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
More similar in mission to GroundReport is ProPublica. The January ’08 born site shares GroundReport’s soft spot for the underdog, both reeking of earnestness first, business model second. But the former is peopled by journalism vets like founder and former editor of The Wall Street Journal Paul Steiger. ProPublica is driven by a full time staff of investigative reporters, meaning that nary an amateur writer is to be found on the website, whereas GroundReport subsists on them.
Global Post, too, with its cadre of professional reporters living abroad, maintains a level of professionalism and a scale of pay well above that of GroundReport. A base rate of $1000 for four posts a month and a 10,000 share stake in the company brings in “journalists who are, from what I could gauge, of a considerably different realm” than those found on GroundReport, says Charles Sennott, Global Post’s Executive Editor and VP. And when Sennott says “different realm,” he’s politely segueing into a discussion of the various awards (like Pulitzers) that many of his correspondents are bringing with them to Global Post.
And yet this lack of professionalism on GroundReport does not phase Sterne. In fact, she argues that the coverage provided by the people who are living the stories they’re reporting is irreplaceable. “You get the sort of perspective that a reporter from the states can’t really get. Everyone who’s reporting is experiencing these things first hand,” she says. And Sterne counts on this close up view to create public pressure around events like the genocide in Darfur.
But is coverage from the locals enough to set GroundReport apart from the proverbial pack? Can you get quality work from a network of reporters who, for the most part, do not speak English as their first language? When I ask her this, Sterne talks about the Wikipedia-like editing style and reputation rating system, kind of answering the question but mostly sidestepping back into more upbeat territory. “The editorial team can revise any content on the site, a rating system determines what goes on the front page and in our RSS feed, and a flagging system catches copying,” says Sterne, noting that these steps keep the good stuff on the front page and the bad stuff at bay.
While citizen journalism critics balk at the fact that the bad stuff is allowed to exist on sites like GroundReport, others are more optimistic. “I have no problem with citizen journalism, no worries about the quality. That gets filtered out quickly,” says Charlie Beckett, director of POLIS, the media institute at the London School of Economics and author of Super Media: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World. Far more problematic for Beckett is the tendency on the part of international news sites to, well, “suck.” They’re plagued, he says, by problems of lack of feedback and disorganization and can easily turn well-meaning websites into disjointed messes. In this way, GroundReport is ahead of the curve as far as low-funded startups are concerned. The site’s organizational interface—a.k.a. sending the good stuff to the front—disposes of the problem of digging for the read-worthy.
And unlike big papers with foreign bureaus, GrondReport does not pay to have and house reporters on the scene. Their reports live next door. The aspect of the site that is most often questioned—its complete reliance on untrained citizen journalists and volunteer editors—is also the project’s saving grace as far as money is concerned. GroundReport shares ad revenue percentages based on the quality and popularity of contributors’ articles, which spurs better contributions but also puts a natural cap on the amount that the site will have to pay for each specific act of journalism. Writers succeed only when the website as a whole does.
And while sums like $52.59 for 33 postings look paltry to Americans, they don’t seem so puny to contributors like Kenyan Fred Obera. On his profile, Obera calls himself “a writer, a human activist’s and a media practitioner born in Kenya and currently a student of Public Relations at The University of Nairobi.” He has been writing for GroundReport since August of ’07 and focuses on Africa-centric coverage. “I’m not in it for the money, but it does make life better for a poor journalist like me,” he says. “It’s enough to make participating worthwhile for some of our contributors in developing countries,” says Sterne of GroundReport’s Third World correspondents. Argue all you will about the value of earning $2 per post, but few can deny that the very concept of paying citizen journalists is something of a novelty. Overhead costs for web start ups are generally so low because only a couple of people are making any money at all. Consider, for example, The Huffington Post, which made an estimated $11 million in ad revenue in 2008 from thousands of posts and only 50 paid employees.
Generally, economics and ethics are like twin siblings born to dysfunctional parents who have grown up vowing to destroy each other. Sterne brokers a small bit of peace between them with her payment scheme. “It’s just the right thing to do,” says Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, of sharing revenue with contributors. “If it turns out to help produce better journalism, all the better. But it starts with doing the right thing by people who are doing the work,” he continues. Aside from being the right thing to do, the revenue sharing is also a major piece of what makes GroundReport worth looking at.
Rachel Sterne never wanted to be a journalist. Ask her what she envisioned herself doing a mere four years ago and she’ll tell you that she was studying English and she was going to maybe write novels. But watching her field pointed questions like a pro, responding with answers both expertly earnest and full of golden PR nuggets, it’s hard to see her doing anything else. ♦