NetJourn Summit: Gannett’s experiments in crowdsourcing

Steve Safran October 10th, 2007

Moderator Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine wrote an influential article last year that brought the notion of “Crowdsourcing” into the vernacular. He spoke with three employees of Gannett, which has turned around a number of its properties into social and interactive sites with success. Jeff spoke with Gannett’s Jennifer Carroll, and MacKenzie Warren and Kate Marymount of the Ft. Myers News-Press about some of their experiments in crowdsourcing. Read on, for my messy, unfiltered notes.

Jennifer Carroll: Everything we put forward - the response, the engagement has been terrific. We look at the journalism - public engagement journalism, civic journalism - how we can make it happen.

Kate Marymount, Ft. Myers News-Press: We sued FEMA after the hurricanes of 2004. We wanted to know how FEMA distributed aid and they wouldn’t tell us. We fought a long and costly battle, which we could afford to do. We got the documents. Here’s how we turned to the public: As soon as we got the database with 2.2 million files we posted it to the database. We told the public and said “go in there and search and tell us the stories we need to investigate.” In the first 48 hours there were 60,000 searches. People saw that their neighbors’ homes got aid but they didn’t, or they got aid but their neighbors didn’t. It was a successful example of crowdsourcing.

MacKenzie Warren: We had a sewer project by a corrupt city government. We turned over the investigation to the readers. We said “we’re gonna post every primary document we can find and you tell us what you find that’s fishy.” They had 6,500 people poring through.

Moderator: These are pocketbook issues. Would people care about non-pocketbook issues?

Marymount: We have seen that this isn’t confined to the big hits - the “home run projects.” We invite people to contribute ideas every day. We have created in Southwest Florida an idea that the readers have a role in everything we do.

Warren: We have to sort out - are we happy with the result because it’s what a newspaper would do or because it’s what the readers would do. We have to understand it may be successful when it’s not what we would have done.

Carroll: Little League sports fans are very passionate. The audience is passionate and they’re showing pictures - not just of their kids - but of the other parents and you get a sense of community. We have to keep finding ways for them to engage, discuss, be treated as experts and important people wherever they are.

Audience member Will Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News; What motivates people for crowdsourcing is partisan politics. The US attorney scandal’s talking points memo, for example. Democrats who want to make Republicans bad or Republicans make the Democrats bad. That’s produced some great journalism for example. But how comfortable are you with that?

Carroll: We say bring on the debate. As long as we have the crazies, optimists and realist together, that’s great. At the same time we’re still doing our professional reporting and keeping a sense of what the dialogue should be. The vitrioloic, homophobic, racist, out-of-control chatter is something we shut down immediately. Fortunately the tools are getting better at helping us report abuse. It’s not only in racist stories - it’s in high school sports. You never know where it’s going to come up.

Audience member: How do you divide up all this labor?

One of the things we found out was that giving this a hierarchy was messy. We still don’t have all the tools we needs. We also have to accept as journalists we no longer control, when we turn to crowdsourcing, the pacing of information. The sewer story built on our website. As a bit of a control freak that made me crazy at first. When you turn it over to the public it’s messy and we don’t have all the tools yet, maybe.

Audience Member: Have you thought about allowing users to monitor other users, rate other users like Amazon does?

Carroll: Yes. We’re rolling out the tools that will allow us to do that.

Audience Member Merrill Brown: How proactive are you in reaching out to the local blogosphere?

Carroll: In the new tools we’re rolling out now, anyone can blog. It’s become an integral part of our tools.

Audience Member: You’ve mentioned new tools and processes - to what extent have they deepend you vision and shaped your editorial choices?

Marymount: By enlisting our community, our journalism is broader and deeper. We have sources we’ve never had before. The journalism we are committing only gets better. Does it still look like traditional journalism in the newspaper? Yes. But it’s better.

We consider our newsroom a laboratory where we’re always trying new things.