The Guardian asks what role crowdsourcing will play in the future of journalism

Mercedes Bunz of The Guardian's Digital Media Blog recently asked whether it was time for journalists to fully embrace crowd-sourced journalism with an award. This hypothetical question was in fact just recently made a reality, when an anonymous group of Iranians received a George Polk Award in Journalism for their footage of a female protesters violent death. Despite the difficulties of determining who in the crowd should get the award, should it actually become its own award category, the blog post sheds light upon the important role the crowd now plays in journalism.
Social networking services consistently put average day citizens on the front lines of news as it is unfolding. Reporting on events like the plane that safely crash-landed on the Hudson River or the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake can only accurately be told with the help of crowd sourcing technology. Crowd sourcing websites like Ushahidi actually worked to save lives in the Haitian earthquake, pooling user contributions to create a crisis map of the most devastated areas.

The crowds ability to capture and publish what they see, hear, and feel as it happens ultimately creates a more accurate mosaic of an event felt from a variety of different perspectives.

Although crowd sourcing depends upon users essentially being in the wrong place at the right time, they ultimately contribute material that The Digital Media Blog described as "faster, more detailed and richer than the material provided by news agencies."

Crowd sourcing, in a less obvious application, can also be used for investigative reporting. One reporter followed the tip-offs posted by citizens only to uncover a sensational story regarding the police's involvement in a death.

Respected news outlets such as The Guardian and CNN have gone so far as to reach out to the crowd. The Guardian has an entire page devoted to uncovering MP's expenses, which employs the help of average reader in sifting through nearly 240,000 pages of expense documents. So far 26, 155 users have participated in the effort. Employing crowd sourcing in a similar fashion, The Huffington Post called upon readers to scourge the 1,400 page US Senate Stimulus Bill. The call was meet by 367 participants who willingly trudged through the bill in a search of any abnormalities that might exist.

For news agencies to monitor all of the incoming information from the masses would be an impossible task. News outlets and reports might be willing to devote their time to finding coverage of a specific event, but looking for story leads is impossible.

In order to save time while also capitalizing on the crowds desire to participate in the news, some outlets have created digital versions to accompany and perhaps replace the more traditional "tip" hotlines. Sites like the CNN iReport are notable for taking such an approach and receive nearly 10,000 monthly iReports. Although this represents a hefty amount of data to sift through, news outlets can use statistics to tag reoccurring leads that might result in a bigger story.

For reporters to benefit from crowd sourcing, The Digital Media Blog recommends that journalists cultivate a crowd following, stating "...in order to be able to ask for information using a blog or Twitter account, it is required that the journalist has built up a relationship within a community." In the competitive world of journalism, crowd sourcing can be used as a huge asset to reporters in gathering information. While issues of accuracy are ever present, Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, believes the combined "mosaic [of images or information] will be true, even if a few pixels aren't."
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Internet proving hard to control - the latest from political crowdsourcing

Do Labour and the Tories know what they are doing when they open their campaigns up to the public?

Is opening up your campaign to the internet a good idea? The Tory attempt to make #cashgordon one of the top trending hashtags on Twitter was probably more trouble than it was worth and – of course – Labour's PeoplePosters campaign to crowdsource an election poster has been taken up by people who don't like them that much either.
The excellent Beau Beau D'Or, who has been using Photoshop for satire since the last election, posted the following on his blog:

I can't think of much worse than the Conservatives getting into power. The mask will drop, pockets will be lined and despair will reign but just because I have a go at the Tories (frequently) does not make me a Labour voter [...]

PeoplePosters is a PR exercise for the faithful, maybe a PR campaign if Labour can get it into the MSM [mainstream media]. Ten digital posters over a few days is not an advertising campaign despite what the spin doctors and misguided/cynical tweeting MPs say. You are being treated like idiots.

Someone may well produce a great poster. Meanwhile Tories will be lapping up the mountains of bullshit (and producing their own) to discredit Labour, a potential own goal. They will also be given the opportunity for quick rebuttal having scanned all the entries.

He links to Chicken Yoghurt, again, not a Tory blog, which has a page of posters comparing Brown's record to Cameron's lack of substance ie "[Brown] Helped kill 600,000 Iraqis. Could he [Cameron]?"

I can't help wondering if Labour's adoption of the user-generated poster, which came of age with mydavidcameron.com, has fully acknowledged the sense of fun and mischief that anything like this really needs to get going. The page on the Labour party website inviting submissions features a head and shoulders shot of Philip Gould and a brief to "highlight Labour's pledge to protect frontline investment in key services". That reads more like a pitch to an ad agency than an attempt to speak the people who are most likely to take part.

On the other great political crowdsourcing exercise of the last week, the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones looks at how the Tory party's crowdsourced response to the budget fared.

A spokeswoman came back with a rather vague reply. Yes, there had been "hundreds of really good comments", though they appeared to fall more into the category of opinion rather than fresh analysis. She could not give me any example of a detail spotted by the web crowd that had eluded the party's Treasury team, but promised that some of the comments would be published this week.

So maybe this week we'll see.
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I have overdosed on new, brilliant ideas... by Victor Keegan of The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/03/victor-keegan-entrepreneurs Next I bump into James de Rin, whose startup crowdsourcecapital.co.uk links ideas up to the support – and share capital – of online crowds, thereby bypassing the stock exchange and other intermediaries. Wow, again. When he heard I was a journalist he told me to peer into the future of newspapers at payyattention.com, which links readers and writers in a social network of newly fashionable micro-payments.
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The Guardian crowdsources the history of the internet...

We're looking to compile a history of the internet, by the internet. Want to help?
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