Speaker: Turi Munthe, Demotix

A bit about Demotix…

• Background is politics and freelancing
• Desire to create not just a socially-responsible business, but a “actively good” one
• Basic idea was to create a safe platform for anyone wanting to upload stories not being covered.
• “Free speech as soft power” — led to democratization of regions such as the Middle East.

• “Mainstream media has been shedding jobs like a 70 year old man sheds hair.”

  • Both foreign correspondents and local reporters are being cut.
  • Only 4 US newspapers even have a foreign desk.
  • Even the BBC doesn’t have a full-time staffer in Latin America.

• This enshrines “parachute journalism”.

  • Shallow knowledge of local issue.

• Ever-increasing reliance on AP and Reuters for world news.

  • Ramifications for free speech.

• Business model: instead of big networks of volunteers, Demotix receives content, sells it to newspapers and splits the take 50/50.

  • Launched in 2009; got scoops because of local journalists.

    • In June of that year, had several journalists in Iran when Ahmadinejad declared himself president after only one round of voting.
• London-based sales team, global network of resellers, strategic partnership with Corbis

“What we realized we couldn’t do”

• To build a model on citizen journalism, you have to get content that’s sellable.

  • Text is really difficult

    1. Most papers will tell you people can’t write
    2. Impossible to copyright data; can’t sell it as text.
• Despite starting as a platform for free speech, platform is mainly used for photo and video.
• Good at: bomb fallout, protests, Arab Spring, etc.
• Some contributors are able to live off earnings. Would be breaking even if weren’t reinvesting at current pace.
• People actually contributing journalistic content is a really small number.
• “80/20 rule is actually 99/1 when it comes to useful content.” — Web 2.0 is a myth.
• Very few people actually interested in newsgathering.
• Built network by a lot of reaching out to groups like local camera clubs.
• “The way you go out and build your community in the beginning is how your community will be forever.”

• Example of Digg:

  • Used to be really cutting-edge stuff; lost their original users. Became free for all and lost its actual value.

  • Demotix, going for a specific demographic, has retained its user base.

    • One of its competitors (Citizen Site) sought to grow user base as much as possible and while they get the occasional good scoop, it’s not as consistent.

      • That said, they’re doing some interesting gamification stuff.
• Gamification: “Web gurus treat human beings as children — and are right to do so.”
• Temptation to use internal stats to gamify content filtering process, but feeling is it cheapens the process of journalism.
• Worries about faked content. Happens to everyone and would be brutally bad if done early on. Use metadata and calling to verify.

• Balance between speed and quality.

  • Quality of photojournalism has vastly improved over the last decade or so, with everyone taking photos.

• Storyful: “opposite of Demotix” in approach. Acts as breaking story news curation service.

  • Both pushes highly-shared stories to the front as well as verifies the content.
• No way around using humans for news
• Contributors everywhere except Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa

• Important points for communities:

  • Improving that communities news

  • Learning how to engage that community is very important

    • Community is who will decide your front page. Off-site, will write your content.

Questions to audience:

• How has the relationship between journalist and audience changed?

  • Pew: “Views of the News Media 1985-2011”
  • Content quality has decreased
  • Culture of deference has lessened
  • Simultaneously adds new voices but decrease of trust in accuracy makes everything relative; what is true?
  • Liveblogging as a direct result of citizen journalism: “article without the stitching” due to the realization readers can “do the stitching themselves.”
  • “Downside is we have nobody to trust.”

• How does a community impact the way in which you create news?

  • To drive engagement, repeat visits, etc.
  • Newspapers start from a negative position — inaccurate, partisan and influenced. The community is those readers who have overcome that.

• What is UGC good/bad at?

  • Good at: news sourcing, accuracy, trust, speed, data crunching, content

  • Bad at: access, investigative work, writing = “lowest common denominator journalism”

    • “You cannot do citizen journalism without a professional journalism lead.”

      • The job of professional journalists now is to learn to manage these networks as effectively as possible.
  • Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker cannot be replaced by UGC — he has relationships, time/funding, exceptionally difficult work, verification. Writes 10,000 word articles that are read.
  • Hackgate is another example of something that couldn’t be discovered by UGC.

• What are the implications for journalism? Can UGC address some of the bigger blindspots in journalism? What is the next phase?

  • Shift in trust from professionalism to authenticity.

    • “From Encyclopaedia Britannica to Wikipedia.”
    • Things better managed as communities will become communities (i.e., Craigslist). Things that need unique curation and authority will continue to be run by journalists.

  • How do you sell truth?

    • Stories are now “collections of subjectivities.”

Follow Turi Munthe on Twitter @turimunthe.