Quake illustrates power of grassroots reporting

By Robert Niles. Posted: 2005-06-14

The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 27,000 Southern California residents reported on Sunday morning's 5.6-magnitude earthquake, using forms on the U.S. Geological Survey's website.

The Did You Feel It? feature allows residents to answer a variety of questions about what they felt and the damage they've witnessed, all which help seismologists gauge the intensity of a quake in the reader's location.

"The machines can tell us what the ground did. But only people can tell us what it did to them," seismologist David Wald of the geological survey in Golden, Colo. told The Times. "I call it citizen science. You couldn't do it without the people."

Call it citizen science or citizen journalism (or grassroots journalism, etc.). Either way, the episode provides another example of the power of the Internet to gather information from a massive number of sources almost instantly.

Comments:

From Jon Garfunkel on June 14, 2005 at 10:26 PM

One thing is for sure: there's no better indicator of claims of populist media triumphalism than an earthquake.

After all, nothing is more guaranteed to get an online journalist out of his or her chair than a rubbing of tectonic plates in their vicinity.

Robert, as long as you want to be clear about vocabulary, let's clarify this. What the USGS has done is online data gathering. If we want to give it an expansive name, let's call it aggregatable declarations. That's my term to encompass what is done by voting, surveys, petitions, Amazon, epinions, etc.

But the "grassroots journalism" which has been professed by Gillmor, Rosen, et al has never been about data aggregation, it's been about doing actually discursive writing-- the type that is doesn't lend itself to aggregation. It's been about having conversations, but the earthquake data submissions weren't conversations in the slightest. In fact, the more impersonal it is, the more people can participate. It just appears, even to blogging pressmen, that is insulting to journalists that anything related to information gathering is called journalism. Why not call it "grassroots surveys"? The pollsters have escaped much of the populist rage
that's been directed at the media.

If we agree that aggregatable declarations are a good thing, then we would push to develop technology to support such. I work on it as a Drupal module; and I suppose that the other major blogging and CMS software will
get around to it someday. Of course such software can be used by journalists.

From Robert Niles on June 15, 2005 at 10:48 AM

Data-gathering is the core of all journalism. Without information, there is no journalism -- just speculation... or fiction.

Grassroots journalism can involve readers on multiple levels, from contributing data to final storytelling. I'm confident that Gillmor, Rosen, et al, would contest your position that their work has "never been about data aggregation."

From Jon Garfunkel on June 15, 2005 at 5:42 PM

I don't doubt they'd contest it either. There's a way of continually morphing this definition. It didn't make Steve Outing's layers, but there's room for a twelfth. If this were truly valued, you'd see more people write about, and more interest in developing software to support it.