“We’ve done this before,” said CNN.com vice president Mitch Gelman, referring to so-called citizen journalists and user generated content.
“They used to be called stringers.”
Such was the tone of Monday’s Knight Digital Media Center discussion “It’s a Conversation, Stupid: Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, UGC and Journalism,” hosted at USC Annenberg.
As it turned out, there wasn’t much “stupid” to go around, either in the audience or the panel. Gelman, along with Yahoo News editor-in-chief Neil Budde, Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson and Kinsey Wilson of USAToday.com were pretty much preachers addressing a converted choir. It wasn’t a question of whether online interactivity and talkback were worth incorporating into the way news is reported, it was a question of when, how and with what vetting process.
The panel began by presenting a few examples of what didn’t work: the L.A. Times’ 2005 reader wikitorial experiment that lasted two days before collapsing under the weight of user-posted pr0n, following a referral from Slashdot. Neil Budde said that a similar fiasco caused Yahoo News to shut down its forum features.
Budde then pulled up a slide of a Google search for his name, with “Neil Budde sucks” being the top list item. So, clearly, user talkback is going to happen whether the professional news dot-coms facilitate it or not.
Anonymity versus persistent identity
“What’s the right amount of anonymity [on a site] to get validity as a poster?” asked Budde. The panelists agreed that the push and pull between a user’s desire to post anonymously versus the site’s interest in culling out trolls creates a unique dilemma, one that increasingly complex software can solve.
“We wanted a sort of universal credibility meter,” said Davidson. “Until that exists, things like Open ID and other technologies create portable reputations.” Newsvine’s system puts new users into a holding pen, called the “Greenhouse” where they post and debate and the good seeds naturally separate from the bad. Senior users help junior users “graduate” to the main content area.
“We want to differentiate the good from the bad in new users,” he aid. “But you can’t just pay attention to the good, you have to carefully monitor the new.” Unlike eBay’s user rating system, which has been shown to shut out new users from transactions, he said his site is good at assessing who will become a “valuable” contributor.
Metrics such as page view time, frequency of views, traffic habits and so forth help them build a picture of each user and decide whether or not to reward him or her with content-creation privileges.
“I can’t reveal all of it,” he said, in regard to his site’s user-profiling techniques. “If I did, it would be too easy to game.”
An army of photographers?
CNN.com’s Gelman pointed to a number of examples of his news network’s ability to get fresh, breaking and legit images quickly, thanks to “iReporters,” users who post material themselves.
The recent political upheaval in Myanmar, the so-called “Saffron Rebellion,” presented a challenge for CNN because they had no reporters in the country at the time. Yet, images of the conflict began rolling into the website–material that no other networks had. They decided to run with them.
“You have to balance the possibility that it may be wrong with the importance of getting (the pictures) out there. After they passed the threshold of authenticity, we put them on the Web and on air.”
One audience member asked about profit sharing: “Aren’t these citizen journalists doing your job for you, for free?”
Gelman said no, that in certain circumstances, as in the Virginia Tech shootings where CNN used Nokia cellphone video taken by Jamal Albarghouti, his network does pay for UGC. And handsomely, too. But the vetting process, as well as quality control concerns, are quite serious, he said. [OJR smelled trouble way back when, though. Visit the archives here.]
Questions within questions
Moderator Michelle Nicolosi, managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (and its website) and former editor of OJR, boiled it down to what she called “The Big Giant Question.”
“Should newspapers and their websites have the same brand? The same quality level? How heavily should they maintain filters? Are they doing a service or disservice [by allowing uncontrolled online content]?”
USAToday.com’s Kinsey Wilson said “there needs to be some commonality; we have about a 50-percent overlap. You have to play to the strengths of the medium, though. One of the interesting conversations we have is the question of quality: how do you maintain credibility and what role does speed play in credibility?”
Gelman: “Trust is the bond with the audience. At CNN we call ourselves ‘the most trusted name in news,’ and according to studies by Pew, that’s true. But if you look a little closer, you see that there’s not a lot of trust of journalism. How do you redefine what trust is–there are different expectations now–a different standard of trust. Part of the opportunity for us was to figure out what our audience demands. Authority or authenticity?”
Each panelist seemed to agree that more journalists, citizen or otherwise, on the streets equals better news. “We can’t be everywhere at once,” said Wilson.
Gelman agreed: “Ninety percent of being a journalist is showing up.”
About Noah Barron
