Crowdsourcing is expensive, but it's worth it, networked journalism event is told

It’s easy to underestimate the cost of  inviting the public to be involved in journalism, but the cost may be worth it,  panelists at at networked-journalism summit suggest. 

“It’s vastly expensive to invite people to come to your website and participate,”  says RobHamman, of the British Broadcasting Corp.  If you invite people to submit material directly to a professional news site, there are vast legal, hardware and content-moderation expenses, he said.  If you ask people to email contributions, a fire-hose of submissions results, and it takes a lot of staff time to review and select material.

As a result, says Hamman, he thinks it may make more sense of news organizations to devote time to training citizens to do and post their own journalism on their own websites. Then news organizations should link to it, comment on it, or otherwise augment it.   “I think news organizations do have to do more cheerleading – informing people how to create things and put them online and then for look for them.  We have to understand how to find the signal and then know what to do about it."

"The sweet spot is marrying the discipline of professional  journalism to the sort of  energy from bottom up flow of  the combination of users and citizens,” said Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor.  "An open platform editorial system is completely antithetical to the way a  professional newsroom organization has worked for an entire generation."  There was an idea, said Rosen, that letting the public in would “spoil the news.”  He said that’s changing.

Gannett Co. has embraced letting the public into the news process as a concept. Inc., the nation’s largest newspaper chain, said Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s top strategist for web services.  “We are in the middle of an incredible transition.” She added later: “From what we hear, our credibility is now measured in multiplicity of voices . . .  it’s messy . . .  but at the same time we are never backing away from the professional side."

Hamman, Rosen and Carroll  spoke at the Networked Journalism Summit in New York on Oct. 10, 2006. The event, organized by the new journalism program at the City University of New York, took places in the TimesCenter auditorium of the new New York Times building.