Crowdsourcing and Journalism – The Wave of Participatory Culture
Significance & Overview
Due to advances in digital technologies and the proliferation of participatory culture, the efficient use of ‘crowdsourcing’ has emerged within a range of contexts, particularly within the field of journalism. According to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, journalism crowdsourcing refers to the “…act of specifically inviting a group of people to participate in a reporting task – such as news gathering, data collection, or analysis – through a targeted, open call for input; personal experiences; documents; or other contributions.” (Wilson 2019).
In turn, the deployment of crowdsourcing within journalism acts as a knowledge-search method and a way to engage with a particular audience (Aitamurto 2019). Aitamurto (2019) notes through utilising aspects of crowdsourcing, “…journalists can find otherwise inaccessible information that contributes to their investigations”, ultimately unveiling a broader range of perspectives.
Tow Center for Digital Journalism notes that crowdsourcing for journalists usually takes two forms:
- Unstructured Call-Out – an open invitation to vote, email, call or otherwise contact a journalist with information.
- Structured Call-Out – engages in targeted outreach to ask people to respond to a specific request. Responses can enter a newsroom via multiple channels, for example, email, a website or Google form.
Furthermore, crowdsourcing is underpinned by six different calls-to-action (C-T-A), voting, witnessing, sharing personal experiences, tapping specialised expertise and completing a task (Yumi 2019).
Crowdsourcing in Practice
In 2017, ProPublica and NPR (National Public Radio) launched ‘Lost Mothers’, an investigation into the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth within the United States (Gallardo 2018). Obtaining reader input was a key component to the major U.S. story on maternal health, whereby through elements of crowdsourcing thousands of individuals participated. ProPublica’s engagement reporter, Adriana Gallardo, set out to find women and families willing to share intimate personal experiences. In February 2017, ProPublica published a questionnaire aimed at women who had experienced life-threatening complications in childbirth, in order to obtain ‘human stories’. In this case, it is evident the CTA employed was ‘sharing personal experiences’, enabling individual’s to discuss their intimate experiences relevant to the project.
Within a few days of publishing the maternal health questionnaire, ProPublica and NRP received 2,500 responses. Using a variety of social media channels, ProPublica reporter, Nina Martin, scoured social media to compile a list of women who died from pregnancy and child birth-related causes. In turn, the search focused on public posts on Facebook and Twitter, along with crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe. The team of journalists proceeded to verify the women’s basic information using obituaries and public records. Working alongside a team of graduate-student journalists from New York University (NYU), progressed the search, whereby students reached out to family members for additional information. Despite initial hesitations, individual’s opened up about their personal experiences, whereby the questionnaire was shared with them directly. The personal stories obtained went on to fuel the ‘Lost Mother’ series, whereby connections developed during this investigation, are still being maintained for follow-up work.
Reference List
Aitamurto, T 2019, ‘Crowdsourcing in journalism’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, April, viewed 12 May 2020, <https://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-795>.
Gallardo, A 2018, ‘How we collected nearly 5,000 stories of maternal harm’, ProPublica, 20 March, viewed 12 May 2020, <https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-collected-nearly-5-000-stories-of-maternal-harm>.
Yumi, W 2019, The social media journalist handbook, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York and London.
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