Journo Pays Crowdsourcing Company to Write Column

Would a freelance columnist’s day-to-day be easier and more fruitful with a supporting cast of 1,000 active researchers, interviewers, and fact checkers? Adam Penenberg, NYU journalism prof and contributor to The Atlantic Fast Company, decided to find out.

For his profile of San Francisco company Servio (formerly CloudCrowd), he enlisted the services of… Servio, which bills itself as “the largest editorial and writing service in the world.” But can a west coast outfit be expected to dig deep when the assignment focus is its own inner workings? The answer, writes Penenberg, is not really:

Basic facts were accurate; anything that required interpretation, however, was ripe for abuse.

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