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uption in a sewage utility in a town
in Florida—Gannett decided to export
this model to its other newspapers. 4
Readers (a.k.a. community members)
would also play a significant newsroom
role in the renamed “community
desk,” which would oversee everything
from blogs to news articles written
by readers.
In reporting on Gannett’s strategy, I
chose to focus on how the changes were
being implemented at one paper, The
Cincinnati Enquirer. One indication
of how the newsroom was changing
was the shift in job responsibilities.
A longtime metro reporter, Linda
Parker, had recently been reassigned
as “online communities editor.” Every
Enquirer Web page prominently featured
the words “Get Published” as a
way of eliciting stories, comments and
anything else Cincinnatians might feel
compelled to submit. It all landed in
Parker’s queue; perhaps not surprisingly,
these words and videos never
have resembled anything commonly
considered journalism.
Even figuring out how best to prompt
contributors has revealed valuable lessons
to those at the Enquirer—ones
that other news organizations can learn
from. “It used to read, ‘Be a Citizen
Journalist,’” Parker told me. “And no
one ever clicked on it. Then we said,
‘Tell Us Your Story,’ and still nothing.
For some reason, ‘Get Published’ were
the magic words.”
Now, nearly two years into the
experiment, the Enquirer considers
this feature to be an unequivocal
success. I sat with Parker, a cheerful
woman in her mid-50’s, in April of
last year as she pored over several
dozen submissions she had received
that day. There was one written by a
local custom car builder trumpeting
his upcoming appearance on a BET
show, and another, expressing with the
intensity of emotional passion befitting
the circumstance, is a notice for
a play being held to raise funds for a
fifth-grader’s bone marrow
transplant. Parker
almost never rejects
anything she receives,
though she scans each
one for “the F-word,”
and then posts it to the
site. “A few years ago
these would have come
across the transom as
press releases and been
ignored,” she says.
This observation
points to a central
problem with Gannett’s
strategy—indeed, with
both the hyperlocal and
crowdsourcing movements in general.
Readers are content to leave the gritty
aspects of reporting to journalists;
they prefer to focus on content and
storytelling that Nicholas Lemann,
dean of the Graduate School of Journalism
at Columbia University, once
characterized in The New Yorker as
being the equivalent of the contents
of a church newsletter.
As it turns out, Tom Callinan, the
Enquirer’s editor, observed a while into
the project “even ‘Get Published’ was
too newspaperlike in its sound. People
don’t want to get published. They want
to ‘share.’” And so this is what the
Web site’s button now encourages its
readers to do. The results continue, as
Callinan says, to tend toward “pretty
fluffy stuff.”
Lessons Learned
So what are we to take away from
these experiments? Readers are very
interested in playing a role in the
creation of their local media. They
don’t necessarily want to write the
news; what they want is to engage
in a conversation. This doesn’t mean,
however, that they don’t have valuable
contributions to make. This fall,
Callinan told me, readers shared with
others on the Enquirer Web site news
4 Betty Wells, special projects editor at The News-Press, wrote about the newspaper’s
use of crowdsourcing for the Spring 2008 issue of Nieman Reports in an article
entitled, “Using Expertise From Outside the Newsroom,” which can be read at www.
nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100085.
New Venues
about a stabbing at a local strip club
and a photograph of a theater fire.
“We were able to confirm the stabbing,”
he said. “We would have never
known about it without the tip.” It
might not be grist for a Pulitzer, but
it fills the copy hole.
Nor were these key lessons lost on
those of us involved in Assignment
Zero. In fact, Assignment Zero’s community
manager, Amanda Michel,
employed the lessons of what didn’t
work adeptly at her next venture, directing
The Huffington Post’s effort,
Off the Bus, with its citizen-generated
coverage of the presidential campaign.
Rather than duplicate what journalists
were doing, Off the Bus leveraged its
strength—namely, the size of its network
of 12,000 “reporters.” With citizen
correspondents spread across the nation
and ready to attend smaller rallies,
fundraisers and get-out-the-vote
events that the national press ignored,
Off the Bus found its niche.
Off the Bus became arguably the
first truly successful example of crowdsourced
journalism with some of its
citizen reporters breaking national
stories. Perhaps its most significant
story was about the moment when
Barack Obama, at a nonpress event
fundraiser in San Francisco, made
his famous comment about how rural
Nieman Reports | Winter 2008 49