Crowd-sourcing in News Generation

In an effort to sift through the growing amount of data available to them, many professional journalists have turned to crowd-sourcing as a means of analyzing big data sets. WikiLeaks has been doing this since its inception, relying on the internet at large to find meaning in the hundreds of thousands of documents they leak. But some sites, like The Guardian, have taken a more calculated approach, creating an interface for their readers to analyze documents page by page and find pages that they should look at more closely.

Taking crowd-sourcing somewhat to the extreme, some newspapers have experimented with moving towards fully crowd-sourcing their news gathering operations, and as newspapers' revenues continue to plummet, this model seems more and more appealing as a cost-cutting measure. Gannett, publisher of around 90 daily newspapers in the U.S., including USA Today, started moving towards a fully crowd-sourced model as long ago as 2006, and other newspapers have followed suit since then.

But what's most interesting in this space is sites that are using crowd-sourcing to do completely new things, not just to cut costs. Ushahidi, in my opinion, is one of the most compelling examples of this. Ushahidi allows people around the world to contribute original information and data and synthesizes this in meaningful ways. For example, during a crisis in Kenya, Ushahidi was used by citizens around the country to report where acts of violence had occurred and where people were gathering to protest. Ushahidi's platform was able to map these locations out and synthesize data on the overall trends being reported. Something like this would be impossible to pull off via traditional methods, and because citizens are passionate about a topic like this, they are very willing to contribute their time and knowledge for the greater good.

People have just begun to explore the possibilities that crowd-sourcing holds for news generation online. So far no single model for crowd-sourcing has stuck in news generation, but I think we can be fairly certain that crowd-sourcing, in some form, will be around for a long time to come.