The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Wiki Journalism
Is Rachel Stern’s DIY news the future of citizen journalism?
By Lily Quateman
While interning at the State Department in 2005, Rachel Sterne watched Kofi Annan plead with the Security Council to intervene in the Darfur genocide. Unfortunately, nothing happened. From there, Sterne had a few options. She could add Darfur to the list of things beyond her control, become a humanitarian, join the government to add one more outraged voice to the UN mix, or buy a supportive “Save Darfur” t-shirt and turn the genocide into her go-to talking point for dinner parties.
But for Sterne, who had just received her BA English from New York University and was full of a particular brand of youthful idealism, dinner party pseudo-concern didn’t seem like enough.
“There was no public pressure about Darfur because the public didn’t have a personal connection with the issue,” says Sterne, bent over her MacBook at the WeMedia Game Changers conference. There she sat for three days in March ‘09 amidst an odd combination of old and new media folk, conducting interviews about the future of journalism with nary a glance out the windows at the lovely University of Miami campus. She is just shy of 5’11”, thin with brown hair and the sort of cute that makes it difficult to believe that she’s a web journalism geek. She doesn’t have the requisite pastiness of skin or the hunched back that suggests too many hours spent hunched over a keyboard, separating her from most of the new generation of journalists bred for the web.
But then you watch her interviewing old media devotees like the head of strategy at The AP, Jim Kennedy, and new media crusaders like Amra Tareen of citizen journalism site AllVoices.com and it becomes easier to imagine that even pretty girls can be obsessed with the internet and what it means for the future of the news. But unlike her pasty brethren, Sterne is just as comfortable in front of the camera as behind. She uses her interviews not only as a means of grilling, say George Brook, international editor at The Times of London, about the Times’ audience interaction on the web, but also to flirt a bit and push citizen journalism into every conversation. Whether it’s intentional or not remains unclear, but Sterne also does a bit of hair flipping in the midst of questions like “do you see opportunities for citizen journalists to fill the gap in your foreign coverage?”
More than 50 of the conference’s participants filtered through Sterne’s GroundReport-emblazoned interview site, answering a few questions and bantering for the camera before heading to the next panel discussion or workshop. As her interviewees returned to their discussions and debates about the future of the news though, Sterne calmly worked on streaming her new footage directly to GroundReport, putting together a real-time report on the conference.
Sterne founded GroundReport, an open source global news site that shares revenue with its far-flung network of 4,000 citizen reporters, in the Summer of 2007. The site’s professed goal is to democratize the media by making original, intelligent reporting possible for amateurs and professionals alike. More importantly, in a world obsessed with “monetizing content,” GroundReport produces international news at a fraction of the cost of the mainstream media by relying on the locals for coverage.
So let’s say that you’re living in Congo, a riot breaks out, and you’re overcome with a need to spread the news. You start by creating a profile and, if you’re feeling creative, uploading a picture, too. Your profile tells readers not only how long you’ve been writing, how often you write and how much money you’ve made, but also serves as an archive for all of your past contributions. And once the riot is over and you have a minute to work on your GroundReport profile, you can also upload a bio detailing any qualifications or associations that might influence your coverage. Once you’ve started your profile, you are free to upload any original copy or multimedia content you like about the riot as long as there is original reporting involved. From there, a plagiarism filter flags copied content and the copy that makes it through the filter is checked over by GroundReport’s team of 30 Wikipedia style volunteer editors. If you are, in fact, a citizen journalist rather than a plagiarist, the editors correct grammar, translation foibles are rectified and your post is approved for inclusion in the site’s RSS feed.
If a particular story becomes popular enough, it is elevated to the front page. Both the hits and the star ratings are recorded on your profile, using up to 5 stars to mark you as a reliable or useless correspondent. Contributors are paid on a monthly basis according to the hits and stars their articles receive. Sterne says that earnings can range anywhere from a few cents to upwards of $200. Looking around the site though, it’s clear from the earnings field on various profile pages that the average GroundReporterer’s pay is much closer to the few cents side of the spectrum.
Though still in its infancy, the start up site has already garnered a lot of attention. Business Week recently named Sterne one of America’s 25 Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs and she has snared content partnerships with big names sites like The Huffington Post and Mogulus. And hardly a week passes without Sterne speaking on a panel about the future of the news—usually calm, collected and surrounded on either side by middle aged men who’ve been at this a lot longer than she has.