Personal Computing: Power From the People

The democratization of journalism via the Internet -- creative solutions or sloppy low-standard information?

The Internet is the great equalizer, with anybody having access being able to obtain a world of information and participate in the worldwide conversation. As the Internet evolves, society evolves with it, in fields ranging from journalism to science.

With the shrinkage or outright demise of more and more daily newspapers, the debate over the use of the Internet for news has intensified.

It's clear that the printed newspaper, with its cost burden of paper, ink, trucks, cars and gasoline, can't compete over the long term with the Internet as a delivery mechanism. Newspapers will eventually have to find a new niche, just as radio found a niche after television assumed the place radio once had.

Many bloggers and other new media types celebrate the misfortunes of the old media. But they'll need to do a better job, better emulating the investigative and fact-checking techniques employed by traditional journalists, if Internet journalism is to reach its potential.

Journalism, whether online of offline, needs to fulfill its "fourth estate" role of reporting abuses in both the public and private sectors to protect democracy and promote the common good.

Bloggers in general write from a personal perspective about issues they feel strongly about. They're not known for double-checking their information, relying on readers to correct them. Journalists use expert sources, typically multiple ones, to report information that needs to be reported, whether they have a personal interest in it or not, and they're typically overseen by editors and supported by fact checkers.

The Internet is all about speed, and this can be both a strength and weakness of Internet news. The rush to outscoop the competition has always been a part of journalism, but the Internet has accelerated this.

An incident last year involving a CNN iReport sheds light on this. iReport bills itself as "Unedited. Unfiltered. News." In October a poster there reported that Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had suffered a severe heart attack. The report was false.

The SEC then launched an investigation to determine whether the posting was intended to depress the company's stock price. Concern about the health of Jobs, who had previously been treated for pancreatic cancer, had earlier in the year precipitated a significant drop in the stock's value. In the meantime, this past January Jobs took a six-month leave of absence from Apple to focus on his health.

Along with speed, another strength of the blogosphere is in its numbers. Bloggers can simply be in more places than journalists, reporting on more breaking events from a gripping first-hand perspective. U.S. soldiers blogging during the Iraq War demonstrated the benefits of this kind of citizen journalism.

Another power-from-the-people benefit of the Internet, which has implications beyond Internet journalism, is sometimes referred to as "crowdsourcing." This term, coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, refers to distributed problem solving.

With journalism, it can mean querying readers of a Web site or an independent online discussion group about their experiences or opinions and using this as part of your research. Another example is "wikis," which are informative Web sites in which anyone can contribute or edit articles, with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia being the largest and best known.

"Open source" software is yet another example. Here anyone interested and with the right technical skills can participate in creating or improving computer programs.

Crowdsourcing also extends to the worlds of marketing, consumer affairs, and science. Companies have long employed advertising agencies to organize focus groups consisting of ordinary people as