But it wasn’t just fun. Metrics were essential to make sure work got done. I tracked people’s participation, and noted when they dropped out of a project. We knew which of our writers got published more frequently. The number of people who opened our e-mails and then took action told me our conversion rates. Our membership was approximately 60 percent Democrat. Women were the majority; their participation on reporting projects never fell below 50 percent. After Bittergate, retired journalists joined OTB in droves.
Each OffTheBus staff member—the professional component of our pro-am formula—also played a specific role. Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen were our publishers. Marc Cooper, a veteran journalist and a member of the faculty at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, was our editorial adviser. From August 2007 until April 2008, Neil Nagraj coordinated writers and edited copy. Later, editor John Tomasic took his place. In September 2008, we hired Hanna Ingber Win to oversee our features.
As OTB grew, it required the staff to continually restructure and consciously blur that pro-am divide. We invited those who passed an editing test to become op-ed editors.
Citizen journalists, using primarily Twitter, gained worldwide praise for providing the initial bursts of information during the terror attacks last year in Mumbai. But almost a year earlier, in December 2007, Bryan Bissell, an OffTheBus member and a substitute teacher, created a breakthrough moment for OTB and for pro-am reporting broadly.
Minutes after news broke on November 30, 2007, that several staff members in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign office in Rochester, New Hampshire, had been taken hostage, I tapped our database to find our contributor nearest to the scene. It was Bissell. Two hours later, when school let out, he raced over to the headquarters. By then, Fox News had named Troy Alan Stanley as the hostage-taker. The police had cordoned off downtown Rochester, and reporters were camped outside the campaign office. We found Stanley’s home address and sent Bissell to his neighborhood.
When Bissell arrived at Stanley’s building, there were no police and the super’s wife insisted that Stanley was innocent. “Stanley walked into his apartment not two minutes ago,” she told him. Bissell then talked to Stanley, who said he had only just learned of the hostage situation. Less than two minutes before we published our story, Fox News issued a correction. Bissell not only demonstrated how HuffPost could do much more than aggregate existing news reports, he also did what citizen journalists in Mumbai did not—advanced a story beyond the Web’s organic happenings.
It was an important early milestone in helping us understand what we could do with OTB. Initially, we had two main strategies for producing our journalism: we recruited and mentored citizen journalists who could independently write and report, and took on stories using collaborative-reporting methodologies in which a network, not an individual reporter, breaks news. This is both revolutionary and not. Major metro dailies like The New York Times often publish stories that draw from reporting by a half dozen or so reporters and stringers around the country. OTB stories were like that approach on steroids, with twelve thousand reporters and stringers, albeit unpaid volunteers, to draw from.
The first strategy—recruiting and mentoring citizen journalists—was by far the most time-consuming, costly, and risky. We struggled for months to build a cadre of committed writers who could carry the publication. We invested most of our editorial resources in fact-checking, editing, reworking leads, and providing guidance. The ideal of a citizen journalist bequeathed to us by new-media evangelists both inspired and got in the way. Incoming writers had great expectations, like beating The Associated Press to a scoop. They raced to put out copy only to realize the story already sat on HuffPost’s homepage. Ultimately, many more felt comfortable being impressionistic, profiling their and their friends’ experiences around the campaign. They resisted hard leads. We risked becoming the Monet School of Journalism. This forced us to redouble our efforts to nudge and teach writers how to produce the sort of reliably reported coverage we desired. We had to create and sustain a strong reporting culture, and that meant slower growth to start, and lots of editing.
"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