Yesterday, Dateline NBC posted a group page on Facebook soliciting friends of the Virginia Tech shooter. From the Facebook group discussion:
WE UNDERSTAND HOW DIFFICULT THIS IS, AND WANT TO HELP SHARE YOUR STORY…. DATELINE NBC URGENTLY LOOKING FOR ANYONE WHO KNEW SEUNG HUI CHO. WE HAVE PRODUCERS AND CAMERA CREWS NEARBY READY TO TALK TO ANYONE WHO CAN SUPPLY INFORMATION ABOUT HIM AND HIS MOVEMENTS LEADING UP TO THE TRAGEDY. WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO PRODUCE A THOUGHTFUL AND INFORMATIVE REPORT THAT MIGHT SHED SOME LIGHT ON THE TRAGEDY AND POSSIBLY HELP PREVENT SOMETHING LIKE THIS FROM HAPPENING AGAIN. ( via Boing Boing )
Some are seeing this as online ambulance chasing, and NBC has since taken the page down. Admittedly, it does seem a bit tasteless juxtaposed with the outpouring of support on the site; there are now dozens of condolence groups established by students at Alabama, Drexel, Arkansas, BU, and Harvard to name a few. The solicitation was even more egregious on a network like Facebook, still more intimate and private compared to the wild west of MySpace.
That said, Dateline did have the right idea: crowd-sourcing. There are now a myriad of user-generated content sites focused on news reporting that are really opening up the space to anyone who has a story. Prior to the Internet, reporters used to approach stories from the outside-in. Now UGC has given us an entirely new way of looking at news gathering, an inside-out perspective. This has been playing out on blogs and in some of the major news outlets for a few years now.
What is really different about these new sites is their focus on the news aspect (rather than “letter to the editor” commentary) and the concept of linking the UGC reporter with the professional reporter/news outlet. They are essentially building a broad base of stringers.
As newsroom staffs are getting smaller and smaller and RSS is continuing to gain in popularity, it is only a matter of time before these sites really start to see mass-integration and usage. Here are few that are enabling this open-source reporting movement:
NowPublic collects stories and eyewitness accounts from anyone any time.
Pluck is syndicating blog content for direct distribution to newspapers and other traditional media outlets.
Global Voices collects blog news from less developed countries
NewAssignment.net fosters the new style of reporting that combines work of professional journalists with input form online readers and spawned Jay Rosen’s Assignment Zero project.
YouWitness News Service is the UGC service that Yahoo! launched they are eventually planning to expand this service to local news and high school sporting events.
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