Crowdsourcing seems to be the word of the day. I hate the word itself, but not the concept necessarily. The kinder, gentler term “citizen media” is much more palatable to someone like me who hates being lumped in with the crowd.

Today, “crowdsourcing” has been used on blogs I read to refer to a way to get out the vote tomorrow and a way to augment news reporting on the Gannett Publishing properties (including USA Today, the Ft. Myers News-Press and tech news. Social networks like Digg and Netscape use the “crowdsource” model to push news stories above the fold, to tell a site visitor what stories deserve their attention.

I’m a long-time ‘letter-to-the-editor’ believer, and think that newspapers and other news sources would be silly not to draw on their reader/user/subscriber base for contributions and tips. Where I start to fall off the ‘crowdsource’ bandwagon, however, is when it comes to crowd bias. Crowds become mobs. Mobs don’t report; they dogpile.

Evidence of this exists in every sphere where politics is discussed. My question for the ‘crowdsourcerers” is this: How do you plan to edit and/or monitor the factual accuracy of what the crowd brings to you? Video, photos and text can all be altered and edited. Bloggers may have outed Dan Rather on fake documents, but they’re just as capable of producing them.

The jury is still out on this for me. There are some huge benefits — not the least of which is ‘buy-in’ by the readers themselves, but there are some big holes in the road, too.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, Gannett, citizen journalism, social networks