crowdsourcing

The plural of anecdote is not data — even when it’s ‘crowdsourced’

Tuesday, 11 March 2008, 18:05

I really like what the Times does online, but I must say that Roy Greenslade’s analysis of today’s Times splash is right on the money.

It doesn’t take university-level stats to know that self-selecting samples cannot be extrapolated to populations. An online vote touted as “a new kind of interactive poll” is no different than the sort of phone-in vote that papers have run for years.

It’s a very clever way of creating a very big collection of anecdotes, but to call it a “poll”, interactive or not, is misleading.

My favourite bit (in the printed editon) was this: “The poll, which attracted 2,476 responses, is novel because it reflects not just hard statistical data, but people’s observations and anxieties about the state of the economy”.

Eh? “Hard statistical data”? Where? Methinks the “just” was superfluous.

Further down (in a tiny boxout at the foot of the jump on page 4) communities editor Tom Whitwell provides the disclaimer that should have been right up in paragraph two — the story “does not have the statistical rigour of an opinion poll”.

The Times isn’t the first newspaper to report its online votes as if they were some sort of survey, of course. But to sacrifice the intellectual rigour of a story for the sake of fostering online “community” or experimenting with “crowdsourcing” is a very strange set of journalistic priorities indeed.

I wonder how many letters will flood in tomorrow from the Royal Statistical Society and various OxBridge dons.

The obligatory Google Map is very pretty, though.

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On the (Citizen) Media

Saturday, 13 October 2007, 08:48

NPR’s On the Media has an excellent summary of the state of the art in networked journalism in the form of its report from last week’s Networked Journalism summit in New York.

There’s nothing terribly new here, but the nine-minute package is a great introduction to the topic for the uninitiated. Have a listen:

The crowdsourced story in Ft Myers comes up, plus more about the concept of “crowdsourcing” from Wired’s Jeff Howe, who coined the term.

Robin Hamman talks about the flood of material that the BBC receives and how it needs to be careful to specify that it does not want people send in pictures of fluffy kittens.

Also mentioned are local news aggregator, Topix, Jay Rosen on AssignmentZero and why it didn’t work as expected, Mark Potts on why Backfence failed, a discussion of Talking Points Memo’s crowdsourcing of the US attorney documents as an example of a rare networked journalism project not linked in some way with a large news organisation, and and Jeff Jarvis on why experimenting with innovative collaboration between amateurs and professionals is the way forward — and essential for the latter.

Update: On Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine blog and elsewhere, Jay Rosen responds at great length to the reference to AssignmentZero in the OTM package. OTM’s Bob Garfield has replied to Rosen’s criticisms.

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More essential reading: data and interactivity in online journalism

Monday, 13 August 2007, 08:31

A post published last week on the Newspaper Next blog is going straight to the list of essential online journalism blog posts.

Steve Buttry looks at how presenting local information databases online can help newspapers “become the source for answers”. There are loads of great examples of how US newspapers presenting public records in an easily-accessible form for their readers.

Making existing databases available and useful to readers is just one side of the data coin, though. What about the opposite possibility: enlisting readers’ help to generate the data that will form the basis of new reporting?

Jeff Jarvis has a suggestion for a networked journalism project about local infrastructure. Jarvis suggests how things like the Bakersfield Californian’s pothole map or MySociety’s FixmyStreet to the next level.

Once readers have identified potential trouble spots, Jarvis says, “do what you do best: add journalism.”

Someone has already acted on the suggestion.

Incidentally, these issues are good example of some of the other items of the essential reading list. The Newspaper Next post is a collection of data projects that turn the web into the canvas for computer-assisted reporting, as Derek Willis put it. They are also good examples of Ryan Sholin’s online journalism skills trinity — they are examples at the intersection of “data” and “interactivity”. Now if only we could find some way to add the third component, “multimedia”. Angela Grant has some contributions for that section of the reading list.

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