AP Wades Into the Crowd to Gather the News
Important Details: It’s a simple but profound idea: "There will be someone at the scene of almost everything." That’s the thinking behind the Associated Press’ just-announced agreement with crowd-sourcing news site NowPublic.com, as expressed by AP’s Jim Kennedy, VP of strategic planning. Kennedy told Outsell that the agreement is a logical extension of what AP has been doing since the ’80s, taking in citizen photos and video on the major news events of the day from the Oklahoma City bombing to the space shuttle explosion to 9/11 and to the Asian tsunami.
AP took in those photos, and some citizen written accounts of major events, but it did it in an ad hoc way. This agreement seeks to normalize and integrate citizen involvement in news gathering.
"This is about the journalism where the audience [becomes] part and parcel of the news process," says Kennedy. He acknowledges that there is much to be worked out — all the many rules of verification and authentication ( to see "what’s in the camera" as necessary). So AP is testing the idea in phases. First phase: "access some NowPublic content" for AP use, selectively choosing what aids the AP report ,and picking a couple of local AP bureaus to test out the idea on local basis, more thoroughly integrating citizen content into its daily report. To be considered later:
- Making NowPublic content available to AP’s newspaper customers;
- Making AP content available to NowPublic in a form that aids its crowd sourcing site;
- Looking at extensions of the crowd sourcing idea that extend AP’s reach into such emerging social networking sites as MySpace and Second Life — not creating "fake people" as Kennedy says, but aiding coverage of social media.
Founded in 2005, NowPublic.com is a Vancouver, B.C.-based Web site, which claims 60,000 contributors. It’s a kind of news wiki, enabling contributors to add stories, photos and videos to evolving news stories with their own comments. Its mission: "To be a participatory news network which mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world."
Kennedy says that NowPublic’s combination of news focus, technology, naming of sources, and ability to verify all make it a good partner. Given the alignment in philosophy, he says the agreement was largely worked through in six weeks.
In Outsell’s Opinion: AP deserves a land-speed award for getting this deal done quickly. News publishers are legendarily cautious — for good reasons in the legacy world — but online they’ve got to move fast to stay up with the crowd. In this case, aligning with a news-oriented crowd sourcing site in just six weeks merits recognition and is worth noting by all in the news trade. AP’s walk-before-you-run approach is also worth acknowledging. In the middle of last year, it moved forward with an agreement with blog search site Technorati. It learned from that agreement and others it has been making. Each step builds confidence that the open Web, the viral Web and now citizen journalism can all be embraced — on the same basic principles that have sustained the news industry for more than a century. The crowd is already gathering the news. It wants in on the action. AP’s move is a smart one to wade into the crowd and make some new friends.