“As Reported”, a 4IP pitch

This post is one of many we’re going to be (hopefully) doing opening up the ideas we have which we feel have some value and which could benefit from your feedback.

This pitch was given to the Yorkshire launch of 4IP on the 4th February 2009. It was one of four pitches shortlisted for two pots of development money. We didn’t win.

I want to start with a simple premise that most people agree with: that the 4th Estate is a cornerstone of a democratic and civil society. News matters, it enables us to be good citizens because we’re well informed.

But there’s a problem. We’re inundated with information. Some of this is easy to process through simple filtering like news sources from neighbourly gossip. But it’s increasingly difficult to determine the veracity of information – how good it is.

It’s the same for journalists. In a busy 24-hour news ecosystem the drive to publish can come at the cost of checking sources thoroughly. “Copy and paste” journalism is nowhere more prominent than in covering reports, press releases, factual statements and analysis. Most of these stories break web conventions by not linking to their source. Reports are invariably referred to as “a report by *****”. This is often because the reports don’t exist online, they are commercial reports or factual statements from sources that don’t independently publish the information.

There’s a lot of this stuff produced daily by independent public authorities like the ONS, “Quangos“, “Think Tanks“, Universities and commercial organisations. It makes for easy news for journalists.

Example: you might remember the story in january this year about the carbon footprint of servers and of say, doing an online search. The story provoked a lot of interest, not least because lots of technologists were alarmed that they were contributing so much carbon by doing so little. An online search was alleged to produce half as much carbon as boiling a kettle! A furore followed and debate took place amongst different communities on the web. The BBC Backstage mailing list for example had many people pointing out that the source of the news story was a quote from someone from a company that helped companies go green, so a company with an interest in highlighting “green issues”.

The web is good at doing this digging. It was subsequently found by the various online communities that the source of the news was also mis-quoted. The news source was, basically, faulty.

So, there’s a lot of information out here. Our traditional ‘filters’, journalists, aren’t doing such a great job of checking the veracity of the stories and linking to them appropriately. They’re busy people. They have a life. So, how do we get a better filter? We turn to the audience itself, the crowd, to help us get the news we deserve.

Some ways for the audience to interact already exist.  Comment is Free is a great resource. It’s a feedback loop from readers to editorial staff and the printed and main online content via a “middle layer” of blogs.  But it doesn’t explicity cover sources, and you can’t directly verify sources through the service.

Then there’s Wikinews, which operates a community driven citizen journalism ‘service’.  Sources are an explicit field here, but wikinews itself is very niche and the verification of sources and rating of sources is not covered.

We need something that offers us a means to find and understand the veracity of news sources.

This is what “As Reported” is about.

And this is how it could look on a page, initially perhaps via a Greasemonkey script or Firefox plugin, which pulls back to the data from an API which we’d build.  The content here is indicative but you could have:

• Sources that the story draws on
• Ratings of that source (a research institute, commercial organisation or public authority)
• Other stories that draw on that source
• Comments on the veracity of the source (though you may not want to expose this back out)

The source of the news is not only kept in check and made transparent but it potentially becomes a means to find other relevant content (other stories, potentially joining up a “News Event”).

What would we do with this £5000 grant? We’d produce a proof of concept and create aggregation site of reported stories to see which sources are used, compile a starter list of institutions that produce reports and allow users to comment on story.  Moreover, this prototype wold suggest alternative reading sources and give a rating for veracity of 1-5 etc. It’d be done in 2mths. And from there we’d look to develop an API and pull in relevant comments from other web sources.

The image from the second slide was taken from Citizen Kane and symbolises perhaps the best and worst excesses of the press and of the age of control. What I hope to have described in the last five minutes is how we can create a simple service to produce a more transparent, more democratic news, a news which we deserve and which is very do-able.

There were four questions from the panelists.  I only remember one, Tom’s. He was typically incisive and asked whether we’d allow people to comment seeing as commentary had not proved particularly successful at the Guardian.  I suggested we would but that you wouldn’t necessarily display it back as that creates a feedback loop to spammers and egoists.

Thanks to those people on the day who provided advice and critical comment.

• Digg this
• Bookmark on delicious