Crowdsourcing or Citizen Journalism?

Dennis Ryerson, editor of the Indianapolis Star, wrote a column this week: We have new sources of expertise: you that explains some of the new Gannett strategy.

He writes:

Traditionally, reporters go to official sources and spend a lot of time digging out public documents to prepare news stories. We spend hours searching for people who may be affected by the decisions of school officials, city leaders, and others whose work affects our lives.

One thing we haven’t done much of is this: Ask.

We rarely if ever ask for the public’s help when we research an important issue such as operation of the Marion County coroner’s office (now under investigation by the prosecutor’s office) or what’s happening with the county’s troubled juvenile detention center.
Why? In part, because the highly competitive nature of our business — we want to be first with the most — makes us reluctant to tip off our TV, weekly print and online competitors to what we are doing.

And in part, it may be because of professional arrogance. We know what we are doing and we don’t need your help, thank you very little.

That has to change. Readers have a great deal of information and experiences and we’d like them to share those things with us. So in the future, we will be more open about asking for your help.

This sounds an awful lot like Dan Gillmor’s famous “my readers know more than I do” idea of citizen journalism, under a different name. Ryerson’s column delves into a couple of the thornier issues surrounding such citizen journalism… crowdsourcing… networked journalism, er, whatever it is. Still, the idea of asking your audience to join you in a conversation about the news and how it’s investigated, reported and shaped is a good one, and one we should be exploring more in college media organizations.

No doubt, it will take work. The people who get paid to do this stuff are still trying to figure it out. But that’s why college media should be doing it: it’s experimental. As Ralph Braseth has been known to say, “If you can’t experiment in college, when can you?”

If anyone knows of attempts at citizen journalism/crowdsourcing at a college media outlet, let me know. I’d love to talk to the folks behind it so we can all figure this out.

Ryerson link via Doug Fisher.

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