Interesting point of view of a journalist.
During the recent earthquake in Ontario and Quebec several articles on the local and national news papers were written starting from stories posted by thousands of people on social networks.
The definition the journalist gives of crowdsourcing is so "using a large group of people to get the big picture" instead of man-on-the-street interviews.
Also the weakness of this approach is well analyzed, "There is one big caveat to all this. If a natural disaster is sufficiently dire, the power will go out and cellphone towers could be damaged. In that situation, social media becomes slightly less effective than smoke signals and we have to get on the ground to get the news out.".
Something is clearly true, crowdsourcing is a well known word among journalists and often you can find it on the first page of prestigious news papers. For example the yesterday NY Times was thanking crowdsourcing for an instantaneous coverage of IPhone4 defects and it was doing it on the first page!
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