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Brian Lehrer's listeners became observers, reporting where a quart of milk sold for less than $1.20, $1.20 to $2 and $2-plus. (Image: portion of WNYC map of New York City on Google Maps.) |
Crowdsourcing: Enlisted legmen, formerly known as the audience
To hear Brian Lehrer describe it, his station’s foray into audience-based reporting began as a quest for a fresh take on an unremarkable story.
When Lehrer’s popular WNYC talk show wanted to get listeners talking last summer about the preponderance of gas-guzzling SUVs and minivans on New York streets, producers decided that instead of merely asking people to call and weigh in, they’d have them count how many of such vehicles were parked on their respective blocks. The show’s staffers then pooled hundreds of quick, individual observations into a broad survey and mapped the results online.
“What could be simpler than looking out the window?” Lehrer says.
Those simple but significant “acts of journalism” marked WNYC’s entry into “crowdsourcing,” a new kind of reporting for the station that invites citizens to help each other understand their world while allowing editors to reach beyond their newsrooms for manpower.
The station has since produced additional crowdsourced projects, including a well-received price-gouging package featuring a detailed map of grocery prices, and it will ask for listeners’ input on which political footballs the Brian Lehrer Show will kick around in its election feature, “30 Issues in 30 Days.”
“Think of it as tapping your listeners to help you do your job better,” John Keefe, WNYC e.p. for news, told pubradio journalists at this month’s Public Radio News Directors Inc. conference in Washington, D.C. WNYC’s and other interactive journalism projects, such as station blogs and Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism network, figured heavily in the conference.
Crowdsourcing is “kind of the buzz phrase of the moment,” notes Jonathan Ahl, news director at Iowa Public Radio and PRNDI president.
Advocates say that by pairing amateurs’ experiences with professional journalists’ expertise in contextual storytelling, crowdsourcing can both broaden the scope of journalism and strengthen ties between news producers and, in Web 2.0 parlance, the people formerly known as the audience.
Projects such as WNYC’s tap average Joes and Janes to share labor on specific stories. In last fall’s price-gouging project, hundreds of listeners visited neighborhood stores and reported back to the station the prices of milk, beer and lettuce. The news was in the outliers — all verified by WNYC journalists—that showed that some stores were charging above what the state allowed for milk, Keefe said.
Other efforts tap outsiders on an ongoing basis. Over the past five years, MPR’s Public Insight “Rolodex on steroids” has helped the network find, vet and quickly turn around dozens of stories in Minnesota and beyond, Bill Wareham, MPR news director, told the crowd at PRNDI. That project has since expanded to partner with networks in four other states, and MPR is looking for “three to four” more stations to join, Wareham said.
During this year’s presidential primaries, New Hampshire Public Radio’s well-regarded citizen-journalism project, Primary Place Online, assembled more than 70 residents of Exeter, N.H., to share impressions of the candidates before the state’s primary. Relationships begun during the project have yielded many stories in the meantime, says Jon Greenberg, executive editor for NHPR.
Not that it’s easy. Relying on outsiders to collect information doesn’t save any work for the pros, Greenberg says.
Because participants tend to be self-selecting, the producer can’t assume they amount to a representative sample and sometimes must actively seek out underrepresented voices. Fact-checking is also just as necessary, if not more so, if stations hope to hang stories on the findings of amateurs, say those who have experimented with crowdsourcing.
“It’s not abdicating our role as professional journalists,” Greenberg says. “It’s trying to open up the process so you’re not working from the insular place that professional journalists often get stuck in by just taking input from professional sources.”
Others warn against getting swept up in new-media excitement at the expense of the core service.
“There’s still a huge segment of our audience that wants to passively take things in,” Ahl says. “How much of our resources do we dedicate to that small percentage of people who want to be participants?”
Which isn’t to suggest that the head-in-the-sand approach to innovation is preferable to cheering “hooray new media, forsake the core,” he says. The stations that will thrive are the ones that “look for balance,” he says. “Unfortunately, moderation doesn’t get a lot of attention.”
Ask for facts, check the facts
The crowdsourcing concept isn’t new, of course. Wikipedia, to name an oft-cited example, is a behemoth digital enterprise built by thousands of strangers.
Crowdsourcing happens, Wired’s Jeff Howe wrote in the 2006 article that coined the term, when “distributed labor networks” use “the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains.” (Howe’s book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, is due out next month.)
Journalists take the results a step further, overseeing the “labor network,” weaving thicker stories from the findings and contextualizing them with maps and charts.
Crowd-sourcing proponents cite several benefits. The practice breaks a big problem that producers can’t tackle on their own and jobs out the manageable pieces to a larger work force.
Another positive: Crowdsourced projects allow news organizations to engage with a broader swath of the world they aim to cover, which in turn produces stories that allow the audience to “see themselves reflected in what we do,” MPR’s Wareham said.
The group journalism experience itself offers another public-service benefit, Lehrer says. Participants are asked, in effect, to “stop and open their eyes” and more thoughtfully consider, say, the price of milk or a presidential candidate’s qualities. “It makes people think about things in different ways,” Lehrer says.
Pubcasters willing to try such projects are better positioned to make them succeed than their commercial brethren, says Jeff Jarvis, noted blogger, professor and new-media thinker.
“You have the power to mobilize your public,” he told a handful of pubradio journalists after a PRNDI session. “I think you have a public that’s more willing to do this.”
Stations that want to experiment should keep a few things in mind, according to those who have tried crowdsourcing.
- Start small: People are more likely to answer simple questions—how many SUVs are on your block? Just as important, the results are easier for the newsroom to process. Roughly 450 people submitted grocery prices, and the various amounts and addresses created “a mountain of work for a couple of producers and interns,” Lehrer recalls. “Don’t bite off more than you can chew — go for quality over quantity.”
- Be relevant: Underwhelming crowdsourcing projects in other media have tended to focus on “questions that nobody gave a damn about,” Jarvis says. Good topics “tend to be things that matter to people’s pocketbooks.” The relevance issue works both ways — stations have to come up with subjects that would benefit from average folks’ observations, Greenberg says. For NHPR’s primary project, “ultimately it’s the voters that are going to matter, so clearly they’re going to be relevant.”
- Be specific: Journalists are often told to ask open-ended interview questions, but such tactics don’t often provoke useful crowdsourcing content. Fact-based surveys are fairly straightforward in this regard, but for even more experiential projects, “you have to tell them specifically what you want them to do,” Greenberg says.
- Verify, verify, verify: For the price-gouging project, “it would have been easy to just map what everybody submitted,” Lehrer says. But the producers saw plenty of “eye-popping” results that, as it turned out, were also wrong. WNYC only mentioned on-air the prices that producers verified themselves.
The more you interact with participants, the more “social pressure” there is on them to be honest and responsible, Greenberg says. That said, “verification is a huge piece of the process any time you turn to citizens for information.”
Web page posted Aug. 6, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
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