Small Plane Crashes Into Richmond Hi-Rise

Photos

The story I was writing

see larger image

uploaded by todmaffin

Okay.

Never mind. I give up.

I've been working this story actively for the last 90 minutes, uploading photos, constantly monitoring the media, and updating the story every minute.

And yet, NowPublic's editors haven't linked to my story (which contained five real-time photos and more than 600 words of very up-to-the-minute text)

Instead, the NowPublic home page is linking to a "story" by a NowPublic staffer which contains a snippet from a radio station's web site and a single line of original text.

Worse, they took the photos I uploaded and used it on their own story.

If this is crowd-sourcing, I don't get it.

More on my blog at todbits.com later.

:-(

Following-up, here's an email I sent to Ryan: 

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the email.

It's nothing personal -- I really like you guys and totally want you to succeed!

In fact, one of my clients (a major international broadcaster) was asking me about citizen journalism projects that I liked. I tried to call you guys but there's no phone number listed. I emailed Michael at his tippett.org address and I filled out the NowPublic contact form.

I never heard a peep back.

It's too bad. That was a huge opportunity that got passed by. (Do people check that email box?)

So, about this story.

After I blogged about how I thought the U.S. bridge collapse wasn't well covered here, I specifically made a note to myself to try to contribute when a breaking news story happened, so that I could see from a first-hand point of view how it worked. I thought that was only fair.

I do understand it's an organic process, but my comments were from the POV of a contributor.

People want to be credited with their work, trust me.

It was, from a contributor's POV, demoralizing to have their story (and comments) ignored, only to be supersceded by a snippet from a web site. And have their photos used on another story.

You have to admit, Ryan, the NowPublic lead story for several hours contained only a quote from the News1130 web site, and a single line of original text.

I recognize what crowd-sourcing is trying to do. I'm just suggesting that from a contributor's perspective, it was reeeeeeeeeeally frustrating. (Not to mention pig-slow servers, and a UI that was confusing.)

I'm quite serious about wanting to help.

If you want to grab coffee or a drink one day, my treat. Let's talk about how to improve it!

:)

. . . tod =-)

      Tod Maffin
      http://www.todmaffin.com
      +1.604.618.2861

My newest keynote presentation:
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