It sounds impressive: twelve thousand people. But the challenge was not persuading them to sign up. It was figuring out what they were willing and able to do after that, and then cost-effectively coordinating their efforts so that they added up to real journalism. By Election Day, we had solved enough of that puzzle that I can now say to professional journalists: we found a viable pro-am model for advancing stories both around the globe and in your backyards, and you should take a serious look at it. Our experience with OffTheBus demonstrates that what Clay Shirky calls the “mass amateurization” of journalism can provide real breakthroughs—not only in the democratization of news and information but also in bolstering the role of the media as a pillar of democracy. What we did won’t replace what traditional newsrooms do, but if taken seriously and used properly, this pro-am model has the potential to radically extend the reach and effectiveness of professional journalism. And it won’t break the bank. More than five million people read OTB’s coverage in October 2008, and our tab for sixteen months of nationwide collaborative journalism was just $250,000.
Here’s what we did and how we did it.
Mayhill Fowler had been managed and edited for almost a year by the staff at OffTheBus before she broke Bittergate. Though we were working with several hundred writers, we could give reporters like Fowler personal attention because OTB did not operate like a traditional newsroom. Pro-am journalism demands a new kind of management.
I’m not a journalist by training and I directed the project using the online organizing tactics I learned on the campaigns of Howard Dean and John Kerry. Unlike traditional organizers, Web organizers communicate and organize using online tools. They operate asynchronously. An e-mail they send out at 5 p.m. may not get read until 9 p.m., or 1 a.m. Or maybe never. They must deal effectively with fast, exponential membership growth. They set aside a greater percentage of their time and budget for initiatives that capitalize on unforeseen circumstances. A good online organizer knows that most people join an organization after they take an action on its behalf, like donating $5 to fight cancer.
OTB was the fourth organization I had launched, and I had become a working existentialist: you are what you do. Rather than write manifestos or abstract guidelines, I focused our membership on immediate goals and challenges. Our projects built a culture based on journalistic standards that drew heavily, but not exclusively, from so-called Old Media. We sent back pieces for rewrites and subjected our contributors to different degrees of editing. Deadlines and assignments weren’t just practical necessities; they were our best marketing tools. OffTheBus experienced its highest growth when we launched high-profile projects, like our Superdelegate Investigation that engaged 227 contributors to find out everything they could about this handpicked group of potential kingmakers.
Stories, not technology, were our best organizing tools. They gave information greater cohesion and structure than a wiki or a blog. They invoked a shared purpose. They also worked equally well from the ground up or from the top down. Let’s try to figure out which way the evangelical vote will swing in Iowa, wrote Dan Treul, the editor of The Saint, the campus newspaper at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to fellow OTBers in December 2008. And people signed up. Our best assignment e-mails drew participants by posing questions to members: How is the convention impacting Denver? Will Reagan Democrats vote Obama or McCain? Much as the Obama campaign successfully tapped into a yearning for engagement, OffTheBus spoke to thousands of citizens who wanted to help gather and report the news, not just consume it. There was a palpable joy among participants who transcended the role of spectator and created new narratives beyond those they were seeing in their daily newspapers day after day. This genuine interest in quality journalism is perhaps the most important lesson in all of this for the professional press.
"Broke Bittergate" are you kidding?
#1 Posted by Buzzcat, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 09:15 AM
I think this is a really important piece, both for what it says (and the lessons learned), and for the way it says it. Unlike some who talk about serious, fact-based, citizen journalism models, Amanda is fundamentally inductive instead of deductive in her approach; not that she doesn't plan, but she learns through doing, and the method is constantly adapted to the needs of the story and the production of serious content. Great piece, and required reading for journalists and newspapers serious about building a base of investigators and researchers to supplement tight budgets.
#2 Posted by Zephyr Teachout, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 10:34 AM
You are dead-right about transparency and disclosure.
Here's an approach I launched with the help of the Poynter Ethics Fellows that can work in any newsroom, provided the Guild gets out of its own way.
Setting aside my overweaning pride in my own work, I was surprised it never took off. If anyone gets interested in this as a model for Pro-Am projects, I'm at loose ends and willing to devote a little time to moving the idea a long.
http://www.postregister.com/ethics/disclosures.php
#3 Posted by Dean Miller, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 12:23 PM
Amanda -
Did you pay your writers? Did they have health benefits? Did they have any kind of journalistic training? Did they have routine editing? If you openly admit some of your "Grassroots Correspondents" were Obama volunteers, how could you possibly avoid the problem, much less the appearance, of bias? Maybe you answered all these questions in your lengthy post, but I don't know because I found it impossible to read all the way through. Perhaps some good old fashioned newspaper editing is in order.
By the way, if "Bittergate," which ironically plays off the name of the mainstream media's greatest success, was your biggest achievement, you've got a ways to go.
#4 Posted by Evan, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 01:18 PM
How depressing to realize that Journalism 2.0 is as dull and self-important as the current, flailing model.
#5 Posted by DJ, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 01:57 PM
"good writers are scarce."
And good reporters are even scarcer.
The leader of this effort, like most non-journalists, seems to make the mistake of believing that journalism is writing.
No, journalism is based on reporting. And reporting is hard, time consuming, and expensive.
There was a small bit of reporting in this effort, and that's commendable. But that seems to be where more emphasis should be placed in the next trials.
#6 Posted by Abe, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 02:08 PM
This article is important both in what OTB did and couldn't do in this new experiment of citizen journalism and Amanda has done a great job laying out just how it evolved from concept to reality online.
Of course, I'm biased - all journalists are, the trick is to be AWARE of one's biases - and since I did participate in OTB as much for my own broadening as a journalist as well as pure curiosity, I was surprised at the quality and the quantity of the work.
Yes, more editors would have been much appreciated, especially by me, we're filing on the fly along with - in my case - paying msm, who wrote my checks, but it was still a great learning experience for everyone and a new concept in the real never turns out precisely as one imagines, though in this case, it produced some newsworthy insights and stories.
The section was written more women than men and I suppose that figured into the pro-Dem point of view more often than not.
Amanda and Marc and their very small team didn't have the resources of a major traditional news organization and they still produced enlightening stories from the ground up, which most of the national reporters (or local journalists for that matter) didn't have the time or knowledge to do since they were covering the horse race, daily events, and candidates on the ground, but rarely sticking around to learn what was happening on the ground and behind the headlines. That's what citizen-journalism did very well, despite the variety of professionalism in the writing.
I'm glad I jumped into the fray in 2007 by blogging on OTB and Amanda and Marc were both professional and supportive to those of us who did - yes, without pay or health insurance or even, expenses. It was crazy, gloriously fun, hard work, and just one part of what can become yet another model that can be used by more traditional print media if the Guild can change along with the times...that are a changin'.
Yahoo for Amanda, Marc Cooper, Ariana Huffington, Jay Rosen and the rest of the tiny Huffpo team - and volunteers - that actually created a model that can become part of the future in journalism. It was no small task and just the beginning of a revolution.
#7 Posted by Beverly Davis, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 02:23 PM
I'm a little worried about a possibly misplaced buzzword: "generative."
First, here's what wikipedia says: "Generative Systems refers to systems that use a few basic rules to yield extremely varied and unpredictable patterns." There's more there, but a critical part of the definition is that complexity falls out of "basic" or "simple" rules. That's supposed to be the power--or at least the poetry--of generative systems or grammars or whathaveyou.
"Generative" is a buzzword because it's great pals with another buzzword: "scalability." If a system is generative, the thinking goes, it's also probably scalable. Not just scalable, really, but radically scalable. In OffTheBus's case, it seems to me, the idea would be that into the system go simple pieces of writing and reportage from volunteers and out of the system emerge nuanced, sophisticated works of journalism. Within the system, meanwhile, the inputs interact and commingle according to a set of more or less naive rules, dynamics that don't themselves require much more sophistication what's involved in the inputs themselves.
Now, OffTheBus may have accepted these inputs and produced these outputs, but it doesn't look much like a generative system to me. Actually, it sounds like it took heroic effort and enviable intelligence on the part of editors like Amanda Michel. For that, they deserve serious praise--they did a big job with few resources. They were efficient, perhaps very efficient. But generative systems don't need brilliant editors pouring in hours and hours of administration or organization. Layers of hierarchy are not appropriate.
Also, I doubt that the metaphor of a pointillist painting can be an argument that OffTheBus was a generative system. Pointillism doesn't refer to a system of dots; they're not interacting with one another. Pointillism refers to something closer to a collection of dots, residing next to one another inertly, such that the magic happens in the eye of the beholder. The viewer of a painting does the work to bring the image alive, as it were. Likewise with OffTheBus, the reader of ground-level coverage does the synthesis in order to reach an overall intelligent idea of the landscape.
So I have great hope that distributed reporting can be done sufficiently efficiently that it works. But as with wikipedia, I have no illusions that there won't be a core of highly sophisticated actors encouraging, organizing, filtering, and editing.
#8 Posted by Josh Young, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 02:31 PM
Abe,
I agree with you that the work of journalism is most importantly in the reporting, and I think this is what made OTB so interesting--it was focused on solid, verifiable, information gathering, far more than impressions.
Some examples from this article (although there were many more)::
* Identifying former President Bill Clinton’s financial impact on Senator Clinton’s campaign. Kerri Glover, a former Clinton administration staffer, dug up names from Clinton’s ’92 and ’96 campaign fundraisers. Our network of researchers generated a list of guests who had overnighted in the Lincoln Bedroom during the ’90s. Before long, we had a roadmap. No fewer than five people with accounting experience calculated the net contributions to Senator Clinton’s campaign from Bill Clinton’s former staffers and from his book-signing tours. “Usually an untrained intern would check figures like this,” Marc Cooper quipped. “We’ve got dueling accountants.” Such redundancy is a network fact-checking tool. Daniel Nichanian, a senior at Yale University, and I analyzed the final data and he wrote the story, “Bill Clinton: Hillary’s Rainmaker,” which illustrated the benefits of running for office with a former president at your side.
*Volunteers recorded the Obama and McCain campaign conference calls, and made the audio available to the public as part of our Listening Posts project.
*Pictures of headquarters around the country
I know they also recorded hundreds of interviews with precinct chairs in Iowa.
I tend to think the great advantage of distributed research like OTB did is the capacity to amass facts. If you create a task that is inherently verifiable (ask people to research public documents, e.g.), you can do much more fact-based reporting. Designing the projects and figuring out fact-checking mechanisms are essential, but hurdles that can be overcome. When I did similar (much smaller) projects with the Sunlight Foundation, we would require people to send documentation of their research before publishing it.
That means that the role of reporter/editor changes, to one that requires extensive management capacity and planning, such that the work can be distributed. Then, and only then, is the second-level task of writing called on--I agree with Amanda that the writing was uneven, as was the reporting. But more verifiable information about the campaign, its mechanics, and its money, was reported on than could have been done with a similarly sized staff of three.
Because I think we are in a crisis of public information--more is available, but less is aggregated in a meaningful way for citizens--this kind of project is critical. I don't think they did it perfectly, or even near perfectly, and I don't actually read this as a triumphalist piece. Its an educational one--here's what we did, here's some first steps, and if we're going to figure out how to do good journalism on less $, here are some thoughts.
This is an interesting conversation!
ZT
#9 Posted by zephyr teachout, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 03:55 PM
Just to say, I was one of the people lucky enough to take part in this wonderful experiment. One thing I cannot emphasize enough, is that Amanda was in touch in a way that made me wonder if she had a Blackberry implanted in her head. When I think about it now, realizing the sheer numbers of people involved, it was her personal touch that made the difference. I'm not sure if it would have been the same without our robot.
Point two: The amazing thing about Mayhill Fowler was that no one was ever quite certain who she supported. Literally every story she would write, the comments following would accuse her of supporting yet another candidate.
There is something truly amazing that did happen with the Huffington Post. I will say that computers are not my language; not my comfort zone. I always make the joke that everyone who understands computers is a year younger than I. But this is what the Internet was supposed to do. This is a model. People -- I -- was able to have even just a tiny voice -- in a pretty big event. I was trying to explain HuffPo to my aunt, and I said that it's like the New York Times, but online. Journalism is not dead; it can be sixty years old, however.
Jodi Lampert
#10 Posted by Jodi Lampert, CJR on Thu 5 Mar 2009 at 07:46 PM
Clearly, this is a brilliant young lady and --after becoming an avid reader of Off The Bus and not a contributor-- I understand why it made such a good read. I live in the So Cal area so I had long followed the work of Marc Cooper who was also part of this project but had never really heard of Amanda until now. I had read the Cooper had moved on from OffTheBus. And after reading this I Googled Amanda and see she has just been hired by Pro-Publica. No surprise there! And what a loss for The Huffington Post.
#11 Posted by Mike Grady, CJR on Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 01:23 AM
My bet is that like Ariana Huffington's contribution to journalism, Amanda's will be valued more with the passage of time, honored in more nuanced ways. As one of the retired pros drawn out of my mothballs by OTB, I saw both the problems and the constructive innovation of Amanda's approach, was impressed by the organizational skills that she concentrated at the center, liberated as a reporter.
Received Wisdom shattered under the sheer weight of our ability as a group to get out there and check. My first story for OTB was entitled "What Fifty State Strategy?" because the Obama campaign was at no point a force in Kentucky and ignored evidence of real support in Louisville, leaving MoveOn to focus some Louisvillians in Southern Indiana, where they paid off. Yet I still hear the mainstream media prattling about Obama's 50-state strategy, because Obama said he had one.
Sitting cross-legged on top of a press table at a Palin rally, surrounded by NYT types, I counted people--disproving the MM accounts which accepted the drastically exaggerated press releases. Having arrived early, I nailed numerous on site interviews in a rally where the press was not allowed to interview, as the Self Important Herd allowed itself to be herded In an Indiana contest so tight that results were not conclusive until days after the election, out there in so many places on the ground, we saw early that Indiana was shifting to Obama. Some of us new or old pros (fact-based reporters who were also adept writers) became feature writers working with Hanna. We were all of us--the organizers, the feature writers, the data and impression gathers--just figuring out the potential, getting tight as a group, forming teams,our when OffTheBus abruptly stopped because the election had been won. It was like hitting a wall at 1000 mph.
In its wake, I'm working on the Huff Post World section, which Hanna edits, doing a series on Iraq. The effect of OTB is evident. With the choice of form before me, I could have come at this series as a seasoned reporter, as a Middle Eastern scholar of sorts, as the family member of a paramedic in Fallujah or perhaps as an activist, calling for us to get out, citing specific ways to do it, with suggested actions and contacts. Instead, I let fly with all of it, and it is uneven, experimental, textured, getting thought-out responses from the darndest variety of people. I credit Hanna for running it, Amanda and before her Ariana for blowing out the walls in the first place.
#12 Posted by Gail McGowan Mellor, CJR on Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 05:28 AM
Props to DJ & Evan -- I was ready to beat my head against a wall 'til I read those comments.
@ the same time, re: "if 'Bittergate,' which ironically plays off the name of the mainstream media's greatest success, was your biggest achievement..."
I won't go into the professional transformation wrought by Ivy Leaguers w/ visions of Woodward-Bernstein cachet. But there are some good books out there -- "Republic of Denial," "Leaving Readers Behind," "The Powers That Be," etc. -- that any journalist still invoking Watergate really ought to check out.
Oh, and: one reason efforts like OTB "hit a wall" after the election? People don't have the same time or energy for quirky political paraphernalia. Plus... wait, I guess "Josh Young" already made the point more thoughtfully and patiently than I could (n/m).
#13 Posted by jms, CJR on Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 04:55 PM
When you write, "Our network of researchers generated a list of guests who had overnighted in the Lincoln Bedroom during the ’90s," do you mean that they did any more than to Google this phrase:
clinton lincoln bedroom list
which leads to this list from the AP, via CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/02/25/clinton.money/list.html
Searching the Internet for information that reporters have previously gotten by harder work is reporting, but it's not really something to crow about.
I'll bet those photos of campaign headquarters were devastating!
#14 Posted by Abe, CJR on Tue 31 Mar 2009 at 03:12 AM