Community Journalism, Not Vigilante Journalism

Yesterday, Todd of OhmyNews posted a blog entry called Citizen Journalism Returns… He talked about the fact that they are different because they “edit every single published story.” He then quoted a piece written earlier in the day by Paul Bradshaw about Erik’s visits to journalism students in Europe going on now.

One of the things Todd mentions is the Steve Jobs false heart attach reports. We here at allvoices take a dim view of people submitting false reports.  At the same time,  we don’t believe that one person has he right to decide what should and should not be reported. Instead,  allvoices takes a different view of citizen journalism. We let you the community decide.  We don’t edit your pieces. We don’t decide what can and can not be posted on the site. You might say we are community journalism instead of vigilante journalism.

I talked to Sanjay Sood, allvoices CTO, about this and he offered the following:

While it’s true that allvoices does not have human editors accepting and rejecting user reports, we believe that the proper technology and community input can provide the necessary validation.  Just as journalists validate their stories via multiple sources, the allvoices system can automatically validate a users contribution against thousands of traditional news sites.  Just as you judge the news you receive by the reputation of the source and reporter, the allvoices system considers the past actions of contributors (if any) to handle and verify a new report.  The allvoices community, like your friends, helps you vet what to believe and what is just false.  allvoices is all about building perspective and context around the news that matters to our users without the barriers of the traditional media.

We have four mechanisms that let community members add their voice to the news: Flagging,  voicing up or down, adding 

Flagging lets you mark a piece as inappropriate for the site or the story. If you want to learn more about flagging, check out Flagging stories… Voicing up or down an item on the site allows you to share whether you think this piece belongs here or not. Try not to think of these two buttons as whether or not you agree with the item. Instead, think of these buttons as your “review” of the item. Is it a good item which others should view? Or, is it something people should disregard?

Flagging and using the voice up and down buttons are quick ways to express your opinion and help to validate information. If you have something to say about the item, comment on it. You can comment on a report from its main page. If you have a comment on a related item (blog, image, or video), you can click that item and then comment on it directly. Commenting on items keeps the conversation going and growing. It helps us all to learn from each other and validate what is being said.

The last way you can voice your news is to add your own news. This can be a related item like a blog, a video, or an image. Or – you can write your own news story and let the system link the two together.

No matter how you add your voice to the news, know that we are depending on you and your fellow community members to help us verify the news you read here. We believe that by taking down the walls that block your voice, we can all work together to make everyone better informed.

Flagging stories…

One of the “hidden” features on allvoices.com is the ability to submit an abuse report on an item reported on the site. Since the system doesn’t have “editors”, we depend on the community to help us out. To that end, I thought it might help if we had a blog post about what is abusive content and how you flag something.

Flagging is our way of learning from you what doesn’t belong on the site. Underneath the picture, you will find three actions you can take for the item:

• Voice up: Clicking this shows that you think this is a good contribution to the site and that more people should see it. It doesn’t mean you agree with the content, it means that you think more people should see it.
• Voice down: Clicking this shows you aren’t impressed with this contribution. Just as with the voice up link, it doesn’t mean you don’t agree with the content – it means you think it shouldn’t be getting as much visibility on the site.
• Flag: Clicking here allows you to report content that should not be on the site in the way it currently is.

We are going to look closely at flagging content today. A future blog post will go more into the details on voicing up and down.

Flags you can apply

The allvoices site allows you to flag content in one of 6 ways:

• Sexual content
• Violent or repulsive content
• Hateful or Abusive content
• Harmful dangerous acts
• Infringes my rights
• Spam

The first four are fairly self-explanatory. You are reporting content that you don’t belive should be on the site because it is something that is harmful to someone who views it. Flagging an article with these flags doesn’t mean that it will be removed from the system, but does let us know that it might need to be buried or given less visiblity.

The last one, SPAM, is a story that isn’t news. It is an advertisement or a link to something off the site that isn’t news. When allvoices looks at these reports, we verify whether the story is spam and then address it from there. (If it is determined to be spam, it usually falls on my plate to contact the reporter and ask them to provide news, views, information, etc. instead of just a link.)

The other option, infringes my rights, means that this is content that you wrote or own and which someone has stolen and reported as thier own news. This could be a picture from your site, a story from your blog, or a video you took which has been placed on the system as original content instead of linked to from a views story.

If you are reporting news, we want your views- your photos – your videos – your words – your voice. We dont’ want you to “borrow” someone else’s content. After all, what is borrowing to you is stealing to someone else. We need the community to tell us when the content on the site is not attributed correctly.

If you are posting a new story that is based on someone else’s reporting, then provide attribution to the original source. Tell people, “I saw on xyz site an article about abc. This is my take on it”

If your content has been placed on our site by someone else, please join us and flag the item as “Infringes”. Provide some details (including a link) so we can verify it and take care of the problem.

Need to know how to flag something? Check out this screencast! (May take two clicks to start.)
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