Last weekend the United States media news group, Journal Register Company, attempted an intriguing experiment involving community Crowdsourcing and the use of free online publishing tools for the production of all their publications.  

Journal Register produced all of its 18 daily websites and newspapers (including Connecticut’s New Haven Register and Michigan’s The Oakland Press) using only free web-based tools, such as the cloud based Google Docs, social media websites, Facebook and Twitter and the open-sourced software, Scribus.

The initiative aimed to prove that newspapers could be produced at lower costs by utilising free web apps and tools. The company serves 992 communities in 10 states, reaching nearly 14 million people each month.

The initial experiment began in April, titled ‘The Ben Franklin Project’ – a process which the Journal Register Company hoped would prove that the journalistic process could be flipped upside down and revolutionise the profession.

Instead of the reporters and editors calling the shots and deciding the news agenda, their consumers were placed at the beginning of the story cycle. Readers suggested story ideas and then became a part of the Crowdsourced news gathering process. Forms of participation included the submission of questions from residents to local officials, and sharing ideas/local knowledge on issues involving the community.

An example of one such collaboration can be found here, where the residents of Lake County, Ohio, offered their opinions to The News-Herald on the county’s most dangerous roadway intersections.

The participating public had full access to the reporter’s and editor’s  source material, and were actively encouraged to question, advise, scrutinise and participate in the story research.

“This is a groundbreaking experiment for our Company and our industry,” said Journal Register Company’s Chief Executive Officer, John Paton back in May.

“We have taught ourselves the power of open source journalism by involving our communities and we have showed the industry a way to a much more effective business model by bypassing costly legacy media proprietary systems and harnessing the power of the web.”

Following the success of April’s ’Ben Franklin Project’, the experiment was expanded to encompass all of Journal Register’s daily operations. As an additional trial, the Crowd also had an influence on the editorial story budgets.

“These are everyday issues that impact the health – physical and fiscal – of our readers,” said Jon Cooper, Journal Register’s vice president of content. “The Ben Franklin Project has renewed the focus on stories that impact the communities we serve because the ideas for those stories come from the communities we serve.”

Could such a process work long-term? It’s a topic that has been discussed in the past, and Crowdsourcing has already been applied sporadically to aid journalists in their story-gathering.

Although Cooper later revealed his company would not be converting to a fully integrated Crowd/Cloud model in the immediate future, he believes that the idea is a potentially viable one.

He said: “If an operation- part Journal Register or an outside company- wanted to, they could [use these methods]. The tools we discovered, trained on and used as part of the Ben Franklin Project could allow a news organization to throw away their old methods and start anew.”

For Crowdsourced journalism to work, journalists must be dilligent and enthuse their crowd. Ultimately, the key word is participation. There is also a responsibility on the part of the Crowd to take the model seriously. Viral spoiling campaigns which drive pointless story ideas will ultimately prove counter-productive and undermine the quality of the publication’s work. However, a failure to engage with the crowd renders the whole concept of Crowdsourcing pointless. Without participation, the model cannot work. It’s a fine balance.