Chapter 8: What the Crowd Creates: How the One Percent Is Changing the Way Work Gets Done

We have a deadline! I have to file all the comments for the book a week from Friday. Expect the next postings to come fast and furious. Once again: I'm posting excerpts from my book on crowdsourcing to Crowdsourcing.com in order to elicit comments about its content from readers. The most trenchant of those comments will be gathered into an appendix that will be published as a chapter in the book. Here's the last sections—the denouément, if you will—to Chapter Eight:The Price of Being a Pioneer

The Price of Being a Pioneer

If I sound sympathetic to the predicament Current TV faced in its first forays into crowdsourcing, it’s because I spent the first half of 2007 making the same mistakes. In that time I helped run an experimental journalism project called Assignment Zero, an attempt to use crowdsourcing to conduct an extensive, far-reaching journalistic investigation. It was a pioneering effort and it’s true what they say about pioneers: They’re the ones with arrows in their backs. In the end, I came to think of Assignment Zero as a highly satisfying failure. On one hand we failed to meet our optimistic goals; on the other hand, by charging heedlessly into uncharted territory, we learned a great deal about how the crowd can come together to create great journalism. The basic principles behind successful crowdsourced journalism aren’t much different than those behind successful crowdsourced television or photography.

Assignment Zero was a joint effort between Wired and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism initiative started by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. In early 2006 Rosen began conceiving of a journalism project that would involve both professional and amateur contributors. But Rosen needed funding to staff up with the professionals he would need. Later that year he flew to San Francisco to meet with Evan Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Wired.com. Newly acquired by Condé Nast, Wired.com was looking to experiment broadly and boldly, particularly in the realm of so-called “citizen journalism.” It was a fortuitous meeting, and together the two created Assignment Zero, indicating the nascent character of citizen journalism. The aim was to have a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond. We would use the crowd, in other words, to cover crowdsourcing. Having coined the term in a June 2006 Wired article, I was brought in as a consultant. We launched in March 2007 with the intention of producing 80 feature articles—enough to fill a dozen magazines—over the course of 12 weeks. The result, we wrote when launching the project, would be "the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing." We would post the features on NewAssignment.Net, and run a selection of the best stories on Wired.

But our strategy, as with Current TV’s at the time it launched, revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of the crowd’s interests and abilities. In a word, we were naïve. To our credit, we conceived of Assignment Zero during a cultural moment when belief in the crowd’s abilities—especially their capacity to “reboot the news,” as Current’s Robin Sloan puts it—ran high. Some of the most exciting moments in journalism over the last few years had been produced not by a handful of intrepid reporters, but by a legion of amateur photographers, bloggers and videographers. When a massive tsunami swept across the resort beaches of Thailand and Indonesia, who brought the event home for the rest of the world? Amateurs. When terrorists set off a series of bombs on buses and subways in London, who produced the most riveting images and soundbytes? The passengers and their cell phone cameras. Hurricane Katrina served to reinforce the point: As the waters rose, and then receded, professional journalists—to say nothing of the victims’ families—relied on information and images from those whose journalistic accreditation started and ended with the accident of their geographical location. The news media’s primary contribution was to provide the Web forum on which people gathered to distribute information and images about what was happening inside the city. Traditional journalism seemed, a woe-be-gone, antiquated model. Ripe for the crowd, in other words. We didn’t stay naïve for long.

Like Throwing a Party

One of the first hurdles we faced was technological. We needed to build a site that would allow large numbers of contributors to sign up and participate in meaningful ways. We used Drupal, an open-source publishing system that's become one of the leading platforms for community-driven projects. We wrote our optimism directly into the architecture of the site by creating some 60 topic pages (ie, “Crowdsourcing the Novel”), each containing up to 10 separate assignments. (ie, “Interview an expert on this subject.”) After several months of design and testing, we were finally ready to go public.

“It’s like throwing a party,” Assignment Zero executive editor Lauren Sandler told the New York Times the day we launched. “You program the iPod, mix the punch, dim the lights and at 8 o’clock people show up. And then who knows what is going to happen?” Like Current, we had far more guests than anticipated. Also like Current, we didn’t have anyone there to greet them when they showed up. Rather than recruit volunteers beforehand to manage each topic—doling out assignments, corresponding with would-be contributors, or just providing a friendly face—we decided to hold off building this essential layer of community managers until after the party had already started. It was a fateful mistake. The flood of volunteers made Assignment Zero’s design flaws quickly apparent. Potential contributors — which numbered roughly 500 after the first week — were routed to a single Assignment Zero staffer, a former WashingtonPost.com editor, Steve Fox, who couldn’t begin to correspond with them all.

The net effect was to put the organizational onus on the volunteers themselves. Baffled by the overarching concept of crowdsourcing, confused by the design of the website and unable to connect directly to a manager or organizer, most of the initial volunteers simply drifted away. Over the course of the next two weeks, around 30 volunteer professional editors were assigned to manage various topics. But this presented a new set of hurdles. Each editor needed to be trained to use Drupal. Even once they were up to speed there was a lack of understanding of the nature of open-source projects. “What we really needed were people who understood online organizing,” says David Cohn, an Assignment Zero editor. “But many of the editors just didn’t have much experience with the Internet.”

Crowdsourcing was both the subject of our investigation and the methodology of how we pursued it. That proved to be another mistake. The topic was simply too meta, too nebulous, too new, to gain the kind of immediate traction we needed given our 12-week deadline. Asked why Wikipedia had been so successful, founder Jimmy Wales responded that it was because everyone already knew what an encyclopedia entry should look like. The crowd might be enthusiastic, but they’re not mind readers. Our contributors didn’t know if they were supposed to be writing AP-style reports, blog entries, Op-Eds or the kind of polemical screeds so ubiquitous on the Internet.

“What we learned,” says Rosen, “is that you have to be waaaay clearer in what you ask contributors to do. Just because they show up once doesn’t mean they’ll show up over and over. You have to engage them right away.” All volunteer projects— be it citizen journalism, an open-source programming project or simply an AIDS walk — must inspire passion. Conflict in the Middle East inspires passion. Helping photographers improve their craft inspires passion. Using the crowd to investigate crowdsourcing inspired only confusion.

After roughly six weeks — halfway through its run — Assignment Zero reached its nadir. Most of the original volunteers were gone, the majority of topic pages were deserted and communications between staffers, volunteer editors and the few contributors that remained were uneven, resulting in frequent misunderstandings. A drastic change was required. Although much had already gone awry, we still had one advantage working in our favor: hard-earned knowledge from six weeks of trial and error.

The first order of business was a site redesign. Although none of us were in contact with Current TV at the time, we were devising a similar approach to increasing participation: Adopt the social networking features common to Facebook or MySpace. We placed the editor’s picture and email at the top of each topic page and—most importantly—provided a forum for contributors to gather and discuss the project. We too had tried to establish a vertical relationship with each contributor; we too failed to grasp that the crowd didn’t want to talk to us—they wanted to talk to each other. The effect of this reorganization was felt immediately, as contributors could now collaborate openly with each other and review one another’s reporting. The Cincinnati Enquirer, which I wrote about in Chapter 5, made deft use of this approach: Don’t try to control the discussion, just become the room in which it takes place.

However, the majority of topic pages had yet to attract a base of interested volunteers. We had created our topics in the belief that people would happily work on any assignment we made available. But as Livingstone or Cooperstein are well aware, you can’t issue directives to a community, only offer suggestions. If people follow you, great. If not, you follow the community. We learned this lesson through sheer necessity. With less than six weeks left in Assignment Zero’s run, we had to jettison most of our topic pages, which required painfully excising those topics I considered most important. We concentrated instead on the topics that had gained traction in the community—including those, like crowdsourced religion—I’d have never thought to assign. But that wasn’t our last slice of humble pie: People might want to reboot the news, but that doesn’t mean they want to write it. In response, we shifted priorities again, and asked contributors to conduct Q&As with people involved in crowdsourcing efforts.

The changes had an immediate, and positive impact. Asking our volunteers to “write the story on open-source car design” had had all the appeal of asking people to rewrite their college term papers. Asking them to talk to someone they admire and respect was met with a far warmer response. All efforts were now focused on what we called “interview week,” which was intended to be a five-day flurry of activity, with contributors interviewing sources and transcribing the interviews to create 50 Q&As. Community activity increased exponentially. Contributors even unearthed additional subjects to interview, and our list of sources soon exceeded 75. Given clear direction and an appealing task to work on, Assignment Zero volunteers quickly rallied. “The crowdsourcing gears finally kicked in,” says Cohn.

In the final two weeks of the project, Assignment Zero even began to resemble a professional journalism outfit. Editors and contributors discussed potential questions; the interviews were scheduled, conducted, transcribed, filed and edited. And as they began pouring in, it became clear that many would exceed our expectations. In my rough count, at least 60 of the 80 interviews would stand up to professional scrutiny, which is to say the interviewer was well-informed, asked challenging questions and managed to elicit interesting (and occasionally fascinating) commentary from his or her subject. A mutual embrace of experimentation ran through all the interviews, a cheerful admission that the kinds of collaborative efforts enabled by the Internet are both powerful and yet still in their infancy. “We need to try different things,” the prominent political blogger Susan Gardner told one of our contributors. “The process of elimination is undervalued. What’s wrong with trying something, assessing and taking it as positive information that this particular model doesn’t work? That’s not failure. That’s important information.”

What the interviews also make clear is that contributors volunteered to tackle subjects about which they were passionate and knowledgeable. In this they held a considerable advantage over professionals, who often must complete interviews with little time (or inclination) for advance research. It is a community’s ability to allocate intellectual resources organically in this way that can make it a more efficient machine than a traditional, hierarchical organization. It’s exactly this miracle of self-organization that make crowdsourcing, in the best of circumstances, so efficient. In the final analysis Assignment Zero accomplished its goal: it embodied the best of crowdsourcing while studying it.

Eyes and Ears: Journalism in the Age of the Network

Not long after Assignment Zero concluded Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor who started Assignment Zero, published his own set of “coordinates” for the new territory into which journalism is heading. Number one, Rosen writes, “get the division of labor right.” Simply put, most participants will have a very limited amount of time to contribute. Sometimes it’s ten minutes per week, sometimes it’s ten hours, but tasks have to be constructed to accommodate a range of commitment levels. This is as true in other spheres of crowdsourcing as it is in journalism, and explains why Current has rejiggered their formula to air photos and short Webcam footage as well as their bread and butter “pods” that can take weeks to shoot and edit. Number two is to understand participants’ motivations before asking them to contribute. “The difference between an amateur journalism production and a command-and-control system like a newsroom is profound and decisive,” Rosen writes. Which is why, he rightly believes, it will never replace a system of paid correspondents. But it could very well supplement one.

Assignment Zero, Rosen has said, was just the dry run. Rosen has continued to use the NewAssignment.Net platform to launch crowdsourced journalism projects. One, called Beat Blogging, helps professional journalists utilize social networking software to assemble a specialized crowd that can help improve the reporter’s understanding of the complex subjects he or she is forced to tackle.

Around the time Assignment Zero ended I helped launch a crowdsourcing initiative at the Brian Lehrer show, news-driven talk show broadcast on WNYC, NPR’s affiliate in New York City. Unlike Assignment Zero, Lehrer’s team started small. On the morning the broadcast aired, we asked listeners to count the number of trucks or SUVs on the street outside their homes. The show received over 450 responses from all five boroughs, allowing listeners and contributors alike to draw some interesting conclusions. This conformed to Rosen’s observation that one must accommodate for people with lots of enthusiasm but little time. The SUV project only asked listeners for a few minutes of their day, and involved a concise, easily communicated assignment. The results were unremarkable—about half of the vehicles on New York City streets were truck class vehicles, which is about the national average¬—but listeners loved it. Next the show asked people to choose a local grocery store or deli and record the price of a six-pack of Budweiser, a quart of milk and a head of lettuce. This time the conclusions were more revealing. The radio show displayed the results on a map on its homepage—showing that geography had little to do with price. Delis in the ghetto, the show discovered, often gouged their customers as cravenly as shops in the ritziest Park Avenue neighborhoods.

This is precisely the kind of journalism at which the crowd will always prove superior to professionals, for the simple reason that the crowd outnumbers them. Journalism is fertile ground for crowdsourcing for many of the same reasons that the sciences are: Much of the basic labor involved in reporting—as in scientific research—lies in the sort of data collection that hardly requires a degree, or even much training. A newspaper can scarcely afford to send 25 reporters across the city to determine the price deviation of a head of lettuce. It falls below—and beyond—their mandate. But it’s important information for a resident, and like the SUV experiment, proved highly popular with WNYC’s listeners.

It’s a model that works just as effectively when the stakes are considerably higher. Early in 2007 the readers of the liberal news blog Talking Points Memo, or TPM, noticed a pattern in the firings of US Attorneys in Arkansas and California. Working with the community at TPM as well as his staff of reporters, Josh Micah Marshall, TPM’s editor and publisher, was able to connect the dots and determine that the attorneys were being forced out for not conforming to the Bush administration agenda. Mainstream outlets soon picked up the story, drawing further attention to the scandal. The awesome potency of TPM’s community became clear the night of March 19, 2007 when the Department of Justice disclosed 3,000 pages of emails, memos and other internal records relating to the attorney firings. The “document dump,” as such disclosures are called, came too late at night for newspapers to do more than skim the contents. Marshall, however, sicced his readers on the DOJ documents. According to a New York Sun article  written a few days later, the readers divided the papers into 50-page chunks, and made remarkably quick work of it. “The first post about the records hit the site at 1:04 AM. Within half and hour, there were 50 summaries posted by readers gleaning the documents. By 4:30 AM more than 220 postings were up detailing various aspects of the files,” including uncovering references to “Karl’s shop,” a clear indication of the White House’s political involvement in the dismissals. It was a stunning display of how the crowd’s sheer numbers could prevail over the limited resources of a professional news outlet. In early 2008 Marshall and TPM were awarded the prestigious George Polk Award for Legal Reporting for its “tenacious investigative reporting.” These are the kinds of models that hold enormous promise, and that I predict we'll see much more of in coming months and years. Such examples capitalize on the crowd’s most salient characteristic: it possesses the power inherent in large numbers.

This basic epiphany—that we are all better served when the crowd complements what journalists do, rather than trying to replicate it—animates the Vancouver, Canada-based NowPublic.com. “We think of our members as an army of eyes and ears,” says Leonard Brody, the company’s CEO. “But we’re not asking them to be journalists. The phrase ‘citizen journalism’ makes about as much sense as ‘citizen dentist.’” Instead, NowPublic asks their network of 130,000 users spread across 140 countries to simply upload photos, videos and in some cases basic reporting any time they witness a newsworthy event. The company then sells the content to news organizations like the Associated Press (AP), which recently signed a distribution deal with the NowPublic. “What we learned from the experiments with citizen journalism is that people are great at recording what they see, or taking pictures, but not so great at analysis and horrible at packaging,” says Brody. “We’re probably closer to iStockphoto’s model.”

The AP has a larger network of correspondents—3,000 reporters, photographers and videographers—than any news organization in the world. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number that’s signed up with NowPublic, a fact Jim Kennedy, AP’s director of strategic planning, is happy to admit. “It’s a big world out there. We use NowPublic to get a more comprehensive map of coverage, an additional radar system beyond our own correspondents.” Kennedy notes that with the Web, the goal for a news outlet is no longer to simply get one or two good photographs. “We want as much image coverage as we can get. When we talk about crowdsourcing it’s focused on finding a good nugget that would add to our report, but I think it will add up to much more than that eventually. I can imagine a whole lot of contributions—amateurs as well as professionals—that could be woven into the coverage.”

Crowdsourcing is going through a period of adaptation. In the end it would be foolhardy to fault the crowd for any of Assignment Zero’s missteps. The failures were those of organization, timing, and community management, not a lack of response on the part of our volunteers. People’s motivations to participate in community-powered projects are as diverse as the crowd itself, and include the enhancement of one’s status within the community, the opportunity to learn or perfect a skill, the chance for financial gain or simply the intangible rewards from working with others toward a shared goal. What was abundantly clear, even in our limited experiment, was that there is an immeasurable amount of enthusiasm and—to use frank, economic terms—potential labor that people will happily expend in the service of a project they find rewarding and meaningful.

Ironically, it’s just this enthusiasm—evident in iStock, Assignment Zero and as this book goes to press, Current TV as well—that has created one of crowdsourcing’s greatest conundrums: The crowd responds in such great volume—think of iStock’s two million photographs, or the 75 million videos posted to YouTube—that the task of sorting through it all is far too time consuming to be done by all but the largest teams of employees. Fortunately, that’s where the crowd performs its niftiest trick of all: The crowd, as we’ll see next, is its own best filter.

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