base impulses emerge. Photographers shoot, heroes declare, and most of us cower. We are not soldiers, expected to engage in selfless acts that trump survival instincts. We are civilians and if called to duty, who among us will accept?” — David Carr

In a sense, the New York Post photo quickly acquired a power that very few online-only photos have, with the exception of some iconic ones such as the Flickr/Twitter photo of a plane landing on the Hudson River in 2009. Seeing it printed in a newspaper arguably gave it some of that power — just as the photos on September 11 that Carr mentions, the ones of people jumping to their deaths, also had a larger-than-life effect because they appeared in print. Would a photo shared on Facebook have that same power?

The power to ignore as well as to promote

The second example isn’t a photo but a news story — and it isn’t about a story that appeared in a newspaper, but about stories that *didn’t* appear. Namely, the stories that the New York Times didn’t run because it decided not to send a reporter to the trial of Bradley Manning, the former Army private who is accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks and has been in custody for the past two years. For many, the case is a crucial test of the government’s ability to treat a suspected whistle-blower fairly, a test that critics say it has already failed miserably.

Given what is at stake in the trial, a number of sources argued that the New York Times should have sent a reporter to cover the hearing directly, instead of just running an Associated Press story about it. The core of this argument is the idea that the Times is the “newspaper of record,” and that historic events must appear there so that they can be preserved for future generations. The paper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, expressed something similar to this view in a post on the topic, in which she argued that the NYT was wrong to rely on wire-service coverage, and The New Republic said:

“The N.Y. Times is the paper of record that published and stood behind the Penagon Papers. Where are you now on the brutal prison treatment and studied legalities being visited on U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning? It’s unconscionable and sad if The Times sits quietly by saying nothing.” — New Republic

But isn’t the idea of a “newspaper of record” a little quaint now, a throwback to the days when one or two newspapers essentially controlled the news flow, and were seen as handmaidens of democracy instead of mortal, money-losing commercial entities? Many of us have grown accustomed to the fact that news can emerge from anywhere, at any time — from sources that are actually involved in the event in question, or from those committing “random acts of journalism” — and web-only outlets can grow to become massive media entities in their own right, like The Huffington Post.

And yet, there is clearly still some power in the shared experience of seeing news appear in a printed newspaper, to the point where many are ready to attack the Post for taking advantage of that in the service of something evil, and attack the New York Times for not taking advantage of it in the pursuit of something good. And obviously much of that power comes from the brand that has developed behind these media institutions over time — a brand that has been built up by that shared experience. But as those shared experiences and brands lose some of their power and their reach, and a hundred different web sources take over, what do we lose and what do we gain?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Getty Images/Mario Tama and Flickr user George Kelly

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