Lessons learned — and what I’d do differently — as a citizen journalism pioneer

Presenting GroundReport at TEDxEast

In 2006 I launched one of the world’s first citizen journalism platforms, GroundReport (it no longer exists). With the renewed citizen journalism discussion on Twitter, I thought our lessons learned may be valuable:

1. I had been an intern at the United Nations, and witnessed the lack of global action in the face of the Darfur crisis. I launched GroundReport in response to the American media’s complete failure to cover the Darfur genocide, and countless other conflicts.
2. I thought that surely, if only Western audiences were aware of what was happening, they would pressure their government to intervene. I thought that hearing the firsthand accounts of Darfur would make Americans care.
3. In some ways, GroundReport worked. We broke stories that no one else could, either because of media blackouts (protests at the Beijing Olympics) or lack of on-the-ground resources from failed media models (terrorist hotel attacks in India).
4. But in most ways, GroundReport experienced what Huffington Post and others did: human nature. People mostly consumed stories of extreme good and extreme bad, whether done by celebrities or everyday citizens.
5. Our model, informed by my experience creating fair-use content libraries at LimeWire, was very focused on compensating content creators with a profit share based on traffic to their work, which seemed most logical.
6. Of course, the highest traffic-producing stories were not the truth-telling independent global news accounts we created GroundReport to support. Instead, they were often a race to the bottom quality-wise, and we had to quickly increase our controls.
7. We deputized our users with a journalistic background and found that if at least one other trusted user had approved a story before publication, we could halt the spam and link-farming.
8. Ultimately, the ad rev brought in by our platform was just enough to sustain hosting, and not enough to attract the most talented contributors. Investors thought it was ridiculous that anyone would trust a random person over the nightly news.
9. If I could do it over again, I’d make GroundReport open source, bake in self-policing by users for quality control a la Wikipedia, deconstruct the antiquated ‘news narrative’ format into data components, and make the system distributed & decentralized via API.