The Modern Journalist

Crowdsourcing News (from the mailing list)

My buddy Dave just posted a great thought on how you can engage your audience to develop more comprehensive reporting covering.

It’s a wonderful idea, one that is already deployed with distributed computing. Strangely, though, I think traditional news rooms would outwardly reject the notion on engaging their readers to contribute actual reporting. As I’ve heard countless editors tell me over the years, they can marshal all types of resources when need-be.

Of course, social media has the ability to reach far more — and far more cost-effective — means to gathering information.

The post comes from The Modern Journalist mailing list:

Dolores Labs: “We take tasks that can be done on the web, by an average person with little training, and broken into small pieces, and then distribute them to thousands of anonymous workers.”

An example would be here.
My response follows:
It’s funny, I just wrote a story on BOINC, the distributing computing platform that enables regular folks like us to give up parts of their computer processing power to solve science problems.

You may recognize this is Seti@Home - or the DNA genetic decoding project.

Distributing computing works just as Dave described the crowdsourcing for news (ack, that is such a newspaper word) - scientists break down their large tasks into a series of smaller problems, which individuals then download — let their computer work on it — and then upload back to the original database, until everything is done.

We’ve seen bits and pieces of this with Indy Media - which formed so that individuals protesting the World Bank in Seattle could publish their accounts. Now, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. It’s also the madness method behind Twitter-Google Maps election mashup, where you can literally watch people voting through their SMS.