This article was originally published on Brainsbook.com.
GroundReport.com is a global news website that democratizes the media by helping everyone tell their story. I started it after witnessing diplomatic apathy in the face of the Darfur crisis as a reporter on the Security Council for the US Mission to the United Nations. GroundReport informs and empowers the public to participate in the news conversation, and change the world.
When I speak to investors or journalists about GroundReport, I often describe the technology behind the platform, ‘scalability,’ and our mass payment system. But when I write to the GroundReport community, I always reinforce that they “have made GroundReport what it is today.” Without their participation, GroundReport would be nothing.
So is it the tools or the people using them that help GroundReport to succeed?
Both are crucial. They are the components of a healthy, growing network. GroundReport’s value is in its web of trusted relationships. When I described GroundReport to a Reuters executive, he was skeptical of the concept of citizen journalism, which is the idea that any individual can act as reporter with the increasingly ubiquitous connectivity and devices we all have. But when I described the nature of the stories, the exceedingly sophisticated reporting that our community produces, a light went off. “It’s an outsourced stringer network,” he said, “and that’s how Reuters built its name.” The value of a trusted network of individuals– online, offline, or somewhere in between—cannot be underestimated. Indeed, it is at the core of businesses and entire industries.
We trust GroundReport contributors to publish factual, original news reports. They trust us to keep our website running, to save and protect their content, and to pay them fairly and punctually. It has not been an easy path to find this balance, and our network has taken on different incarnations throughout GroundReport’s lifetime.
Our network started small. After completing a prototype of GroundReport, I needed a global community of reporters, but didn’t know where to begin. So I asked a few friends for help. Or, more specifically, I made a list of all the friends I knew living around the world, and gave each one a topic or region to direct. The topic or region with the most stories at the end of the month would land its owner $100.
The first grassroots version of the GroundReport network worked. Soon that initial network had spawned its own offshoot networks centered on geographic regions. First it was Turkey. Professionally trained journalists with differing views sparred using words and images on the GroundReport.com. I feared that people visiting the site might think we were a Turkish news site. But the regional focus ebbed and flowed, moving with world events. When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, GroundReport hosted the greatest English-language coverage by Pakistani locals in the media. GroundReport also swept through Africa as journalists told their friends about the website that pays you in American dollars for your work.
Slowly, all these microcommunities bonded together. We launched GroundReport groups, and our most passionate contributors created collaborative publications across time zones and borders. We defined our mission further, and the community responded. Mohan Nepali, a frequent reporter from Kathmandu, emailed me this morning, describing GroundReport as “a people’s vehicle for globalization.” We cultivated content partnerships with sources like Global Voices and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, who fulfill the GroundReport duty of reporting from the ground on the events of the world.
GroundReport has witnessed the potential of grassroots bootstrapping. Now, as our larger family grows, we will focus on again creating small networks—micronetworks– around the world, pockets of community that nurture themselves before integrating into the cloth of GroundReport. These micronetworks will be as autonomous as possible, giving their members a sense of real ownership and impact, and will focus on journalism schools, nonprofits, regions and movements. We hope to learn something from the achievements of community organizing—a potent force in the United States—to apply to our mission of democratizing the media.
We also must continue to nurture the network and protect its integrity. One of the biggest mistakes in launching a ‘crowdsourced’ venture—an initiative that relies on the wisdom and input of crowds—is to let it grow wildly out of control. Like a young child, communities need guidance and boundaries, even discipline, in order to work together smoothly and create something of value.
In the beginning we built GroundReport.com and let people do whatever they wanted—the result was a mess. Spam, poems, press releases and unfinished sentences clogged our pages. As we began to edit daily, to show that the GroundReport network is a living, breathing thing, it grew with us. We attracted more sophisticated reporters, and scared off troublemakers. In GroundReport’s next phase, we will raise standards even higher to show the world the real potential of a democratic media.
It may work, and it may not, and if history is any indicator, the network will surprise us in dazzling ways as GroundReport grows. In the meantime, we will continue to speak with our contributors, to learn more about their needs and concerns, and to enjoy our collective wild ride.
Rachel Sterne is CEO of GroundReport.com, a news platform that helps people across the globe participate in the media. Previously, Rachel worked in Business Development at LimeWire and as political reporter on the Security Council for the US Mission to the United Nations. Rachel has written for The Huffington Post and think:act magazine and spoken at major universities, NBC Universal, Digital Hollywood, Networked Journalism Summit and Waldzell Institute, where she was honored as a 2007 Architect of the Future. A member of the Founders Club in NY and the Australian-American Youth Leadership Dialogue, Rachel graduated magna cum laude from New York University as a Presidential Scholar.