Why Citizen Journalism Works

Sir Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin.  Born in 1822, he was an early proponent of eugenics. Well, we all make mistakes.  But he was also a scientist who first applied mathematics to social sciences.

He created the first weather maps, he invented police forensic science with an analytical method of deciphering fingerprints, he introduced the notion of IQ tests for intelligence, he was the founder of scientific meteorology and much more.  My interest in him and and his work, however, has to do with journalism – an area he actually never directly touched upon.

Up until now, journalism has escaped the rigors and disciplines of science. This was probably a mistake.

Our story begins at the West England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in 1906. (And here I am deeply indebted to Timothy Ferris, who has written a wonderful book entitled The Science of Liberty.)

While at the fair, Galton watched as nearly 800 people paid sixpence to guess the weight of an ox on display.  The winner, writes Ferris, came pretty close.  When the contest was over, Galton obtained all the entry tickets.  What Galton discovered was that although no one individual actually guessed the accurate weight of the ox, and many were wildly off, the crowd as a whole. and measured as a whole, had concluded, by averaging out all the entries, that the ox weighed 1,197 pounds. The correct weight was 1,198.

“The vox populi – the voice of the people – was correct to within one percent,” Galton reported.  “This result is, I think, more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.”

This turns out to be the case, over and over again.  The Wisdom of Crowds – a book by James Suroweicki, notes that when contestants on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? called their ‘expert’, the expert only got the correct answer 65% of the time. The studio audience got it right 91% of the time.

When Eli Lilly, the drug company, created a web site called InnoCentive to ‘crowd source’ problems that had stumped their R&D teams, more than a third of the problems were solved.

The Dublin based Intrade.com accurately forecast no only the 2004 and 2008 American presidential elections, but congressional results in all 50 states.

The wisdom of crowds.

This is not anecdotal, it is analytical.

The key element that Galton noted in the ox guessing, and indeed in all such polling, was the necessity of paying for the admission ticket. This created a barrier to wild random guessing and forced the participants to focus on the problem at hand.

Can this concept be applied to Citizen Journalism?

I think so.  I think it is a scientific and mathematical case for citizen journalism.

Up until now, journalism as been the opinions of one ‘wise man’ (or woman) articulating his or her view of what happened.  Even with the best of intentions, there is going to be error.  This is human nature.  Let’s call it the Rashomon Effect.  Good people all see the same thing in different ways, and each believes it to be the truth.

A hundred years ago, it was so expensive to send a correspondent overseas and receive their cable communications that that was the best journalism could do.  So journalism schools drummed into people the importance of telling the truth.  Good reporting.

But today, we can open the floodgates to anyone and everyone to report on what they perceive to be the truth.

The result, when properly and accurately tabulated, like Galton’s Ox weights, should be something far closer to what is actually going on.

The flood of information, from many sources, is in fact a far better way of getting on the reality of any situation than depending upon one person’s view or opinion.

However, as Galton pointed out more than 100 years ago, there has to be a price of admission.

This is critical.

Through innovations like the Travel Channel Academy, we are actually creating a Galton-like model for the gathering, processing and transmission of information. Instead of one camera crew or one journalist going out to report on the best hotel or the best beaches, we have now built an army of thousands of trained participants in a video based information matrix. And, as they have paid for the privilege of admission, they fit the Galton criteria.

Now, all we have to do is unleash them.

We have to rethink the way in which we process information. We have lived for 10,000 years in a linear world of journalism and reporting – since Grok and Iggoo first drew animal figures on the walls at Lasceaux.  We are deeply steeped in the concept of one story at a time from one griot.

But the web allows us to move to another model completely, and Galton shows us that not only is it OK to do so, it is, in fact, far more accurate.