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The Wisdom of the Crowd Resides in How the
Crowd Is Used
‘… the animating idea—our readers know more than we do—is evolving into
something that, if used wisely, will be far more efficient and useful than our
first, early attempts at this new form of journalism.’
BY JEFF HOWE
Our presidential election was
indeed historic, but not just
for the reasons emblazoned
in headlines throughout the world. It
was also the most closely monitored
election in U.S. history, as everyone
from CNN to The Huffington Post to
Harvard University asked people to
document their voting experience and
provide instant reports on problems
at the polls. Thousands responded,
sending in text messages, photographs,
videos and even voice mails. The
resulting data were aggregated and
displayed—in real time—on maps, in
charts, and over RSS feeds.
All of this activity signaled a small
but significant advance in the use of
crowdsourcing as a new tool in digital
journalism. While crowdsourcing, or
citizen journalism, has been widely
embraced by all manner of news operations
over the past several years, its
track record has been decidedly spotty.
In theory, crowdsourcing offers outlets
like newspapers and newscasts and
Web sites an opportunity to improve
their reporting, bind their audiences
closer to their brands, and reduce
newsroom overhead. In reality, relying
on readers to produce news content
has proved to be a nettlesome—and
costly—practice.
I coined the word “crowdsourcing”
in a Wired magazine article published
in June 2006, 1 though at that time I
didn’t focus on its use in journalism.
It was—and is—defined as the act of
taking a job once performed by em-
ployees and outsourcing it to a large,
undefined group of people via an open
call, generally over the Internet. Back
then I explored the ways TV networks,
photo agencies, and corporate R&D
departments were harnessing the efforts
of amateurs. I had wanted to
include journalism in the piece, but
there was a dearth of examples.
That quickly changed. Not long after
Wired published this article the term
began to seep into the pop cultural
lexicon, and news organizations started
to experiment with reader-generated
1 Howe’s article, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” can be read at www.wired.com/wired/
archive/14.06/crowds.html.
New Venues
content. Around this time, some of the
more memorable moments in journalism
had been brought to us not by a
handful of intrepid reporters, but by
a legion of amateur photographers,
bloggers and videographers. When a
massive tsunami swept across the resort
beaches of Thailand and Indonesia,
those “amateurs” who were witness
to it sent words and images by any
means they could. When homegrown
terrorists set off a series of bombs on
buses and subways in London, those
at the scene used their cell phone
cameras to transmit horrifying images.
Hurricane Katrina reinforced
this trend: As water rose and then
receded, journalists—to say nothing
of the victims’ families—relied on
information and images supplied by
those whose journalistic accreditation
started and ended with the accident
of their geographical location.
With these events, the news media’s
primary contribution was to
provide the dependable Web forum
on which people gathered to distribute
information. By late 2006, the stage
seemed set for the entrance of “citizen
journalism,” in which inspired and
thoughtful amateurs would provide
a palliative for the perceived abuses
of the so-called mainstream media.
These were heady times, and a spirit
of optimism—what can’t the crowd
do?—seemed to pervade newsrooms
as well as the culture at large.
At Wired, we were no less susceptible
to the zeitgeist. In January 2007, we
Nieman Reports | Winter 2008 47