Quick question: who is going to produce a better news story, a single random person or a whole bunch of random people?
One can replace “news story” with almost anything, but the basic question is the essence of a democratic system of everything versus a more authoritarian system. I bring this up because I’ve recently been reading about crowdsourcing and Assignment Zero in particular. The general idea of rounding up a bunch of random dudes off the street to write a news story is, I believe, absurd on the face of it, but AZ had a little credibility because there were editors and organizers.
My main problem with the concept is that I fail to see the problem it’s supposed to solve. A specially trained journalist should be able to outwrite a mass of people who may or may not have any such training, and a group of people can be just as biased as a single person.