TheWayoftheWeb

I’ve already covered why the fake Steve Jobs heart attack story published on CNN’s iReport shouldn’t be seen as a fault of Citizen Journalism as a whole, and why we should all be encouraged to verify and fact check articles before we take them as gospel, or reprint them.

The Silicon Valley Insider has published a defence of their repeition of the story, but for me, it does little to convince me that they did anything other than repeated the story quickly to grab page views.Especially when they appear to justify reprinting any rumour that is possibly credible enough to be worth publishing.

‘Sometimes this information is fact. Sometimes it is rumor or scuttlebutt. Sometimes it is speculation. Always it is information that we believe is credible or interesting enough to bring to our readers’ attention.’

In their defence, the original story did contain a disclaimer: ‘We’re making calls, but as yet we have no idea whether it’s true.  Confirmation/denial the moment we get it.’

Anyway, in my opinion, as someone who has worked on websites with User Generated Content, and various levels of moderation, I think there are a few ways that sites containing Citizen Journalism can evolve.

• Scott Karp covers one method. Rather than a totally open system that just requires an email address and solving a Captcha code - effectively meaning anyone can publish fairly anonymously, CNN and other site owners could actively search out anyone already publishing content, and select people who demonstrate a verifiable responsibility/ability. Increasingly this will be the role of professional Editors online, and although it goes against the ‘open ideal’, the main downside is that it costs organisations time and effort. Scott goes into more detail, and the restrictions he’s applied to Publish2 in a post well worth reading.
• Sam’s post on my previous article highlights the legal dilemma - moderate everything at a huge cost, or let it be a free for all. I disagree that we shouldn’t blame a company that encounters problems because they’re not willing to pay for the resources to moderate a service - but I think there is a third alternative - crowdsource the moderation. An effective rating and reputation system would indicate reliability and past success rates in the hands of fellow Citizen Journalists. And although it will be tough to make a system than cannot be ‘gamed’ to a large extent, it would have avoided an event like the CNN one - where an account is used to make one fake story then disapear. The better the system and the more effort it takes to game it, the smaller the amount of fraudulent users that will make the effort.
• Increase the private identification of users. One easy way is to offer a small payment for articles, which requires bank details/paypal account details etc - or even some proof of identity before being allowed to post. It may add to the need for resources - but it’s less work than moderating every article, and would also weed out many of the fraudulent accounts.

That’s three possibilities with a bit of thought. I’ve actually been thinking about this problem for a while, and I’m working on some ideas which may help to increase the reliability of Citizen Journalism and Blogging, whilst also removing some of the barriers the citizen journalists and bloggers undoubtedly face - if I heard Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, would I know who to contact for a fast response, and would they be likely to respond? Or would my attempts to verify the facts mean I get scooped by a larger site or mainstream media and miss out on the benefits of getting the news first?

In a 24 hour, second by second online world where every moment counts if you want to break a story first, we shouldn’t blame people for falling for the idea that accuracy can be discounted in the rush to publish before anyone else - especially as the result of it backfiring can be a loss of respect, authority and readers.

But I also don’t think we should excuse it as a necessary byproduct of online journalism which can’t be evolved and solved. That’s just laziness. And many of the comments on the Silicon Alley Insider story pick up on this. In our efforts to evolve online journalism, it’s just stupidity to disregard all that preceded us in ‘dead tree’ publications simply because the digital world offers new opportunities and challenges. In my next post, I’ll outline some of the things that should make the transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘digital’ journalism, if the online world wishes to base itself on solid foundations and be taken seriously in terms of reputation as well as numbers and revenue.

I was going to make two points regarding the discussion of Citizen Journalism in the wake of the fake article posted on CNN’s iReport ‘Unedited. Unfiltered. News.’ The article falsely claimed Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, and had a big effect on Apple share prices.

Tim Windsor beat me to one of my points, pointing out that the blame for this should lay more with CNN than citizen journalism in general. Many people seem to have ignored the fact that one bad article on one implementation of Citizen Journalism, does not mean the concept as a whole is flawed - even on the CNN site there’s going to be a good ratio of interesting, factual stories to the fake ones, let alone taking every instance of Citizen Journalism across the internet. After all, how many newspapers have ended up in court because of errors or false articles and images? Did that end print journalism?

My second point is around fact checking and reprinting and responding to articles. Increasingly we all get our news from a huge variety of sources, both mainstream and individual-generated. This means that as receivers, we need to be more proactive in judging all our inputs. Particulary if, as bloggers and content producers ourselves, we intend to republish and share that information. In a world where everyone is a potential news source for their friends and contacts, it’s damaging to our own individual reputations to spread something which is old and out-of-date, irrelevant to our contacts/friends/audience, or simply false.

It’ll take time, and better tools, but increasingly people will be looking for more ways to verify information. When I see breaking news on Twitter or Facebook etc I check it against mainstream news via Google News etc. When I read mainstream or non-mainstream websites and blogs, or microblogging etc, I measure it against what I know about the sorurce, whether it’s a friend who might have discovered exclusive news, or an organisation I know has generally been reliable. And that’s just basic fact checking.

After all, Reader Reception Theory has been around since the 1960s, meaning that the understanding of a text is shaped by the interpretation of a reader based on their own experiences and culture. Journalists have always been trained and told to question everything and check all the facts. And there have been enough cases where rumours and fictitious articles have been well publicised.

On the plus side, the debate around Citizen Journalism has not only reminded me of a planned blog post which never saw the light of day, but also helped further ideas for a couple of applications I’ve been thinking about. And Steve Jobs is OK, which is good!