— 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.

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?

Some trades, however, might just demand a little professional training, or even an official imprimatur. Which brings us to journalism. There’s something reassuring about the assumption that reporters have learned to ask follow-up questions, or dig for documents, or work a beat, or cultivate sources, or work with an editor (God forbid!). To be fair, Howe isn’t suggesting that anyone should have any platform to tell any story; his Rules of Crowdsourcing contain many a caveat, including Pick the Right Crowd and the Benevolent Dictator Principle, that serve as gestures of quality control. He doesn’t want the crowd to run amok.

But I’m still not sold. Most blogs, including mine, are collections of observations and opinions that use previously reported work from old fogy professionals. When I was a kid (huff, puff) there was a general belief that one should study film and literature, and learn the difference between opinion and analysis, before becoming a movie critic. Anyone who thinks the same standards still apply hasn’t surfed the Web in a while.

The fact, as Howe acknowledges, is that crowds contain a wide range of intelligence and lack thereof. That’s why I get nervous when folks make sweeping pronouncements about democratizing the media. It is doubtless true that one doesn’t need a journalism degree to become a journalist. I don’t have one. But it’s equally true that some people know a lot more about some subjects — government, music, sports, geopolitics — than others. They have paid the dues and passed the tests, are best prepared to make sense of the world. Yes, I still take comfort in the idea of expertise.

And this is what really gives me pause. In the past eight years such quaint staples as facts, research, and experts have been thrown under the bus by a political culture that deems them unnecessary. Global warming? Oh, you and your wacky science. Exit strategy? Please. So what if you’ve spent most of your life gathering information and boiling it down to conclusions? Experts are just so passé.

It would be hard to argue that this approach has worked. But distrust of experts, or informed analysis, has trickled down through the entire culture. To me, crowdsourcing suggests that the novice is by definition just as qualified as the professional. That degrees and certificates are just so many pieces of paper. That “elite” is a dirty word. Call me old fashioned, but I take comfort when the guy behind the wheel has a driver’s license.

So sayeth the devil — who, as you might also recall, is in the details.

Chris Vognar is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and an arts critic for The Dallas Morning News.

— 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.

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?

The newspaper I write for, The Irish Times, was the first newspaper in Britain or Ireland to go online, back in 1994, and one of the 30 first papers in the world. Like many other papers, for quite some time, our online content resembled the layout of the actual paper. This may have had something to do with the large Irish diasporic community all over the world; the intention was to offer these long-time loyal readers a familiar experience that looked like the paper they read at home. Thus the news object itself created a community.

In Europe, we are struggling to recognize what appears to be becoming the norm at some American papers — that the reader is not merely a passive consumer, but also a potential participant in the form or content of the newspaper. Like any journalist who values quality, accuracy and transparency, I’m nervous about Michael Maness of Gannett’s declaration that “We really had to train our newsrooms to accept that they didn’t have a monopoly of ideas and opinions.” Where does experience fit into that statement? In our newsroom, we still have that monopoly, with little opportunity for readers to drive content — other than our letters pages, which receive a vast number of contributions and is probably the most read part of the paper.

Thus I was particularly interested in Howe’s analysis of what made readers respond to the efforts of Linda Parker, the “online communities editor” at The Cincinnati Enquirer. Trying to elicit stories from readers — and thus generate free, non-professional content — she first posted these words on the Enquirer site: “Be a citizen journalist.”

“Citizen journalism” is a term that has been kicked around a lot in Europe. It was effective during the London bombings, when rail commuters used their camera phones to capture images of the scene. Those images were picked up by both print and broadcast media, and it marked a dawning awareness that readers and viewers wanted to have some ownership of the content that made it into newspapers and broadcast media. It also scared some of us. We’re a highly unionized industry in Ireland and Britain, and membership in the National Union of Journalists is mandatory. Our press photographers don’t write stories, and writers don’t take photographs. Right now we’re uncertain about what these union rules will mean online. Will writers agree, for example, to shoot video and post pictures? What will happen to our photographer colleagues? These questions matter — particularly as Howe suggests that crowdsourced content, when applied to non-unionized newspapers, can provide either free or very cheap labor.

But what made Cincinnati readers reply to Linda Parker in huge numbers was not the invitation to “Be a Citizen Journalist” — which suggests the term may have already been regarded as outdated, even if the concept was not. Nor did “Tell Us Your Story” work any better. What worked were the words “Get Published.”

This resonated loudly with me. Ireland is a country where there sometimes seem to be as many creative-writing workshops as there are bars. Everyone wants to be a writer. It’s almost part of our culture. So how about a scenario where not everyone can be a writer, but everyone has the chance to get published in a newspaper? I am quite certain there would be a stampede if our newspaper invited stories from readers under that headline.

So we would then have what Howe calls a potential crowd. But what do we want from it, and how do we use it? I don’t yet know the answer to that. But I do know that what starts happening in America usually makes its way across the Atlantic sooner or later. Whether, as a journalist, you agree with what Jeff Howe is writing about in Crowdsourcing is, in a way, irrelevant. The fact is some of this is already happening, and it has implications for all print journalists, as newspapers across the world cut down on staff and lose resources.

Rosita Boland is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a reporter for The Irish Times.

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.

– 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.

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.

Howe doesn’t deal with journalism much in the first three chapters (he tackles it more directly later on). But it’s clear how the inexpensive and intuitive tools of the Web can gnaw away at the media franchise. Back home in Charlotte, a local blogger has been covering crime in more detail than our paper or the local TV stations — and that was before EveryBlock came to town.

But let’s set aside the Big Troubles of journalism and think about more practical questions: How can journalists make a living when so many people are happy to do it for free? And what types of journalists stand the best chance to survive in a crowdsourced world?

Although he doesn’t say so flat-out, I think Howe’s book gives hope to two kinds of journalists. Let’s call them the Renaissance freelancer and the hyper-expert.

The Web is made for dabblers, and it seems to me that someone with lots of different journalism skills can cobble together a career more easily than ever before — writing a little here, editing a little there, taking a few photos, doing a little Web design. And maybe supplementing that with work that isn’t journalism-related at all — after all, someone has to make all those butter sculptures.

And even though the crowd is smarter than the typical individual, there will always be a need for individuals who have insight above and beyond the crowd. Maybe that insight is special expertise; maybe it’s a voice that stands out; more likely it’s a combination of both.

So the Renaissance freelancers and the hyper-experts have nothing to worry about from the media revolution. Problem is, that doesn’t include most journalists.

The people I worry about most are the moderately, narrowly gifted – the cop reporter whose sourcelist can’t match the data from a dozen blogs, the movie reviewer who doesn’t divert you from Rotten Tomatoes, the editors and photogs and artists who do work that keeps them in the business, but nothing more.

The business is disappearing in the crowd. And those folks are in trouble.

Tommy Tomlinson is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a columnist for The Charlotte Observer, and a former Pulitzer finalist.

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.

On Monday, Tommy Tomlinson of the Charlotte Observer will respond to chapters 1 to 3. The following Monday, November 17, Rosita Boland of the Irish Times will respond to chapters 4 to 7. Then, on November 24, Chris Vognar of The Dallas Morning News will respond to chapters 8 to 11.

In addition, I taped an hour-long interview with the author, Jeff Howe, in which I asked my own set of questions about each section of the book. We’ll be dividing that hour up into parts and posting them on the same three Mondays the responses will appear.

Finally: We do want your input. Head to your local bookstore or library and pick up a copy and read it along with us. We’d love for you to participate, either by leaving comments or by writing a piece of your own. (If you’re interested, email me.)

The interview with Jeff Howe:
— Chapters 1 to 3
— Chapters 4 to 5
— Chapters 6 to 7
— Chapters 8 to 11

The responses:
— Tommy Tomlinson on chapters 1 to 3
— Rosita Boland on chapters 4 to 7
— Chris Vognar on chapter 8 to 11