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Crowdsourcing And The Future Of News

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We’ll look at “crowdsourcing,” you, and the future of the news.

A user-generated video taken of looters during the London riots of 2011 and posted to YouTube. (extremecoverage/YouTube)
A user-generated video of looters taken during the London riots of 2011 and posted to YouTube. (extremecoverage/YouTube)

The old model of journalism was like this… Lone reporter, heroic or otherwise, goes out into the world, asks a lot of questions, digs and digs, fills a notebook, and brings back the story. In a shrinking world of journalism, that still goes on.

But the new model, or a piece of it, is very different. Scores of ordinary people – or hundreds, or thousands – sending in their observations on what’s going on. Their piece of the puzzle. To make the whole picture of the news. “Crowdsourcing.”

This hour On Point: We’re talking about crowdsourcing and the future of news.
-Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Derrick Ashong, host of Al Jazeera's The Stream

Mandy Jenkins, Social News Editor, The Huffington Post

Robert Hernandez, professor at USC Annenberg.

Photos

Tom prepares before the show. (Alex Kingsbury/WBUR)
Tom prepares before the show. (Alex Kingsbury/WBUR)
Robert Hernandez (aka @webjournalist) talks with On Point. (Alex Kingsbury/WBUR)
Robert Hernandez (aka @webjournalist) talks with On Point. (Alex Kingsbury/WBUR)
Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins talks with On Point. (Alex Kingsbury/WBUR)
Huffington Post's Mandy Jenkins talks with On Point. (Alex Kingsbury/WBUR)

From Tom's Reading List

Huffington Post "If you are like most people, you don't much like the way the "national media" cover politics. As a long-time member of the Washington press corps, I agree with you. We can be trivial, shortsighted, credulous, ideologically blinkered and timid — on a good day."

Nieman Journalism Lab "If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack."

The Guardian "The George Polk Awards, one of the most important annual journalism prizes, has honoured the anonymous video of the death of Neda Aghan-Soltan during the 2009 Iranian election protests. "

This program aired on September 23, 2011.

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