WaPo Guild Concerned, Bothered, Worried About Crowdsourcing

The Washington Post, like many media outlets who have their hands on Sarah Palin's emails, asked readers to help comb through the e-mails, a job that probably would once have fallen to a couple star investigative reporters and a passel of interns and taken weeks. This concerns the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, reports Media Matters. "He said the union did not specifically object to the Post asking readers to look through e-mails. But 'We are more concerned about sort of a long-term shift to a different model of covering the news, the region, and those things," said Fredrick Kunkle, co-chair of the Guild and a Post reporter. "In that sense, we are concerned where the Post is contemplating a model where they eliminate more professional journalist positions in favor of a model like the Patch or Huffington Post, where essentially we turn over coverage of some areas of the news to unpaid or underpaid bloggers, community journalists, people with very little experience in order to save money but to continue to create content. That bothers us or worries us.'" "What does bother us and what seems from our view clear in these contract talks is that the Post clearly wants to shrink further, wants to make it easier to eliminate positions and what we worry about is that they will replace experienced professional journalists with unpaid bloggers, underpaid bloggers, contract writers, community journalists and inexperienced writers. That's how they will try to continue providing content under the brand of The Washington Post. That is what concerns us," Kunkle added. We hope this is just a case of the Guild using a current event to draw attention to the fact that the Post's contract expired on June 7, and that management is "seeking more power to reassign and terminate employees," as Media Matters writes. (Full disclosure: I'm a former part-time employee of the Post.) Because while there are lots of issues to work out with newspapers replacing reporters with unpaid bloggers....complaining that readers will sift through 25,000 pages of boring crap for you so you can go out and report on important stuff is really silly.

Fishbowl

WaPo Guild Concerned, Bothered, Worried About Crowdsourcing

Rachel Kaufman

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Rachel Kaufman