Collaborative News : A Study

Web version

It has taken some time, but a web version with links to individual sections is now available courtesy of The Center for Citizen's Media. 

The Hype vs. Reality vs. What People Value: Collaborative News Model Study

After a relatively frantic month, I am finally posting my survey results.   The paper should also be available in html format soon on the Center for Citizen Media's website.  Some highlights:

Their Side of the Story: Summarizing

So what is the reality compared to the hype about these collaborative news websites and their
future? According to their current users:

1. These websites provide unique, valued information for their communities. It’s not so much about the soapbox, as it is about the entertainment box, info box, and voting box. On net, they are perceived as faster, more mixed source and better highlighters of under-covered topics. [Details: p24-26 Why Do They Seek Here: Primary Uses, and p26-27 Trading Off: What Do Users Most Value]

2. People are ready for fuzzy credibility (if not too much). They take info with a grain of salt, watch the warning opinion signs, and make their own judgment calls. Moreover concerns are partly balanced by a new kind of credibility -- an ethos about the goals of the sites, such that even if they do not trust a good chunk of the audience, they trust the site and community as a whole. Part of that ethos is generated by a sense of ownership at the voting box. In part, it is in response to transparency and openness. And in part, it is due to the idea of accountability to no one but the public. (That last piece threatens to be tested as bigger players and associated advertising enters). [Details: p28 Credibility, and p37-42 Perceived Strengths over MSM]

3. There is a new definition for what qualifies as an “expert” for news. Professional and life experiences count, and especially for specialized topics, can count much more than a traditional press pass. People still want “editors” and “experts” but are open to different providers. [Details: p37-42 Perceived Strengths over MSM]

4. Moreover news’ value is not solely about scooping an original story (although these websites sometimes beat traditional news media there). Currently, most postings still refer to existing stories, but what has become possible is a mash-up more comprehensive than any single source. For example, embedded in any one Wikinews story can be links to articles from the BBC, New York Times, and Washington Post, interspersed with links to blogs, additional context from Wikipedia, an associated report from a nonprofit or governmental agency, not to mention a connected comment/discussion thread. This remixes content in one place and ina way distinct from traditional news media providers. [Details: p37-42 Perceived Strengths over MSM]

5. Not everyone reads the details, much less contributes to creating it, but they do value the potential it creates. Sites that recognize these nuances develop features to address that continuum of involvement (to more easily ignore noise, find noise, judge noise, make noise, and/or connect with certain people). Moreover, the very different information flow and community on the various sites predicts that there is space for alternatives to enter. [Details: p30-32 Motivations for Actively Contributing to Content, and p16-18 Part I: Strategies from the Real World]

6. Diversity is a valued, but also destabilizing force. Especially for non-niche news, ambitions to transform into any organizing force are tempered by the challenge of reaching goal coherence (outside of an Alpha group) or even just getting all the neighbors to like each other. However the ability for information to quickly reach large numbers, who then get voting on the issue, is evidently out there. [Details: p34-37 What Is their Perception of the Challenges, and p42-43 Discussion of Implications]

7. Interactions are not confined to news exchange among a semi-anonymous group of strangers.
Socializing and political mobilization are not primary activities, but online and offline
personal exchanges can be sparked off the sites’ discussion of issues. [Details: p29 Do They Make
Friends: To What Extent A Politicizing Force, p 44-47 What is Natural and What Can be Built]

8. At the end of the day, these are still citizens with other offline lives and jobs to lead. While they may want and like to write a post, leave a comment, vote on a story, and help develop the community, the majority do not call themselves “journalists” or “citizen reporters” in any formal sense. Borrowing an analogy made by Michael Tippett, founder of NowPublic,

“When I was a kid, there was a product called Shoe Glue (plastic stuff you could patch up shoes with.) No one advertised it as, ‘Be a citizen cobbler.’ That’s a crazy connotation from institutions not relevant to people’s lives. Citizen journalism is a misnomer to most if thought about like that.”

To them, it is about the public engaging as a group with the news. To make it more likely that a greater mass gets and stays engaged, this means keeping the means of participation relatively simple. [Details: p32-34 Barriers to Contributing: Reasons for Not Writing Content or Posting Comments]

For those interested in reading further, the full report can be downloaded in PDF form:

Download CollaborativeNewsStudy_a.pdf

Table of Contents

An Introduction ...  2
  - Study Components ...   3
  - The Limitations of Popular Anecdotes ...  4

Part I: What’s Out There? Mapping A Corner of The Landscape
  - Backing Up: Understanding the Context ...  6
  - Circling Back: Some Definitions ...  8
  - Developing a Conceptual Framework ... 10
  - Features Structuring Participation & Production ...   12
  - Features Structuring Community ...    14
  - Strategies From the Real World: A Bit More on Why Communities Matter ...   17    
  - Identifying What is Distinct in a Model ...   18

Part II: What Do They Think? Surveying the Community ...    19
- Methodology ...     19
- Summary of Survey Results ...    21

• Demographics 
• How committed are they: Notes on usage behavior
• How do they seek
• Why do they seek: Primary uses
• Trading off: What do users most value
• Credibility
• On Aesthetics
• Do they make friends: Extent a politicizing force
• Motivations for contributing to content
• Sources of information
• Barriers to contributing: Reasons for not writing content or posting comments
• Perception of challenges
• Perceived strengths over MSM

A Discussion of Implications: Tying it all Together ... 42
  - What is Natural and What can be Built ...  44
  - Their Side of the Story: Summarizing ...   48

Appendix and References ... 53 

Sharing What They Think

Unfortunately, I have been quite negligent of this blog. 

As a quick update, I have been trying to get a more concrete understanding of how people use and why they value collaborative news websites.  Towards that effort, I had been working with sites over the last month to post surveys on their websites and get their users' perspectives. 

More recently, I have also made the surveys accessible outside of those initial postings.  Although this site receives minimal traffic, in case you have stumbled over and are a participant on collaborative news sites like Global Voices, OhMyNews, Metafilter, Wikinews, among many others, you can participate here: Share What You Think

Perhaps do to some recent attention, I've been a little overwhelmed by the Digg folks (Thanks!).  I'm  hoping to catch equal feedback from participants in the other diverse sites out there.

BBC Highlights Need to Change

A recent BBC article takes a critical look at its own and more generally MSM's (lack of coherant) response to the blogosphere.  The reporter using several examples, ranging from bloggers' role in tracking down the origins of a fake cartoon in the Danish cartoon controversy to questioning the typeface of documents aired on CBS News, highlights the potentially powerful role of the blogosphere as alternative sources and watchdogs.  The reporter also discusses the political agenda and bias of many blogs, but does not validate that as a reason for MSM to not engage.  In particular, he warns that "sniper fire" from bloggers criticizing stories in detail, if fair, must be answered and corrected.

Mapping the Landscape

I'm trying to compile a list of collaborative news sites.  The current list is a work in progress, please email me if you think there is a site I should check out:

General News   
    OhMyNews    
    Wiki News   
    Global Voices
    Kuro5hin   
    MetaFilter    
    Open Source Radio   
    Pligg            
    Now Public
    Newsvine
    Reddit
Specialized News - Technology       
    Digg   
    Slashdot.org    
Photos and Videos       
    Echochamber project       
    Nowpublic.com   
    Current TV
    YouTube
    (Flickr)   
Hyperlocal       
    Goskokie.com   
    First Monday   
    Itsyourtimes.com   
    Phillyfuture.org   
    Chicago Daily News   
    Greensboro101   
    Lawrence.com   
    Spokesman Review   
    Rocketboom.com   
    Bakotopia.com   
    Backfence.com   
    YourHub
    Westport Now    
    Ibrattleboro    
    Bluffton Today    
    Baristanet.com   
    Pegasus News   
    Bayosphere    
    MyMissourian   
    The Northwest Voice   

An Introduction: The Hype vs. Reality of Collaborative News

I have hesitated to post, until I had seen and understood everything.  But, the realization has finally sank in that I can never catch up with everything.  New experiments are being added everyday.  So in keeping with my subject of study, please, if you think I am neglecting something (or misinformed), update me.

The quick story:

I'm a graduate student working on a masters project about emerging collaborative news models.  This blog will hopefully be interesting and informative along the way.

A longer version of what I just wrote:

There is much confusion over the hype vs. reality of blogs/citizen journalism/interactive technology’s impact.  What is out there?  How should the emergence of these innovations be analyzed?  How do they differ from the communication and knowledge offered by traditional news formats?  How do they change the engagement of citizens to each other and to societal issues? And following from any resolution to this confusion, how can they be used to inform and improve news media for the public?

A year ago, many in the news industry were fretting over the emergence of bloggers.   Nervous headlines tinted with fear and loathing raised the common question of who qualifies as a legitimate journalist, (the subtext, of course, being would the profession of journalism survive).  Since then the criticism has quieted down, but the rapid pace of innovation on the web has not.  While some have relegated bloggers to the sidebar (concluding that the old news giants with their resources would continue to reign), bloggers were just the beta version.  The next (scableable) generation has emerged and some traditional news media are finally dipping their toes in the waters and paying attention.  In the growing mass of voices, the key players who will organize the clutter and engage the voices (now also the eyeballs) are still being determined.  In my opinion, those who figure out how to best aggregate and distill the cacophony will win a loyal base.  Those who also figure out how to create sustained conversations among the distilled sound will win a potentially powerful base.

The news industry is undergoing a period of transformation.  Credit should be given to traditional news organizations for recent initiatives that incorporate blogging and other forms of interaction.  While I will provide some description of their recent changes, my study focuses on emerging organizations, where the degree of innovation is most dramatic.  Primary examples include OhMyNews, Wikinews, Global Voices, Digg, Now Public, and Slashdot.  These models offer a basis for interesting comparisons between new structures and formats.  As predominately online entities, they also offer useful inferences about the entry of Internet goliaths such as Yahoo and Google that are increasingly playing in the space of news content.  Moreover, unlike Technorati and other alogorithm based news aggregators, these sites offer an interesting view of the human dynamics at play in what is too often seen as a 0s and 1s programmed sphere.

In the past months, I've been attempting to understand the successes and challenges of these site structures in changing the dynamics of participation, collaboration, organizing, and information sharing.  In my final paper, focusing on a few key examples, I will attempt to make more concrete the manner and degree to which these emerging models magnify the reach of information, the creation of community, and the role of individuals beyond that of a spectator.  In addition to format analysis, data from surveys and interviews is hoped to provide greater texture on why people use and how they value the sites.   Time and resource constraints will likely trim the eventual output, but the goal (admittedly ambitious and lofty) is to help diminish confusion and provide tangible insights on how these emerging innovations can improve, work with the news industry, and, most importantly, be leveraged into lessons on the potential to massively highlight and engage others on issues important to us, society.