"Crowdsourcing efforts don’t fit neatly into discrete classification, but for the purpose of this report, we’ve organized our typologies into six different calls to action: Voting—prioritizing which stories reporters should tackle; Witnessing—sharing what you saw during a news event; Sharing ... personal experiences—telling what you know about your life experience; Tapping specialized expertise—contributing data or unique knowledge; Completing a task—volunteering time or skills to help create a news story; Engaging audiences—joining in call-outs that can range from informative to playful [...] The research shows that crowdsourcing is credited with helping to create amazing acts of journalism. It has transformed newsgathering by introducing unprecedented opportunities for attracting sources with new voices and information, allowed news organizations to unlock stories that otherwise might not have surfaced, and created opportunities for news organizations to experiment with the possibilities of engagement just for the fun of it." (Executive summary) more

"While this report will examine some traditional, or “legacy,” business models for media, our focus is on the economic issues that news organizations—large and small, old and new—face with their digital ventures. This report focuses on news organizations that do original journalism, defined ... for our purposes as independent fact-finding undertaken for the benefit of communities of citizens. Those communities can be defined in the traditional way, by geography, but can also be brought together by topics or commonalities of interest. We also look into media companies that aggregate content and generate traffic in the process. We confine our report mostly to for-profit news enterprises. We recognize the outstanding work done by such national organizations as ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as local sites like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost. But for the purposes of this study, we felt it was more valuable to spend our time examining organizations that rely as much as possible on the commercial market." (Introduction, page 3) more