Newspapers are a large part of the raw material that we use to compile Keesings, so we are very aware of the skill and dedication that goes in to high quality reporting.  It has become very fashionable to say that crowdsourcing or citizen journalism can replace professional writers and editors, and provide free news.  People like personal stories, told with emotion, and as ways of getting people interested in an event, they can be compelling.  This can be especially valuable in drawing attention to events that would otherwise be hidden or go unnoticed (such as the 2007 uprising in Burma).  What personal emotional accounts dont usually do is provide anything beyond the thrills and chills of the moment.  They do not explain the context, how the events relate to other events, what the causal factors were, whether they are likely to occur again, and so on.  Such analysis takes time and skill.  Not every personal account will be insightful you need some way of picking out the most informative, which is the job of an editor.  The most informative is not necessarily the most popular, so even voting and review systems will be just as likely to pick out silly or offensive stories as ones that actually explain anything.  (I just looked at the top two stories on the digg crowdsourced news website they were 5 things you didn't know about Terminator's Skynet and Headless chicken lives for 18 months.)

The use of crowdsourcing in the media coverage of tsunami of 2004 is often given as an example of how exciting citizen journalism is, because it brought on-the-spot images to a global audience extremely quickly.  The footage from mobile phones was certainly frightening and dramatic, but by itself said little else.  Most people can probably guess that being caught up in a tsunami would be a very frightening experience, but you cant guess from sharing in the fear what the government response would be, whether a warning could have been sounded, or what could be done to prevent loss of life from similar events in future.  The scary images will not indicate whether poverty or environmental degradation were significant in the tsunamis impact.  To answer those sorts of questions requires expertise.  The job of a journalist is to realise that such questions are important and to seek out the relevant expertise to write an informative not just emotional story.

At Keesings we seek to provide simple definitive accounts of what actually happened.  We leave it to our readers to imagine the emotional impact.   

by Fran Alexander, Editor

I would like to draw your attention the latest 'Breaking History' feature which has just been published on the site. 

With researchers at London's Imperial College predicting that swine flu could infect a third of the world's population if it continues to spread at its current rate, we've produced an article on the development of the outbreak.  The article also looks at the international response to swine flu, and the history of flu pandemics.