Tanja Aitamurto

THE IMPACT OF CROWDFUNDING ON JOURNALISM

This article analyzes the impact of crowdfunding on journalism. Crowdfunding is defined as a way to harness collective intelligence for journalism, as readers’ donations accumulate into judgments about the issues that need to be covered. The article is based on a case study about Spot.Us, a platform pioneering community-funded reporting. The study concludes that a crowdfunded journalistic process requires journalists to renegotiate their role and professional identity to succeed in the changing realm of creative work. The study concludes that reader donations build a strong connection from the reporters to the donors, which creates a new sense of responsibility to the journalists. The journalists perceive donors as investors, that cannot be let down. From the donors perspective, donating does not create a strong relationship from donor to the journalist, or to the story to which they contributed. The primary motivation for donating is to contribute to the common good and social change. Consequently, donors’ motives are essentially more altruistic than instrumental. Thus, when the public donates for a cause, the marketing of a certain type of journalism should be aligned with the features of cause marketing. The traditional role of journalism as a storyteller around the campfire has remained, but the shared story is changing: people no longer share merely the actual story, but also the story of participating in a story process.

Open innovation in digital journalism: Examining the impact of Open APIs at four news organizations

This article examines the relative value of open innovation principles for digital media, exemplified by the emergence of Open Application Programming Interfaces (Open APIs) at four news organizations: The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today and NPR. The use of Open APIs represents a shift toward an open innovation paradigm that may help address twin challenges facing the news industry: the need for improved R&D and the need for new revenue streams. This paper extends the interdisciplinary study of open innovation to digital communication. Findings indicate that the use of Open APIs has accelerated R&D through knowledge-sharing with web developers; generated new means of commercializing content by extending a firm’s product portfolio; and forged innovation networks that function as external R&D departments. The article discusses the constant negotiation between openness and control, and open and closed paradigms in journalism.

Balancing between Open and Closed: Co-Creation in Magazine Journalism

This study examines the impact of co-creation on magazine journalism by drawing on data from a structured, sequenced online co-creation process in an established consumer magazine. Co-creation is examined as a method for open journalism. Co-creation surprises and even shocks journalists, as they face the “real” reader, in intensive online reader engagement, instead of the imagined “ideal reader.” Journalists compromise quality, feature journalism to comply with readers’ wishes, thus breaking the reader contract and consistency in the magazine concept. Co-creation created a strong feeling of ownership over the magazine among readers; however, the end result was disappointment for both journalists and readers due to the failed content-integration process. Co-creation established a connection between the readers, which strengthened the magazines’ community-creator function. The findings indicate that co-creation is a more challenging method in journalism than crowdsourcing. This article contributes to the study of open journalism and the digital future of magazines.

Crowdsourcing as a Knowledge Search Method in Digital Journalism: Ruptured Ideals and Blended Responsibility

This article examines crowdsourcing as a knowledge-search method and an open journalistic practice in digital journalism. The study draws on data from four cases in which professional journalists used crowdsourcing in their investigations. Crowdsourcing resulted in an efficient knowledge discovery and a continuous flow of tips to journalists and thus benefited journalistic investigations. The horizontal and vertical transparency in crowdsourced journalism supported the knowledge-search process. However, the high volume of submissions in some cases made the journalists compromise the journalistic norm of data verification, which resulted in publishing unverified information. Crowdsourcing as an open journalistic practice thus ruptures journalistic norms and creates pressure for new ones to emerge, such as blended responsibility, in which the responsibility for data accuracy is shared by the journalists and the readers. The article extends the examination of open journalistic practices and contributes to the understanding of their impact on digital journalism.

The value of crowdsourcing in public policymaking: epistemic, democratic and economic value

ABSTRACT While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creation in public policymaking in the following three dimensions: democratic, epistemic and economic. Democratic value is created by increasing transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and deliberation in crowdsourced policymaking. Epistemic value is developed when crowdsourcing serves as a knowledge search mechanism and a learning context. Economic value is created when crowdsourcing makes knowledge search in policymaking more efficient and enables government to produce policies that better address citizens’ needs and societal issues. We show how these tenets of value creation are manifest in crowdsourced policymaking by drawing on instances of crowdsourced lawmaking, and we also discuss the contingencies and challenges preventing value creation.

Unmasking the crowd: participants’ motivation factors, expectations, and profile in a crowdsourced law reform

ABSTRACT This article examines the demographic characteristics, motivations, and expectations of participants in a crowdsourced off-road traffic law reform in Finland. We found that the participants were mainly educated, full-time working professional males with a strong interest in off-road traffic. Though a minority, the women participating in the process produced more ideas than the men. The crowd was motivated by a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Intrinsic motivations included fulfilling civic duty, affecting the law for sociotropic reasons, to deliberate with and learn from peers. Extrinsic motivations included changing the law for financial gain or other benefits. Participation in crowdsourced policy-making was an act of grassroots advocacy, whether to pursue one’s own interest or more altruistic goals, such as protecting nature. The motivations driving the participation were in part similar to those observed in traditional democratic processes, such as elections as well as other online collaborations such as crowdsourced journalism and citizen science. The crowds’ behavior was, however, paradoxical. They participated despite the fact that they did not expect that their contributions would affect the law.

Collective Intelligence in Law Reforms: When the Logic of the Crowds and the Logic of Policymaking Collide

This paper shows how the two virtues of collective intelligence -- cognitive diversity and large crowds -- turn into perils in crowdsourced policymaking. That is because of a conflict between the logic of the crowds and the logic of policymaking. The crowds logic differs from that of traditional policymaking in several aspects. To mention some of those: In traditional policymaking it is a small group of experts making proposals to the policy, whereas in crowdsourced policymaking, it is a large, anonymous crowd with a mixed level of expertise. The crowd proposes atomic ideas, whereas traditional policymaking is used to dealing with holistic and synthesized proposals. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice. The conflict prevents policymaking fully benefiting from the crowds input, and it also hinders governments from adopting crowdsourcing more widely as a practice for deploying open government principles.

The Open Paradigm in Design Research

Introduction The shift from closed to open paradigms in new product development is seen as an emergence of new forms of production, innovation, and design.1 Innovation processes are shifting from open source software to open source hardware design. Emulating open source software, design information for open source hardware is shared publicly to enhance the development of physical products, machines, and systems.2 Similarly, the rise of the “maker culture” enhances product tinkering,3 while the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement embraces “the open” in design.4 Users participate in design via crowdsourcing and co-creation on platforms such as OpenIdeo and Quirky and by joining proliferating open innovation challenges.5 At the back end of the design process, customers are invited to participate in mass customization and personalization to personalize products.6 The open paradigm has received scholarly attention through studies of open source software7 and open source hardware.8 Moreover, user engagement in the design process has been studied as user-centric innovation,9 participatory design,10 and codesign,11 as well as customer co-creation and crowdsourcing.12 However, the “open” landscape in design lacks consensus regarding a unified definition for open design practices. This lack of agreement partially results from the gap in approaches to design. Studies of innovation and new product development are focused on user-centric approaches and customer engagement in several stages of the design process, whereas current definitions of open design are focused on openness of technical design information and largely exclude, in particular, the early stages of the design process. The open design definitions also lack the commercial aspects of openness. Thus, the existing definitions are too narrow to holistically represent the shift from a closed paradigm to an open paradigm in design. Moreover, the lack of clarity and consistency in definitions is hindering the development of open design as a design approach. To fully advance the research on methods and practices, a more comprehensive perception of openness in the design process is needed. 1 See, e.g., Henry Chesbrough, “Open Innovation: A New Paradigm for Understanding Industrial Innovation,” in Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, ed. Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke, Joel West, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–34; Henry Chesbrough, Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011, Kindle edition); Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 371–446. 2 Christina Raasch, Cornelius Herstatt, and Kerstin Balka, “On the Open Design of Tangible Goods,” R&D Management 39, no. 4 (2009): 382–93. 3 Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown, 2012). 4 Hilde Bouchez, “Pimp Your Home: Or Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive—From a Consumer Perspective,” The Design Journal 15, no. 4 (2012): 461–78. 5 Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim R. Lakhani, “Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search,” Organization Science: Articles in Advance 21, no. 5 (2010): 1016–33. 6 Fabrizio Salvador, Pablo Martin de Holan, and Frank Piller, “Cracking the Code for Mass-Customization,” Sloan Management Review 50, no. 3 (2009): 71–78. 7 Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh, “Open Source Software and the ‘PrivateCollective’ Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science,” Organization Science 14, no. 2 (2003): 209–23. 8 Sanne van der Beek, “From Representation to Rhizome: Open Design from a Relational Perspective,” The Design Journal 15, no. 4 (2012): 423–42. 9 von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation, 17.

Examining the Quality of Crowdsourced Deliberation: Respect, Reciprocity and Lack of Common-Good Orientation

We examine deliberative quality of crowdsourced deliberation in this paper. Analyzing data from two crowdsourced policy-making processes, we found a good quality deliberation with respect, reciprocity, and storytelling according to the standards in the theory of deliberative democracy. We identified a group of super-deliberators, whose deliberation was above the average, and low-quality deliberators, whose deliberation was below the average. The findings show that even when crowdsourced policymaking was not designed for deliberation, it can facilitate a fairly high-quality democratic deliberation.

Motivating Participation in Crowdsourced Policymaking: The Interplay of Epistemic and Interactive Aspects

In this paper, we examine the changes in motivation factors in crowdsourced policymaking. By drawing on longitudinal data from a crowdsourced law reform, we show that people participated because they wanted to improve the law, learn, and solve problems. When crowdsourcing reached a saturation point, the motivation factors weakened and the crowd disengaged. Learning was the only factor that did not weaken. The participants learned while interacting with others, and the more actively the participants commented, the more likely they stayed engaged. Crowdsourced policymaking should thus be designed to support both epistemic and interactive aspects. While the crowds motives were rooted in self-interest, their knowledge perspective showed common-good orientation, implying that rather than being dichotomous, motivation factors move on a continuum. The design of crowdsourced policymaking should support the dynamic nature of the process and the motivation factors driving it.