iReport vandals spotlight a challenge

It seems the rosier the apples, the closer one must look.

Consider this story about iReport, a poster child of mainstream media's dalliance with citizen journalism. 

CNN's iReport citizen journalism site was vandalized again last night with a false report claiming that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was "found dead in his multimillion dollar beachfront mansion" after a coke binge with "male dancers everywhere."

It's likely the work of 4chan message board goons, upset over a report that AT&T was blocking the site for its broadband customers. . . .

[The false story] highlights the risk of high-profile news organizations like CNN running citizen journalism sites.

More here.

So what got those apples bad? Was it the boorishness of a big corporation? Regardless , can citizen journalism always expect succor in a marketplace of ideas? Or is there need for a regulator within? These questions may, in themselves, contain the vandals' unintended lessons.

A sustainable model emerges: Use collective intelligence but fact-check with journalists

My quick note on sustainable journalism originally published in CCJIG's Spring 2009 newsletter:

A clichéd refrain of critics is that citizen journalists have little incentive to check for facts or fairness, or to even write well.

So is fact-checking on life support?

Consider the evidence. More and more citizen sites are hiring a professional journalist (or two or three) to edit members’ contributions. As citizen journalism matures, it seems to be increasingly turning into a method to investigate a story rather than a replacement for professional journalism.

Is that a challenge to the very premise of citizen journalism? Quite the contrary, it would seem. Take Julien Pain, founder-editor of the French cit-journalism site “Observers.” In recent media interviews, Mr. Pain says Web traffic has zoomed with the increase in perceived credibility. He says his site “takes advantage of the best aspects of a blog, but maintains professional direction.” Clearly, the site has realized enhanced value through edits by a professional.

Another example is Cynthia Farrar’s citizen journalism forum, whose tag line boasts, “People powered, professionally produced.” The site, “Purple States,” was described by one blogger as a “new media company that gathers content from citizen journalists like you, edits their videos and interviews, and delivers those packages to major media outlets.” Its teams comprise “citizen journalists. . . who travel together to report on news from the frontlines. Their journey is professionally. . . edited, and aired on a variety of major media platforms.” Purple States’ documentaries have been streamed on nyt.com, washingtonpost.com, Verizon v-cast as well as on local television.

That seems to be the emerging model: Employ a collective intelligence but fact-check using a professional. I predict it will emerge as the definition of “sustainable journalism,” a meme to explore which Leonard Witt recently got a $1.5 million gift. The model potentially enhances citizen journalism’s credibility but also creates avenues for laid-off journalists.

A citizen site that has bucked the trend is CNN’s “iReport,” which continues to declare that “the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they post.” iReport, which turned one year old February 15, has more than 25,000 reporter-members. Its virtual branch in Second Life – “our bigger, better space” as one iReporter gushed – is called iReport Island, the rapidly growing “network of 3-D citizen journalists.” iReports are also broadcast in CNN Radio feeds to “more than 1,500 affiliates in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand Aruba and Newfoundland.”

I expect that if citizen sites won’t fact-check, then others will do it for them – that is a fundamental reason why collective intelligence is a utility. For instance, check out Public-Press.org, Spot.us and Newsdesk.org. Clearly, this idea that others will do the fact-checking, has its own pitfalls given that Web users tend to frequent content which reinforces – not challenges – their attitudes. Mark Glaser of MediaShift once observed that Web traffic to non-partisan fact-check sites -- such as PolitiFact, FactCheck, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog -- is always less than the Web traffic to partisan fact-check sites -- such as Newsbusters (conservative) and Media Matters (liberal).

Besides, consider what Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute writes in a recent Time. He calls for Web users to make a “micropayment” via some sort of EZPass system which he claims would, besides saving the newspaper industry, “nourish and encourage all sorts of citizen journalism and blogging.” A consensus seems to be developing that if citizen journalism is to have monetary value, fact-checking will be inevitable.

All of it leads me to offer that we don’t have to be particularly intrepid to appreciate the emerging model – “employ a collective intelligence but fact-check using a professional” – as worthy of our group’s careful attention.

Also see: Can selling news via the Web save newspapers?
And see: Some thoughts on citizen journalism and Mumbai
And: How to add value to amateur content

Some thoughts on citizen journalism and Mumbai

Oh, what a Thanksgiving break it is proving to be.

As I sit in this oversize chair, looking out of a bay window at the Michigan snow gently drifting from the cold sky and into the gray woods, the world seems so beautiful.

But within, I feel a deep sense of hurt. Mumbai has suffered what Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution calls "a dramatic demonstration that the global jihadist syndicate based in Pakistan is still as deadly as ever."

Nearly 200 innocents have been killed in that warm, hospitable city, which was my home for more than three years in the late 1990s. Many of the victims are tourists, including 19 from foreign nations such as the United States.

The timeless Indian classic, Taittiriya Upanishad, celebrates tourists, or guests, as akin to the gods: Atithi devo bhava. If only terrorists read the classics.

Oh, maybe they do. Just different ones.

As for me, for four days now, I have been a veritable prisoner of hi-def television and hi-res laptop. It has been a high, a somewhat deprecating one. Nostalgia about my own years in the newsroom consumes me: Deadlines, bylines, leads. Those were the days.

The 24-hour news market –– CNN, MSNBC, Fox –– offers live footage punctuated with relays by Indian broadcast journalists Rajdeep Sardesai (CNN-IBN), Barkha Dutt (NDTV), Arnab Goswami (Times Now) and others.

I notice a special place for citizen journalists in the coverage. For instance Dina Mehta is an early interviewee on CNN. Arun Shanbhag finds mention in the New York Times.

And let it be a matter of record: I am now officially a fan of Twitter. At one time Thursday I was counting a hundred "tweets" a minute! All live. All from south Mumbai. All from the heart. (Some from the mind too.)

Twitter's micro-posts, each of 140 characters or less, have intensely reported the action, particularly events at the Taj Mahal Hotel and Leopold Cafe (which used to be, along with Kailash Parbat near Nariman House, my favorite hangout in Colaba), at the Oberoi on Marine Drive, at Cama & Albless Hospital on Mahapalika Marg. I see that Mathew Ingram has declared Twitter to be "a source of journalism." At one time the Indian government is reported to have called for a lull in Twitter's live updates in order to protect the commandos' strategy. As Forbes puts it, Mumbai is "Twitter's moment."

But Twitter is not the only star platform. Vinukumar Ranganathan's shots on Flickr offer some of the finest early pictures from south Mumbai. The bloggers at Mumbai Help offer realtime comments of community, condolence and consolidation. Others, such as Gaurav Mishra, offer aggregations of the best of the blog action.

Then there are the networking sites. Wikipedia's page for the events reminds me of the super-hit toy poodle pup which grows before your very eyes. GroundReport boasts multiple amateur reporters who are paid by the traffic their stories bring. NowPublic, of the "crowd powered media" tag, has some pretty impressive multimedia coverage. So does CNN's iReport ("Unedited. Unfiltered. News.") There are other sorts of victims too: The netizen demand seemed to have crashed Mahalo’s servers Sunday.

Mumbai's bloggers seem to have leaped from the footnotes into the narrative.

I'm no security expert but Mumbai’s terrorist attacks suggest that, in large countries, pursuing national security via centralized command may not serve dense urban areas susceptible to guerrilla tactics. Besides, as Newsweek reports, Mumbai’s authorities clearly “flunked the intelligence test.” Ratan Tata, whose company owns the Taj hotel, says Mumbai has little “crisis infrastructure” in place.

So here’s another thought. Do bloggers byting their observations serve as the eyes and ears of the citizenry? Are bloggers who use their homes as newsrooms, their computers as teleprinters, and the Web as preferred medium, veritably offering themselves up as intelligence assets? If so why not use them as such? After all bloggers constitute, to use Stephen Cooper's lexicon, a “fifth estate” –– which self-respecting blogger considers himself or herself to be merely "audience"? Mumbai's intelligence authorities should seriously consider vetting chosen bloggers for their potential to disseminate information; perhaps just pay closer attention to certain citizen reports which might help preempt future attacks.

If "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," as Jawaharlal Nehru warned seven decades back, then roping in motivated, networked bloggers with a nose for news might be a common sense way to gather intelligence. Besides, doing so might offer an innovative check on state power by substituting the need for any new federal intelligence agency –– who wants more prying, interfering, bureaucracies anyway?

At this time what soothes me is –– strangely –– an analysis Salman Rushdie, the clever writer who survived a death fatwā, offered at Central Michigan last month: “There’s no such thing as security. There are only different levels of insecurity. The moment you accept that, it sets you free.”

Nikhil Moro, Ph.D.