Crowd Sourcing Journalism

I’ve never been so disappointed. I am going to miss Joseph Gordon-Levitt talk at USC about hitRECord - which I noted in my very first blog post is an inspiration for my study of civic media tools.

The worst part is, though, I’m not just missing him speak – I’m missing the chance to ask him a question. I’ve always been one of those anonymous members of the crowd at various talks. I go, I listen, I sometimes think of questions, but I never actually ask them (probably in part because I tend to mentally ridicule the people who ask dumb questions and I fear others doing the same to me. In thinking about it, I should probably stop doing that). This time, however, I actually have a question before even going that I know I want to ask and have thought about so much I even developed crazy pipe dreams about how he might respond that involve getting coffee or exchanging e-mail addresses.

Before diving into that question, however, I feel like I should probably briefly explain hitRECord. But since JGL explains it far better than I do in a form that actually typifies his project, you should really just watch this video.

I’ve always thought it seemed like one of the coolest things any actor has done to leverage his or her influential position to actually make something amazing related to filmmaking. I see lots of actors and musicians playing benefits concerts, but to me those are really just philanthropic and fundraising ventures that graph connections between causes and the celebrity’s occupation. Bono’s music only has anything to do with AIDS in Africa because he plays a concert or writes a song, not because of connections between the music industry and AIDS in Africa. I’m not saying that’s bad at all – I’m glad people leverage their position in support of meaningful causes and Bono has done some amazing things – it’s just that I’m way more interested in how people use their position granted by an industry to actually break away from the form of dialogue that industry perpetuates.

But I digress.

In my study of civic media tools, I’ve come to the conclusion that a model like hitRECord could be leveraged to create an amazing community media device that goes beyond most other forms of citizen journalism. Right now, it seems like the primary way for ordinary people to get involved with news outlets is through two main options. Certainly there’s a lot of text based stuff that runs the gamut between these things, but I’m focusing on video and audio work (similar to hitRECord).

1. Community media outlets – people can actually produce content or help other produce content. This may be through networks like Paper Tiger Television.

2. Participate in traditional media outlets – this may be through things like CNN’s iReport or responding to questions on the Public Insight Network.

I have a serious preference for the first, but I think there’s a lot of room between the two ideas for some really nifty stuff. That’s where my idea comes from. It synthesizes a number of existing tools to make something that I don’t think has been done before – a citizen-based, distributed reporting system.

The basis is this: on something like iReport, CNN is really just soliciting raw video footage that they can integrate into their reporting. But what if instead of giving that over to CNN, you passed that footage into a network of people who together could create their own news stories? So that you upload a video, make note of location/place/time/etc, and that opens up a “case” where registered users could form a task force with a variety of rolls (I’m thinking background research, causal explanation, fact checking, script writing voice recording, and editing – this aspect is inspired by the book Wiki Government and the website Help Me Investigate) that would ultimately wind up creating a short news story that could be tagged onto a map so that the stories could be searched based on a variety of different criteria – time/location of event, type of incident, who contributed, etc.

I think it could really push people to grab on to the media they produce and may actually help people reconsider how they relate to dominant outlets. Granted, there are issues with motivation and questions of why people would actually do this, but I figure there are probably enough journalists being fired/retiring, enough people wanting to develop skills in one of those areas, and so on to develop a decent core group, and if a rewards system could be set up, I definitely think the project could take off. It may not be revolutionary, but I think it has the potential to get more people involved than are doing anything to create news stories now.

Thus, my question for JGL that I don’t get to ask is this: Have you ever considered creating a version of hitRECord that focuses on community media rather than narrative film? Encouraging people to make short featurettes about issues they wish had been covered in the news or think should have been covered differently? Too bad since I won’t be there my dreams of starting this project over a cup of coffee seem to be more or less dashed…