COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE IN JOURNALISM: THE CONFLICT AND THE INTERPLAY OF THE LOGIC OF THE CROWD AND THE LOGIC OF JOURNALISM

Abstract

Professional journalists are increasingly using crowdsourcing as a knowledge search method, thus aiming to channel the crowd’s collective intelligence into to their news articles and feature stories (Aitamurto, 2013, Vehkoo 2013). By so doing, they hope to discover useful knowledge, which can improve the quality and relevance of their stories (Afuah and Tucci, 2012, Brabham, 2013, Aitamurto, 2015). Thus they rely on the twin virtues of collective intelligence, those virtues being the large number of participants and the cognitive diversity of the participant crowd (Levy, 1997, Landemore, 2013; Page, 2008). This paper shows that when collective intelligence is harnessed to professional journalism, it can lead to a more efficient knowledge search. However, the large number of submissions from a diverse crowd cause also complexities, turning the virtues of collective intelligence to perils, as is shown in this paper.