The June issue of Wired magazine coined an interesting buzzword: "crowdsourcing." It's like outsourcing, but with a large number of unpaid or low-paid amateurs.
For Mike Tippett, it forms the basis of what he wants to accomplish. NowPublic.com, the Vancouver-based news site he built on that notion, is the result. It opened for business on the Web a little more than a year ago, and is now ramping up its marketing and outreach.
"What I want to accomplish is simple," he said. "I want to build the largest news organization in the world."
So far, Tippett can claim some 30,000 reporters, who are really not more than registered contributing members working without a newsroom and on their own deadlines. They can write and post their news stories, cellphone-camera pictures or videos, or something they read on-line elsewhere (with attribution) about what they consider to be important news. One New York City woman produces professional-looking man-in-the-street interviews, and posts them on the site.
Essentially, it's a marriage of social networking and blogging, with a the shimmer of up-to-the-minute news.
Tippet throws around words such as "citizen journalism" and "democracy," saying he does not interfere with posters — no editor filters it, and nothing is taken down (unless it violates the law). What original content members post on NowPublic.com is covered by Creative Commons, a copyright licensing system developed for the digital world that allows copyright holders to set their own terms.
It's the journalism equivalent of open-source software, such as Linux, which relies on an unorganized and unpaid army of developers, each contributing to the quality of the product. It worked for software, and it's working for Wikipedia.org, so why not news?
Yet citizen journalism as it has been understood so far has an Achilles heel: Trust. The way most citizen journalism is conceived, stories are written without verification by unknown writers who carry little authority, if any. Mainstream journalists, the ones most threatened by citizen journalism, have long considered the lack of accuracy, trust, authority or reliability the weaknesses of "citizen journalism."
But citizen journalism is gaining a foothold on the Web — Sourcewatch.org lists 32 such websites — mainly because people have learned that they must develop a healthy skepticism about what they read, coupled with a mistrust of traditional media.
It's his approach to crowdsourcing, Tippett says, that citizen journalism develops its trust. NowPublic.com brings back the traditional notion of a hierarchy of news stories, but this time stories are ranked by the site's members. The more comments added to a story, he says, the greater importance it develops, and the higher up it goes on the site. Moreover, a story gains authority as more people support it, Tippett says. "It's the power of the crowd."
Many blog sites could argue the same, but what sets NowPublic.com apart is the way visitors can read the news. It can be sorted by importance — a front-page approach — or by freshness or by popularity. For instance, after I started writing this story, a small plane had crashed into a building in New York, and the Associated Press version of the story appeared on NowPublic.com minutes later. Two hours later, it was still the top story, with 475 views and two comments. Shortly after, a member called "jenblossom" posted a photo of the resulting fire, taken from her office window.
Another interesting concept Tippet has created is linkage with bloggers — people who post their own blogs on NowPublic.com will get a link back to their own blogs, where others' comments will appear automatically as they do at NowPublic.com. The effect brings new visitors to both sites, increasing traffic.
All this, Tippet hopes, will attract masses of visitors, and with them will come advertising, which will provide the revenue stream. The ad-supported site will remain free.
