May 15, 2003
Blogs + news = citizen reporters
I've been predicting this for some time. In South Korea, there's a new site called OhMyNews.com -- where everyday citizens contribute news stories they encounter in their daily travels. It has a readership of 1.2 million per day, which makes it bigger than virtually every U.S. newspaper, and 26,300 citizens registered as regular reporters. It is now so popular that South Korea's new president Roh Moo-hyun granted his first interview to Ohmynews.com after being inaugerated in February. As SFgate.com reports:
"With Ohmynews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media," said its editor and founder, Oh Yeon-ho.
"Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."
I love this. As a journalist myself, one of my biggest complaints about media is that editors -- and too many reporters -- have no idea what's really going on in the world. We're locked to our desks all day long, and in the evening we socialize solely with friends and associates from virtually identical social-class and educational backgrounds (putting us usually in the top-10-per-cent elites of our countries, if not higher). This is why, in the U.S., our news is regularly suffused with stories that would seem to prey solely and exclusively upon the psyches of well-off urbanites in Manhattan: The dire nanny shortage, the difficulty of juggling a law career with dating, the agony of Stephen Glass. That's because we well-off urbanites in Manhattan are producing a stunning amount of the nation's media, and we live in what amounts to a parallel quantum universe that bears almost no resemblance to life in the rest of the nation. I admit that some reporters sometimes get out in the field to report on stories, but not as many as you'd think; and the editors are essentially chained to their desks, so they're forced to believe that the stuff that gets reported in the Wall St. Journal and the New York Times is really all that's happening. Every time I read another story about The Matrix, and the writer talks about how wildly sci-fi dystopic it is -- a world where everyone is deluded into believing the illusion around them is actually real!! Dig it!! -- I think, well, yeah, that's pretty much the world of New York media, in a nutshell.
But je digress. Theoretically, a news service that is authored by roving citizens could be one useful mechanism for leading us out of this platonic cave. The problem is, with a few notable exceptions, news organizations try reasonably hard to fact-check their stuff and make sure it's true. A citizen-reporting system has no such safeguard. The Ohmynews.com people claim they do checking ....
"Marketing people and activists can pose as journalists to promote their own products and ideas," said Choi Joon-suk, a senior editor at South Korea's largest printed newspaper, Chosun Ilbo. "The quality of the online media is a huge problem."
Oh disagrees. All stories are fact checked and edited by professional reporters before being posted on the Internet, he said. Only two stories have led to defamation cases.
I doubt this is true, or if it is, that it will remain true if Ohmynews.com grows larger. There's no way anyone could do rigorous fact-checking on zillions of citizen contributions. That's an inherent problem of an open-ended system.
So why not use the devices of an open-ended system to help solve it -- like a reputation-management system? Instead of having a small, overworked cadre of editors try to fact-check each citizen article -- have the readers themselves do it. You open up the system so that people reading a story can input confirmation of it, or denunciation of its facts if the writer was lying.
A reputation-management system at an open-source news organization could work like this: You have three columns on the front page. One is news that is "pretty much rock-solid true"; it's been either independently verified by a paid editor, or it's gotten hundreds of independent thumbs-ups. The next column is stuff that is "disputed" -- and the third column is stuff that is like "yeah, this stuff is almost certainly false, but what the hell, you can read it for fun."
Obviously, it's possible to fake out a reputation-management system -- by having people vote down stuff that's true, or vote up stuff that's wrong. But with such a large audience -- 1.2 million people -- Ohmynews.com would probably find that this would be minimized. Rep-management gaming tends to happen only in systems where a small number of viewers can have a powerful swing effect. If you have thousands of people voting on stories, it's much harder (though not impossible) for someone to organize a campaign to game the system.
Indeed, wouldn't it be fun if traditional news media implemented this system? What if, every day, Fox News or the Philadelphia Inquirer let you vote on whether or not a story were true? After all, one of the reasons Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass were able to get away with so much chicanery was that their audiences had no real way to complain. They had no input into the media system. If they had, maybe the writers' fakery would have been noticed earlier.
Either way, I predict this concept -- user-generated news -- is going to increase in size and importance, worldwide.
(UPDATE: Jonathan has been writing some interesting thoughts about reputation-management, and argues on his blog that the word "credibility" may be a better term to use. Indeed, "credibility" is precisely the word journalists themselves use.)
(Thanks to Smart Mobs for finding this news item!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at May 15, 2003 11:55 AM
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Well, yeah, that's the whole point behind the eBay feedback system.
Precisely! Though I've heard that ebay's system isn't as good as users would like it to be.
As you said in the article, any ratings system can be manipulated. Search engine optimization also comes to mind.
The significant difference between what you propose here and what happens on eBay is that both parties get to critique each other on eBay, so a buyer, for example, won't want to provide negative feedback to a seller unless he or she doesn't mind receiving negative feedback in return.
I don't know if you could construct some sort of method for trending user responses to determine if there were certain "bad apples" you needed to cull or not....
Good point. The reputation-management system would help to keep writers in check. But it would be better yet if it could also keep readers in check -- to ensure they don't mod down stories that are truthful, and vice versa. That strikes me that it might well be possible, if you had a karma-like system (viz. Plastic or Slashdot).
This all makes me think of the sites mentioned (Plastic, Slashdot, et al) as pioneers of the reputation management frontier - what can be learned from communities like them will eventually lead to systems which work better, which are fairer and more efficient. Evolution which will lead eventually to reliable decentralised media.
Very good, I give this thread and the accompanying article a credibility of 9 (of 10).
Funny how these abstract, almost antiquated and chivalrous ideas like reputation, credibility (and taste, eventually) will be quantified as we digitize our society. I can see rep and cred being like platinum itself and a source of "wealth".
I am all for it as I see it now, we may end up making saints of ourselves through utility: A concept for which I have been arguing inversely (that honesty/credibility/reputation lead one to be more functionally whole).
Did you mean to refer to "decentralized media" as a sub-culture, or as a description of the future of all media?
There seems to be a future in which there is a decentralized, ad hoc media network composed of hundreds of localized reporting hubs (or blogs, sites, whatever your term). This decentralized media uses the least expensive available bandwidth and resources, and by its nature is somewhat random.
This is in direct opposite the existing massively centralized media network that uses the most expensive bandwidth and resources and is of limited diversity.
But je digress. Theoretically ...
O.K. Clive -- it's now clear that you are the author of all those Frank Magazine articles with the phrase je digress in them. That would make it 80% of those articles, nicht wahr?
Good points all above -- about the role of credibility in a new landscape of media. Yes, I've wondered whether Plastic/Slashdot/ebay et al have created something that other people will copy. The barrier to this stuff being used in traditional media is that too many traditional journalists don't want input or feedback from readers. The higher you go up the journalistic totem pole, the less likely the people are to give out their email addresses. They'll contact you if they want to hear from you, thank you very much.
The "well-off Manhattenite" bias is why I also read things like Street Roots, a newspaper whose writers and vendors are (mostly) homeless people.
That's an incredibly cool site!
Where can I find more information about this ?
That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.
These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
