Crowdsourcing could garner more eyeballs for advertisers, but at the expense of good journalism.
Gannett plans to involve its readers in the news  er, excuse me  information gathering process to a greater degree than most companies have in the past. But what motivated Gannett to implement crowdsourcing in the first place?
Critics say it's the money. The company has not planned any layoffs as part of this initiative. But the move may draw more readers to view advertisements if they feel involved in the news gathering process.
In a statement, Gannett's Senior Vice President of news Phil Currie links to a number of articles, both from the mainstream media and from bloggers.
"Not everything here is positive, of course," Currie said in the statement. "But some people didn't think the Wright brothers could fly, either."
Sound like an absurd comparison? I agree. The Wright brothers may have flown the Kitty Hawk, but Gannett seems to be piloting the Spruce Goose. What happens when Gannett cannot rely on news suggested by its readers after the company completely restructures its organizational culture?
In a world of publish-first-ask-questions-later, crowdsourcing will further damage the mainstream media's credibility for the sake of, as Uncle Rick likes to say, "selling eyeballs."
Carolyn Washburn, editor of the Des Moines Register, seems to approve of the Gannett paper's move to implement the crowdsourcing concept.
"We no longer want to be limited to the places we can get to ourselves; no matter how many other events we have to cover on a given day, we will immediately publish photos and information from your event because we've created an easy way for you to send it to us," Washburn writes.
Readers may just have to get used to seeing an unusual amount of smoke in the sky.
Well we seem to be on an aviation kick with our crowdsourcing posts (see Heidi's post below) but I saw this morning in Poynter's E-Media Tidbits blog that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' critique of citizen journalism sounds much like yours.