DigitalJournal: Getting Paid to be a Citizen Journalist

December 22nd, 2008 in News, by Head Honcho

An earlier post tackled the possibilities of crowdsourcing in the field of journalism. But this area of crowdsourcing still has a long way to go, as there are many risks to utilizing this model. Jeff Howe gives an example of its dangers:

This morning a citizen journalist with supposed inside information posted a story to CNN’s iReport site claiming that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains. Apple stock, unsurprisingly, dive bombed as a result, its fall only arrested once Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton came out disputing the claim. (The story has been removed. Here’s CNN’s statement). (Update: Now the SEC has announced it will investigate the posting.) CNN wanted to give its viewers a voice. Instead it provided stock manipulators with one. Nice.

A news agency lives and dies by its credibility. Featuring a poorly researched report - or worse, an outright fabrication - can have negative repercussions on the news site. In the case of CNN’s iReport, the “news” about Steve Jobs is a big blow to the website’s credibility, which is hard to live down. And while there may be safeguards (prior restraint, for instance) to avert erroneous reporting, this may not be enough.

DigitalJournal.com uses a crowdsourcing model which minimizes the risks of such haphazard citizen journalism.

DigitalJournal is a website which covers news and issues of the day from multiple perspectives. Like crowdsourced journalism sites like NowPublic, it also has citizen reporters from everywhere in the world. Members can also contribute by posting blogs, uploading photos, commenting on news articles.

The big difference is that DigitalJournal is offering payment for news articles written by its citizen journalists. Thus, the website gives news contributors an incentive other than a sense of civic duty or community recognition.

The rationale of giving monetary incentives to citizen journalists is sound: since the contributor is being paid, he would - theoretically - be more careful in coming up with a report. He would exercise more discretion and perhaps would practice self-censorship.

In determining the quality of the news articles being posted by contributors, DigitalJournal has placed a voting system wherein readers can vote for a news article that they like. More votes for a particular article means that the news article can be placed on the front page of the website. More importantly, the popularity of an article determines payment that the citizen journalist can collect. Hence, the voting system put up by DigitalJournal encourages citizen journalists to not just write as many articles as possible, but to write quality articles as much as possible.

For more information about the website, watch the video below, featuring an interview with DigitalJournal’s Chris Hogg.