ALTHOUGH it has gained popularity nowadays as one of the newest methods for news gathering, an academician and a journalist are lukewarm in using crowdsourcing as a method for reportorial purposes.
In an e-mail interview with the BusinessMirror, Associate Professor Rachel E. Khan said crowdsourcing is convenient but not the best tool for news gathering. Khan, who teaches at the journalism department of the University of the Philippines’s College of Mass Communications, added crowdsourcing is only relevant when a journalist wants to pursue leads and clues in a story.
Nevertheless, Khan said crowdsourcing should be disregarded if a report requires a credible view or opinion.
“If the story is in need of an expert opinion, then the journalists should go after the ‘expert’ in the traditional manner of reporting,” Khan said. “For one thing, how will you determine the credibility of the source? How do you separate the legitimate source from the trolls?”
A Reuters report cited Jeff Howe as having coined the term in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine. According to Reuters, Howe defined crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”
While Howe cited the cost-benefits as companies “discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd,” US-based Filipina writer Ninotchka Rosca is not that sold to the idea.
Rosca said crowdsourcing has even contributed decline in quality of news coverage, especially in social media. Furthermore, she said crowdsourcing had led to the generalization of coverages. “It has broken down specialization of news gathering, leading to a lack of quality,” Rosca said in a forum at Kamuning Bakery in Quezon City.
However, Khan said it is not fair to blame social media as the culprit for the perceived shallow thinking of some millennials.
“Seriously, to blame only one factor [i.e., social media] for shallow thinking is shallow thinking!” Khan said. “Millennials are [deemed] shallow because of several factors, including the declining quality of elementary and high-school education; the fact that they grew up with television or video games as their babysitters.”
Khan, nonetheless, blamed Filipinos’ aversion to reading as a factor. “Filipinos, in general, are not readers and therefore, are not deep thinkers,” she said. “A person who grew up with a fondness for books [and consequently, abstract thinking], will be able to use social media as an aggregator of information [both useful and useless] rather than as a deterrent to knowledge.”
As far as the quality of blogs is concerned, Khan said it will be the readers who will determine if a blog has quality and substance. Khan, meanwhile, said bloggers need to address the bigger issues in blogging,such as unethical practices in blogging, “ranging from plagiarism to paid propaganda” disguised as “unpaid for” opinion or news.”
She also urged news sources to be media savvy to determine if the blogger should be given the proper recognition. For the blogger, Khan advises he or she must develop a significant following to gain credibility from the professional media. Khan also advised bloggers to develop an instinct of an investigative journalist so they can break into the mainstream media.