I attended the NY Chapter of the Social Media Club two nights ago, and the discussion launched off of Jay Rosen’s http://www.assignmentzero.com which is an experiment on the idea that you can cover the new as good or better by using a widely dispersed group, acting in unison, than one single professional journalist.  It’s based on the idea of “Crowd Sourcing” where many people each do a small amount, and yield powerful results.

For a lot of this topic I was simply enjoying certain ideas popping out.  I like the idea of harnessing the spare moments of many people.  Some interesting benefits to this:

• reduce the amount of inference, assumption and speculation on the part of any one individual, because that individual’s task is so restricted in scope, that there’s no reason for him/her to stretch beyond what he’s absolutely sure of
• increase the focus on single points of strength; the other side of the restriction coin is that because each person focuses only and wholly on what s/he is good at, each single point’s strength is raised, which therefore raises the strength of the whole piece
• As part of this process, the biggest hurdle, or problem to solve, is organizing the participants/contributors.  How to keep 700+ journalists working in tandem?  Another question to ask is, how to easily and quickly identify - or help participants to identify - their single most effective way to contribute.  Because in this type of organization, it’s always best for the overall if each individual were to focus on what s/he does best.
• What could this do to celebrity?  I love this idea, that in harnessing the efforts and strengths of many people’s small contributions, you naturally do away with the need - or possibility - of the “I” to shine, of the “Me” to be fed.  “I” and “Me” become sublimated to the “Us” and “We” - Can this tradeoff be carried out in a way that my own “Me” is fed directly by being part of the “We”

The conversation soon moved to asking question about credibility and trust in journalism and the media.  We started off by asking how do we, as content receivers, get our news and determine who is trustworthy, etc.  And since most of us in the room are also content producers, the discussion quickly turned to that side of the topic:  How can “I” as a content producer, make it clear that I am credible, trustworthy, believable, etc?

Although it really is an important topic with a wealth of tips, techniques and strategies for both explicit and implicit communication of “my credibility” I believe that the desire of the content producer to be viewed as credible can be considered at odd with the desire of the content receiver to receive trustworthy, solid “content” or news.

So going back to having one news piece be covered by 700 people instead of just one, I want to make two analogies.

First is the car insurance industry.  If you are male, 21 years 3 months old, 6′, brown hair (plus a whole lot of other information) they can predict, with a certain amount of reliability, what your liklihood of getting into a car accident is.   It’s not bias.  It’s not belief.  It’s just statistics.  With mass amounts of data, no one person needs to be an individual.  He is just a liklihood.  And while it’s degrading to the individual, it’s an incredibly efficient way of assessing risk factors across millions of people, something that in no way could be accomplished by assigning a personalized, rigorous interview process for each car insurance applicant.

Second example:  On this blog, I get 25-to-45 visitors a day for the search term “Myspace Music Player” and 110-140 visitors a day for the search term “VIP Movie Tickets.”  I’m not sure which engines they come from, but I know what my logs tell me.  But look at what I just wrote.  How is that possible?  Are there 45 people in the world who, each day, type in the search “Myspace Music Player” and then click on my site?  I mean, is it the same 45 people?  Impossible.  Every day, a DIFFERENT 25-to-45 people type that search phrase into the engines and end up clicking into my site.

And this is just a small example (because both these topics are only a few months old on my site).  I have pages here and on other sites where these types of trends continue for months, and years.

It’s the same concept as with the car insurance companies.  While there’s no way to predict what any one individual in the world will type into the search engines, it IS possible to predict, after a while, how many random individuals in the world will search and find my site.

So how this relates to establishing credibility?  It means that you or I, desiring to be an informed world citizen of the world, can be better serves by DECREASING our need to find one or a few highly credible sources, and instead putting our time and efforts towards drastically increasing the sheer number of sources.  While any one of those sources may or may not be trustworthy, or may or may not be biased, by making the choice to take in a wide range of bias and human flaws, the average result will be that I have a clear view of the situation.

In reality, this means that if I’m pro-bush, I increase my informed-ness by reading both pro-bush, anti-bush, and all the variations in between.  The belief that any one group, and one person does NOT have bias is flat out false.  So if I, the reader, want as broad and true a picture of reality as possible, I can only hurt myself by preferring one bias over another.  I may at the end of the day decide to SIDE with one view.  But which side I TAKE should not influence HOW MUCH I KNOW.

Ok, that’s all for now…