Eventful: Crowdsourcing Local News Reporting

We present Eventful, a system for producing news reports of local events using remote and locative crowd workers. The system recruits and guides novice crowd workers as they perform the roles of field reporter, curator, or writer. Field reporters attend the events in person, and use Eventful’s mobile web app to get a personalized mission, submit content, and receive feedback. Missions include tasks such as taking a photo, and asking a question to an attendee. In parallel, remote curators approve, reject, and give real-time feedback on the content collected by field reporters. Finally, writers put together a report by mashing up and tweaking the content approved by the curators. We used Eventful to produce a news report for each of the six local events we decided to cover as we piloted the system. The process was typically completed under an hour and costing under $150 USD.