Kate Jaimet's Blog - Posts Tagged "crowd-sourcing"

A friend of mine is a web developer for a major urban daily newspaper. The city where he works has about two dozen food trucks, which serve a variety of edibles – from the traditional hot-dogs-and-fries to more exotic salads, wraps and soup -- to the hungry crowds of downtown office workers. So my friend came up with a great idea: why not create an interactive map that would allow readers to see the locations of the various food trucks and, by clicking on each food truck icon, pull up pictures and reviews – submitted by other readers -- of that day’s edible offerings.

Just had a fabulous falafel at #muhammedsmediterraneandelights.
Ugh! Too much salt on #pierrespalatablepoutine.

It may sound like a mundane or trivial idea, but this is the kind of crowd-sourced concept that makes the eyes of today’s cash-strapped newspaper managers light up, because it features the holy grail that they all seek: Free Content.

Of course, it hurts the professional pride of writers (like myself) to think that the content hurriedly texted on his cell phone by some Joe getting lunch at the food truck could be as appealing to readers as our own carefully honed and crafted prose. But that’s irrelevant. All the professional pride in the newsroom plus five bucks will get you a shawarma at Muhammed’s Mediterranean Delights. The executives seeking some kind of business model that will keep traditional media companies afloat in the turbulence of today’s digital ocean couldn’t give the proverbial rat’s ass for their reporters’ professional pride.

And there’s another aspect that makes this idea so appealing. A website like this one is likely to be hugely popular with readers. Imagine you’re a hungry office worker. It’s 12:30 and you’re just thinking about popping down to street level for your lunch break. Why not take a quick peek to see what other people are recommending among today’s street-food offerings? Maybe you’ll even join the conversation and post a picture and review of your own lunch. Lots of people clicking on the site means lots of revenue coming in from digital ads – and everybody’s happy.


Everybody’s happy, that it, until Jane Q. Office Worker posts a comment: “Just got food poisoning from the butter chicken at Muhammed’s Mediterranean Delights. Barfing all afternoon.” People stay away in droves, and Muhammed, who swears there was nothing wrong with his butter chicken, decides to sue for libel. But he won’t sue Jane, who doesn’t have much money. He’ll sue the deep-pocketed news organization that allowed the comment to be posted on its site.

So, for the brilliant idea to work, the newspaper needs to assign someone to vet all the comments that come in – there might be hundreds a day – and post them in near-real time to the website. Of course, the newspaper, which has been cutting back staff for the past decade, doesn’t have such a person readily available, and can’t afford to hire one. But it does have writers (remember those people nursing their wounded pride back in the newsroom). So the managers ask themselves the question: Does it make more financial sense for the newspaper to employ a relatively highly-paid journalist to write, perhaps, one or two food-related stories and reviews a day? Or does it make more sense to employ a lesser-paid intern or junior copyeditor to vet the comments and reviews coming in from dozens or hundreds of readers?

The example of food trucks may seem trivial. But this is a question that strikes at the existential heart of newspapers today.

As newspapers move more and more toward digital platforms, will they continue to be what they have traditionally been: organizations that employ dedicated journalists to investigate and break stories; provide objective coverage of public institutions; report on current news events; write profiles of extraordinary people in our communities; and offer insightful opinion and analysis?

Or, will digital newspapers become curators of vast amounts of crowd-sourced content, content that is more rough around the edges, less crafted and polished, perhaps more biased and error-prone than the stories in traditional newspapers, yet which offers a diversity of views and a speed of reporting impossible to achieve in conventional media models?

I don’t know what the answer is. In fact, I’ve never asked myself the question this bluntly.

But speaking to my web-developer friend, I know it’s a question that all of us -- journalists, editors, and newspaper executives – have to face.

We might as well face it head-on.