When we were drawing up the plans for the Nieman Journalism Lab, one of our goals was to create an environment for collaborative learning. We don’t know what the future of journalism will hold, but we’ll get closer to figuring it out if we can get as many smart minds working on the problem as we can.

So it’s in that spirit that we announce the Lab Book Club. Every month, we’ll choose a book that wrestles with the future of journalism in some way and spend the month analyzing its arguments, debating its theses, and figuring out what it tells us about where the news business is going. For the first edition of the Lab Book Club, we’ve picked Crowdsourcing, by Wired reporter Jeff Howe. It’s an examination of how tasks once performed by employees are increasingly being performed by a large, undefined group of people.

You can probably figure out where to sub “journalists” and “the audience” into that last sentence.

It’s a fascinating, very readable book, and I hope you’ll pick up a copy and read it along with us. In future months, we want to get the audience actively involved in the club; we’ll be looking for volunteers among you to read and respond to each book’s arguments and positions. (More information on that later.) But for this first issue, we’re drawing up on the very talented members of the current class of Nieman Fellows.

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[Here's the first response in this month's Lab Book Club. We're reading Crowdsourcing by Wired writer Jeff Howe; Tommy Tomlinson responds below to the first three chapters. See here for more about the Lab Book Club. —Ed.]

Two guys who make a mint in the T-shirt business by letting customers vote on the designs. A struggling punk band that finds salvation on Myspace. Amateur shutterbugs all over the world who create a massive (and cheap) archive of stock photos.

These are heroes of Jeff Howe’s book — a chronicle of the ways that part-timers, hobbyists and semi-pros can team up to do a lot of things better and faster than people who get paid to do those things.

Or, more to the point, people who used to get paid to do those things. Which is where we journalists start to get a chill at the base of the spine.

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As part of the Lab Book Club, I interviewed Jeff Howe, author of the very interesting Crowdsourcing. We marched through the book’s chapters in an hour-long session in the Nieman Foundation’s basement; here’s the first 20 minutes, which cover chapters 1 to 3. Some of the issues we cover:

– Patterns in how different professions respond to the “threat” of crowdsourcing
– How a bad economy impacts enterprises that depend on audience participation
– What open-source software can tell us about the willingness to pay for news
– How the concept of trust changes in a crowdsourced environment
– Whether we’ll ever see a return to skill differentiation being rewarded, or whether the triumph of the amateur is permanent

Plus I bring up Marx’s theory of alienation of labor. Just try getting that from another blog!

My thanks to our own Ted Delaney for the shooting and editing. For more about the Lab Book Club, check here.

As we’ve noted, we were pleased to have Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing, as the centerpiece of our first Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club. He gave us an hour of his time for a video interview, part 2 of which will be posted on Monday.

Jeff wrote a very personal post on his site today about his developmentally delayed son, Finn — and, in a way, about crowdsourcing. It’s worth a read. I suspect it’ll end up being as powerful a piece of evidence of the power of crowds as the anecdotes in his book.

[Here's the second response in this month's Lab Book Club. We're reading Crowdsourcing by Wired writer Jeff Howe; Rosita Boland from The Irish Times responds below to chapters 4 through 7. See here for more about the Lab Book Club. —Ed.]

Something I thought about throughout this section was: Does an international perspective make a difference in how you look at crowdsourcing as a journalism tool? And if so, what are those differences?

Jeff Howe is American, writing about crowdsourcing in a country with a population of 300 million. My home country, the Republic of Ireland, has a population of four million. Is crowdsourcing about finding your community, no matter whether it ends up being large or small? Or how much does it have to do with the pool of people you start off with? And do different cultures respond differently to crowdsourcing, or are there key common themes no matter where in the world you may be?

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As part of the Lab Book Club, I interviewed Jeff Howe, author of the very interesting Crowdsourcing. We marched through the book’s chapters in an hour-long session in the Nieman Foundation’s basement; here’s the second chunk, about 19 minutes. This excerpt was supposed to cover chapters 4 through 7, but Jeff and I talked too much, so we’ll finish up those chapters in another video later this week. Some of the issues we cover:

— What kinds of journalism the crowds can and can’t do well
— His aspirations for crowdsourced investigative reporting
— Why reporters get uncomfortable with comments on news stories
— The class implications of letting people do journalists’ work in their free time
— What crowdsourcing can tell us about how news organizations should be structured
— Could crowdsourcing increase the market value of writing skill?

My thanks to our own Ted Delaney for the shooting and editing. For more about the Lab Book Club, check here.

[Here's the third and final response in this month's Lab Book Club. We're reading Crowdsourcing by Wired writer Jeff Howe; Chris Vognar from The Dallas Morning News responds below to chapters 8 through 11. See here for more about the Lab Book Club. —Ed.]

We’ve saved the devil’s advocate portion of our Crowdsourcing analysis for last (because, as W.E.B. Do Bois once said, the devil must take the hindmost). This isn’t to say I think crowdsourcing is a sham; on the contrary, for better and/or worse, the crowd is here to stay.

I’m just now sure how warmly or universally we should welcome that reality.

Jeff Howe’s conclusion reinforces my belief that crowdsourcing is more benign and useful for some tasks than others. For example, kudos to the anonymous basement dweller Minh Lee, who crafted the perfect game mod for Half-Life. Such activities seem perfectly suited for a basement. What better place to kill off extra-dimensional monsters and zombies?

Keep reading »

As part of the Lab Book Club, I interviewed Jeff Howe, author of the very interesting Crowdsourcing. We marched through the book’s chapters in an hour-long session in the Nieman Foundation’s basement; here’s the third and final chunk, about 14 minutes. This one covers chapter 8 through 11. Some of the issues we cover:

— The wisdom of Sturgeon’s Law
— Why news organizations should moderate comments on their sites
— How his UK book cover got crowdsourced
— Tim Ferris’ research to pick his book title
— Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans
— How hyperlocal fits in

My thanks to our own Ted Delaney for the shooting and editing. For more about the Lab Book Club, check here.