Nov 28th, 2006 | Social Media | 4 Comments
Oprah, the billionaire “queen of all media,” reached out to the Internet for help with a recent show — or to stir up some publicity for a recent show, depending on how you look at it. She posted a question to Yahoo Answers, which is a kind of “wisdom of the crowds” site in which people ask questions and then others answer, and anyone can vote on which answers they like the best. The question was “What would you do with $1,000 to change the life of a perfect stranger?”
Here’s the intro that someone at the Oprah show wrote:
You may have heard about the concept of paying it forward — the idea of doing something meaningful to help someone else without asking for anything in return. So, if you were given $1,000 with the understanding that it had to be used to help others, how would you use the money and why? To see how others turned these endless possibilities into amazing results, watch Monday’s “Oprah.”
Just a cynical attempt at boosting ratings for a show, right? Except that Oprah’s question got more than 31,000 responses in just a few days, some of which were heartbreakingly personal. The number one response according to readers? “Give it to Christian Blind Mission International… for example, $33 will heal a father or mother of blindness from cataracts. $200 will do the same for a child.” Some details from the actual show are here.
Oprah’s question got the most responses Yahoo Answers has ever gotten on a question, beating the previous record set by another celebrity: Dr. Stephen Hawking — the author of “A Brief History of Time” and the man who holds the Lucasian chair in Mathematics at Cambridge, once held by Sir Isaac Newton — who asked how the human race could survive the next 100 years. He got about 25,000 responses.
Nov 7th, 2006 | Citizen Media, Social Media | No Comments
Jeff Howe, the contributing writer for Wired who wrote a recent piece on Gannett moving to user-generated content (or “crowdsourcing”) which I wrote about here, takes a look at some of the responses to the piece — both positive and negative — in a new post on his blog. In another post, he descrbes how the process by which the Wired story evolved was very much like the way journalism itself is evolving:
To wit: A magazine article inspired a major policy shift at a corporation, which I discovered in doing some reporting for a blog entry a month ago. This led to a scoop I was able to take to my magazine’s Web site. I then used the blog to provide supplementary materials.
And those blog posts in turn, he says, allowed him to provide readers with a peek at the “factual framework” for the article, and also drew readers to the blog, which should produce more tips, ideas and contacts for further stories in both print and online version of Wired magazine.
In a more recent post, Howe describes how the Cincinnati Journal has set up a page where anyone can report problems they’ve had voting or getting registered to vote in the U.S. elections, complete with a Google map that shows the different locations and has popup explanations such as “Enquirer reporter and photographer threatened with arrest while trying to cover U.S. House Majority Leader John Boehner.” Pretty interesting stuff.
Nov 4th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
There have been plenty of announcements over the past few months of newspapers merging their print and online operations (like the London Telegraph) or pushing their staff to do other things such as multimedia, blogs, etc. (like Business 2.0 magazine requiring all of its writers to start blogging). Now Gannett has said that its newsrooms will now become “information centers.”
What does Gannett mean by that? Although the term is sure to be the subject of much derision from newsroom veterans — and it definitely has a kind of 1984-ish feel to it — the idea seems to be to get away from the newsroom as the place where news is created (which has never really been the case) to looking at it as a place where reporters and editors filter all kinds of information that readers/viewers/listeners might want, including information that comes from “the people formerly known as the audience,” as Jay Rosen likes to call them.
This latter concept was dubbed “crowdsourcing” by Wired magazine (which has a story about Gannett’s move here), and involves being open to contributions from non-journalists, whether those contributions are stories, pictures, contacts or just opinions. This is the kind of thing that many outlets, including the BBC, dabble in from time to time. But Gannett wants to make it a staple of its news-gathering process, and has already seen the benefits.
According to the Gannett memo announcing the initiative, pilot projects in a number of locations have seen positive feedback in a number of ways:
What they found is remarkable: Breaking news on the Web and updating for the newspaper draws more people to both those media. Asking the community for help, gets it - and delivers the newspaper into the heart of community conversations once again.
As Doug Fisher describes it in his excellent post: “The palpable arrogance in too many modern newsrooms — that somehow we are above it all and are indispensible to our readers/viewers/users/customers — has got to go. We aren’t, and they could care less. We squandered much of that public support long ago. We continue to do so.” Gannett is trying to find a different way, and they should get some props for doing so.
Update:
Jeff Howe, who wrote the piece for Wired on Gannett’s move to crowdsource news, has more details on his blog about crowdsourcing. Hat tip to PaidContent for the link. And Tim at eBiquity says (quite rightly) that this kind of initiative is great, provided it isn’t just an excuse for getting by with fewer journalists. Greg Yardley wonders whether such a system wouldn’t be open to “gaming,” and my friend Rob Hyndman notes that in some cases he would rather have Pulitzer Prize winners on the ground reporting a story rather than “pyjamas media.” And Drums ‘n Whistles says there are risks to crowdsourcing too.
Oct 21st, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
In a recent post, Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web put together a good overview of four of the main “social news” services that are out there: Digg, Reddit, Netscape and Newsvine (for the uninitiated, Digg.com is a phenomenally popular site where users can vote links up or down based on popularity, Reddit.cm is very similar but smaller, Netscape.com is the revamped AOL service run by Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. that moved to a Digg-style format, and Newsvine.com is a service run by several former journalists that blends news, commentary and voting. It’s worth checking out Richard’s analysis.
