07.11.07 | 2:00 AM Assignment Zero
- Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
- Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book
- Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules
- (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
- Design Within Reach: Architecture for Humanity Builds the Future of Housing
- (Q&A) The Experts at the Periphery
- News the Users Can Use
- (Q&A) Tricksters
- Put 40 Strangers in a Virtual Room to Talk About Religion
- (Q&A) Crowdsourcing Is a Word and We'll See What It Means
- (Q&A) The Law of Large Numbers and That Eureka Moment
- (Q&A) Maybe the Fans Are Smarter than the Coach
Editor's Note: This story is reprinted from Assignment Zero, an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism produced in collaboration with Wired News. This week, we'll be republishing a selection of Assignment Zero stories on the topic of "crowdsourcing." All in all, Assignment Zero produced 80 stories, essays and interviews about crowdsourcing; we're reprinting 12 of the best. The stories appear here exactly as Assignment Zero produced them. They have not been edited for facts or style.
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Reported by Muhammad Saleem, Andy Sternberg, Derek Powazek and Patrick Crawford
Written by Patrick Crawford
Fact-checked by Ian Elwood
Edited by Christine Riedel
Can social news sites they survive they very openness that makes them thrive?
Devotees of "crowdsourced" media sites love to equate social editing with democracy, and they've got at least one part of the comparison right: social editing is every bit as raucous, messy and enthralling as the electoral process. For the latest proof, look no further than the much-debated DVD hack posted at social-editing titan Digg.com.
In case you missed it, last month a user posted a link to instructions on cracking the digital copyright protections encrypted into HD-DVDs. Digg removed the link, then was so swamped with users reposting the story that the site temporarily shut down. After some soul-searching about the rights of free-speech versus those of privacy and intellectual property, Digg allowed the link to go back up, and the site's founder, Kevin Rose, wrote in Digg's blog that, "now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company… If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying." No one ever said the media revolution would be bloodless.
The explosive growth of social editing or social news sites such as Digg.com, Newsvine.com and NewsTrust.net , has made a pressing issue of these debates about the virtues of an unedited public sphere and the control of information. That's because social editing web sites allow users to source, debate and prioritize content without intervention from an editorial staff. Most of the stories at social news sites are not written by users but instead are "seeded" content, or links to stories posted elsewhere in mainstream media or on blogs. Thanks to the sea of information floating around on-line, members can seed nearly any imaginable idea — truthful or libelous, insightful or illegal — to a social news site and let the community vote on it. On any given day, readers at social news sites might find completely unresearched blog rants struggling for creditability alongside front-page news from the New York Times. The idea is that the "wisdom of the crowd," to borrow James Surowiecki's term, will sort the information more effectively and more responsively to the public's needs than an editorial staff. Andrew Sorcini, who spends some 10-15 hours a week on Digg, calls the process a way of making the community "collective arbiters of taste."
The jury is still out on the public's ability to vet information, but the very existence of social editing indicates that a fundamental shift is occurring in way people think about news. Users of social editing sites are no longer passive media consumers. Instead they see media as a live discussion in which the public deserves a voice equal to that of an editor. Skepticism of mainstream reporting runs rampant at these sites, where community members use the social editing platform to engage each other in a debate over the meaning and validity of news. In the best case scenario, then, social editing morphs the public into a giant fact-checker; in the worst case, it means that traditional goals like objectivity and responsibility are replaced by an on-line popularity contest. It matters less if an idea is provably valid than if it's popular.
Either way, mainstream media are taking note. USAToday.com now employs features for ranking and commenting on information that any social news user would find familiar, and even more staid news outlets know that the public is now permanently involved in the news conversation. Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC's World Service and Global News Division, wrote in the journal Nieman Reports that the new digital environment is "fundamentally changing our relations with the audience — how they use the new digital tools and what they expect from us… We must also help those who receive our news to contribute to our services as we witness fundamental realignment of the relationship between broadcaster and the public."
Sambrook's observation that the editor and reader can now work together symbiotically is at the heart of social editing. NewsTrust's Fabrice Florin envisions a process in which "established news publications and quality-based crowdsourcing/social news sites would partner more closely with each other, and leverage each other's expertise to further public interest." Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson says, "we don't look at the mainstream media as our competitors. We try to make them better."
But where there's traffic and open access, there's money, and the sudden popularity of social news has given rise to groups such as SubvertandProfit.com, an underground marketing company that pays Digg users with established accounts to post and digg, or vote in favor of, stories. Rumors also abound that groups of Digg users have banded together to use their votes to control the site's content.
It is a reflection of the Internet zeitgeist that Digg, which hit the public consciousness when a user posted celebrity phone numbers from Paris Hilton's stolen cell, is now willing to risk its survival to post another hack. The same near-anarchy of communication that powers these sites also keeps them in constant peril. But it is clear that social news is here to stay in some form. Once citizens get a chance to vote, they won't give it up without a fight.
