Content from the Community
When the world is your oyster
In the age of digital media, everything is immediately at your fingertips. As a journalist, this expands your palate and your reach when it comes to writing and reporting stories. Anyone and everyone is almost immediately accessible, so why not utilize those resources for the purpose of reporting? While a useful and engaging tool to use, it’s also easy for this reach to produce lazy (and sometimes insensitive) journalism.
When thinking about crowdsourcing as a form of journalism, I’m brought back to an instance I witnessed about a year ago. Following a shooting on a college campus, some students were live tweeting the trauma. Underneath their tweets, you had a slew of journalists and reporters commenting and messaging the students saying “Hi, Im a reporter from publication X, can I use your message in a story? Can I message you with further questions? Can you send me live footage/pictures?”.
Clearly, the main motive here was to get more information on a breaking news story. As a journalist, I understand the desire and necessity to get a story out as quickly as possible.
But as a person, and a social media user, I’m appalled by the lack of sensitivity involved in the way that the reporters went about it. It’s an understood phenomenon of journalists and breaking news in general to ask families or people in direct line of trauma the million dollar question: “How’re you feeling?” When you couple that with the public nature of social media, it’s hard to see it as anything other than selfish and insensitive.
On the other hand, not all methods of crowdsourcing come off quite so squeamish. Websites such as BuzzFeed have created a trend out of asking for stories from their readers in order to produce more content. The BuzzFeed Community page is full of voluntary community engagement about a variety of topics. From the more outrageous posts like “17 Sex Stories That Are So Fucking Hot, You’ll Probably Masturbate To Them” to the family friendly “What Little Things Do You Do To Stay Healthy?”, BuzzFeed has fostered an environment where a good amount of their content is crowdsourced from their audience.
The difference in approach here is the voluntary nature of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed puts out an olive branch and hungrily and happily welcomes all who take it. A lot less savage than messaging someone about their wounds while they’re still trying to lick them. While I wholeheartedly agree with community engagement in journalism, I also think that fostering trust and open communication with your audience first is the best way to do that. Allowing your audience to come to you as active participants, instead of treating them like cows to be milked, is likely to produce better results and a better community relationship in the long run.
