socialmedian: The Troubles of Crowdsourcing: How Do You Keep a Secret?

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The Troubles of Crowdsourcing: How Do You Keep a Secret?

Source: Mashable!

Jun 29, 2009

Summary

The New York Times has a fascinating story about the kidnapping of one of its reporters, Pulitzer prize winner David Rohde. He, along with his interpreter and driver, has been kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan on Nov. 10., and for 7 months – until Rohde managed to escape – the NYT kept the news from breaking out to increase his chance of survival. The hardest part of it? Keeping the news off Wikipedia.

Anyone that’s ever worked in a media publication knows that however tense or difficult their relations between other media publications may be, when a horrible accident happens or when human lives are at stake, it’s generally not hard to keep the news a secret. A couple of phone calls to other editors should do the trick, but what do you do when you want to keep the news off a site like Wikipedia, which has thousands of editors?

According to the NYT, you call Jimmy Wales, and he, with the help of some admins, makes sure the relevant entries are erased and fixed every time someone tries to edit them and add the information that may compromise David Rohde’s

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Comments (2)

Billso,

Jun 29, 2009

Interesting article!

Albertrevette,

Jul 02, 2009

interesting but arguments should be better developed, in essence the articles said that newspaper business has always functioned like social networks, of bookmarked links and shared items, making news travel fast from people to people on different social networks long before internet medium has appeared