A New Way of Reporting the News

Where three—or more—is not a crowd
A New Way of Reporting the News
By Hector Bryant L. Macale

FACED BY dwindling revenues and staff downsizing, should news organizations—the traditional gatekeepers of the news—be afraid of a world where blogs and citizen journalism have become increasingly important?
The future of journalism remains hotly debated among members of the press. Yet, news organizations may yet learn a thing or two from the new trends and techniques in which the news is being researched, reported, and presented.
“It’s a revolutionary moment in journalism. There is room for all kinds of experimentation now,” said journalist Sheila Coronel during her presentation on new trends in investigative reporting before a group of journalists last July 13. It was Coronel’s first visit to Manila since she assumed the post of  inaugural director of The Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at the Columbia University in the United States last year.
The first and one of only three Hall of Famers of the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism, Coronel is a co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism where she served as executive director for 16 years.
“The business models that supported journalism for the longest time, especially print journalism—which are circu-lation and advertising that allowed newspapers to get revenues—are slowly crumbling and possibly collapsing,” Coronel said, adding, “Many newspapers are losing their circulation.”

Moving to new media
The changes not only affect the print medium but the broadcast medium as well. If the average newspaper reader in the US is 50 years old, Coronel said, the average viewer, say of global TV news giant CNN, is 60 years old.
“The audience for the so-called mainstream media is dimi-nishing,” she said, adding, “That is why the revenues that have sustained mainstream media operations for so long are slowly moving to new media.”
As consumers leave the traditional forms of media, advertisers follow them to the online medium where user-generated content is king. The power to act as information’s gatekeeper is devolving increasingly to the audience. No longer the monopoly of news managers and editors, new journalism involves greater participation among consumers in any aspect—research, writing, and distribution, according to Coronel.
“We don’t exactly know where things are going,” she said, adding that the source of news and information is currently shaped by both the press and the consumers every second.
The idea of who the journalist is is also increasingly being contested. The audience now is not just a consumer of news “but also a producer of stories.”

‘Pro-am’ journalism
Coronel explained how news organizations in the US are slowly realizing the potential of “citizen journalism” to improve their content, particularly in their investigative reporting, as well as their market.
US-based news organizations now allow non-professional or “citizen” journalists to take part in researching or investigating stories. Instead of relying on in-house reporters, a story is being “outsourced” to a large and undefined group of people. In this journalism approach also known as “crowdsourcing,” Coronel said, news organizations are “basically asking the audience to be part of (their) research and reporting.” She likened the “crowdsourcing” approach to Wikipedia, and open-source software, both of which operate in a public and collaborative manner.
The term “crowdsourcing” was coined by Wired writer Jeff Howe and editor Mark Robinson in the article, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” published in June 2006.
Although it has become one of the profession’s buzzwords these days, the core concept of “crowdsourcing” is not new in journalism, said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review (http://www.ojr.org). In his July 31 article, “A journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing,” Niles wrote: “At its heart, modern ‘crowdsourcing’ is the descendent of hooking an answering machine to a telephone ‘tip line,’ where a news organization asks readers to phone suggestions for stories. Or asking readers to send in photos of events in their community.”

More sources
But among the pioneers of this modern “crowdsourcing” approach in journalism is Assignment Zero (http://zero.newassignment.net), an experimental project designed by noted American journalist and media critic Jay Rosen. Rosen, who teaches journalism at the New York University, is also a prominent new media pioneer and citizen journalism supporter. Wired writer Howe also works as a senior writer at Assignment Zero.
In the site, the group explained that Assignment Zero was designed to test “whether large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, can report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely.”
In a story about “crowd-sourcing” itself, Coronel said, Assignment Zero had 70 to 80 people interviewing every- where. “How can anyone beat 80 people being sent out from all over the world doing something on a single topic?” she asked. Very few news organizations would have that kind of infrastructure, she added.
Already, some news organizations in the US use the “crowdsourcing” approach in their stories. One such organization is Gannett Company Inc., reputedly the largest newspaper publisher in the United States, and which publishes 85 daily newspapers (including USA Today) and nearly 1,000 non-daily publications. Gannett uses “crowdsourcing” to cut costs amid union protests, Coronel said.
But “crowdsourcing” is not just a way to cut cost, Coronel added. Since people who took part in such “crowdsourcing” projects naturally want to see how their stories got published, “crowdsourcing” is also a way to get readers.

A threat to journalists?
The first successful “crowdsourced” investigative project by a mainstream news outlet, Coronel said, was done by The News-Press in Florida. Investigating the sewer and water costs in the state’s Cape Coral city, the paper asked its readers for their sewage collection costs. With the help of its readers, The News-Press found out that sewer and water costs in the city were overpriced.
Coronel thinks that similar “crowdsourced” investigative reporting can be done in the Philippines. News outlets investigating crime in an area, for example, can ask the public to provide them with their experiences on crime-related incidents. However, Coronel said, such projects require editorial direction on choosing the topics and fact-checking reports from the public.
TV giant ABS-CBN news did a bit of “crowdsourcing” during the last elections when it engaged viewers in sending reports to the network through its “Boto Mo, i-Patrol Mo” campaign, which it described as an example of “citizen journalism.”
This brings Coronel to a major issue: Would “crowdsourced” or “citizen” journalism pose a threat to professional journalists?
Coronel believes otherwise. “Journalists, take heart: There’s still room for skilled journalists in this new initiative,” she said. “But it’s different. You’re not doing the research and reporting by yourselves. You are democratizing the whole process.” It’s not just citizen journalism anymore, she said, but more purposive journalism. It has become citizen plus professional journalism, Coronel said.
In a letter posted in Assignment Zero, Rosen wrote about this mixture of professional and citizen journalists in the project: “The people getting, telling, and vetting the story are a mix of professional journalists and members of the public—also known as citizen journalists,” he wrote. “This is a model I describe as ‘pro-am’”.
Rosen explained how “pro-am” journalism works: The “ams” or amateurs are the people contributing and writing for a project while the “pros” or professionals, on the other hand, are the “journalists guiding and editing the story, setting standards, overseeing fact-checking, and publishing a final version.”
How about the vetting process in “crowdsourced” journalism? How do you check the veracity or accuracy of a report from the contributor whom you just met online and may be half the world away?
Coronel said: “You just have to trust that the editors of that site or that project are doing their jobs well.” It’s a risk, she admitted, but a smart editor would know which contributions to choose, how to check and countercheck, and detect possible biases.
She said contributions in a “crowdsourced” project should be subject to the same journalistic standards. By combining the inputs of a professional journalist and a non-professional one using rigorous journalistic standards, “we have more resources for research and reporting.”

Interactive databases
US-based news organizations and websites also increasingly use interactive databases in their investigative reports. Because the Web is a very visual medium, there are now quantitative analysis technologies available to better appreciate the data. These include: webscraping software that can quickly “extract” information from the Internet as soon as it is available; social network analysis that shows the connections between individuals and groups; and mapping software that enables readers to browse data visually through maps.
Journalists now, for example, investigate stories using Google Maps, the interactive online mapping technology of Internet search giant Google.
Using a map, the New York Times looked at the more than 1,600 murders committed in New York between 2003 and 2005. Readers can view all the homi-cides by borough, and can even see brief details of the incidents (http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20060428_HOMICIDE_MAP.html).
The Washington Post contains a comprehensive database of political advertisements by candidates running in the presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/politicalads). Readers can watch the 198 ads online, by choosing categories such as type of race, candidate/organization, party, state, issue (What issue did the ad discuss?), character (Did the ad use children or families?), cue (What symbols, images, and perceptions did the ad use and convey?), music (Did it use “patriotic” or somber music?), type (Did the ad attack a rival or was it a biographical one?), among other things.
Interested on who gets the highest salary between top shot National Basketball Association (NBA) players Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Garnett? Then check out the online USA Today which contains year-by-year listings of salaries for NBA players (http://nbasalaries.usatoday.com). The site also allows readers to see salaries and contract totals for specific players, plus median and total salaries for each team. USA Today also has similar databases for other sports such as football, baseball, and hockey.

Innovations
What is interesting, Coronel said, is that most innovative databases are done not by news organizations but by individuals and non-profit organizations. One good example is Chicago Crime (http://www.chicagocrime.org), which uses online records of the Chicago police department to visually show which areas of the city have the highest or least crime-related incidents.
Using webscraping software to download information from the Chicago police website as soon as it is uploaded, the site can even show which type of crime —for example, murder—happened on what date in what street and type of location (ATM, abandoned building, airport/aircraft, etc.).
For its efforts, Chicago Crime won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and was named by the New York Times as one of 2005’s best ideas.
Another helpful site is Teton Post which offers detailed information about members of the current 110th U.S. Congress (http://www.tetonpost.com/citycon). For example, readers can look at Sen. Hillary Clinton’s information profile, speeches, bills she sponsored, financial contributors to her campaign, and even her account in MySpace, an online social network.
For a detailed analysis of legislation in the U.S. Congress and state of California, MapLight.org tracks bills, the interest groups supporting or opposing the bills, and the campaign contributions these groups give to members of Congress and for the state of California. Highlighting the intrinsic connection between campaign donations and legislative votes, the site helps citizens hold their legislators accountable. As MapLight.org stated in its website (http://www.maplight.org): “Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws.”
Although readers now want to see the data for themselves, journalists still play a large role in interpreting the databases, Coronel said. “This is why I don’t think journalists will be extinct because you need journalists to figure out which data are relevant, how they relate to each other, how to make sense of the data.”

New skills, new ways
Here in the Philippines, Coronel noted, many of the newspaper sites are still just online versions of the print versions. Only a handful of the local news websites have begun improving their content online using various Internet technologies and software.
In this year’s midterm elections, GMA-7 posted online a geopolitical map that identified the bailiwicks of the 2004 presidential candidates, election hotspots, the top vote-rich provinces, and those that were living under poor economic conditions. It also has a diagram showing the interconnection among the country’s leading political clans, and current and past government positions of the family members (http://www. gmanews.tv/eleksyon2007).
The Philippine Daily Inquirer supplemented its election coverage with a Google Map of the country comparing the number of voters per province this year with those of 2004 as well the election hotspots (http://www.inquirer.net/map_api/map_api.php).
Coronel said that it also does not help that critical public information, such as the crime database of the Philippine National Police, is not online. She believes, however, that such information is going to be available here soon.
News organizations should no longer be content in only providing text and video for its investigative stories, Coronel said. Journalists now should not only know how to write, but also do multimedia techniques in their reports, such as podcasting and videocasting.
There lies the challenge, Coronel said, for journalists to learn new technical skills and new ways of visualizing the story. “Active storytelling,” she said, “means a different way of telling the story.”

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