Social Media Crowdsourcing helping Journalists create data 

From seeing a news outlet’s Instagram story with a poll, to a journalist on twitter asking for the public’s insight on a breaking story, or even the weatherman on the local news asking for pictures of how the weather looks in your neighborhood, journalism crowdsourcing is all around us. 

Journalists create their own data with social media crowdsoucing: 

The global Investigative’s network’s piece “How Three Reporting Teams Crowdsourced Groundbreaking Investigations’ ‘helps highlight the way that crowdsourcing helps journalists. One way is that crowdsourcing helps journalists create their own data. Just because a journalist wants to do an article or feature piece about a topic does not mean there’s already enough data and sources to write about the topic. However, by crowdsourcing the reporter can get the data and research they need. 

            This idea of journalists using crowdsourcing as a recourse reminded me of a time I used crowdsourcing for reporting and did not even realize it. In high school I was the editor of my school’s newspaper and I wanted to do a feature piece on the problem with banning books in public schools. I ran into a problem when I could not find the right statistic that really would grab the readers, so I decided to do some crowdsourcing – but at the time I didn’t know that was what it was called. I went to every English class and asked students to write down their favorite book then on my own did research to find out which of those books were banned somewhere in the United States. I then figured out the percentage of students polled whose favorite book was banned somewhere in the United States. This piece of data made for a great opening of the piece but would not have existed if I had not done my own crowdsourcing. 

The New York Times and social media crowdsourcing

The above anecdote is on a very micro level but using crowdsourcing to gather data and information is used by some of the most prestigious news outlets. For example, The New York Times has used crowdsourcing as an effective tool in their reporting. A piece from Gather: a platform to support community-minded journalists talks about how the New York Times used crowdsourcing in their reporting about COVID-19. The piece mentions that the New York Times wrote about the long-term financial issues created by COVID-19 and how they “encouraged readers to submit COVID-19 related medical bills and share their experiences”. This is a great example of prestigious news organizations using crowdsourcing to gather data and spread awareness on issues. 

Crowdsourcing is all around us: 

Crowdsourcing in journalism is something that we see more than we realize. If you have ever taken part in crowdsourcing leave a comment below! Whether it’s taking part in a news outlet’s Instagram poll or calling into your local news station, let us hear about it!