A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

the cheaper early morning alternative after concluding, “We need to find a way to do
this.”
Putting the Power of the Crowd to Work
News organizations are not the only outfits putting their customers to work for
them. Jeff Howe, a contributing writer at Wired magazine, coined the term,
“crowdsourcing” and wrote a book about “why the power of the crowd is driving the
future of business.” Before you invite users to help you report a story, study his 10 rules
of crowdsourcing, especially No. 6: “Keep it Simple and Break it Down.” 128
Some of the problems raised by journalism partnerships involve culture and
practice—”that’s not how we do things around here”—and some go to more serious
issues of journalism values.
Amanda Michel, who headed the Off The Bus reporting program for the Huffington
Post during the 2008 presidential campaign, gathered a team of more than 12,000 people
interested in helping the site report the election story. Among the OTB coverage that
caught the attention of mainstream news outlets was its account of candidate Barack
Obama’s comments about “bitter” voters who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy for
people who aren’t like them.” 129
That sort of coverage from the campaign trail coverage was not typical, however, of
most of the work by OTB volunteers. Just 14 percent of OTB’s 12,000 volunteers
expressed interest in writing articles. Others said they were more interested in looking at
Federal Election Commission files or other public records that worked well for that kind
of networked reporting.
Michel said she learned to be quite clear about the standards the site would uphold.
“A lot of people who haven’t worked with volunteers are nervous about setting
standards,” Michel told a brown‐bag lunch at the Shorenstein Center. She said people
are worried that “if you reject someone’s work, if you tell them they have to do it again,
that people will lose interest.”
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