I don’t like Gamification. It’s been a buzzword for years and too many people seem to be missing the point. Corporate suited types see the engagement people show video games and think “Oh, I’ll have some of that!” (disclosure: I am currently a corporate suited type). This leads people to do silly things such as add badges and a points system to their boring web site. But that’s bunk. It’s like the flavouring in cough syrup.

All the cherry flavour in the world isn’t enough to mask that medicine. Would you want to drink that, if you didn’t have a cough? Of course not. (If the answer is yes, you probably have deeper problems than we should discuss here.)

People are smart. They can see through an attempt to disguise something boring with ‘gamey’ techniques. If the activity itself is intrinsically boring, unrewarding, or frustrating, that sort of cherry-flavour veneer won’t help.

Instead, we need to focus on creating intrinsically rewarding experiences. People don’t play Halo because the game is boring but they like getting the badges. People play Halo because the game is awesome. The badges are an afterthought.

So what makes games intrinsically rewarding?

Want to make people run? Don’t give them a badge for running. Give them a ball and shove four sticks in the ground. They’ll run around the field chasing the ball (and each other) for ages. The experience is intrinsically challenging and amusing, and the running is a by-product. Games rely on dynamics like these and rules to generate the conditions for positive engagement.

These dynamics are all based on basic principles. Chief among these principles are Motivation, Feedback, and Challenge.

Life is ambiguous. Games are not. At every moment in a game, your goal, your motivation as a player is clear. When it changes, this is clearly marked. Your clarity of action is perfect, existential angst disappears. This is a rewardign state of being. Many other activities in life are frustrating because these conditions don’t apply, so there’s no way to know how you’re doing.

Which brings us to the second main principle.

People love dogs for a lot of reasons, but one of them is emotional transparency. Dogs have no guile. They’re obviously happy, or resentful, or frightened, or tired. In other words, they give clear feedback. But one of the frustrating things in work or a lot of activities is lack of clear feedback.

Are you doing well? Are you approaching your goals? Did the changes you just made to your way of working actually make a difference? A lot of the time, it’s surprisingly difficult and time-consuming to answer these questions.

In contrast, one of the reasons games are intrinsically rewarding is because your performance is always clear. Badges and achievements are one way of making this clear, but usually they’re a weaker, supplemental way. The best way of communicating clear feedback is if feedback is encoded directly into the game dynamics themselves – as in the score in football, or dying in Halo. Failure is an especially powerful feedback mode. Games are just experiences encoded so the failure has no cost outside the game.

Finally, a key principle of game design is Challenge. Games are intrinsically rewarding because challenge is always modulated to the skill level of the player. When you start playing a game, it’s easy because the challenges are basic. As you gain experience, the challenges become more difficult, keeping you at your optimal level of engagement and generating flow. In video games, the computer takes care of this. In the case of other games, the other players do – as long as they’re novices too, or good teachers.

So rather than facing people with a brick-wall level challenge right away, a well-designed game gives them a basic challenge first, and then . . .

Allows them to expand at their own pace.

So, interested in implementing some of these principles at your company? Hire a game designer.

Game design is an art in itself, and there is a lot written on the subject. If you want to reap these rewards, you need to bring in a specialist. (The two above are game designers Minkette and James Wallis, of Portland (OR) and London (UK), respectively.)

Games can use technical support, but they’re not about the technical support. This isn’t about the technology. It’s about experience.

Game designers craft intrinsically rewarding experiences. The badges are just frosting.

The badges in and of themselves are meaningless. They’re only of value in the context of an activity that is intrinsically rewarding enough to make people want to participate in it. When an activity is designed well enough to be intrinsically rewarding, you can start assigning extra rewards like badges. These rewards gain endogenous value – a value that truly exists only within the context of the game.

When it comes to the bigger picture, some people say there should be a points system for real life. Thing is . . .

A lot of things we do ALREADY happen in the context of an endogenous value system that only has meaning to other people playing the same game.

There wasn’t much time for questions or discussion at the session, but thanks everyone for listening and see you tomorrow!

Like CNN’s iReport, or pure-play citizen journalism outfits like Citizenside, Guardian Witness allows news readers to become contributors and participate in the making of the news. It’s already getting lots of reactions online. So – will it work?

1. Experience

The Guardian has form in this department. This is something they’ve been doing for some time, as their Digital Development Editor Joanna Geary pointed out. From MPs’ expenses to the London riots of 2011, they’ve engaged citizens as investigators and collaborators for years. The culture of open journalism at the Guardian goes way back past the launch of initiatives like Comment is Free. (“Guardian Readers” even got a byeline in the case of MPs’ expenses story – a well-deserved accolade.)

It’s exciting to see an established operator like the Guardian take this step. Since the Guardian has been doing collaborative journalism for years, Guardian Witness isn’t really about the Guardian entering a new space. Rather, this is about the Guardian trying to take advantage of their readers’ latent reporting and content-creation capacity through a formalized tool. In this case, it’s a mobile-heavy offering, with Android and iOS apps for mobile creation.

2. Funding

This move is also very interesting from a business perspective. Guardian Witness is sponsored by EE, one of the UK’s big mobile service operators. Since I started working in digital PR last year, I’ve gained a whole new perspective on how companies and news operators can work together to mutual benefit. I don’t think anyone has found the answer yet – I don’t even think that there is one, singular answer – but it’s clear from the press release that EE sees this as a good fit with their corporate image as other 4G providers start to enter the marketplace. Here’s Spencer McHugh, EE’s Director of Brand:

“Smartphones have changed the way in which news is covered and shared around the world as ground-breaking mobile technology breaks down the barriers between journalists and the public. As the first providers of superfast 4G in Britain, EE is uniquely placed to support this transformation in the way news is reported, consumed and shared. This revolutionary new platform from the Guardian recognises these developments, enabling users to film or photograph something and share it with the Guardian’s editorial team in a matter of seconds, and EE is delighted to support the Guardian’s approach to open journalism.”

3. Incentives

Looks like the Guardian is starting out with setting assignments for users – a great means of engagement. The first assignments are simple (and have been criticized for this), but I think that’s necessary at the start. As the platform develops, they’ll have to be careful about incentives. Copyright remains with the original content creator, but contributors’ work may be syndicated or licensed on. In the case of a major story (especially celebrity gossip stuff) the video or photos might be worth a lot. Who gets the cash, and in what proportion? This will take some working out.

4. Integration

Shiny social meda apps and excellent code are the new thing, but they can be easily derailed by something as old as humanity: politics. If this isn’t integrated into the Guardian’s way of working – if it isn’t worked right into the newsroom and editorial process – it won’t reach its full potential. Joanna Geary has given tantalizing hints that this won’t happen, saying “I think the big thing is the integration into the production and journalistic process. This isn’t a bolt on.” I’m keen to hear more on that.

5. Community

Perhaps the Guardian’s biggest advantage as it launches Guardian Witness is the strength of its existing community. Newspapers in the UK (whatever the word ‘newspaper’ means these days) aren’t just news conduits. They’re identities. A Sun reader is different from an FT reader is different from a Guardian Reader, as immortalized in Yes Minister.  The Guardian has been a major player in online news for years. They’re known for innovating and including users in many ways. People will want to participate because they believe in what the Guardian stands for and because it helps them identify as a Guardian reader . . . well, a Guardian person-formerly-known-as-a-reader, to mangle Jay Rosen’s phrase.  In this light, the current lack of social plug-ins such as the ability to like, comment, or otherwise interact with existing content is quite a handicap. But I’m betting that this release is all about minimum viable product, and we can undoubtedly expect incremental upgrades as the platform matures.

6. But . . . Community

Many people will post images, video and reports after they’ve witnessed a news event. The images flooding out of Boston after yesterday’s atrocity are just the latest shocking example. But will people choose to post on this platform? There are powerful incentives for them to post directly to their Facebook and Twitter profiles, where their own personal communities are already waiting for them. This has been pointed out by a few commentators already. This is a significant challenge, and ultimately it boils down to incentives as well. Most people don’t post or share news to get paid – they do it to appear connected and in-the-know among their peers.  I’d argue that Guardian Witness will be successful to the extent to which it can enables people to share news through the platform, while also making them look good to their Facebook and Twitter communitites. It’s a tall ask, but if anyone can handle it, I think the team behind this one can.

This is a fascinating initiative and I’ll be watching with great interest as it develops. How do you think Guardian Witness will do?

My first job when I moved to the UK was as a receptionist at a TV production company in Kentish town. (Well, I was actually hired to move in furniture, but worked up to answering the phones.) The boss there was an energetic, garrulous guy named Ian. He could spin off a dozen concepts for reality TV shows with his first sip of Pinot Grigio, drove his Jag to work every day from his house in Islington – and he was very proud of being working class.

I never really got that. How could the Cambridge-educated managing director of a TV company consider himself working class? In Canada, the class system doesn’t work like that.

Well, it turns out it doesn’t here in the UK, either. So says Science.

Over two years ago, I worked on an interactive investigation for BBC Current Affairs called The Great British Class Survey. The survey launched in early 2011, but it’s taken until now for the responses to be properly studied, revised and published. And what results they have been! On April 2nd, the BBC finally published the results. Apparently it’s the largest study on class ever conducted in the UK, with over 160,000 respondents.

The results have been fascinating. Professors Mike Savage and Fiona Devine, our partner sociologists, (along with their research team) were able to use the data they gathered to blow apart the old three-way working/middle/upper division of class. They describe the UK more accurately with seven classes: Elite, Established Middle Class, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Traditional Working Class (yep, that one’s still there), Emergent Service Workers, and the poor, isolated Precariat. You can take the test yourself if you want, and find out which of the seven new classes you fit into.

I’ve been thrilled with the impact this work has had. There have been hundreds of responses on Twitter.  There’s plenty of mainstream coverage, too – the Telegraph, Reuters, the Guardian. Even the Daily Mail covered the survey in depth. They even did us the honour of a cartoon by Pugh:

There was even a hilariously sour spin-off piece in Vice magazine.

Plenty of the coverage takes issue with the results, of course – this piece from The Boar is just one example. But that’s the whole point. Class is something important and infinitely discussable, and the survey is sparking debate and discussion. It even looks like all this hot air might have some sort of effect. I’ve seen ‘Precariat’ used at least once in print, and heard it a couple of times in the wild – people at my office were talking about the survey earlier today.

This was a fascinating project to develop and produce. It was the last interactive project I worked on before I left the BBC. I’m pleased to see that it’s come into its own at last, and profoundly grateful to all the people who helped make it happen.

Fig. 1 – A Canadian penny on the sidewalk

In which are explained the various rules, and variations, of luck-obtention in the finding and picking up pennies on the street

When I was growing up, in Montreal, and old enough to just have learned where babies come from, I also learned about penny luck.

The idea is simple. If you find a penny on the street, and pick it up, it brings you good luck for one day.

Since then I’ve grown a lot older and learned a lot about the way the world works. It turns out that, like so many things, penny-picking-up-luck is more complicated and subtle than it appears at first. I’ve given this matter considerable thought and engaged in over 20 years of penny-luck experimentation. So I thought I’d clear up the rules.

Rule 1. Luck is redeemable at a rate of one day per penny. 

This one is pretty obvious. One penny = one day of good luck. One penny is worth one cent. Therefore if you find a five cent coin, it confers five days of luck. A quarter is worth 25 cents and so covers you for the better part of a month. If you find a loonie or a toonie, they convey 100 and 200 days of good luck, respectively. By the same token, I am still riding on the wave of the $10 bill I found in the parking lot of the Angrignon Mall Future Shop on the 10th of January 2011. (So far it has pretty much worked.)

Rule 2. Exchange rates apply.

As stipulated in Rule 1, luck accrues at a rate of one day per penny, or one day per cent. But whose pennies are we talking about here? It seems logical that the pennies you grew up with are the luck standard for you. Of course, I grew up in Canada, so in my case we’re talking Canadian pennies here. But I live in London now. If I went out in the street today and found a British penny in the street, that would count for 1.56113 days of good luck, at current rates. (Which is a bit of a bummer, ’cause when I moved to London in 2005 one British penny equaled 2.45 days of good luck. If I found a two-penny coin back then, I was set for like a whole week.)

Rule 2, Corollary: exchange rates apply in reverse, too.

If you grew up in Britain or the USA and you come to Canada and find pennies on the sidewalk, you’re sort of getting ripped off. At current rates, if you’re British, a Canadian penny only gives you 0.640563 days of good luck. That’s about enough to get you to three-thirty in the afternoon or so.

Rule 3. Luck is bankable until the finder decides to use it.

This one is a real surprise, but I assure you that the logic holds. This is Science here people, and we all know you can’t argue with Science. As the saying goes, finding a penny makes that day lucky. But what if you find another penny that day? (This has, in fact, happened to me several times during my years of experimentation.) Your current day is already lucky, so the second penny’s lucky day must fall on another date. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that it the luck should accrue on the next day. Logically, it follows that any luck past the first penny is bankable, and can be redeemed at a future date of the finder’s choosing. By extension, any penny luck is bankable – including the luck from the first penny. This is really convenient, because it’s a great idea to save luck up until you need it – for example, for a big presentation, a hot date, or an appointment with your bail board.

Rule 4. Luck must be redeemed consecutively.

Though luck is bankable and can be called on at any time, you can’t cut up luck from multiple-cent finds into smaller chunks. That means that if you find a dime, you have to use all ten days in one go. You can’t use one or two of them and keep the other nine or eight for later.

Rule 4, Corollary: luck need not be redeemed at a rate of one luck-day per calendar day.

If you’ve banked a lot of luck, and have something really big coming up, and you really really need a lot of luck, you can focus all your luck from a particular find into one day. For example, I found a pound coin on Carnaby street the other day. I’m saving that one up to use in one go – next time I play poker I am makin’ it, baby.

Rule 4, CoroCorollary: Focused luck has to all be spent on the same day.

Because seriously. You can’t go spending all your luck in some sort of like twice normal concentration or some random shit like that. That’s just silly. It’s one day per penny, or all at once. Your choice, punk.

Rule 5. Redeemed luck lasts 24 hours from the moment of redemption.

Because otherwise time zones would apply, and that would just be weird. And confusing. Like I’m supposed to keep track of where I’m from and use the time zone from there? But there are like 12 time zones in Canada. So that clearly doesn’t work. It has to just last 24 hours.

There, that’s all the rules that I’ve been able to determine from many years of observation and experimentation. I hope you find them useful.

Sounds like you’re painfully aware of the difficulties most established news operators are going through right now. Publishing is essentially dead, or dying (witness the Encyclopedia Britannica’s decision to stop publishing yesterday – a case in point if ever there was one). By some accounts, television is holding steady, and radio too – but that’s only because most stations have trimmed staff to the barest possible minimum. While I was at the BBC, I worked through three separate rounds of staff cuts. Each one was meant to be the last one, impossible to go further, pushed through against tremendous opposition from the unions, and yet – they pared down even further. Those legacy publications that have done well, like the Economist and perhaps the Guardian, have done so because they’ve embraced the digital sphere and let it change the very nature of their business.

Make no mistake: traditional, platform-based journalism is being crushed, and its dust will blow away on the winds of the internet. I know this is a melodramatic way to put it, but it’s an important point to make. Newspaper, television and radio journalists now are all in the position of itinerant bards at the advent of the printing press.

The good news is that there’s never been a better time to be a journalist. The bards have disappeared, but we still sing, and we still spread news. Just so, the digital sphere is growing fast as the blast front of an explosion. Good skills in writing, producing video and audio are more important than ever. They just need to be couched in an understanding of sharing and search – the air and water of the internet. There’s no use writing if your content can’t be shared or found. A mediocre piece optimized for social sharing will beat a piece of beautiful content without links every time. So you need to intuitively understand the answers to two questions:

1. What makes people share stuff? Will they want to share this? How will they share it, when they find it?
2. How do people find stuff? How will people find this? What will they be looking for?

So don’t try to be a television journalist, or a radio journalist, or a newspaper journalist. There’s no future there. But be a 21^st century journalist instead, and every day new opportunities appear, new platforms are launched, and the ecosystem you work in will grow more subtle and more complex.

If you understand the way social media works, you’re in a strong position. And by “understand” I don’t mean “have a Twitter profile.” That’s good – essential, even – but a real understanding of social media means always thinking against the background of those questions up there. Taking this further, it means knowing how a company or news operator can apply its brand values to effectively reach people of a particular demographic.

Editors and publishers can sometimes be an egotistical lot, so they’d never admit this: most of them are desperately trying to find ways to make their particular news brand relevant in the social media environment. As for those who aren’t, they either:

1. think they’ve got it sussed, (in which case they’re guilty of a dangerous case of hubris), or
2. think they don’t need to do anything (in which case they’ll be unemployed in a year or so)

No one has figured this out yet – not completely. That’s why if you can come to such an editor with implementable, practical ideas on how they can thrive in the interactive media sphere, you’ll have good chances. Be ready to sell your ideas with enthusiasm and persuasion. As the saying goes, never be afraid of people stealing your ideas. If they’re any good, you’ll have to ram your ideas down people’s throats.

You’ve already gone some of the way; you’re on Twitter, you’re on YouTube. Work on that. Make sure that when I Google you, your channels dominate the top 5 search results. If you’ve got a unique name, that’s an advantage. Use it.

If you want a job in PR, we’re looking for people in London right now. It’s the same stuff as journalism – communicating ideas with effectiveness and power. Better pay, too, and hot damn is there a lot of work to do. The team I joined in January was 40 people last year – now we’re 80, and hiring as fast as we can.

How about it? You can apply right here.

There I’ll be designing interactive communications strategy and working up crisis response scenarios, as well as a whole bunch of other fascinating stuff.

I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in. It seems like interesting times at Edelman. The company has grown from about 3000 to nearly 4000 employees in little over a year, and the 80-person London Digital team, which I am joining, was just 35 strong only a year ago. I’ll be working with, among others, Tim Callington and Robin Hamman – who I first met when he was Head of Blogging at the BBC. (Yes, the BBC once had a Head of Blogging).

It’s been a heck of a ride at Citizenside. Since I joined in February, Citizenside’s member base has grown from 50,000 to nearly 70,000 members around the world. The Arab Spring and the Occupy protests have really started to grow Citizenside’s membership internationally and flood the feed with truly excellent photos. In January 2012, Citizenside will unveil Citizenside 3.0, a completely redesigned website that focuses much more on community interactivity.

This is the historic moment for citizen journalism, and I think the next couple of years will be really interesting for Citizenside. I wish the Citizenside team in Paris all the best in their continued quest to fully realize the potential of citizen media.

As for me, I’m really looking forward to new challenges, and working with the award-winnning team at Edelman.

Onwards!

Coping with this upsurge in distributed newsgathering capability is one of the most important challenges for any news organisation active in 2011.

The users are already sharing vast volumes of valuable material. However, their output is unstructured, often highly subjective, and devoid of context or analysis.

Professional news organisations can add value here, if they develop ways to work with users to create high-quality journalism together. For all their experience in research, production skills, and their contact networks, this is a difficult task for the pros. The intelligent application of game dynamics is a key part of the solution.

Citizenside exists specifically to take advantage of this new opportunity for networked newsgathering. Game design principles are at the heart of our work. Here are some of the ways in which we apply them to improve our journalism.

Intrinsically rewarding experiences

This is not about ‘gamification’ – a word whose trendiness has leached it of all meaning. There are compelling editorial reasons that applied game dynamics are fundamentally important for any interactive journalism operation.

At the most basic level, any news operation that wants to survive must attract, motivate and retain a network of active users – whatever its business model. This is precisely what game design is about: creating intrinsically rewarding experiences.

As proven by its soaring player numbers and revenue, the gaming industry has already mastered the art of attracting, motivating and retaining a large user network. Any interactive journalism operation benefits from the application of proven game design principles from the very beginning.

On a more specific level, there are four main ways in which game design principles can help attract, motivate and retain a network of active users.

1. Motivation

Blank pages are terrifying, and total creative freedom can be daunting. On the other hand, a specific, achievable challenge can be extremely motivating.

It is a fundamental game design concept that players need always to have a clearly defined, intriguing problem to solve. It is even better if the problem is pitched at just the right level of complexity for their level of experience. In this way they are neither bored with a simple, repetitive task, or frustrated by something too difficult for them to solve.

This very simple but powerful idea should inform all editors’ interactions with their users.

In the networked news ecosystem, it is not enough to simply ask users to send in newsworthy material. Most people have neither the news awareness, nor the contact network, nor the editorial nous to simply find newsworthy images. These remain the pro’s advantage.

However, using a game design approach, an editor can motivate a distributed network of users to attack a range of newsgathering tasks. Specific creative challenges are attractive to users. Viewed through the lens of game design, newsgathering tasks become challenging but achievable missions that users can complete.

At Citizenside, missions take the form of ‘Calls for Witnesses’. These are targeted calls for UGC, usually delivered to people within a defined radius of a news event. With members all over the world, we usually have several within a reasonable distance of any given news event. When we contact them, we give them specific information about the event and the sort of images we would like, and the deadline. This avoids the bewildering challenge of the blank page, instead offering users a specific, achievable challenge.

2. Feedback

Constant information on progress and performance is a vital part of any rewarding interactive experience. Users who aren’t constantly aware of how they are doing will find the experience frustrating and will stop coming back.

Many news websites ask users to ‘Send us your images!’. This makes sending information easy, but is not a rewarding user proposition. When a user enters text or submits images that way, there is usually no return information about what happened with it. Was their note read? Were their pictures looked at? . . . Is anyone even there?

Clear feedback to users is absolutely essential, but communicating directly with every user is extremely labour-intensive (and thus effectively impossible).

Viewed through the lens of game design, the solution is simple. Well-designed games use points and often use leveling-up structures to mark player progress.

In Citizenside’s networked news operation, users get points for submitting material, for making comments, for having their images viewed, and for many other actions. In short, users are recognized and rewarded every time they do something that helps inform the user community, or increases the quality of content, no matter how small.

Citizenside users level up as a function of these accumulated points. As they prove themselves, we grant them more user privileges. Effectively, a user’s level is a quantified measure of their commitment to the site. The feedback is clear. It allows them to see at a glance how far they’ve come, and – crucially – where they stand compared to other users.

Another game mechanic that is useful to Citizenside’s newsgathering is specialized rewards. We are implementing a badge-based system of identity rewards that will reward users for specific types of actions. For instance, submitting many photos will unlock a ‘shutterbug’ badge, while leaving many comments can lead to a ‘life of the party’ badge. (This is similar to the Xbox Live series of achievements, and the FourSquare badges).

A particular application of this principle will be specialist badges awarded for local coverage. Many of our users take photos near where they live, becoming specialists in local news over time. After all, no one knows an area like the people who live there full-time. By rewarding users for consistently contributing material from a particular location, we can identify them as reliable local experts. This recognition will be publicly displayed on their user profile, thus granting them feedback on our recognition – as well as serving as a valuable signal to the editorial team.

3. Trust

A level-based system with clear feedback, such as the one sketched above, has advantages for the editorial team as well as the user. A clear trust signal is, perhaps, the most important advantage.

Any media operation with more than a few hundred users will find it impossible to manage relationships with each one individually. How then can an editor quickly determine the quality of incoming information, without a time-consuming background check on each member?

Because it is based on the sum of past contributions, a user’s level effectively shows the degree of commitment that a user has demonstrated to his or her particular user community. This level is an unambiguous, quantified trust rating. It enables editors to make rapid and accurate judgements on a source’s trustworthiness in a networked newsgathering context.

In addition, badges serve to further refine a user’s profile. Are they specialists in photography, videography, or very active in the community? Have they unlocked privileges as power-users in a particular town or neighborhood? This is all vital information when assessing the context and validity of information.

4. Loyalty

Finally, game dynamics can aid in user retention. There is a well-established ‘lock-in effect’ among players of massively multiplayer network games such as World of Warcraft. Once players of such a game have accumulated rank and status in one game world, they are disincentivized from leaving it, because that level is effectively non-transferable social capital. They would have to start building their rank again from zero in a new game.

In the news context, this means that once users have begun submitting material to one media operator, they are much less likely to submit future material to competitors, as they will not get the same rewards (levels/badges/status) there.

It should be noted that long-established media companies have a latent advantage in brand loyalty, which can be exploited when it comes to setting up a networked newsgathering operation. Users who have grown up reading or watching a particular news brand often display high loyalty, and can be reluctant to switch.

Naturally this puts established companies in a good position when it comes to soliciting material from their users. This is why Citizenside provides a plug-and-play version of its technology to other media companies, which we call the Reporter Kit. It is the same software as Citizenside uses to interact with our own user base, with one difference. The Reporter Kit allows news companies to collect news images and video directly from their own users, without passing through the Citizenside website. This allows established media companies to build on their brand loyalty and take advantage of the newsgathering ability distributed throughout their existing loyal user base.

Conclusion – game or die

None of these principles amount to transforming journalism into a game. Rather, as journalism is necessarily becoming an interactive, networked pursuit, media operators must adapt the lessons learned in the best interactive experiences.

Video games, one of the most popular and fastest-growing media in our civilization, offer a wealth of basic principles that can be applied to attract, motivate and retain a network of active users. Citizenside is applying these principles in many ways, which give us and our partners an edge in a difficult and fast-changing marketplace.

I’ve been reading a lot of people’s stories lately, as we’re collecting them over at Citizenside. When you’ve read enough of these recollections, you start seeing patterns. One motif keeps coming back time after time: the phone call from a loved one.

At home, at work, on that day many of us were interrupted by a phone call from a friend, a parent, a child.

“Turn on the TV, something’s happened,” they said.

That phone call played out a billion times around the world that day. It was, in a sense, a proto-tweet. After all, what’s more common on Twitter than “I have seen something that you should check out”?

At its essence, that phone call is a basic act of journalism, motivated by a personal relationship. It’s about sharing information with your nearest and dearest in an emergency.

If something on the scale of 9/11 were to happen today, the results from a media perspective would be quite different. Eye-witnesses would flood the internet with video, photos, and other content. Facebook, Twitter, and other services would be blazing with links shared and re-shared. The scale of this content sharing would be colossal, petabytes per second.

But if you zero in on an individual’s action – whether it’s filming and posting a video, commenting, or linking to it – it comes down to something very personal.

We’ve all seen the multimillion-view scoring videos on YouTube: the music videos, the random viral hits, the subversive advertising ads. But that’s just the thinnest slice of what’s posted there, and it’s not representative of the majority of what’s out there.

My team here at Citizenside contacts people every day regarding fascinating videos they’ve taken of news events. Often they only have a few dozen views. They weren’t uploaded by someone who wanted to get a million hits and an ad deal. They’re usually uploaded by someone who was in the right place at the right time and wanted to show their friends and family something they saw.

The subtext of posting a video on YouTube is often “This is what I have seen. You need to know it, because you are someone I care about.” It’s a personal act to film something, upload the video, and tell your friends. We are members of networks because of personal connections. The really important business of news happens between these personal connections, on a personal scale: we witness an event and tell others about it.

That’s the main difference between 2001 and 2011. Now sharing news can mean sharing videos, pictures and other stuff, rather than just a simple phone call. When stuff happens, we still tell our loved ones about it. Only now we do it in ways that generates ‘content’ as a by-product.

A billion photos texted around the world generate content in a way a billion phone calls don’t.

The kicker here is that all this content we’re all generating has value to people beyond its immediate (and personal) audience. It has information value to a wider network of people beyond our loved ones. In some cases, it even has economic value.

This has created the major media challenge of the second decade of the 21st century: finding a way to extract maximum benefit from that flood of content generated by millions of essentially personal information transactions among small groups of people.

Note that I say ‘benefit’ here and not ‘profit’. Overall, everyone benefits when information is more easily available. Yes, some people may make a lot of money off of this, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s a different story. And exactly how to do it is still an open question.

Don’t be fooled by the broadcast towers, the printing presses, the millionfold growth figures of Twitter and Facebook. Even in the case of huge, world-stopping news like 9/11. At its essence, news reporting happens one-to-one, because individual people want to share something important with their friends.

Here’s a story: today we received a series of great photos from our contributor pete_riches. He was in central London this weekend and saw one of the visually most impressive demonstrations I’ve seen in quite a while: thousands of UK Sikhs marching to Trafalgar Square in memory of the violence at Amritsar in 2004.

Sikh high priests lead the march through Piccadilly

And thereby hangs a tale. The marchers told pete_riches they had gathered in memory of the Amritsar massacre. This was the event on June 6th, 1984, when Indian troops stormed the holiest Sikh shrine, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, on a Sikh holy day, brutally massacring over 7000 praying Sikhs.

Others know the Amritsar Massacre by another name – Operation Bluestar, or the Amritsar raid. In the accounts of this event, Indian troops stormed the temple on June 6th, 1984 to dislodge heavily armed Sikh extremists, after a tense standoff lasting several months. The official report of the death toll was close to 300, though some reports eventually put the total at closer to 1000.

Of course, these are two descriptions of one and the same event. C.P. Scott, former editor of the Guardian, famously said that “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” Many facts can be independently verified and backed up by evidence. But in this, as in many situations, it seems that which set of facts a person chooses to accept depends greatly on their point of view.

There’s no dispute that there was violence at the Golden Temple in Amritsar that day. And it’s sure that this was an important and terrible day in Sikh-Indian relations, which set off a chain of events and reprisals that have caused friction between Sikhs and Hindus in India for decades.

At Citizenside, we’re here to promote citizen journalism, not to take political positions.

In the editorial team, we try to investigate and verify the facts as much as we can. We try to be as open and transparent about our process as possible. And we’re totally committed to the authenticity of the images and videos you see posted here. But unlike many news organisations, we can’t (and don’t) impose some version of objectivity on our members. That’s one reason we deal primarily in images and video; they’re often less amenable to being slanted towards a particular point of view than text. pete_riche’s photo report shows you the scale of this event better than any written report could, and the images speak for themselves; a river of orange turbans flooding Picadilly, stern priests with sabres drawn leading them to Trafalgar Square.

In text, the image description takes the Sikh point of view, presumably as told to pete_riches by the marchers on the day. Rather than change this text to fit with the ‘official’ account of events, we kept it essentially as it was. We believe that eyewitness views are a vital raw ingredient of news reporting. When processed with other ingredients – analysis, expert opinion, and so on – you get the final ‘cooked’ product of mainstream news reporting.

Citizenside news is, in a way, news reporting in its raw form, straight from the eyewitnesses themselves. There’s an essential value to that, which we don’t want to tamper with.

In many ways this raw product should be treated the same as any news reporting: with caution. We show you what’s happening, you make up your mind. It’s not our place to do it for you. What we can do is bring thousands of eyewitness reports closer to you, and make them easier to find.

We’re also building community reporting tools that will make it possible for you to help improve or add to an initial news report, if you were there too.

With many eyewitness reports taken together, we can start building a more complete picture of what happened at any given event. Working together, we can create a shared account that reflects much more than what a single reporter could ever see.

I think that’s really something worth working towards.

The task of foreign reporting is changing profoundly. Thanks to social media channels, readers from Ohio to Osaka can get information straight from the source in other countries. So do we still need foreign correspondents?

This dinosaur just evolved.

Richard Sambrook, formerly head of Global News at the BBC, knows his foreign reporters. He was on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, along with Mimosa Martini and Mort Rosenblum. He described a vivid image of foreign correspondents as they were in the past:

You could call the old model the hunter-gatherer correspondent. Twenty years ago the average foreign correspondent was white, male, middle-class, didn’t speak the local language, relied on perhaps a dozen sources in the country he was posted, and only had to make one or maybe two deadlines a day. This model doesn’t exist any more.

When a reader in New York can simply follow the twitter feed of a protestor in Tahrir  square, it’s clear that that style of working and living is no longer possible. Those old correspondents often benefited from the limited information available to readers and viewers back home. “One of the dirty secrets of foreign reporting,” said  Sambrook, “Is that you could in the past say what you wanted and the people back home would just have to trust you. They’d never know. Now they will know.” So is foreign reporting dead? It’s more important than ever to know what’s happening around the world and how it could affect all of us. But do we need foreign reporters for this? After all, foreign reporting has several big drawbacks, as enumerated by panel moderator Charlie Beckett:

1. It costs a lot of money. Sending highly-paid reporters (especially TV reporters, with their expensive kit and teams of assisitants) abroad is expensive.
2. Often foreign trips are just ego trips. Many foreign correspondents have become celebrities. They’re part of the story, and often the correspondents want to be seen ducking the bullets. They’re easily accused of being vultures. “Photojournalists are even worse,” said Beckett. “They pretend their work is some sort of art form. Do we really need them?”
3. Colonialism of the mind. If you have to send someone out, then the news has to be reported from a home perspective. We hear correspondents talking about ‘Our troops’ etc. What about seeing things from the perspective of the locals? Isn’t that interesting?
4. New technology means you don’t need to send anyone. In early days of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, we learned more through social media than anything else. Why not just hire local professionals? Why not train up locals instead of sending your people? Why not partner up with local news agencies? “Don’t get on a plane, get networked,” said Beckett.

Goodbye information scarcity, hello managing abundance

In many cases, technology has made eyewitness reports of events in far-away countries widely available. Our members’ reports from the Ivory Coast to Algeriashow how much is possible. So is there still a role for professionals to play? Sambrook says yes, but it’s vastly changed from the old hunter-gatherer model. Sambrook described the new way of working as the “Farmer correspondent”:

Now a foreign reporter has to be multilingual. People drawn from diverse backgrounds, often with a strong history of connection to the country they’re placed in. They’re working with hundreds of sources, thanks to social media.

I found this description interesting because it describes precisely the sort of work our editorial team at Citizenside does every day. We interact with our community of thousands of contributors worldwide, asking for more information, verifying packages, and making sure that the best information makes its way to our homepage. This sort of work doesn’t even have to be on location – Andy Carvin’s work on the revolutions in the middle eastis an excellent example of this. Really the task of a foreign reporter is becoming more editorial. Instead of seeking out and transmitting scarce bits of information, the task is managing an abundance of eyewitness information shared through social media. It’s collating, curating, and explaining context and implications in a way that readers back home can understand easily. There is still a role for pros sent out into the field, especially in conflict situations. Conflict reporting is dangerous. Mimosa Martini described a situation that occurred to her in Iran:

When I was in Iran, covering the election and subsequent riots, my Iranian cameraman turned his camera off. He was afraid he’d get trouble from the security services. I argued with him, but eventually realised he was right. What’s the worst they could do to me? Send me out of the country. To him? Far, far worse.

But parachuted correspondents like this aren’t specialists in the local situation: they’re crisis reporting specialists. There’s simply no way they can ever know a situation and gain access as well as the people who live there. That’s exactly why the members of the Citizenside community are so important. You know your own backyard like no one else. You are all foreign correspondents, to our readers in other countries. Your intimate access to the news happening right around you is your huge advantage.