But as we change where we get our news and turn to places like Twitter for information and verification of facts, it’s important to ask how that polarization will translate to social media – if it will at all. Several journalists discussing the future of news dissemination (something we’ll also be discussing at paidContent Live in April) tied these issues to those of crowdsourced news, particularly in the Middle East, when the tensions between accuracy and access are most apparent.

NBC correspondant Ayman Mohyeldin made an interesting argument about verification, arguing that people should be free to select the accounts they want to follow and personally decide whether to trust that information or not, just as they tune into particular cable shows in the United States and apply their own sense of skepticism to Maddow and Hannity.

“You ultimately choose which channels to watch,” he said. “There’s no reason that should be different in who you follow.”

The argument puts a good deal of trust in the user’s judgement and takes some pressure off journalists or random people on Twitter to present accurate information, but it’s an idea that fellow panelist Andy Carvin has popularized to much controversy recently. The idea came under fire during the spread of misinformation on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, and certainly has its detractors:

The end user is responsible for deciding who they trust, @AymanM says. True, but most don't have the expertise to decide. #nextnews #sxsw—
Eric Carvin (@EricCarvin) March 10, 2013

But it’s a good reminder that even if we think of cable news as being particularly polarizing right now, news consumption and opinions on Twitter might not be all that different.

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That’s why Storyful, a service that partners with media companies to aggregate and verify news from social networks, says it has decided to open up its formerly private Twitter account to help crowdsource the distribution and verification of breaking news reports.

Before he started the company in 2010, Storyful’s founder Mark Little was a foreign correspondent for a number of outlets such as Ireland’s Raidió Teilifís Éireann — much like Burt Herman, a former Associated Press reporter who started a company with a somewhat similar name: Storify. But while Storify is designed as a tool that anyone can use to pull together or “curate” a social-media stream from sources like Twitter and Flickr, the idea behind Storyful was to build a professional service staffed by journalists who could track breaking news reports through social networks and help media companies verify them. The company has a staff of 33 editors working in dozens of countries, and works with a number of outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters.

Collaboration is becoming a key journalistic skill

As part of its service, Storyful had a private Twitter account called StoryfulPro, which collected and distributed breaking news reports from both its own team and the various sources they monitored within their countries or their fields of expertise — including both professional journalists and citizen reporters, or what the company likes to call “networked journalists.” The primary audience for the account was over 1,000 professional journalists that Storyful had worked with before. On Tuesday, Little announced that the service had decided to make the Pro account public, allowing anyone to use or contribute to the process.

In a blog post, the Storyful founder said he decided to do this because he believes crowdsourcing is the best way to determine the truth of a breaking news report as quickly as possible. As he puts it:

“Storyful believes the key skill for journalists in a social age is collaboration. There really is no alternative to working with others in the Golden Hour. If a newsroom decides to go it alone, the chance you will be consistently first is nonexistent. The chance that you will often be wrong is 100 percent.”

As we’ve seen in a number of recent cases — including the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. and the death by suicide of director Tony Scott — the pressure on media outlets of all kinds to break news first can result in a profusion of incorrect reports, which then get redistributed through Twitter and other social networks faster than any correction or clarification can match. Little’s phrase “the golden hour” refers to the first hour after a news event occurs, which Storyful believes is the most crucial period for fact-checking, and he says one of the most important contributions that can be made is when someone — either a professional journalist or reliable source — kills a false report before it can spread. Says Little:

“Breaking news now emerges in a ‘Golden Hour’, when skilled intervention is most valuable, when a celebrity death starts to trend on Twitter or an explosive video goes viral on YouTube. In this Golden Hour, the best journalists are often the ones who STOP a story, not start it.”

Crowdsourced news verification is almost always better

Storyful isn’t the only company or media-related startup that is trying to bring some kind of professional rigor to the process of real-time news verification: the NBC project Breaking News, which started as a Twitter account, also has a growing team that curates and distributes real-time news it has verified, and Sulia develops Twitter lists of credible sources (both professional and amateur) around various topics and breaking news events. Some media outlets also have their own internal teams that do this, such as the BBC’s “user-generated content desk,” which verifies reports from social media for use by BBC reporters.

I’ve argued before that one of the most compelling examples of crowdsourced news verification is the way that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio used his Twitter account as a real-time newswire — or what he prefers to call a public newsroom — to filter and verify reports coming out of Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, something other media outlets should emulate. And in a recent post, I also tried to make the case that this kind of verification or fact-checking is almost always better when it is done in public (although many readers seem to disagree with me on that).

One of the reasons for that is the amount of knowledge that can exist in what journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience.” Little says in his post that the company’s golden rule is that there is always someone closer to the story — and in many cases that person is not a traditional journalist or mainstream news source:

“Often, the closest person is still the wire reporter or networked journalist. But rarely do we rank the key source on the basis of authority and power. Authority has been replaced by authenticity as the currency of social journalism.”

Little says the closed nature of the Storyful Pro account always troubled him, because of his belief that crowdsourcing is almost always a better route to take for fact-checking the news (something he has written about in the past for the Nieman Foundation) and that’s why the decision was made to open it up. I’m glad the company decided to do so as well, because the more services and networks and media outlets there are trying to do this — whether it’s Storyful or Sulia or Breaking News or even Wikipedia — the better off we will all be as news consumers.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Petteri Sulonen

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By now, many people are becoming used to Twitter as a source of breaking news, whether it’s a report about the death of Osama bin Laden or details about the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. But it’s still fascinating to come across new examples of how the real-time information network can be used to report on a breaking news story, whether by professional journalists or those committing what Andy Carvin of NPR has called “random acts of journalism.” In one recent case, a member of Reddit pulled together a news report about a shooting in Toronto, including the tweets of those who attended and later became victims of the incident — another sign of how social media is changing both the way we consume and the way we produce journalism.

According to a number of news reports, the shooting took place late Monday night in a suburb of Toronto called Scarborough, at a house party attended by an estimated 250 people. By the end of the incident, two people were dead and more than 20 others were wounded. Within a matter of hours, a user at Reddit who goes by the handle “BitchSlappedByLogic” had posted a description of the events leading up to the party as well as the aftermath — and even some information about the background of those involved and their apparent gang affiliations.

The Twitter-sourced report is easier to verify

The entire report was compiled via Twitter, with links to individual tweets by someone who said he was the host of the party, as well as a teenaged girl who was one of those killed in the shooting:

Apparently, it was this guy’s party, as he says here. He’d been planning this party since July 7th. This guy apparently anticipated that problems might happen at the party. This girl, too. This guy too. So this could be the result of a pretty well-known beef. This person was shot. As was this person. This person was also shot — twice. This person was also shot, according to this tweet. This may be her in recovery, though I can’t be sure.

It’s interesting to look at the Reddit report, and then compare that to a traditional news report from the CBC (the publicly-funded broadcaster in Canada). The one on Reddit doesn’t look or read anything like a normal news story — instead of names, it has links to tweets and individual Twitter accounts, and there isn’t much of a story at all, just a recitation of facts or alleged facts. The CBC story has the names and ages of the victims, as well as some quotes from the police about gang violence, a quote from a friend of one of the deceased, and some eyewitness reports from the scene.

That said, however, the Reddit version also has a lot of things the CBC version doesn’t: for example, it has some tweets from people attending the party about the potential for violence — before the shooting even occurs. It also uses messages posted by those involved to talk about the shooting being part of a possible gang war, including links to individual tweets from people threatening more violence, as well as tweets and YouTube videos posted by members of a gang that one of the victims was apparently associated with.

While the format of the Reddit story may be more difficult to read, it also makes the story a lot easier to fact-check while you are reading, since any reader can simply click on a link and see the message or user profile that the author is basing their statement on (in one case, the Reddit post has a link to a screen-capture of a tweet that has since been removed). The CBC story has no links whatsoever. And while the traditional news story simply makes statements without providing any evidence other than an interview with police, the Redditor uses words like “apparently” and “I can’t be sure.”

Twitter isn’t a newswire, it’s a newsroom

The approach that Reddit took in this case reminded me of the way that Andy Carvin used his Twitter account as a kind of live-streaming news channel during the uprising in Egypt. In an interview with me at the Mesh conference in Toronto earlier this year, Carvin talked about how he saw his Twitter followers as his newsroom — in the sense that they helped him filter through and verify information from a number of different sources within that country, disproving or verifying videos, photos and other news. As he put it:

I get uncomfortable when people refer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.

While the Reddit report doesn’t do this (although commenters do fact check comments from the police), it’s easy to see how it could be the foundation of exactly that kind of process — one in which anyone, journalist or not, can contribute information that can then be verified or pulled together into a story. Imagine how much better the CBC story could have been if it had made use of some of the background and linking practices that you see in the Reddit post, or if the two had worked together, and you get some idea of what the newsroom of the future looks like.

Mark Little of Storyful, which works with mainstream media outlets to do exactly that kind of thing, has written about how journalists need to stop seeing themselves as gatekeepers of information and start to look at journalism as a collaborative effort involving all kinds of different sources. Twitter is clearly one of these sources, as the Toronto shooting shows — and so is Reddit, which has already proven in the past that it can be a crowdsourced fact-checking engine. And those who learn how to make use of all these tools will wind up producing better journalism.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Juerg Vollmer and See-ming Lee

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By now, many people are familiar with the story of how NPR editor Andy Carvin used Twitter to create a kind of crowdsourced newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East last year, inventing a brand-new kind of journalism on the fly and in full public view. In a discussion with me on Thursday in Toronto about the lessons that can be learned from his experience, Carvin made some interesting points about the value of such an approach — including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human.

The discussion at the Mesh 2012 conference (full disclosure: I am a co-founder) touched on a number of different elements of what Carvin did during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, including two important factors that allowed him to take on the role that he did. The first was the nature of his job at NPR, which — as a senior digital strategist — allowed him to experiment with new tools and take risks. The second was the fact that he already had a number of contacts in the Middle East through his work with Global Voices and other social advocacy groups (Harvard researcher and author David Weinberger, whom I also interviewed at the conference, live-blogged the session with Carvin).

Both of these meant that Carvin was perfectly positioned to do what he did when dissidents started revolting in Tunisia, and then following that in Egypt and Libya. He also noted with a laugh that “it helps when you have ADHD” (which he does), because for several months during the height of those revolutions, he was spending almost every waking minute reading or posting on Twitter, managing several lists of dissidents and thousands of responses from followers. His peak output reached 1,400 tweets a day at one point, whereupon Twitter blocked his account as spam.

Not a newswire, but a crowdsourced newsroom of public editors

But Carvin also talked about how he approached the reporting of real-time events on Twitter, and how he doesn’t really like having what he did called a “newswire.” Instead, he says he prefers to think of it as a crowdsourced newsroom — with him as the reporter, or the anchor (or “news DJ,” another term he likes to use) pulling in reports from different places, and then relying on his followers to act as editors and sources, fact-checking and verifying and also distributing the news that he was curating. As he put it:

I get uncomfortable when people prefer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.

In many cases, Carvin says, this process worked remarkably well — and quickly. In one photo of Egypt, for example, someone he asked for an opinion said that the corner of a building in the background was clearly a prominent local landmark, and then sent a link to a Google Earth view of the building, allowing Carvin to confirm within minutes that it was the same location. He also gave his followers what he called “fire drills,” in which he would ask them to fact-check photos that he knew were fake and then he would look at how many errors they found.

And what happened when he made a mistake and posted something that wasn’t accurate? In one case, he distributed a photo he thought was of a woman who had been shot in battle and was being attended to by nurses — but it turned out she was actually dead, his followers told him, and her body was being prepared for burial. Carvin says he admitted his mistake multiple times, and then retweeted both the criticisms and the corrections as broadly as possible:

You have to be prepared to be accountable in real time. When I screw up, my followers tell me.

News as a process, and the virtues of being human

The NPR editor, who is now working on a book about his experiences, says he believes in the “news as a process” approach, as author Jeff Jarvis and others have described it — in which not only is the reporting of an event crowdsourced in real time, but new information is added and mistakes are also corrected by readers, who journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience” (recent events have also shown how social networks like Twitter and Reddit can act as fact-checking engines).

As I tried to argue in a Twitter debate on Friday with a number of people (which Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute curated with Storify) I think there is a lot of public value in doing what Carvin did, by assembling and fact-checking and correcting information in real time. That’s not to say editors don’t have value, or that reporters shouldn’t try to report things as accurately as possible. But when errors are made, I think admitting them publicly and being seen to correct them (not something traditional media is very good at) actually builds trust.

For me — and I think for Carvin — doing this is connected to a larger principle, and that is the value of being human, and of expressing that humanity, even if it means acknowledging a mistake. The NPR editor also admitted that in some cases he was so disturbed by the videos and images he was seeing from Egypt and elsewhere that he responded on Twitter in a way that he says might not have been professional — but he still felt was justified. As Weinberger noted in his live-blog: “Andy perfectly modeled a committed journalist who remains personal, situated, transparent, and himself.”

This is the kind of thing that mainstream media outlets discourage, just as many try to avoid admitting that they have made mistakes. Restrictive social-media policies put in place by many of these outlets seem designed to remove as many of the elements of being human as possible from the practice of being a journalist — which I think is the exact opposite of what needs to happen if traditional journalism is to survive. And I think Andy Carvin is a pretty good example of what one possible future of real-time, crowdsourced journalism actually looks like.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Luc Legay and personaldemocracy

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Social networks like Twitter and web communities like Reddit often get criticized for being the source of nefarious rumors and false news reports, including the deaths of innumerable celebrities who are very much alive. But just as fakes and hoaxes can spread more widely and efficiently through the web than they can in print or other forms of media, they can be debunked more quickly as well. The story of how Reddit members fact-checked some fake Wikipedia entries is a great example of this in action, and journalism professor Alfred Hermida also points out in an interview with the Poynter Institute that Twitter and other social tools have crucial roles to play in the future of digital journalism.

As Yoni Appelbaum describes in a post at The Atlantic, the fake Wikipedia entries were deliberately created by students at George Mason University as part of a class taught by T. Mims Kelly — whose exercises in fakery of various kinds are presumably supposed to show how easy it is to fool a gullible public. The students came up with several fake historical events, including the alleged reign of terror sparked by a serial killer, and created websites, YouTube videos and other sources they they linked to from their fake Wikipedia entries in order to give them the veneer of authenticity.

Reddit spotted the fake in less than half an hour

The last time Kelly’s class tried a similar hoax, in 2008, it apparently went off without a hitch — and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was apparently not too impressed. This time, however, one of the hoaxers posted it on Reddit. Within half an hour, a keen-eyed user had already questioned the veracity of the entry — and others quickly joined in, pointing out a number of strange coincidences and irregularities that raised doubts about the information. As Appelbaum describes it:

The Wikipedia articles had been posted and edited by a small group of new users. Finding documents in an old steamer trunk sounded too convenient. And why had Lisa been savvy enough to ask Reddit, but not enough to Google the names and find the Wikipedia entries on her own? The hoax took months to plan but just minutes to fail.

As The Atlantic piece notes, one of the strengths of a community like Reddit is that it can come together extremely quickly around a single purpose, something that periodically erupts into public view in “flash mob”-style events — like the recent campaign that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for 9-year-old Caine Monroy, whose cardboard arcade captivated millions of YouTube viewers. In the case of the Wikipedia entries, that community power was focused on fact-checking — something that communities like Hacker News also do extremely well.

In a recent research paper entitled “Tweet and Truth,” University of British Columbia journalism professor Alfred Hermida wrote about how Twitter can be used in a similar way to fact-check news in something approaching real time. Anyone who followed National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin’s Twitter stream during the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere had a ringside seat for this sort of crowdsourced journalism, as Carvin fact-checked YouTube videos and photos and news reports flowing out of the Middle East, using his sources and followers as an army of editors.

More people fact-checking means fewer mistakes

As Hermida puts it in an interview with Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute, verification of media reports and events used to take place inside newsrooms, far away from the prying eyes of the public — but that kind of process is inherently flawed. As open-source advocates say about programming, the more eyes there are looking at the code, the less chance of bugs. The principle is the same for real-time journalism: that if it occurs out in the open, there is more likelihood that the truth will emerge. Says Hermida:

Real-time, networked technologies can unbundle the verification process. Contradictory reports and rumours can be contested or confirmed in public in exchanges that involve not just editors and journalists, but also members of public.

This is what journalism theorists like Jeff Jarvis mean when they talk about news as a process, rather than as a finished artifact that is delivered to a waiting audience. It may not be pretty — crowdsourced journalism often calls to mind the aphorism about how “He who enjoys the law or sausages should not watch either one being made” — but in the end it tends to produce facts more quickly. It’s true that hoaxes such as Abraham Lincoln inventing Facebook can spread, just as Twitter can become obsessed with something like the Kony2012 video, but what’s remarkable about such events is not that they spread, but how quickly they are debunked or fact-checked.

As Hermida suggests in his interview with Poynter, tools like Twitter can be powerful resources for journalists of all kinds, not just for providing early warnings of news events, but for helping to generate verified reporting about those events as well. In that sense, a Twitter stream or a community like Reddit can act like a crowdsourced version of the BBC’s “user-generated content” desk, which fact-checks and verifies reports that come in through social media. All it takes is for journalists to overcome their reluctance about performing such tasks in public.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Future Atlas and Petteri Sulonen

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As traditional media revenues continue to fall off a cliff thanks to the precipitous decline in print advertising, there seems to be a desire on the part of media companies to somehow find a single solution that will magically cure this problem — hence the increasing popularity of paywalls. But as media industry analyst Ken Doctor points out in a recent post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, it is far more likely that success for media entities of all kinds will come by making smaller bets on a number of different things. The big problem for the industry’s traditional players is that they have spent decades getting good at doing one thing. But now not as many people want that thing, and experimentation and rapid innovation is not in the media companies’ DNA.

Doctor says that after years of hoping the rise of the Web and digital media would not decimate the industry, followed closely by the hope that digital ad revenue would somehow arrive and close the gap, print executives are finally starting to understand that both of these hopes are futile:

Until recently, the holy grail was summed up in two words: replacement revenue. Now the jig’s up. No matter how fast you shovel digital dirt into the chasm of print loss, you can’t recreate the past; you can’t fill the hole.

Stack those digital dimes as fast as you can

John Paton, the CEO of Media News Group and a leading advocate of the “digital first” approach for newspapers, has said that the only possible response to the problem of digital dimes’ not making up for the loss of print dollars is to “stack those digital dimes” as fast as possible. In other words, accumulate as much as possible from as many sources as possible (while also reducing costs to try to stem the bleeding). In his Nieman post, Doctor notes that Meinolf Ellers, the managing director of German multimedia agency dpa-infocom, made a similar point at a recent conference of news executives:

What we all see — newspaper publisher or news agency — is that the bundle is eroding, losing its power. The more we see the bundle losing market share and reaching the end of its lifecycle, the more we have to work on smaller, fragmented products that, not each by each, but overall, can compensate. That’s the strategy.

This reminds me of a phrase that David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and co-author of the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, came up with to describe how the Web works: He called it “small pieces, loosely joined.” One of the things I took from this is the idea that the Web allows for individuals and small groups or entities to have almost as much power as — and in some cases more power than — established players. The barriers to entry, and the barriers to discovery, are so much lower now, thanks to the Web’s “democratization of distribution.”

We have seen the impact of exactly that phenomenon in the media industry in spades over the past few years, with the rise of digital-first entities such as the Huffington Post, TMZ, Politico and others, as well as the rise of individual media sources’ using social tools to become the equivalent of media entities in their own right or hybrids such as Andy Carvin of NPR and his one-man Twitter newswire model.

What will readers pay for other than just a paywall?

In his discussion of what media outlets can do to make a number of smaller bets instead of one or two big ones, Doctor refers to a number of things, including “in-sourcing” — using printing presses and distribution chains to provide services to others who need those skills — as well as providing marketing services outside the traditional newsprint platform. These are also things that Paton has focused on while trying to remake the Journal-Register Co., a chain of papers he took over after it emerged from bankruptcy.

But the things that really interest me are the ones that fit the kind of “velvet rope” model I have argued for as an alternative to a hard paywall around content: the ones that encourage a kind of membership approach, where new features or ways of packaging content or experiences related to that content are offered to readers. So live events, for example, which both the Texas Tribune and the Atlantic have been using to their advantage, or e-books, which are a different way of packaging content, can be remarkably profitable, even if that content has already appeared on the Web for free.

Unfortunately, many traditional media companies simply don’t have the kind of culture that allows for random experimentation or rapid iteration and prototyping: in other words, a startup culture. Some papers such as the New York Times have a skunkworks or research lab, and others such as the Washington Post have experimented with new features such as the Trove recommendation engine or the Facebook social reader. But many of these still feel like afterthoughts or side projects rather than a coordinated plan of attack on multiple fronts. The ones that are trying the hardest always seem to be the digital natives, or the ones with the gun to their head.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee

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As we have described a number of times at GigaOM, journalism has become something virtually anyone can practice now, thanks to social tools and digital media. This democratization of distribution has had a profound effect on the coverage of uprisings in Egypt and Libya and more recently in Syria. Thanks to YouTube, Twitter and other networks, more information is available about what is happening in those countries. But is it reliable? According to some reports, the news coming from Syria has been altered by activists who are trying to make a specific point. Does that mean citizen journalism is flawed? Not really. It just means that we need better tools to make sense of the flood of news that is all around us.

As Britain’s Channel 4 described in a recent piece about the rise of citizen journalism in Syria, dozens of video bloggers have emerged who are literally risking their lives to bring video evidence of the violence there to the world: In at least one case, a video blogger died while live streaming a demonstration. While the death of veteran Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin in February got a lot of attention, so far not much has been paid to the “citizen journalists” who are putting themselves in similar situations. In a piece on Colvin’s death, New York Times media writer David Carr said that foreign reporting requires more than just “clicking on a YouTube video.”

Citizen journalism often comes with a viewpoint

Carr is right, at least in the sense that what is missing when we try to understand a place like Syria or Egypt through YouTube videos or Twitter is context. How do we know the videos or reports we are getting are true? Channel 4 said on Tuesday that it has discovered at least one video of the city of Homs was altered by the person who uploaded it, with a cloud of smoke added to the picture.

The video journalist who took the video admitted that he altered it and said he did so to raise awareness of the violence taking place in the city so the world would respond. This sounds a lot like the arguments that some observers made in defense of Mike Daisey, whose report on Public Radio International about visiting Apple factories in China turned out to be partially fiction. Some — including Daisey — said his embellishments were justified because they exposed a larger truth about Apple and its conduct in China, while others said any altering of facts made the entire story suspect.

One of the issues in a place like Syria or Egypt is that much of the reporting we get from nonmainstream sources almost inevitably comes from people who are either involved with a rebel group or are friendly toward it (although it should be noted this is the case with much traditional foreign reporting as well). This phenomenon was also seen during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when video reporters like Tim Pool emerged to tell the story of the protests and developed a large following very quickly, despite making it clear that they didn’t see themselves as journalists.

Traditional and citizen journalism are not adversaries

One response to this phenomenon is to lament the loss of traditional foreign reporting, as Carr seemed to be doing in his tribute to Colvin, and criticize the emptiness or unreliability of YouTube videos and citizen journalism. But another response is to see the value of the phenomenon — as Nick Kristof of the NYT seemed to in comments he made about citizen journalism and the Occupy movement — and try to apply journalistic principles to this maelstrom of content coming from a thousand different sources, some reliable and some not. This is what the BBC does with its user-generated-content desk, which sits in the newsroom and filters and verifies reports coming from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

This is also what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with his Twitter account ever since the Arab Spring revolutions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt. As he described in a recent interview with Current.org, Carvin sees Twitter as the place where he does the majority of his journalism — and where his followers act simultaneously as sources, fact-checkers, editors and distributors:

It’s not that I’m just using Twitter and integrating other forms of journalism — it’s that I see Twitter as the newsroom where I spend my time.

Whenever I write about what Carvin is doing, someone inevitably makes the argument that what he is doing isn’t “real” journalism, which presumably consists of flying to these locations and reporting on camera the way we are used to. The argument seems to be that since Carvin is sitting at his desk monitoring Twitter (and using the telephone), that he isn’t really doing journalism. As I have argued before, this is absurd. Carvin is applying exactly the same journalistic principles that traditional reporters always have, including the duty to verify facts. He is simply applying them in real time and in full public view, which is arguably better than the traditional alternative.

Citizen journalism and the rise of social media don’t mean that we don’t need traditional foreign correspondents anymore, or traditional reporting. If anything, we need those kinds of skills even more than we ever have. But the globe-trotting war correspondent is no longer the only game in town when taxi drivers can report bombings just as easily as a CNN crew, and training the new breed of curator journalists may involve Twitter and YouTube lessons instead of flak jackets. In the end, as Jay Rosen has said many times, journalism gets better when there are more people doing it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Yan Arief Purwanto

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The battle between traditional media and the blogosphere over aggregation (or “curation,” if you prefer) continues to rage. In the latest skirmish, Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill got thrown under the bus by many for a recent blog post in which she summarized a New York Times piece about data-mining practices and privacy. According to her critics, Hill “stole” the story from the NYT, along with a lot of web traffic that rightfully belonged to the newspaper. Some argue that this doesn’t deserve to be called “journalism” — but in many ways the eternal debate over what qualifies as journalism is a red herring. The reality is that aggregation and curation are part of the new media ecosystem, and they can add a lot of value whether we like them or not.

As more and more competitors for traditional media outlets emerge — whether they are corporations like The Huffington Post or teenagers in war-torn countries trying to do journalism on the fly, like the 14-year-old profiled in a recent New York Times story — there seems to be a growing obsession with defining what journalism is, and who deserves (or doesn’t deserve) to be called a journalist. Is the man who live-blogged the Osama bin Laden assassination a journalist? Is National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin, who has been using Twitter as a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring, a journalist?

Some mainstream journalists would answer no to both of those questions, but by doing so they miss the larger point, which is that in both cases, information is provided that increases our knowledge about an important topic. Isn’t that a pretty good definition of journalism, not whether someone made a phone call or has a specific degree, or whether they travelled to a war zone or not? In some cases, as journalist Rob Pegoraro noted, smart curation may actually serve that goal better than so-called “original reporting.”

The question that matters is whether it serves the reader

During a debate on Twitter about Hill’s post and whether it qualifies as journalism or not, Jonathan Stray — the interactive technology editor for the Associated Press — raised a good point when he asked: “Do we judge capital-J Journalism by how much original reporting it has, or how well the product serves the users?” If raising awareness about privacy infractions and creepy data-mining practices is valuable, then Hill’s post served that purpose, because it probably got a lot of readers who might never have seen the NYT piece, or never have made it all the way through the 6,700-word original.

So one perspective is that Hill “stole” the NYT story in a shameless attempt to get pageviews from someone else’s work — and the other is that she highlighted an important issue within that story in a very readable way, and also directed a lot of traffic to the original that might never have gone there without her post. The Huffington Post gets criticized for doing something similar, which mainstream outlets criticize as theft, but in some cases (although not all, I will admit) the HuffPo version is actually better than the original, in the sense that it is more useful or adds more information.

A former colleague, Ottawa Citizen online editor Melanie Coulson, argued in a post that what Hill did isn’t journalism, it’s just aggregation. And in an interview with media blogger Jim Romenesko, the author of the NYT piece that Hill excerpted said that he was perfectly fine with Hill doing what she did if it brought more attention to the issue and to his piece, but noted that “every hour spent summarizing is an hour not spent reporting.”

This is a false dichotomy in many ways. Having followed Hill’s blog at Forbes, I know that she often does original reporting, as well as the kind of post she did with the NYT piece. Both arguably have value for readers, which theoretically should be the primary goal. Many journalists like to focus on sexier pursuits like foreign reporting and investigative stories, but the reality is that much of what we call journalism is very different. In the end, it has to serve the reader — either by informing them or entertaining them, or some combination of the two. That’s not something to be ashamed of.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Yan Arief Purwanto and jphilipg.

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Even as some news outlets like Associated Press hire social-media editors to try and figure out how to make use of tools like Twitter for journalistic purposes, others seem to be intent on locking these tools down and removing as much of the social aspects from them as possible. According to a report in The Guardian, broadcaster Sky News has come out with a new policy that bars reporters from posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, prevents them from breaking news through the service — and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn’t come from a Sky News account. As with so many other similar social-media policies, this completely misses the point of what makes Twitter so powerful.

Although it doesn’t link to an actual document, the Guardian story quotes from the Sky News guidelines, which tell reporters not to tweet about stories if they are not “a story to which you have been assigned or a beat which you work,” and says that anything approaching breaking news must be sent to a Sky editor first before being posted. The policy says that retweeting other Sky journalists is fine — provided they are posting updates about a story to which they have been assigned — but it says Sky staff are forbidden from retweeting anything that hasn’t been posted by a Sky News account:

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.

Twitter is the newswire now, for better or worse

This is even more draconian than the most recent example of a news outlet trying to lock down Twitter use — namely, the Associated Press newswire, which came out with standards for retweeting that not only mis-stated how the process works on Twitter, but also forbade journalists working for the newswire from retweeting anything without adding a comment to make it clear that they were not agreeing with the person being retweeted. The AP rules also strictly forbid breaking news on Twitter, which ignores the fact (as I pointed out at the time) that for many people the real-time information network has become the newswire.

Since then, AP has hired Eric Carvin to be the service’s social-media editor (Carvin is the brother of National Public Radio’s Twitter phenom Andy Carvin, who turned his Twitter account into a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions). At a recent social-media event in New York, Eric told me that he was trying hard to convince the wire service that the benefits of social tools like Twitter outweigh the disadvantages. But as with so many traditional media outlets, both AP and Sky chose to focus their policies on what their staff shouldn’t do, instead of concentrating on what they should do.

As we’ve pointed out before, these kinds of rules seem to be aimed at trying to remove the human being from the process, something that may work in traditional forms of media, but fails miserably when using social tools like Twitter. The whole point of using them is to be social, and that means expressing human emotions and possibly even opinions in some cases. The best social-media policies — like the exceptionally minimalist version that Media News CEO John Paton came up with — simply ask reporters and editors to be themselves, but to think about what they post before doing so, and to use common sense and “don’t be stupid.”

Why remove the social from social media?

Sky News says in the email it sent to employees that the guidelines were necessary to ensure that “there is sufficient editorial control of stories reported by Sky News journalists and that the news desks remain the central hub for information.” And obviously, a news service doesn’t want dozens of reporters tweeting rumors and innuendo about major breaking stories, or tipping competitors off to a scoop. But banning staff from retweeting anyone outside the Sky News operation makes no sense whatsoever, as Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics notes — Sky reporters should be seen as the key sources for information, regardless of where it comes from.

During the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, New York Times reporter Brian Stelter was the first to broach the rumor — on Twitter — that the terrorist leader had been killed, when he retweeted a post from the former chief of staff for Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld. Some wondered whether Stelter would get in trouble from the Times for retweeting something that hadn’t been confirmed, and for posting it before his own newspaper. But as far as I know, there were no repercussions — and Stelter’s tweet in turn was retweeted thousands of times, and likely broke the news to many.

That’s what Twitter can accomplish if you use it properly, instead of seeing nothing but threats and potential negative repercussions. Like other media outlets that have tried the same approach, Sky News risks removing all the benefits of a powerful media tool by treating its staff as though they were disobedient children. Elana Zak of 10,000 Words has a Storify roundup of some other responses to the Sky News policy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users and Rosaura Ochoa

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Late last year, the board that oversees the journalism prizes named after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer changed the definition of its “breaking news” award to stress the real-time nature of the category. This led to speculation about whether someone who used Twitter as a reporting tool — the way that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio did during the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere last year, for example — might be eligible for one. But a spokesman for the Pulitzer board said on Monday that he would not, because Twitter is not considered a news entity for the purposes of the prize. But should it be?

Just to recap, the Pulitzer board changed the “breaking news” award definition in what appeared to be an attempt to stress the real-time nature of the category (and also perhaps because there were no winners of the award in 2011). Instead of mentioning the use of various tools, as the previous definition did, the new version simply said that the award should be presented for a distinguished example of breaking news that:

[A]s quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as times passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage.

Real-time news, but must be on a website

In discussing the changes, the Pulitzer board also said that “it would be disappointing if an event occurred at 8 a.m. and the first item in an entry was drawn from the next day’s newspaper.” As Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab noted at the time, these changes seemed tailor made for a nomination that might include the use of Twitter — such as live-tweeting a breaking news event. Although the specific award is intended for what the board calls “local reporting,” I thought the same description could more or less cover what Andy Carvin did during the revolutions in Egypt.

But when I asked Sig Gissler — the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes since 2002, and a faculty member at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism — he replied via email that what Carvin did wouldn’t be eligible for a prize because:

[E]ntered material must appear on an eligible news site — meaning a site operated by a U.S. news organization that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles.

Gissler also noted (as Carvin himself did in a response on Twitter after the changes to the breaking-news award description) that Pulitzer prizes are typically only awarded to newspapers, not broadcast entities such as National Public Radio. But the main point seemed to be that reporting a news event using Twitter wouldn’t be enough to qualify unless that reporting appeared on — or was associated with — a “U.S. news organization that publishes at least weekly… and adheres to the highest journalistic principles.”

Journalism no longer occurs only in newspapers

Obviously, the Pulitzer board is entitled to award its prizes in whatever way it sees fit. But will it be overlooking some potentially game-changing and arguably historic examples of breaking news journalism if it sticks to that definition? I think so. Whether Carvin fits the traditional definition of a journalist or not, the reporting that he did around Egypt using only a Twitter account — and tools such as Storify for collecting that reporting — comes pretty close. Some have criticized his work as being just aggregation, but the reality is that Carvin verified and reported and did all of the other things that journalists do.

In effect, Carvin did all of the same things that the BBC does with its “user-generated content” desk, which tries to filter, verify and then report what comes in via Twitter and other social tools like Flickr and YouTube — but he did it single-handedly. Should he be penalized for that, or watch some other outlet get credit for embedding his Twitter stream on their newspaper website? Should Brian Stelter of the New York Times get more credit simply because his Twitter coverage of the tornado in Missouri happened to be associated with a newspaper, even though it appeared on his Twitter account and his Tumblr blog?

Like many other traditional journalistic institutions, the Pulitzer board is eventually going to have to come to grips with the fact that journalism is becoming a much more elusive concept than it used to be — not only is it no longer confined to the simple boxes labelled “newspaper” or “broadcast,” but some of those engaging in it don’t fit the traditional labels either. That doesn’t mean they aren’t committing acts of journalism, just that our vocabulary hasn’t kept up with the changes in the industry.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Yan Arief Purwanto

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