Community Contributions

Key Takeaways:

• Volunteer contributions from members of a local community allow small news sites to widen and deepen coverage in non-traditional ways.

• Clearly label the source of community-contributed content.

• Be transparent about contributors’ backgrounds and surface any potential conflict of interest.

 Sometimes trade-offs are necessary

We took the tack all along that it was better to have somebody with a stake in an issue, even if it’s one that might bias them, covering it, than to not have coverage at all. Particularly with a small team.

One of our more extreme examples was at one point we had a suburban city council being covered by one of the council members. And I know a lot of people at journalism schools hear that, I can see the heads starting to explode. But our take was, we’re never going to be able to afford to send somebody to Keller, Texas, to cover that meeting. At the very least we have some confidence that he’s going to get right what was voted upon and how it turned out. We’ve got open comments for people to tell us if he’s spinning it. And it was great. Occasionally, one of his fellow councilmen would come on and say, “Well, Jim, I understood that was your take on how that went, but I felt differently about it.” It created a good conversation. And we were very clear about disclosing it.

There might’ve occasionally been a comment posted saying, how can you call this an objective account? We would respond: we agree it would be better if we had an unbiased source there, but we don’t, and we’d rather provide you this than nothing.

If you have a one percent doubt in your mind if you should publish an item, just skip it.

We have user media all over the site, but everything is curated. One of our editors just has all of our content partners in Google Reader. And he goes through it multiple times a day and selects the items he think are worth picking up. So we’re only picking up maybe one out of every six or seven things they may be posting, and that ensures a certain quality level. Early on we tried, if there was something we were unsure about, to do the research and legwork on it. And we came to the conclusion that, unless it was something huge, it just wasn’t worth the time and effort. If you have a one percent doubt in your mind if you should publish an item, just skip it.

 Broadening voices can lead to new audiences

People have pretty strong opinions about what should be in here and what shouldn’t, and they send me things. From the standpoint of a traditional journalist who’s used to working as somebody who comes in from the outside, gathers information, then writes it so that other people can know about it, it’s been interesting to adjust to that.

A site like this needs to be a news website and to have journalistic standards. But it also is a community bulletin board. I get a lot of contributions, some fall into the category of press releases and announcements, some are articles, photographs. I try very hard to figure out ways to get as much of this stuff on the site as possible.

I’ve had a couple of success stories. One of them is an 80-year-old woman who always wanted to write and had done some writing. It was OK, usable, and it was a different audience than I can get at myself as somebody in his 50s. So I came up with a new place on the site to post her column once a week. It’s been a moderate success. It gets another voice and face out there that’s not me.

 Finding the right sources and linking away

We have some communities, like my beloved Somerville, Mass., where people are on their own websites posting their own news. And these are folks who are covering things with an expertise and sometimes resources that we just don’t have. I’m never going to have a master’s of education degree, but these folks have backgrounds in business, education, city planning, and it’s a real resource for our readers to have that.

I want to take advantage of what they’re doing, so we set up partnerships. With permission, we scrape their headlines, they appear on our site, and you can click through to their site. These folks are happy for us to do it. And since they know the headline is going to appear on our site, sometimes they tone it down. So instead of “We think the school system is corrupt” it’s more like “Superintendent is questioned.”

That has been a really elegant solution to these folks setting up their own sites. We’re slightly more established and experienced at producing the news and getting it out to people, but there are experts out there who are lifetimes ahead of me in knowing their subjects.

We also have less controversial community content. In Somerville we have a community member who feels it’s her civic duty to make sure that the local paper has schools covered, so she takes photos, she interviews kids and teachers. It’s a great way to get schools coverage of interesting things, like the Hiroshima survivor who comes to speak to the classroom. There is no way in a city of 86,000 that I’m gonna have the resources to cover that, but it’s fascinating.

 Verify as if it’s your own content

There was an instance where somebody wrote us a really detailed description of an accident, a hit-and-run, a kid got hurt. It was very descriptive and detailed and it sounded very good, like a good citizen report. And I remember the gal who was editing that day said, should I run this? And I said, you can’t run it – I don’t know if it’s true! We’ve got to call and really check this out.

Sometimes if you get three or four reports of something, not specific like this, but let’s say, three or four reports like, “the power is out on my street,” three different people email you, then I’m fully comfortable going ahead and saying, “there are power outages,” putting it out there and saying, “what have you heard?” Or, “we’ve heard that there was an accident, three different people have tipped us, we’re trying to get more information.” I’m comfortable with crowdsourcing stuff. But I wasn’t comfortable with this. And it turned out he had a lot of the details wrong. He thought it was a girl, it was a boy; he thought it was a hit-and-run, it wasn’t.

The best scenario is, you send somebody over to check it out. But sometimes it’s after the fact. Then you’re weighing information that comes in with what you can get officially. Sometimes it’s a photo, that’s great. Though I guess someone could doctor a photo. Still, it’s a little easier to use a photo as a starting block to something.

 Clearly disclose community-generated content

We have a community bloggers platform, we call it the People’s Post. We get user-generated content in that form. I don’t think we make any money off of it – it’s more of a service to let them get their voice out.

There’s a copyediting process, similar to what we do with comments. We let most go through unless they’re attacks or insults or accusations. When they are, we check with them and edit it harder. But we haven’t had too many issues. Most of the people blogging on that platform are pretty professional. They like it, they get it in the stream of our search engine and such. Some of them have been some of our best-read pieces. We also put a disclosure next to it: it’s not our opinion, it’s theirs.

You can put anything you want up so easily on all these platforms – Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, they’re all basically free and easy to use. So I feel, if we’re going to put anything up on our platform, we might as well try to take it up to the bare minimum of standards, to make sure we’re offering something distinctive.

 Being okay with missing a great photo

Toward the end of last year, somebody sent me a photo. Someone had been cutting the ends off of beer cans and managing to get them around the necks of seagulls. I got a photo of this from someone, saying, I found this gull on the beach with this can around its neck! And it looked photoshopped to me. I sent it to my wife, who’s a serious amateur photographer, and she showed it to some folks she knew, and the consensus opinion was, the thing had been Photoshopped on there. So I sent back a note saying I can’t run this unless you can verify it for me. I made an enemy because she believes I was essentially accusing her of being dishonest. It got pretty ugly. She basically wanted the names of everybody who’d seen the photo — and she wanted it erased from my computer and that of everyone else who’d seen it.

I missed a great photo, unfortunately, because I was too careful about running something I couldn’t verify. If you Google “seagull beercan,” here it is on MSNBC. 

I got an attorney’s letter from her telling me to remove the image and apologize. She also wanted me to reveal the name of the person I’d given it to. If it hadn’t been my wife and she wasn’t OK with it, I wouldn’t have done it. But I wasn’t interested in dealing with a lawsuit, and this was not a principle worth fighting over with this person.

 Serving the community

We look at areas where we can do things with Drupal views and some quick geocoding that just improves what’s out there by a thousand percent.

Right now we have a guy who has a bunch of historic photos of the area, and they’re sitting on a flat HTML page, buried in these links with captions that are saved as images. It looks like it might’ve been laid out in Quark, or something like that. We can go through, geocode those photos, and make an interactive map with before and afters in Google Street View in, like, a week. And that’s a huge service to the community in our mind — just providing a platform for what’s already out there.

 How to be transparent about conflicts

I think as we and other sites reach out more and more to try and engage the community, for it not to be a little staff that does all the work, you actually want to mobilize dozens or hundreds of local people to do writing. Then there’s a host of questions there about how you remain transparent about people’s conflicts, how you actually retain credibility and authority. Within the narrow context of Berkeley, we’ve seen how easy it is for a newspaper or journalism source to be pegged as a totally partisan organ. Then half the people in town think of course it’s right, and half the people think, I won’t believe anything it says. If you’re bringing in lots of people – which we haven’t done yet – there’s something to wrestle with there.

Way back, we had a woman write a piece for us about the downtown plan, and we had commenters come in and accuse her of writing this because her husband is a developer, so she’s trying to promote the idea that the downtown needs to be restructured because then he’ll make a lot of money on his buildings.

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