News, of course, fulfills more than one function in society. It can be a business that is expected to make a profit. However, it also has social and civic roles to play. Among other things, those who report to the news are expected to function as watchdogs, discovering and raising awareness of crime and corruption that need to be remedied. They are also expected to bring the public the information they need to make good decisions. Part of this is discovering information, raw facts. Another part is evaluating and analyzing those facts and building them into a coherent and accurate story.
One of the big questions we’re all facing is whether and how these social and civic functions can be fulfilled in an environment in which the traditional profit models for news seem to be crumbling. News is moving online where profit margins are increasingly slim. These means there are fewer professional journalists to gather, evaluate, analyze, and present the facts. Can non-professional journalists take up the slack?
One interesting example relating to the debate is described in a recent New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe.It’s a profile of Eliot Higgins, who writes a blog called Brown Moses Blog. The blog has a very specific focus – it’s about the rockets and munitions being used in the conflict in Syria. Given the ongoing questions about the use of chemical weapons on civilians there, this is an important topic that speaks to even larger issues. According to the article, Higgins gathers videos posted online by people in Syria, seeks to verify the location they were filmed from sources such as satellite imagery, and then identifies specific rocket or from its shape and other identifying details based on government manuals and other sources. Many find him to be very good at this. The blog is widely followed by experts in the field, and he has been cited as an authoritative source by NPR, The New York Times, and Human Rights Watch.
So, if Higgins, working from his couch, has successfully taken up the responsibility of fact-finding in an environment where traditional news organizations can’t do it, what does it mean? Does he represent a new model that could be applied to other contexts or is he the exception that proves the rule? That is, could other people do what he’s done, or is there something unique about him or about this topic that makes it unlikely that other attempts at this will succeed?
There are efforts to, as one of the sources in the article puts it, “scale” the blog by teaching or training others in this type of “crowd sourced” journalism. Many are hopeful and interest is high.
However, there are some things that are relatively unusual about Higgins himself that can temper this optimism. His posts require a near-obsessive focus on detail and a lot of time. Part of the reason that he has been able to do this is that he he’s been otherwise unemployed – he lost his job before he expanded the blog. The number of people who have both the skills and desire to do what Keefe does is limited, and number who have the skills, desire, and resources to do it without a salary would be even more limited. Higgins has sought out donations to allow him to continue to work on the blog, but it’s an uncertain way to support a family.
In addition, there are, as the Keefe points out, there are some elements of the Syrian conflict that allow Higgins to do what he does. It’s simultaneously inaccessible to professional reporters and awash in social media. According to Keefe, Syria is incredibly dangerous for journalists, “more than fifty reporters have been killed while covering the conflict . . . Yet Syrians have managed to access the Internet, and all the factions in the ongoing civil war have uploaded videos on YouTube.” In an environment where all that video is unavailable, where, for example, the government has managed to limit Internet access, these techniques won’t work. Higgins’ analyses are dependent upon the videos provided by others, all of whom have their own motives – some noble, some not – for filming and posting. Furthermore, if there doesn’t happen to be someone there with a camera who is willing and able to upload it, it isn’t available. It’s analysis at one remove from the action. (And I recognize the irony of pointing this out in a blog post about an article from a news magazine about a blog based on YouTube videos. Yes, I’m even farther removed from the action.) Higgins doesn’t have the option of going to a site and pro-actively seeking out information that he suspects might be missing.
Does crowd-sourced journalism have the potential to overcome these challenges and limitations to take on the social and civic roles traditionally fulfilled by professional journalists? And, if so, in what contexts and under what circumstances is it most likely to do so? What do you think?
