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Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts

Wednesday 8 February 2023

Tech giants explore new OpenAI opportunities as ChatGPT, the latest chatbot launched

  OpenAI, which Elon Musk helped to co-found back in 2015, is the San Francisco-based startup that created ChatGPT. The company opened ChatGPT up for public testing in November 2022. In under a week, the artificial intelligence model amassed over a million users, according to OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. By the end of January, ChatGPT was averaging about 13 million visitors per day. Users have had ChatGPT write everything from essays, to lyrics and even correct computer code. ChatGPT is part of a growing field of AI known as generative AI, which allows users to create brand new content including videos, music and text. But generative AI still faces a number of challenges, such as developing content that is inaccurate, biased or inappropriate. Now enterprises and the public are wondering what wide access to AI will mean for businesses and society.

 Chapters: 00:00 — Intro 01:36 — Chatting with ChatGPT 03:03 — Understanding ChatGPT 06:39 — Use cases and limitations 10:09 — Future implications

Driving innovation: Nigerian artist Malik Afegbua creates hyper-realistic pictures of African people using artificial intelligence at his home in Lagos. China leads the world in this technology, as well as in the number of AI journals and related publications. — Reuters


SHANGHAI: Chinese tech companies are upping the ante in the fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content sector as ChatGPT, the latest chatbot launched by US-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, gains wide popularity since its November debut and revolutionises the field due to its advanced conversational capabilities.

Leveraging machine learning algorithms, ChatGPT is able to mimic humanlike responses with AI-generated content (AIGC) and assist people with tasks such as writing essays and scripts, making business proposals and even checking programme bugs, which it does within seconds.

AIGC-related stocks continued to rally in the A-share market, with Chinese AI companies, such as Cloudwalk Technology and Speechocean, seeing their shares surge by the daily limit of 20% on the science and technology innovation board on Monday.

Experts said that AIGC is likely to become a new engine driving innovation in digital content production and freeing human creators from tedious tasks, with a wide range of commercial applications in fields such as culture, media, entertainment and education.

Chinese tech heavyweight Baidu Inc announced yesterday that it will complete internal testing of its AI chatbot service, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, called “Ernie Bot” in March.

The Beijing-based company has invested large sums of money in developing its Ernie system, a large-scale machine-learning model that has been trained on massive data over several years and possesses in-depth semantic comprehension and generation capabilities.

Robin Li, co-founder and chief executive officer of Baidu, said in January that AIGC will subvert existing content production models in the next decade, and AI has the potential to meet massive demand for content at a 10th of the cost and a hundred or thousand times faster.

Jianying, an AI-powered short-video editing app launched by Chinese tech company Byte-Dance, allows users to generate creative videos by simply putting in a few keywords or a paragraph of text.

Online gaming company Net-Ease has released its AI music creation platform, Tianyin, where users can customise a song by entering lyrics.

Pan Helin, co-director of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Centre at Zhejiang University’s International Business School, said that ChatGPT, as a milestone in AIGC-related technologies, uses reinforcement learning from human feedback to train the data model, with significant enhancements in natural language processing capacities that improve the logic of responses.

Chinese enterprises should step up efforts to roll out indigenous versions of the AI-powered chatbot and increase investments to improve related algorithms and computing power, Pan said.

Chen Jia, an independent strategy analyst, said: “Chinese tech enterprises have unique advantages in expanding AI application scenarios globally.”

China has made significant progress in developing the AI industry.

A Stanford University report showed that China filed more than half the world’s AI patent applications in 2021 and continued to lead the world in the number of AI journals, conference papers and related publications.

Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba have invested heavily in promoting the commercial use of AI, and some Chinese AI unicorns have grown rapidly in recent years, Chen said.

But he noted that Chinese tech companies lag behind top-notch foreign competitors in fundamental research and development input and comprehensive innovation abilities.

“AIGC is in the initial stage of development, and there is still a long way to go to realise large-scale commercialisation, as the application scenarios and related laws and regulations are far from mature,” said Guo Tao, deputy head of the China Electronic Commerce Expert Service Centre.

Meanwhile, the use of AIGC-related technologies raises concerns about ethics, copyright protection and privacy, he added.— China Daily/ANN 

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TIGHTENING THE SCREW ON BIG TECH

The European union’s big battle to keep technology behemoths in check rages on.

Sunday 6 September 2020

The dark reality: education, teachers, children, helicopter parents, Covid-19, unjust lawsuits,society, media, 如所解释的,不要抱怨杀死你的老公 ...

2+2=22

The videos below show a teacher telling a student that he failed because he wrote the incorrect answer – that 2 + 2 equals 4, not 22. In his frustration, he throws a tantrum in the classroom. When the parents are called in to discuss the situation, they also throw a tantrum, claiming there is more than one answer to any question.....










Coronavirus: Covid-19

 


Covid 19 Origin #0 patient




Grandma Goes Off on Trump

 

 

Related  Family matters:

 

SUCCESS: 

 

Mrs. LKY: “The Dragon Lady” – Singapore Politics: Blog

jesscscott.wordpress.com




FAILURE:

Mrs Najib: Rosmah Mansor Draws flak » rosmah



















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https://youtu.be/uR_LfkGwBG8 As readers will recall from the earlier article (above), Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists and pharma...

https://youtu.be/Y_dU2RCqWs4 FORCED TO SHUT DOWN WHEN VIRUSES LEAKED AUGUST 2019    US SOLDIERS WERE INFECTED 300 HUNDRED CAM

Friday 13 May 2016

British media 'barbarians' need lessons

'Barbarians' in UK media should learn manners from 5,000 years of Chinese history





While the rest of the world is discussing unguarded comments made by Queen Elizabeth II saying that Chinese officials were "very rude" during Xi Jinping's state visit last year, Chinese state media has only seen fit to author a single editorial on the subject.

Chinese-language editorial (see below) published earlier today,  the Global Times said that "barbarians" in the British media had blown the incident out of proportion and they could stand to learn some manners from 5,000 years of Chinese culture, via SCMP:

“The West in modern times has risen to the top and created a brilliant civilization, but their media is full of reckless ‘gossip fiends’ who bare their fangs and brandish their claws and are very narcissistic, retaining the bad manners of ‘barbarians’,” it said in an editorial.

“As they experience constant exposure to the 5,000 years of continuous Eastern civilisation, we believe they will make progress” when it comes to manners, it added in the Chinese-language piece, which was not published in English.

For its part, the Global Times simply shrugged off the Queen's comments: “It is not surprising that there are off the record complaints. Chinese diplomats must have mocked British officials privately."

The Queen mocked Chinese officials in private comments that were made public during a garden party in Buckingham Palace. The 90-year-old monarch spoke candidly with the officer in charge of security during last year's state visit -- which was said to have kicked off the "Golden Era in UK-China relations" -- while a camera rolled nearby, picking up their conversation.

The video and the Queen's remarks have made headlines across the world. However, the official reaction in China has been very muted. When asked by reporters at a regular Q&A session yesterday if that "Golden Era" still continues today, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang opted to neither confirm nor deny.

Felicia Sonmez from The Wall Street Journal also asked if China thinks that the video was released on purpose. "I think you should refer your question to those who put the footage on the website," Lu replied, though that question was later deleted from the official transcript of the briefing.

Meanwhile, a report on the Queen's comments carried by BBC World News was blanked out in China.

Last October, both sides declared that the state visit was "very successful." The Queen herself said that it was “a milestone in the unprecedented year of co-operation and friendship between the United Kingdom and China.” Prime Minister David Cameron said that the trip had managed to drum up $58 billion in Chinese investment.

With those economic ties in mind, the Global Times sees the Queen's comments as very minor. “The Sino-UK relationship will not be influenced by this. The Golden Era is based on profound interests,” the editorial said.

Of course, the Queen wasn't the only one to make an epic political gaffe this week. While talking to Her Royal Majesty and the Archbishop of Canterbury at Buckingham Palace, David Cameron boasted about the quality of attendees he has arriving at an anti-corruption summit in London later in the week, seemingly unaware of the cameras that recorded him saying:

"We have got the Nigerians - actually we have got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain."

He went on: "Nigeria and Afghanistan - possibly two of the most corrupt countries in the world."


The Global Times editorial took a jab at these twin blunders, writing: "But among the Western countries, Britain is one of those that gets caught with its pants down and exposes itself most often.” It's hard to argue with that assessment, following Cameron's remarks, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari urged the UK to return assets stolen by corrupt officials. "I am not going to demand any apology from anybody. What I am demanding is the return of the assets," Buhari said at the anti-graft event.

Many have argued that while Cameron's comments may have just been foolish, the Queen's comments were publicized in order to cause chaos in improving UK-China relations, as an indirect attack against Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne. The Global Times was quick to reject this claim, saying that "if they had deliberately done so, that would have been truly crude and rude."

Meanwhile, others have pointed to Queen Elizabeth's umbrella as the true mastermind behind this whole fiasco, The Daily Telegraph reports:

Sources told The Daily Telegraph that the reason the Queen’s comments were audible on the TV footage was because her clear plastic umbrella, which she uses to allow people to see her while sheltering from the rain, had acted like the cone in a loudspeaker, amplifying her voice towards the microphone.

“If she had been holding an umbrella made of fabric, it wouldn’t have happened,” an insider said.

“But because it’s plastic, it reflects the sound like a satellite dish.” - SCMP


社评:英媒爆炒女王私话,八卦术折服全球


英国女王伊丽莎白二世10日在白金汉宫花园举办下午茶会,与伦敦警察署女警官德奥丝有一段私聊。女王的摄影师把它拍了下来,后来不知怎么着漏了出去,英国媒体一顿爆炒。

  德奥丝是去年中国领导人对英国国事访问时安保工作的“警方首席指挥官”,视频中她向女王抱怨中方与她打交道的官员“粗鲁”,做得“不合外交礼仪”。女王应和了她。英国媒体对这段视频如获至宝,不仅有些当“头条”报,还分别向英中外交部以及英王室问询态度和反应。

  英国王室和外交部的回应都是:中国领导人对英国的国事访问获得圆满成功,各方通力密切合作,确保了国事访问的顺利进行。中国外交部也做了类似表态,强调访问的成功,以及双方对两国工作团队的努力给予了高度认同。

西方媒体最喜欢报花边消息,而英国王室和英国政府似乎中招的时候最多,经常被媒体揪住小辫。就在同一天,卡梅伦首相同女王和大主教等的私聊也被拍了视频,卡梅伦当时聊得很嗨,称尼日利亚和阿富汗“可能是世界上最腐败的两个国家”,而尼阿两国领导人12日、也就是今天将参加伦敦举行的国际反腐败会议。

  国家关系越亲密,官员们打交道越多,彼此“有看不顺眼的时候”应当说很正-常,“自己人”私下抱怨几句也没啥大不了的。中国外交官私下里想必也奚落过英国的官僚们。中国互联网上的评论是公开的,去年女王曾被中国网民比喻成“西太后”,卡梅伦被比喻成“李中堂”,当时编排他们的段子红遍中国网络社区。

  然而中国外交官们做事严谨,很多西方大国也搞得跟“外交无小事”似的,媒体很难逮住官员们议论他国的“私话”。在这方面英国即使在西方国家中也是最经常“露内裤”和“走光”的之一,跟它有一拼的是美国,白宫最近几届的主人似乎都有“忘记关麦克风”的时候。

  不可想象英国官方故意把这些视频漏出去,因为相信他们知道一旦故意那样做,才是真正的粗鲁和无礼。那是很不文明的市侩做法,自尊的英王室大概更会重视那样的底线。

  然而“整个英国”还是有些嬉皮士,英媒对八卦的迷恋似乎到了要让一切都“腥”起来的程度。看在这个国家对人类近代史贡献颇丰的份上,让我们主动为它做个解释吧:人都会有毛病,伟大的国家也是一样。   相信中英关系不会受到此次事件的影响,两国间“黄金时代”是由深厚利益打造的,而在这两个历史悠久的国度里,理性都有着不可撼动的地位。

  中国已经站在拥有了全球影响因而树大招风的位置上,世界上的秘闻奇事层出不穷,但那些能跟中国沾上边的,就更容易被发现出来,炒成“一件事”。中国人终将会见怪不怪,耳根子也会越磨越硬。

  西方自近代以来走到了前面,创造了辉煌文明。但那里媒体不管不顾的“八卦狂”们既张牙舞爪,又很自恋,似乎留了些“蛮夷”的不文雅。然而我们同样相信,在与东方五千年文明的不断接触中,他们会进步的。

国际新闻_环球网



Sunday 28 February 2016

Information is power, overloaded, who and where can we trust?

A global survey gauging trust in society finds that people of a feather really do flock together.






THE person you see in the mirror is the most trusted.”

No, that is not a self-help mantra or nostalgia for Michael Jackson’s old hit Man in the Mirror.

Rather, as the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals, that is a common belief in the world when it comes to trust.

People now are increasingly reliant on a “person like yourself” (rising 6% in trust) more than the “leaders” of society like CEOs, government officials, technical experts or even academic experts, according to global communications firm Edelman’s annual survey that measures trust levels in the world.

Says Edelman Malaysia managing director Robert Kay, it reflects the way people in Malaysia are increasingly sharing and weighing information and opinions online.

“When it comes to information on social networking sites, content sharing sites and online-only information, Malaysians trust friends and families more at 74% compared to a company CEO at 57% or elected officials at 53%,” shares Kay at the launch of the Barometer in Kuala Lumpur last Tuesday.

For its fifth survey in Malaysia, Edelman polled 1,350 Malaysians online from October to November last year.

What some might find surprising is that in today’s celebrity-obsessed world, online personalities rake in only 45% “believers”, while celebrities rank last in their trustworthiness at 30%.

Interestingly, Malaysians’ overall trust in online content, specifically that shared on social media has dipped seven points to 42%.

Kay points to the rampant sharing of misinformation online in the past year as the main reason.

Consequently, search engines hold their lead as the most trusted source for information at 66%, he adds, as people feel they have more control over what they read and see.

The rise in peer-to-peer trust inevitably coincides with the decline in public faith in public institutions and the business world.

Faith in the press among the “informed public”, however, has jumped 13% – from 46% last year to 59% this year.

Asked how much they trust the media – on a scale of zero to nine – to do the right thing, Malaysian citizens say they have a lot more faith in the press than before.

This, says Edelman, puts Malaysia’s more informed citizens’ trust in media at the same level as the elite of the United States.

“Malaysia has one of the biggest rises in media trust among the informed public globally, possibly due to the constant coverage of alleged corruption at 1MDB,” Kay notes, stressing that it is crucial for the media to continue pursuing rigorous, balanced and transparent reporting to maintain credibility.

While the survey did not distinguish between trust in local and international media, the trust in the media in Asia highlights the perceived role of the media in this region, Edelman Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa CEO David Brain reportedly said in Mumbrella Asia, a discussion site on the region’s media.

“The media – through Western eyes – is expected to keep politicians to account, but in Asian countries such as Singapore and Malaysia, there is ‘a social contract that the role of the media is about nation building’, and less about revealing the truth,” Brain had explained.

In a panel discussion on the Barometer results, The Malaysian Insider CEO Jahabar Sadiq points out that even as trust in business captains and political leaders fell, those who are perceived to be critical and caring of society and are vocal on social media, such as CIMB group chairman Datuk Seri Nazir Razak and former Cabinet minister Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz, are deemed as “trustworthy”.

Comparing Malaysia to Britain and the United States, Umno Youth exco member Shahril Hamdan suggests the dip in public trust towards the government is a natural development as the nation matures.

“As democracy matures, the cynicism level of people toward the government increases.

“Regardless of how the government communicates or performs, people will put less trust in the government and its leaders.”

Maxis Malaysia Head of Consumer Business Dushyanthan Vathiyanathan believes that it is time for public institutions and the business sector to transform and engage more with people.

“People now are interested in knowing what is happening and not in what you tell them.

By Hariati Azizan The Star/Asia News Network

“You have to be transparent with them and inform them of anything and everything. That’s because now they have information and do their checks.”

Related:

Panel Discussion of the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer for Malaysia



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Sunday 25 May 2014

China Daily Asia Weekly joins ePaper



The China Daily Asia Weekly is the latest newspaper to be part of the CIMB-Asean ePaper collaboration just as Malaysia and China celebrate 40 years of bilateral relations.

The weekly newspaper will now be made free in digital for all The Star’s 80,000 ePaper subscribers, providing more accurate updates of the latest news in China and Asia Pacific.

The latest addition was launched by CIMB group chief executive officer Datuk Seri Nazir Tun Razak yesterday and witnessed by China’s Ambassador to Malaysia Huang Huikang. Star Publications (M) Bhd group managing director and CEO Datuk Seri Wong Chun Wai said the partnership was the first in the country’s history as well as coming at a historic moment.

“Malaysia and China are celebrating a special relationship of 40 years and today, we celebrate the friendship of two media groups. The combined readership from both China Daily Asia Weekly and The Star will make up a larger audience for the ePaper,” he said.

Wong said on Wednesday, Malaysians had welcomed the arrival of pandas, Feng Yi and Fu Wa.

“And today, we welcome the arrival of China Daily into the CIMB-Asean ePaper collaboration,” he added.

 Combined forces: (from left) Star chairman Datuk Fu Ah Kiow, Nazir, Huang, Wong and Zhang during the official partnership ceremony as China Daily Asia Weekly joins the CIMB-Asean ePaper fold at Menara Star.

Zhang Haizhou, China Daily Asia Weekly assistant to publisher, said the missing plane MH370 had seen netizens from both countries attacking each other and forgetting that both Malaysia and China were partners.

“We need a strong and reliable platform to bridge this gap of understanding among people and this is why we are having this bundle with The Star. We are now messengers between the two nations, telling better stories and enhancing mutual understanding,” he said.

Last month, Nazir had launched the CIMB-Asean ePaper collaboration comprising newspapers from four South-East Asian countries – The Star, Thailand’s The Nation, Indonesia’s The Jakarta Post and the Philippines’ Daily Inquirer – the first of its kind in the Asean region.

Nazir said the initiative was fabulous and had exceeded his expectations with 80,000 subscribers.

“Malaysia is the first South-East Asian nation to connect with China and we are very happy to support this initiative, helping people to see the world in all perspectives,” he said.

Agreeing, Huang said the media was the bridge for a better understanding between two nations.

“The Internet is an important channel for exchanging information and the collaboration of The Star and China Daily Asia Weekly is like a combination of giants,” he said.

Also present were China Daily Asia Weekly editor K.S Chan, Malaysia-China Friendship Association president Datuk Abdul Majid Ahmad Khan, Federation of Chinese Associations Malaysia deputy secretary-general Datuk Dr Chin Yew Sin, Malaysia-China Chamber of Commerce president Datuk Bong Hon Liong and Associated Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Indust­ries Youth chief Datuk Ng Yih Pyng.

Top businessmen who joined in the celebration included Eco World Development Group director Tan Sri Liew Kee Sin, i-Berhad executive chairman Tan Sri Lim Kim Hong and Mah Sing Group group managing director and chief executive Tan Sri Leong Hoy Kum.

Contributed by  by Christine Cheah The Star/Asia News Network

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Wednesday 27 July 2011

Investigative Journalism and Reporting, Strategies for Its Survival





Preserving investigative journalism

Plain Speaking - By Yap Leng Kuen

THE frenzy to uncover further “journalistic transgressions'' at the Rupert Murdoch news empire is mounting from London to Australia to the United States there are calls to investigate any other unethical moves.

The recent phone hacking scandal in London revealed that over-enthusiastic journalists have either forgotten their limits or become too bold while their supervisors glossed over their news gathering practices.

It is true the media has to look internally at its ethical standards and ask several questions; to what extent it is hurting people rather than helping; how does one balance the duty to produce a story with other human factors at play; what are the boundaries of “responsible journalism''?

In countries where regulators are constantly monitoring the media, journalists tend to play a more cautious game which does, at times, border on self-censorship.

There are constant reminders of the need to report in a “responsible'' manner. Journalists often struggle in the wake of these reminders and public criticism of a “cowed'' press.

A major consolation is that following this cautious attitude, the publication remains ongoing and jobs are still intact.

In the British phone hacking incident, were the regulators caught “napping'' in the sense that certain journalists had been allowed to push stories at all costs, without questions asked?

The Western press prides itself on freedom to information, and throwing in requirements like “ethical practices'' can result in confusion.

If those journalists who had broken important stories had stuck to being “goody two shoes,'' they might not have achieved the level of success in exposing wrongdoings and other kinds of fraud.

This is not to condone illegal tactics by the press but the nature of investigative journalism is such that it needs some amount of freedom for the information to flow in.

In coming down on the media, regulators should therefore be mindful of the role that investigative journalism plays.

They should not get carried away and impose too many restrictions on the media. For one, it will indicate their level of insecurity and desperation.

Owners and supervisors of media companies also have to behave more responsibly. They ought to be conversant with the laws and rules of journalism, check on their writers all the time and not let slip any suspicious looking piece of information.

On hindsight, this would be easier said than done. But these are practices going on in a lot of media organisations.

At the end of the day, we in the media would have to search our conscience on the implications of all our actions as we are answerable to many parties the Almighty, readers, bosses and society at large to name a few.

It is, as the saying goes, mindfulness all the way.



Investigative Reporting: Strategies for Its Survival

New funding mechanisms and newsroom changes are needed if watchdog journalism is to thrive in small and midmarket news organizations.

By Edward Wasserman

The future of investigative reporting is linked inextricably to the general economic crisis affecting U.S. journalism. That should be obvious, and by saying that I’m not suggesting that investigative work doesn’t have unique vulnerabilities: It’s expensive, offers uncertain payback, ties up resources that could be used in more conventionally productive ways, fans staff jealousies, offends powerful constituencies (including touchy readers), invites litigation, and usually comes from the most endangered class in the newsroom, the senior reporters whose ranks are being thinned aggressively through forced retirement.

Still, for all its uniqueness the tottering support for investigative work needs to be understood within the larger collapse of advertising-funded journalism. The marriage between consumer advertising and news, which dates in this country from the advent of the penny press in the 1830’s, is crumbling. The principal reason is less related to circulation declines—daily newspapers, for instance, still dominate their metro markets—than to the exuberant flowering of Internet sites, some devoted to information and entertainment, others simply to sales, that offer advertisers much more efficient ways to find and reach customers than riding alongside news reports into their homes.

Daily newspapers, for all their general interest posturing, had come to rely chiefly on a narrow range of business sectors—automotive, help wanted, home sales, and department stores—and these sectors have either consolidated or are being drawn away by highly effective, narrowly targeted Web sites. (They’re also being pummeled by the current macroeconomic hard times, but those will pass. Those other developments won’t.)

None of this is cheery news for news operations, but the cost to them of hanging onto advertising as they migrate online isn’t cause for cheer, either. Web-borne technologies enable advertisers to know, with unprecedented precision, who is reading what and where else they have been on the Internet. Hence, advertisers are, or soon will be, able to forecast the audience for certain kinds of content and to base their ad placement decisions accordingly. And what advertisers know, news managers will have to learn. That means editors are not far from being able to determine the revenue value of certain kinds of news and calibrate coverage with that in mind. That’s not an appealing prospect in general for those of us who value independence in news decision-making; nor does it bode well for investigative work to be subjected to narrow, profit-and-loss arithmetic.


The Fort Myers News-Press invited readers to help them investigate a story about an expansion of the water, sewer and irrigation system, in a method known as crowdsourcing.

Finding Investigative Resources

So journalism in this country faces a general problem replacing the advertising subsidies on which it has flourished for nearly two centuries. And investigative journalism has a particular canary-in-the-coal-mine problem of being acutely sensitive to thin financial air.

The challenge is to find new mechanisms to provide investigative journalism with the resources it needs, especially in the small and midmarket operations that are being starved of the kind of reporting that has traditionally held local political and business establishments in check.

Before we turn to some of those mechanisms, two points.
  1. These resources aren’t exclusively financial. They include in-kind subsidies, for instance in the form of labor that is donated outright or sold at a fraction of its value to news outlets.
  2. Preserving investigative journalism may not be identical with preserving investigative journalists. The overall concern should be nurturing a communitywide capability to unearth, report and explain so as to hold major institutions accountable, address injustice, and correct wrongs. Full-time professionals will have their place, but they won’t occupy it alone.
Here are some of the more promising dimensions of the emerging regime under which investigative reporting can survive and flourish. Some are more feasible than others; some are already taking shape. Each has its drawbacks, but they have in common an overall direction of marshaling support from a wider array of sources than we’ve seen under the ad-support model.

Mobilize the Public: The 2006 “crowdsourcing” project of The News-Press
in Fort Myers, Florida is frequently cited as an impressive example of a local paper serving as agent provocateur and communitywide reporting manager. The stories concerned excessive impact fees levied on residents in connection with their water utility expansion. Much of the ensuing investigation, which led to a rollback of assessments, was conducted by knowledgeable irregulars who gathered and analyzed evidence of municipal anomalies the paper reported and posted.

There’s no use dwelling on the huge supervisory challenges within a news organization that are raised by such crowdsourcing, nor on the need to make sure that those involved understand basic principles of journalistic professionalism. A larger concern is whether such an approach is self-limiting in ways that aren’t especially desirable.

The Fort Myers case seems to exemplify the kind of work that’s ripest for crowdsourcing: where the main reporting problems are empirical and analytical, not conceptual or political, and where the goals of the amateur newshounds—saving money—are durable. The danger is that assigning priority to projects susceptible to crowdsourcing could mean giving short shrift to highly worthwhile inquiries whose constituencies are less easily mobilized, less mainstream, and less richly skilled. In short, by institutionalizing a commitment to crowdsourcing are news organizations introducing a durable tilt toward reactive, pocketbook projects that appeal to college educated, professional readers?

EDITOR'S NOTE
“Using Expertise From Outside the Newsroom,” by Betty Wells, in the Spring 2008 issue of Nieman Reports, describes other efforts within The News-Press newsroom to build on this model of engaging citizens in investigative efforts. Read the article » 


Moreover, when a newsroom incorporates outsiders into the process, what they have to say has to be listened to, and an appropriate role must be found for them in shaping the coverage they contribute to. What if your amateur sleuths want to expose employers who hire illegal immigrants, or bird-dog suspiciously foreign workers back to their apartments to see who’s renting to them? Do editors allow crowdsourcing to become mobsourcing, or do they roll up the carpet on the empowerment that was promised to these helpers?

That said, those are good problems to have. The potential gains from leveraging in-house investigative and supervisory staff by enlisting communitywide resources on matters that require laborious empirical work are abundant and enormously appealing.

Relax the Full-Time Employee (FTE) Newsroom Model: News operations aren’t sustaining themselves with revenues from their own operations on anything like the scale that communities need to be covered adequately. What follows may sound heretical, but one response is to make greater resources available by encouraging the newsside to incorporate the practice pioneered by op-ed pages, which have long been dominated by outside contributors. They’d do this by creating procedures and mechanisms to promote strong investigative work from nonjournalistic professionals who bring to bear their knowledge within the community at large.

Though similar to crowdsourcing, this takes us in a slightly different direction, toward a more nimble style of newsroom management and a more serious grant of operational autonomy to outsiders. As one source of such outsiders, consider institutions of higher education: One of the paradoxes of the current economic straits of the news business is that while news outlets are suffering, university journalism programs are booming. (Travelers are familiar with a similar paradox: every airport you use is expanding, every airline you fly is near bankruptcy.) Many of the senior journalists who are being chased from their newsroom berths are being welcomed on campuses, which are benefiting from the increasing largesse of wealthy baby boomers who view donations to educate tomorrow’s journalists as highly worthwhile.

Those new academics could continue to produce journalism. A good many lawyers and accountants too have serious investigative training; some can even write. The problem is that news operations—with some exceptions, notably long-form magazines—are neither managerially suited nor culturally disposed to routinely incorporate the work of people who aren’t FTEs.

That incapacity denies them a ready source of subsidy, since the potential contributor’s reporting is essentially paid for by his or her day job. Naturally, that dependence may raise serious conflict of interest problems, much like those that op-ed pages traditionally handle so poorly. It also requires addressing novel quality control issues.

But given that the need now is to perform a thorough inventory of the investigative resources available in a community in order to harness them so as to keep the toughest and most trenchant journalism alive, ignoring the capabilities of knowledgeable, eager and capable professionals of all kinds would be foolish.

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"Going Online With Watchdog Journalism"
—Paul E. Steiger, ProPublica Editor
 

Endow Chairs: Much has been written about the national nonprofit journalism outfits that either make grants to enable reporters to do major long-term projects or, in the case of ProPublica, use foundation funding to employ top-tier investigative aces and direct them onto stories of national scope. A different approach to using nonprofit money would apply a model familiar to the academic world and be built around endowed investigative positions created on the staffs of small and midmarket news operations, which have been decimated by the declines in classified, home sales, and automotive advertising.

For example, a single national donor, giving only half the $10 million annual stipend that enables ProPublica to employ 20-some investigative reporters in Lower Manhattan, could seed 100 newsrooms with $50,000 apiece to partially fund investigative chairs. (Partial funding would ensure a local buy-in and enable the employer to adjust the reporter’s total compensation to its newsroom pay scale.) In addition to that seed money in the provinces, some modest funding could go into creating a centralized supervisory or advisory capability, perhaps vested in ProPublica or one of the existing investigative shops. The objective would be to supplement the supervision the reporter gets on site from editors who are deeply knowledgeable about local realities with the expertise of seasoned investigative journalists.

What’s important is recognizing that investigative work doesn’t solely mean national stories. Fundamental to the civic role of small and midmarket news organizations has been their work on zoning scams, courthouse favoritism, environmental degradation, political cronyism, and all manner of wrongdoing that may not register on a scale of national significance but that shapes municipal life in powerful ways. The evisceration of local newsrooms risks creating vast free-fire zones for corruption, which no amount of attention to national affairs will restrain.

Tap Into Community Resources: Similarly, nonprofit initiatives need not be exclusively national, either; they could take the form of citywide foundations bankrolled by local donors either to make grants for individual projects or to provide funds for a sustained journalistic operation comprising full- or part-time staff.

That fundraising effort need not be confined to soliciting big contributors. Investigative reporting produces tangible benefits to communities, even if those civic benefits can’t be readily monetized through the private marketplace because they can’t be priced effectively. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real and valuable. What is chasing a crooked mayor from office “worth?” If asked, one citizen might say that having an independent team of skilled investigators whose mandate is to root out and expose local corruption is worth, perhaps, $100 a year to her; another might put the figure at $50, still another at $1,000. But there is some value that each of us would attach to that benefit. The continuing success of listener-supported public radio suggests that audiences recognize and, under certain circumstances, are willing to pay for similar informational benefits. Some bloggers, too, have also been successful in fundraising of this sort.

The challenge is to create the funding mechanisms and position the appeals to enable community resources to be pooled reliably and effectively. Crowdsourcing should not be confined to research and reporting; the crowd needs to be enlisted as a source of financial support, too, which has already been happening at Minnpost.com, which was launched in November 2007. In a midsummer message, MinnPost CEO and Editor Joel Kramer reported to readers that the online publication has “932 members, people who have decided to support financially the nonprofit journalism that MinnPost.com provides.”

Create Specialized Spinoffs: Intense scrutiny of powerful institutions and important social developments is a difficult undertaking for which some people will indeed pay quite a lot, especially if that audience gets to see the findings while they’re fresh and hot. This inside-baseball model is key to the success of the newsletter business and other premium informational services that continue to flourish in spite of the current wisdom that the subscription model is dead. Might that be a model to enable certain areas of investigative work to continue—sell the reporting as a stand-alone publication to the people who are willing to pay for it?

Many journalists will find it distasteful to propose that a news operation might devote a portion of its resources to reporting that will be denied to readers who don’t specifically subscribe to it. (The objection is ironic in view of the eagerness with which news organizations are dicing their broad-gauged audiences into vertical microslivers of neighborhood, age, profession, hobby and any other social descriptor that seems to hold appeal for advertisers. Such verticality is expressly intended to provide specific audiences with some information and withhold it from others. Perhaps because the information is innocuous, the practice isn’t objectionable.) Still, if this proposal meant that important information would be kept secret, the idea would be ethically problematic.

But that’s not the case. The more typical practice of specialty publications is to keep their subscribers satisfied by ensuring them a first look at important findings; the publications themselves are eager to see their work trumpeted into the public domain, which ratifies their importance and reaffirms their subscribers’ commitment.

Moreover, what’s the choice? If the alternative is that the reporting won’t be conducted at all, submitting to a two-step process—first to subscriber, then to general public—is plainly preferable. Having a pair of investigative sleuths prowling the statehouse and reporting on shadowy legislative maneuverings for 2,000 subscribers who pay $500 a year may not be an ideal response, but it sure beats shutting the capital bureau or assigning a skeletal staff to knee-jerk stenography.

In sum, keeping alive the flame of investigative—or, as others prefer, accountability—journalism has never been easy, and the slow-motion collapse of U.S. journalism’s advertising dependency has made it harder than ever. New sources of support need to be devised, and the community’s reservoirs of skill and energy, as well as money, need to be inventoried and tapped. But this is possible. And the consequence may be a richer and more fully responsive capability for investigation, exposure and reform than was possible under the vanishing old regime.


The New York Times creates newsbooks by reprinting some of the newspaper’s investigative series. The newsbooks are sold through their online store.

Edward Wasserman is Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University. A veteran editor and publisher, he writes a media column for The Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post that is distributed nationally by The McClatchy-Tribune wire.