crowdsourcing the news: an experiment

Some journalists and a Carnegie Mellon team are experimenting with crowdsourcing the news. Here’s some intuition on crowdsourcing complex tasks. Here’s an article with some background.

Written by teppo

February 8, 2011 at 8:56 pm

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Given the number of unemployed journalists at the moment, this experiment may not work as planned. Do they have any way of screening out people with prior news writing experience?

Noah

February 9, 2011 at 2:37 am
The great monuments of Athens were built by citizens paid by the city. Yes, and architects designed the work and the “organon technikon” oversaw the tasks, but the routine assignments – fetching, carrying, hauling, painting – were done by people for whom they are daily skills.

The cathedrals of medieval Europe were achieved with a different organizational structure: work was not “crowd sourced” to the city.

In our time, literary skills – among them first, of course, computer literacy – are common enough, apparently, that thousands of people can apply – and find some work.

Does this then raise to a new level the skilled manager of crowd-sourced projects?

Michael E. Marotta

February 9, 2011 at 2:09 pm
BTW, just a quickie —
“How to Identify the Scams on MTurk”

http://www.ehow.com/how_5952609_identify-scams-amazon-mturk.html

Even though it is run by Amazon, postings are not vetted. This is more like eBay than Kelly Services.

Michael E. Marotta

February 9, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Here is a new experimental web site for crowdsourced micronews that you may want to take a look at: http://www.nuuzit.com

C. Sacchi

February 14, 2011 at 12:40 pm

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