Online Journalism Blog had firsthand experience with citizen journalism site AllVoices' recruitment tour of U.K. universities. Speaking to college students majoring in journalism, the company seemed to be selling itself as a leg up into the world of journalism, much like the proliferation of writing gigs on job sites promising "exposure" for writers.
However, even the journalism students aren't buying into the hype. Even when shown the automated method of content filtering employed by AllVoices, including a voting system, aggregation, and contributor reputation, the students remained skeptical of the lack of human editors, asking:
"[W]hat if someone posted something false? What if a PR person planted some fluff complimentary to their client? Do you perform any identity checks? And my particular favourite: What if the person writing was a terrorist?"
After watching the repercussions of the Steve Jobs heart attack rumor that began on CNN's citizen journalism site iReport, the students have a point. User-generated content has been a boon to online content, but at the same time, the lack of editorial oversight has tarnished the reputation of citizen journalism. Automation enables efficiency, but does nothing to ensure quality or accuracy. Citizen journalism needs an overhaul to achieve respectability.
Image by Mark Visosky. Used under Creative Commons Attribution License.
Comments
We want students to seed our community as we believe students have real stories to share with the rest of the world and they are not scared to sharing it.
The absence of human editors is essential to allvoices as we want "real" stories told by ordinary people on-the-ground that editors may not find compelling enough. War in Iraq is a perfect example, did we hear from real Iraqi's what was going on iraq prior to the war?
As you know traditional media, who really does background check and fact checks, have broken false stories. No system is perfect.
Allvoices just has a different approach, but you also know that a lot of newsrooms in traditional are also cutting editorial staff with web and flash developer.
I thought some more on the topic and I have some additional comments and thoughts.
Personally I valued their questions as a critical mind is something very important for journalists (and all other professions for that matter). It also gave me the opportunity to further explain the validation process in allvoices. It is from the blog post not transparent in what context these questions were raised and how we address those in allvoices. Basically all of the questions you mentioned are related to the students being unused to the concept of an open platform weaving multiple perspectives to each post via aggregation, community and reputation, but also that they were unaware of the issues faced with editor-driven validation. I have written plenty on that topic here.
The whole idea with allvoices is to provide context and diversity around any(!) report posted together by providing the readers with some guidance of the validity of the report. Basically the really cool part here is the uniqueness of mashing up content together to provide a new more complete overview of any report, whether it is news, opinions or just a human story. As we let you interact around all different news items and opinions, you create something as cool as a content-based network.
I do completely disagree with the statement "automation only provides efficiency, and not quality or accuracy". If that would be the case then I assume you also doubt that Google is either accurate or quality in their search results. We even broaden this concept by bringing in an element of community and also reputation to fight of the issues with PageRank type ranking systems. I therefore do not really follow your point here or the grounds for your claim on automation not being able to create quality or accuracy.
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