So - what will you pay for accurate Citizen Journalism?

Another interesting post tonight on the RSS reader - Scott Karp talking about prevention of "gaming" social media by PR flacks etc. Discussion was kicked off by Mother Jones News, noting the start of the games played (here giving the example of a Wal Mart shill posing as a concerned resident blogger and others):

As newspapers' circulation numbers and ad revenues free-fall, their executives have decided that publications must go "hyper-local" and online, and they've enlisted the help of amateurs such as Getz to do it. But as her Wal-Mart plug shows, the newspaper industry's embrace of "citizen journalism" has a downside. Reader-submitted content rarely gets vetted by editors. In the same month as Getz's Wal-Mart post, the Democrat published a story by a retirement home's development director about the complex's great new golf course—without disclosing her job—and a woman wrote an article about a boy who'd organized a cancer charity event without noting that she's his mom.

Scott does a good analysis of what is going on in the mediaspace in his article, the area I want to comment on is the area of the gaming the algorithms in these systems. He notes that there are usually patterns observable:

The basic principle that sites like Google and Digg apply to combat gaming is that there are identifiable strategies for manipulating the system, and if you can identify markers of those strategies, then you can design “algorithms” to detect and block manipulative behavior. These algorithms do not always eliminate gaming, but they can reduce it.

Question is, how do you build algorithms that catch first order unknowns such as the undisclosed special interests? Says Karp:

What every newsroom or journalist practicing networked journalism should do is develop a list of all known instances of gaming, and also come up with other possible risks — then they need to develop algorithms to try to protect against these.

So what about the likelihood that some of these algorithms will fail as part of the learning process? The advantage that news organizations have over systems like Google and Digg is that they can actually disclose their algorithms, which Google and Digg can’t do because it would actually give gamers a roadmap.

Poses two interesting questions...firstly, is it really possible to build algorithms that can catch all these tricks, and secondly - and maybe more worryingly - is it worth it?

Thinking about whether it is possible - I can see how it is possible to write algorithms that can trawl data that is electronically available, but it assumes a level of naivete by the perpetrator that is unlikely from any "pro" (who will surely obfuscate themselves). I suspect, like any other form of anti-gaming system, there has to be a considerable amount of (expensive) human intervention - for the medium term, anyway.

Which brings us to the next question - what exactly is the values of all this?

By "value" that doesn't mean "is it a good idea" - that quality and integrity is important to people is clear, look at the BBC's reputation globally - but it is not run as a commercial business. "Value" means who will pay for this benefit, and how much?. The majority of the grockles out there don't seem to give a toss about accuracy, lack of bias, rapacious privacy erosion etc etc in "citizen media" (or in a lot of journalism for that matter), so - on empirical evidence anyway - there probably won't be a huge appetite for large spending on such algorithms in the short term by the production services.

I suspect that its the demand side - i.e. us - who will be asked to pay for it if we want it, just as today we buy quality dailies, subscribe to The Economist etc...so the challenge therefore is, how do you build an easily usable webservice that users can apply to filter/screen "bad" citizen journalism - at a price that is accessible to the majority of people?

One obvious way is limiting recommendations to trusted "friends of friends" networks, but Facebook Beacon gives an instant view of how this will be abused in future.

So, its going to be non-trivial to build this, but the prize could be huge, in that - globally - why would one bother to go anywhere except this sort of service if you were the sort of perspn looking for trusted media?

Sort of like why would you go anywhere except the BBC if you could get it - oh, wait....with the Internet you can, anywhere.....

However, there still seems to be a huge market for complete hoopla - as PT Barnum once allegedly said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people ...