Police Roam MA Suburb In Search Of Boston Bombers (Photo: Talk Radio News Service)

Those who fear that crowdsourcing may soon make professional journalists obsolete should take a look at some of the links below related to an amateur sleuthing experiment on the popular Reddit social news site that went horribly awry last week.

The goal was commendable enough. A “subreddit” was set up to enlist the members of this massive community (14 million monthly visitors by one report) in the hunt for suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. Participants were told not to name names and to focus their effort on combing through thousands of photos posted on the Internet in hopes of finding the origins of the backpacks that exploded, killing three people and injuring 282 others.

The rules quickly went by the wayside, though. Names began being tossed out more or less at random, photos of anyone carrying a backpack were flagged as suspicious and chatter from the Boston Police Scanner were posted as fact. Most damaging was a rumor that Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing for a month, was one of the bombers.

Twitter did its part both to spread misinformation and to serve professional journalists who sought to calm the hysteria.  Some mainstream media organizations picked up on the Tripathi rumors and amplified them, while other journalists tried to settle the crowd by pointing out, among other things, that police scanner reports are unconfirmed and often wrong.

The accusation that Tripathi was involved in the bombings was particularly damaging. When the popular @NewsBreaker Twitter account reported that the missing student had been confirmed as a suspect based upon police scanner chatter, “social media went crazy,” said Reddit General Manager Erik Martin in an interview on Atlantic Wire. “It was posted so many times in [Reddit subgroup] /r/FindBostonBombers that I had to stay up the entire night deleting them.”

Martin called the experiment “a disaster,” and issued an apology to the Tripathi family on behalf of Reddit, which is owned by Conde Nast. Media critics have been swarming in the wake of the incident, with Reddit getting nearly universal condemnation. About the only contribution the crowd made to the investigation was to identify one photo of the suspected bombers that the FBI hadn’t seen. However, the distraction the experiment caused as professional reporters tried to untangle the web of amateur accusations more than offset the small benefits. A chastened Reddit has since launched a new crowdsourced campaign to help locate Tripathi.

Questioning Crowdsourcing’s Value

Does this mean crowdsourcing is a bad idea? In certain situations, yes. Criminal investigations require specialized expertise that no group of amateurs can match. FBI and police investigators had access to intelligence that enabled them to evaluate and discard spurious information that the Reddit crowd didn’t. In a highly charged atmosphere like this, investigation is best done behind closed doors, with information revealed selectively when it can move the process along. The crowd is enlisted to help authorities but not to solve the case.

We can’t help but wonder what the public response would be if police officials conducted their investigation the way Reddit did. If every rumor and bit of speculation was held up to public comment, then our opinion of law enforcement might be quite different. Sometimes there’s good reason to withhold information from the public, as the irresponsible actions of the Reddit crowd made very clear.

However, we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath. Crowdsourcing can have great value when applied to analysis of very amounts of data or eyewitness accounts. Witness the comprehensive Wikipedia report on the Marathon bombings for an example of how many eyes can tell a story better than a few.

The incident also offered some shining examples of traditional media at its best. On Friday the Boston Globe, which has been a poster child of newspaper industry tumult, posted this marvelous account of the factors that set two likable young men on the road to terrorism. It was mainstream media at its best.

Update

Mathew Ingram has a different view. He believes Reddit, Twitter and other popular tools are capable of producing quality journalism, but not in the way we’ve traditionally defined it. Ingram believes that journalism is “atomizing” into component parts, and that the fact-checking and validation functions can be better handled by a crowd.

Related articles

• Inside Reddit’s Hunt for the Boston Bombers
• Reddit apologizes for ‘online witch hunt’ for Boston bombing suspect
• Reddit, Boston and the missing student
• Three things that Reddit did right during the Boston bombings and why that matters [GigaOM]
• Reddit apologizes for fueling ‘witch hunts’ after Boston blasts
• Media, old and new, takes heat for Boston coverage – Chicago Tribune

Citing newspaper closures, high stress and low pay, CareerCast has rated newspaper reporter as the worst job in the nation, behind lumberjack, oil rig worker and meter reader.

The ratings, which the jobs portal has published annually since 1988, factor in criteria like income, growth opportunity, environmental factors, stress and physical demands in ranking 200 jobs annually. Newspaper reporter was ranked #126 in the first published report 25 years ago. However, the last decade has seen ad revenues shrink 60% and reporting staffs dwindle by 30%. At the same time, deadlines have become shorter while demands for output have increased.

The job of newspaper reporter “has attracted many aspiring writers, been romanticized in movies and helped bring down corrupt presidents,” the company said in a press release. However, Publisher Tony Lee said people who like to write are better off seeking careers in advertising, public relations or online publishing these days.

The three top-ranked jobs in the nation are actuary, biomedical engineer and software engineer, the survey said. The rankings aren’t necessarily intuitive. For example, “senior corporate executive” is rated #155, attorney #117 and air traffic controller #170. Mining, a job that many people would say is the worst in the nation, isn’t ranked at all. You can find a list of all 200 rated jobs here.

The the 10 biggest losers, with approximate pay levels, are below.
200. Newspaper Reporter – $36,000
199. Lumberjack – $32,870
198. Enlisted Military Personnel – $41,998
197. Actor – $17.44/hour
196. Oil Rig Worker – $37,640
195. Dairy Farmer – $60,750
194. Meter Reader – $36,400
193. Mail Carrier – $53,090
192. Roofer – $34,220
191. Flight Attendant – $37,74

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In a dying industry, the sensible thing to do is to maximize your revenues before you die. Paywalls might well make money for newspapers. But that doesn’t mean that newspapers aren’t dying. Quite the opposite.

—Felix Salmon, Reuters

That quote, which we first saw in this Mathew Ingram piece on paidContent, gave us new insight on why we dislike paywalls so much. Yes, the newspaper industry seems to be adopting them at a rapid pace, and yes, the paywalls at The New York Times and Financial Times are reportedly successful, but there’s something about putting the subscription genie back in the bottle that strikes us as a step backward.

Salmon puts his finger on one of the weaknesses of most current paywalls: They are defensive strategy. They’re designed to keep loyal readers on board, but they repel potential new readers.

Alan Mutter shares worrisome statistics: More than two-thirds of regular newspaper readers are over 45, their average age is 57 and the average age of the online newspaper audience grows one year older every year. This industry is still headed toward a cliff. Unless those demographics turn around, it’s only a matter of time before the audience dwindles to a size that is no longer economically sustainable.

What’s the answer? Unfortunately, no one has come up with one. In another piece this week, Ingram criticizes paywalls for being a no-growth strategy. His article is mostly a restatement of Mutter’s analysis, but the really interesting part is in the comments section that follows. Both critics and supporters of paywalls vigorously debate the alternatives, and both sides make good points. Done right, it seems that paywalls actually could attract new subscribers, but no publisher is reporting the kind of circulation gains that will be needed to replace this rapidly aging audience.

The time seems right for micro payments, but that idea has never gained any traction. Kachingle was one of the early players in newspaper micro payments, but it has now morphed its business model into a co-marketing app content somethingorother that we can’t figure out. People seem to be OK with using Google Checkout for 99-cent purchases, but not for five-cent purchases. We think there’s a psychological barrier to micro payments. Below 99 cents, people don’t want to be bothered to think about paying. In fact, charging a nickel to read a 5,000-word article seems a little absurd, as if the article has no value. At some point, micro payments work against you.

Reuters’ Salmon argues that paywalls as currently implemented are too inflexible. They impose a limited number of subscription options on visitors regardless of what the visitors want or how they behave. Paywalls should use a sliding scale that maps to the needs of the individual reader, he suggests. People with an intense interest in sports will pay more than those who care deeply about entertainment, so they should pay a different price. Few publishers understand their audiences in that kind of depth, though.

We did see one bit of encouraging news this week. The Newspaper Association of America reported that advertising revenues continued their seven-year-long string of declines, dropping 6% in 2012. However, overall revenues were down only 2%. The reason is that publishers are finally diversifying their revenue streams, and not just by charging readers:

These new revenue sources, which include such items as digital consulting for local business and e-commerce transactions, now account for close to one-in-ten dollars coming into newspaper media companies. They are significant enough in scale that NAA has begun to collect detailed data about these revenue categories and track their trajectory year-to-year for the first time.

Consulting? Affinity programs? Marketing Services? Where have we heard those ideas before?

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