Global For Me is an interesting idea - a website that provides 'crowd sourced news'. How it works is that it allows users to post story ideas. The stories can be able anything (within reason) that a user is interested in being reported. Once a story is suggested and approved, a reporter is commisioned to seek out the information on the story, and publishes a full report within 30 days on the story.
Global For Me definitely seems like an interesting and innovative idea, though from searching the site it seemed that there are some inherent problems with it. First of all, it requires the submitter to provide compensation for his story. This makes me wary that it may be some sort of internet scam, or that a user may end up paying for a story that is subpar. Additionally, the website seemed to indicate that a group of users could work together to commission a story they are interested, though when I clicked on a link to past stories, I was given an error message.
Though Global For Me may not turn out to be 'the one,' the idea is intriguing and certainly has value. Most everyone reads some sort of news (be it entertainment, sports, finances, local, etc) in a variety of forms (newspapers, online, magazines). One problem though is that all this news being published is selected by the major companies for the most part! This gives a voice to each and every user, and lets them have the ability to say what stories are important to them. This is beneficial to everyone, as people will be more interested in reading a news source that addresses their interests, which in turn makes the publishers bank accounts more full. Hopefully Global For Me or some other company can figure out the right business model to take advantage of this idea
Labels: Global for Me
I agree with Seamus – this is a very interesting idea! It really builds upon the current social news models such as Digg, Reddit, and 4chan and takes it to the next level by having a story being investigated further by a reporter. I wonder, however, how the selection process works – whether they will adopt more of a user- or firm-led selection model for this could impact the amount of participation the site receives.
Crowdsourced news is rapidly gaining ground. As we discussed in class, even Newsweek is adopting this model. One of the original and best of these sites is Ohmynews.com. Here is a link: http://english.ohmynews.com/