nwzer’s wisdom of crowds machine funded by the Google Digital News Initiative

Together with the support of the Digital News Initiative, nwzer is taking a huge step closer to facilitating high quality citizen journalism across the world.

We’re extremely proud to announce that nwzer’s wisdom of crowds machine will be funded by the Google Digital News Initiative. Starting in 2018, nwzer will work on this web-based collaboration tool, using the wisdom of crowds principles, assisted by machine learning (Artificial Intelligence), leading to the world’s first user-generated news agency.

The Wisdom of Crowds

The Wisdom of Crowds machine: Real-time merging simultaneous multiple user inputs into one semantically correct article, ready for syndication.

Did you know that 62% of online news readers use Facebook as their primary news source? Yet, we don’t trust social media - or traditional media for that matter - anymore. And rightfully so.The attention- and advertisement-based media industry is broken. Fake news, misinformation and emotion-driven decision making is a direct symptom. Still, nwzer believes that every voice should matter. Everyone should be able to participate in the global discussion.

Ask yourself, what if Reddit, Twitter and Wikipedia had a baby?

As I wrote earlier, user-generated content is active. Websites and services such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia allow for a broad spectrum of user inputs, potentially moldable into semantically correct and sensible articles. However, it has proven to be a huge challenge to actually stitch together these inputs. Parallel collaboration is prone to errors. Different inputs can conflict, erase or duplicate content. nwzer’s wisdom of crowds machine allows for smart stitching without the hassle of manual maintenance. We believe, this technology opens up a broad spectrum of collaboration, necessary for citizen journalism.

Let’s fix journalism

We live in an era where we have more power to take measures in our own hands than we’ve had ever before. We want to challenge the existing, opinionated, traditional media model. Just as what Airbnb and Uber did to their industries, nwzer wants to disrupt the news industry. We believe that together, we can build the first user-generated news agency, eliminating the editorial-driven news industry.

Just as Wikipedia is a better encyclopedia on many fields than its renowned competitors, together, we can create higher quality journalism than the Reuters and Bloombergs out there can on their own.

We love to contribute to the hive mind. We are passionate about subjects that relate to us. But let’s face it, not all platforms are equally suitable for sharing news and knowledge. Reddit for instance, proves we are willing to contribute, but fails when we want to put the pieces together. Multiple separate posts and discussions arise and no manual or (semi)-automated tooling exists to make sense out of the massive input. (hence, the existence of megathreads)

“We are willing to contribute, but fail when we want to put the pieces together.”

Professional journalism is often isolated and one-sided. It is clear that classic editorial journalism leaves the potential of user input untapped, ignoring the opportunities of collaboration with ‘citizen’ or peer journalists. #prosumers

Discussions and collaboration that exist on social media do not relieve its users from the dreaded bubble (echo chambers). Though, everyone should be able to join without bias or influence.

User-generated content is not going anywhere. We are prosumers. nwzer believes that making use of the potential of the crowds’ willingness to collaborate and contribute, the way we consume and experience news, will forever change. Ignoring this is ignoring the future. Now that we’re being funded by the Google Digital News Initiative, we’re going to take huge steps towards making a quality-driven journalism model come to life!