Rachel Sterne is CEO of GroundReport.com, a global citizen news platform that empowers anyone to publish and earn money from original, intelligent reporting. She founded the platform in 2006 with the mission to democratize the media and help the world share its stories. To read more about Rachel Sterne please visit www.groundreport.com

Below is a full transcript of our interview with Rachel.

Megan Cunningham: Can you start by explaining to our community what groundreport.com does?

Rachel Sterne: Groundreport.com is a citizen journalism platform that democratizes the media by allowing anyone that wants to submit their own news reports, opinion pieces, on the ground as events happen around the world.  We also share revenues with our contributors and have ratings and verification systems to make sure that we vet the accuracy of our work.

MC: There are several levels I want to explore here, but can you start by telling me about the current news environment, and why you decided to start GroundReport?

Rachel Sterne: I think right now a lot of people in the media are describing it as this doomsday scenario.  We’re seeing a huge migration of people from print to online.  We’re seeing advertising returns that don’t really equal what they were for print publications; and we’re seeing increased competition because there’s lowered barriers to participation online.

I think this is actually a fantastic thing.  I think we’re in the midst of an information revolution.  It’s unparalleled in this century, and there’s huge potential; and things like GroundReport would never have been possible without it.

I didn’t set out to revolutionize the media.  I was more interested in the social impact and the political impact of what democratizing the media could do.  So my inspiration for GroundReport was actually my work reporting on the United Nations Security Council, and seeing the enormous gap between what is really happening in the world, and what people are aware of.

I started to get into media dynamics and economics a little bit and saw why that is the case.  At the same time, I was very involved in some of these newer technologies, and I realized OK, we can apply some of these technologies to help address some of these inconsistencies and injustices in media and global affairs.

MC: Can you tell me a little bit how you started GroundReport, and how the site has evolved?

Rachel Sterne: The direct inspiration for GroundReport was actually the Darfur crisis; and that was the real spark for me.  It was the day when Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, came down to the Security Council, addressed everyone, and said listen, I’m pleading with you to do something.  The role of the U.N. is to prevent humanity from descending into hell, not to bring it up into heaven; and with Darfur we’re in danger of descending into hell.

Nobody did anything, and it started to make me think OK, why is this possible?  We’ve got all this involvement in various other conflicts and we can’t go somewhere where there’s actually a huge need?  Granted, it is a very complicated conflict, but the other thing that struck me was that the public was just not aware of this.

This has to do in part with lowered budgets for international reporting, and there being less of a commercial opportunity, at least traditionally, with the way we’ve done international reporting in the United States.

I put that in the back of my mind, and then I went to work for LimeWire, which is a peer-to-peer file sharing company, where I managed their web development.  In the course of that, in researching these new content production tools, blogging and things like Digg were just emerging at that time, I realized that we could do a lot with these technologies; these cheap, universal technologies could address some of these iniquities, in terms of what information is out there, and what people are aware of.

So I conceived of GroundReport while I was working there.  I launched it in my spare time using my savings; then in October 2006, I quit to work on it full time.  It’s been a self-funded venture and it’s now three years that GroundReport has been going.

At this point we have over 5,000 registered contributors; 1,000 of them are active.  We’ve gotten reports on events like the recent Iranian protests and the Mumbai terrorist attacks. These reports have been sited in mainstream media from the AFP to the New York Times.

Every day we’re uncovering stories that you won’t see and you won’t find in the mainstream media.  That’s really part of our mission.

MC: Can you explain how a story is created for GroundReport, and how one of those 1,000 reporters goes about reporting it?

Rachel Sterne: Well, the process for posting a report is very simple.  It’s similar to blogging, where they will register, create an account, and then submit their report. Where we start to deviate from what a traditional blog is like is our reputation system, user white list, and the fact that this is a collective tool.

On a typical blog you have your independence, you have an outlet, but the difficulty is, unless you're posting regularly, probably every day, you're not going to have a steadily-growing audience. Whereas on GroundReport, you can post once a week, once a month, even once every three months, and your audience will steadily grow and you'll get more exposure for your work. And if it is approved, you'll also be indexed in Google News, Huffington Post, and a number of different aggregators.

And we stand out that way because we have a verification-only policy. And the policy is that a contributor can be added to our white list if they have a proven track record, if they're a professional journalist, or if they're an independent publisher with their own internal vetting system that we have approved.

Once they're added to our white list, anything they publish goes out immediately.

If it isn't, their work is added to a queue that's invisible to the public, and is only viewed by GroundReport's editors, which are volunteers much like you see on Wikipedia. And these editors have enhanced privileges; and they can see all the work that's waiting in this queue. They can also edit it freely with versioning control to make sure we keep track of all the changes. And once it is approved, they can make the report live immediately.

MC: Can you talk about user-generated content, and to what extent it adds value to the modern journalism environment?

Rachel Sterne: User-generated content, I mean, it almost sounds like an outdated term now, but it applies to anything that regular people, who don't necessarily have a professional pedigree, are creating online. And what GroundReport adds to that, we're not necessarily different from it, but we add a layer of hierarchy and structure that I think is really important if you ever want to have user-generated content of quality.

We were very deliberate in seeding this platform to the earliest contributors. We went out and found them, and we only approved content of the highest quality. And that helped to set the tone from the first day. If you look at the vast majority of user-generated content, usually the majority of it is very low quality. It's terrible, or it's copyright infringing. So, we're different in that we require verification and approval prior to publication.

We also have a copyright-respective process, where we won't publish anything that's infringing on copyright or from another source. So that's sort of unusual in the commercial space.

In terms of creating these hierarchies, I think it's really important to deputize people who are using your website, users who really show an aptitude for what they're doing, who are really, really engaged. Because they can add enormous value to your operation and to the platform. And they'll probably even think of things that you never would have thought of on your own. So that's why we give these enhanced privileges.

It's also a system that you see in a lot of open systems. So, Wikipedia has this in place. If you look at open-source development and software and programs like Linux, there's a hierarchy that is necessary to organize whenever you have massive numbers of people contributing to one effort.

MC: And, as far as revenue?

Rachel Sterne: Our revenue comes from a range of different sources. We very much take an open business model approach.

Advertising is where we get out primary revenues. We work with a number of different parties like Federated Media, Google Ads, etc. We'll also do in-house sales, usually when people come to us.

Another few places where we're expanding is syndication. This is less of a source for us, but it's something that is emerging and especially because we have such a focus on original, independent content, that there's a value there for us.

We'll also do services related to either user-generated content, some of these newer technologies that we've become experts in. So, we've done live streaming and consulted on how to use some of these technologies with partners who are in line with out mission. This is something that is in line with what we want to accomplish, and put our focus on; and we're also very happy to open up that discussion by live streaming it and promoting it online. We get more people involved in the conversation, and they have the value of also expanding their reach.

Some other opportunities are working with start-ups or media companies that are looking to enter into the user-generated space, but don't really know where to start. So all of these different strategies are ways that we're able to use our experience base, and leverage it to help to support the platform.

MC:  Your operation obviously is very sophisticated in technical infrastructure.  Why can't a company the size of the New York Times develop something as sophisticated?

Rachel Sterne: The New York Times absolutely can.  It's a question also of whether it fits in with their internal strategy, whether it's what they want to do.  From there, I think it's really a choice of each individual media entity. 

As a start up we have the advantage of being able to be very agile and very flexible.  You look at some of these larger, more established traditional media institutions, and they have over sometimes hundreds of years built up a very strong brand, a very strong news flow and workflow and newsroom that they're able to manage that way, and to just disrupt it by completely re-launching their entire venture is not something that makes business sense and politically is probably much more complicated.  There is a bureaucracy, etc., that they need to work through.

When I first launched GroundReport I would explain the concept to people, and they were completely incredulous and thought it wouldn't work, and now it is almost a given that every media company needs to be doing something in the area of citizen journalism.  About a year after GroundReport launched we saw Eye Report; we've seen a ton of acquisitions in the space.  Everyone in the space has some kind of mechanism to accept submissions from their audience and really turn them into contributors.  So the answer is, absolutely they're in a position to do it.  It's more of a question of culture and strategy and whether it's something they want to do, and if they're able to so radically change their concept of how a newsroom works.

If a traditional newspaper would like to do this, they certainly have the resources to back it up.  And they have the team and the staff to make it happen.  It's more a question of, is this the strategy they want to pursue?  Businesswise, does it make sense for them? Does it fit in with their revenue model? And politically, is it something they can make happen fairly quickly?

MC:  Can you talk about the state of foreign coverage in the US? Why is it so hard to do well, and why is there so little of it?

Rachel Sterne: With foreign coverage in the US, there are a number of different factors that are sort of going against it.  I am happy to see that there is a renewed interest, and I think it has to do also with what's going on politically. The Obama administration is actively re-engaging more with the world and the global community.  But unfortunately, as a news category, if you compare foreign affairs to something like entertainment there is just not the commercial draw, and there are not as many business reasons for a lot of these media organizations to invest as much into their content.  So along with the hyper-local and local stations, community stations, that have been hit very hard by the economic downturn and the decrease in ad revenues international coverage has actually suffered greatly.

Another thing that doesn't even have to do with economics, but more has to do with the culture of international reporting in the US, is that we always take a US perspective in looking at concepts, and usually every story has to fit into this preordained narrative.  The other out of date aspect of the international reporting space is that a lot of the bureaus are there because they were set up during World War II and they're legacy bureaus that ended up staying.  Paris and Berlin and London aren't necessarily the absolute centers of the world.  But that's where we have our most coverage, because these are these legacy bureaus that we set up.  If you look percentagewise at Western coverage of the world, it is amazing how little we cover South America, Africa, South East Asia and parts of Asia.  It is very heavily focused on Western Europe, a little bit on the Middle East, and it often has to do with what's going on politically with our government and how it is focusing on things.  The result of this is that much of the American public is vastly unaware of a lot of what is actually happening in the world.

The way that global news is reported is often very dry.  You take a very AP-Reuters face list, voice list, opinion list approach to it, so it's not really as engaging as it could be.

I'm very excited about global affairs and I really enjoyed my time working at the United Nations, so I think it's incredibly engaging.  I think there's nothing more dynamic. But, unfortunately, it's often portrayed in such a way that it doesn't really engage the audience and people don't care.

That's why I think citizen journalism and platforms like GroundReport have a lot to offer in terms of adding this element of personal engagement, of emotional engagement.  You're hearing the story from someone who is like you, who lived through it and who experienced it.  And that brings a whole other element to the story that otherwise you might sort of brush off and say, "Oh, another natural disaster.  Another catastrophe.  It doesn't affect me."

MC:  How do you--and I know you talked a little bit about your vetting process from like a process standpoint--but how do you prevent false accounts from being submitted and published?

Rachel Sterne:  We usually approach our vetting process by focusing on the reputation of the journalist.  So we'll start by examining their credentials, where they've published elsewhere, make sure that they have a profile that really shows where they're coming from.  From there we have standard credentials of asking them to cite sources, etc.

But if they're on the ground, our main goal is to verify that they do, in fact, reside where they're say they do, and if we can establish a really strong digital identity and attach that to their work, that helps us.  That helps a lot with the process.

In cases, for instance, where someone is reporting on something where a government uses censorship, or where the reporter could be risking their life, we will allow them to publish under a pseudonym, but we will also independently and privately investigate to make sure that they're credible.

MC:  And how does that investigation take place?

Rachel Sterne:  Again, it's the same thing.  I'm usually finding a digital trail of their identity, looking at what they've established online, what's their portfolio and how they've been able to build it up.  We know a lot of our contributors firsthand.  We know where they went to school.  We know the publications that they work on and usually we've gone out and found them.  So in those cases, we already know that we want them.  We know their work and that will help the process.

The community rates every article on the site.  And all of these ratings go into an aggregate average rating for each reporter.  So that at a glance, you can see that this reporter wrote 65 articles.  He has a four-star rating.  OK, he's probably pretty credible.  We can work with this, but we also allow for the community to report abuse, to add comments, really anything they can do to help enhance that.

The other piece about rating the reports is that they end up on the home page, so the top-rated reports of any day are parsed by geography to make sure we have a good mix.  And then every three hours, we refresh to make sure that we're showing our most recent coverage.

We focus on transparency, and we see this as being much more important, and also more feasible, for citizen journalism. We go with transparency over neutrality.  That is something that NYU professor Jay Rosen often talks about.

So by focusing on transparency the audience actually trusts more what they're reading, instead of wondering, "How neutral is this report?  We don't know what their affiliations are."

Instead, we emphasize very strongly that everyone has to disclose his or her affiliations.  So we'll even work with a non-profit that's reporting as long as they list their Mission Statement, they link to their site so we know exactly where their alliances lie.  But we're still interested in getting that perspective as long as they're honest and candid about what's backing it up.

MC:  You mentioned ProPublica, and the CIR, and a lot of the amazing non-profits that are doing terrific investigative work.  But they obviously have been really struggling with distribution, and it seems like on a case-by case basis, that they're putting together different arrangements.  How have you gone about promoting and distributing the news that you gather from your 1,000 reporters?

Rachel Sterne: We've had a lot of success with promoting the work that we're doing. I think, especially when it comes to breaking news, there's something about the excitement of hearing from someone who's really there, and hearing it before a mainstream media outlet, that's just unparalleled.

We're one of the few outlets in the commercial citizen journalism space that are indexed by Google News, because of our verification process and all of the controls that we put on our work.

Beyond that, we're also in Huffington Post, Topics, DayLife, all of these different outlets, which are looking for compelling, original, independent content. So that helps us enormously. We also use the major social media tools, like, RSS.

Our twitter feed is very, very effective in getting things out there. Twitter has actually been a huge force in how people discover ground reports. We'll send a story out to Twitter, and then 20 people will discover it and re-tweet it, and that ends up being a viral effect as it compounds and exponentially grows so much.

Beyond that, we also are very happy to work with mainstream media outlets. We'll reach out to them if we have a compelling, breaking account. Usually, if they're picking up a full account of all of the coverage around a story, especially if there's a strong citizen journalism outlet, that's another way that we get our name out there and that people can discover us.

So this is what happened, for instance, with the Mumbai terrorism attacks, where the AFP, the BBC, the Guardian, the Age, a whole number of different outlets all picked up GroundReport’s coverage because we were some of the first people to be covering the events.

MC: What types of stories were you able to get?

Rachel Sterne: The Mumbai terrorism attacks is a really interesting case study. The day that that happened, I first found out about it on Twitter, and I was looking at all of the major news sites and there was no coverage anywhere.

We immediately made it our front-page story. We had actually already gotten a submission from one of our contributors. Fan Report has a strong following in India, in Southeast Asia. So, we were already there. We already had people there using our platform that immediately wanted to report the news.

We immediately put it on our homepage, and we were recognized as one of the first with that account. After that point, we did some outreach, via Twitter, to find reporters who were on the ground in Mumbai. And, after vetting their credentials, and establishing that they were credible reporters, they began posting reports regularly.

The interesting thing about the reports, is that it was not only more up-to-date information than we were getting from the mainstream media it’s usually about four hours in advance of these huge, mainstream media outlets, which indicates maybe the lag between how quickly you can act as one of these larger outlets, versus a smaller, more agile outlet like GroundReport.

We were also getting really interesting opinion pieces on how people were feeling. All kinds of context about the political situation that was lost in a lot of these drier reports that just had casualties and locations. It was a part of a larger narrative for a lot of Indian people; it was their September 11th.

We were able to get all of this different context and emotional flavor into our reporting. After that point, we started to be cited in Tech Crunch, which is one of the earlier accounts. That led to Wired, which led to AFP, which led to the BBC, etc. It just grew as a lot of these things grow, and over the course of the terrorism attacks in Mumbai, we had over 100 original reports.

It was a really impressive effort by our community. The other part is, in India, they have a culture that's predisposed to talk about politics, and they love to use the Internet, and they're very savvy.

MC: How does the news have an ethical obligation to Democracy? How does having an informed public improve the quality of Democracy?

Rachel Sterne: I feel very strongly that having an informed public leads to policy changes, because that public will put pressure on their representatives to make policy changes, in light of what they're aware of. If they don't know that this is happening in the world, it's never going to happen, there's never going to be any pressure.

If a representative is afraid that by ignoring the demands of his constituency that he won’t get reelected, he’s going to make some suggestions in line with that kind of pressure. 

So that’s one of the reasons that I think it’s very important to make sure we have an informed, educated public, but with that motivation we get down to what is really probably at the crux of this crisis in media, which is that in media and journalistic institutions you have altruistic people who are looking to act as the fourth estate; looking to act as part of government in really assuring healthy democracy by making sure the public is informed. 

But most of these really large, influential media organizations are for-profit companies and they have to be profit driven; they have to be adding value for their shareholders. 

These two things are not directly parallel.  Sometimes they’re even opposed in terms of the motivations behind them.  So, I think the really tricky thing is how can you build a mission-based media organization that is serving the public, but is also financially viable enough to be commercially successful, and pay for its own efforts, and not be completely dependent on outside contributions. 

I think that’s where a lot of the debate is happening right now. If you’re adding value to people’s lives, there is commercial value there.  Especially now, it’s a really interesting way to differentiate companies, and position them, and actually market them to certain constituencies.

If you’re doing something that makes people feel good, that is supporting justice in the world, you can create a dynamic where both of these motivators are going in the same direction. 

So that’s at least what I’m trying to do with GroundReport.  I don’t know how we can accomplish it at large, but I think there are some incredible efforts. As long as people are still pursuing this, we’re gonna get closer to it.

There are a lot of nonprofit efforts. ProPublica, Spot.us, and all these different incredible ventures funded by the Knight Foundation, for instance.  Beyond that there are some many interesting for-profit and entrepreneurial journalism projects happening.

The other thing that I’m really excited about is what the next generation is going to come up with. It will be difficult for anyone from a legacy news organization to equal the kind of innovation that’s gonna come from someone who grew up always having the internet, whose whole life circles around using the web, and really deeply understands -- even on the subconscious level -- what is possible in a digital media environment.

So I think we’re gonna see a lot of innovation there.  I think we’re constantly seeing innovation from lots of different startups that are focused around media and content.  We’re gonna see it from some of these new characters; and hopefully some of the older characters can link up with them and we can see this symbiotic future there.

Adam Levy: We talked a little bit about this, but how do you balance the need to grow your audience while staying true to your mission?

Rachel Sterne: I think one of the interesting things that I learned from watching GroundReport grow was that when you have a media outlet you have to give people what they want, and it's not necessarily just about shoving really serious international coverage down their throat. So what I've tried to do, just as we allow perspectives from all sides of the spectrum, we also allow content on all different subjects. In some ways I do like the highbrow-lowbrow approach that we see in a lot of western European media, which is in many cases healthier than American media, and I think there is space for that especially if it is done intelligently and respectfully, while also maintaining journalistic standards. So the answer there is to look for what people really want, we're not going to cater completely to the lowest common denominator because that will undercut our mission. But if we find out that people want something, GroundReport is in a position to report on it in a unique way, an original way, and so that's usually the approach we'll go in those cases. We'll find someone who has a perspective that isn't being seen in the mainstream media on a topic that may be of interest to them. It's also important to know what people are talking about and to be aware of what the dominant public conversation is about; Twitter is amazing for this, Google trends is amazing for this there are a lot of tools at our disposal that allow us to plug in immediately, and even preempt the traditional news cycles in terms of what people are looking for.

AL: You just mentioned Twitter, could you talk a little about the impact of the growth of social networks? Specifically, how that impact has affected newsgathering and breaking stories?

Rachel Sterne: In terms of the growth of social networks, in many ways I see social networks as not being separate from a user-generated content platform. You are creating information, you are in many ways documenting news; maybe it's about a news event that's only interesting to a hundred people, or a close circle of friends, or maybe it's something that you witnessed that's potentially interesting to millions of people. But it does share a lot in common with the kind of news generation and citizen journalism platforms that are cropping up now, so I think these two things go hand in hand. I also have always seen news as being an inherently social experience and process.

I think one of the reasons that we do pay attention to the news is not just to get information; if we needed that we would just get an AP feed and we'd be fine, it's part of going to the same outlets as your friends, having a sense of common community. Being able to tap your neighbor on the shoulder and say, "Did you see that story in the NY times?” "Did you see that article in the Wall Street Journal?” It establishes this sense of common values. So I think that news and the potential to be social online are completely interwoven. So that applies to things like Facebook, when you try and start to introduce things like Twitter to this conversation it introduces the element of real-time content, and that's where everything sort of explodes. You have a real-time stream of information that's also linked socially between different people, and you end up creating this experience of the news that is more dynamic and engaging than probably anything we've seen in a really long time. And I think we're gonna see a lot of innovation along those lines in the next couple of years.

AL: Obviously it's no secret that newspapers are struggling financially right now. What role do you see big news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post playing in the near future? In what ways are these papers going to adapt, and how do you see their role morphing?

Rachel Sterne: I think that large news organizations are still incredibly important. No one really has a silver bullet for how newer digital newsrooms and models are going to work. We've seen some great examples in things like the Huffington Post, but we still have a long way to go. I think some of the value that we're gonna see from bigger news organizations is passing down this legacy of verification systems. These newer platforms, GroundReport included, we have a ton to learn from them in terms of how we're going to be bedding our work, they have worked over one hundred years to build up standards and reputation that's unparalleled in the world. We need to learn these lessons and we need to modify these journalistic systems and verification systems to work in a digital setting, and it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel. It makes sense to look at the lessons learned and ask how can we apply them in this new ecosystem?

We need to make sure that we're bringing together the best of both worlds. There's also so much we can learn in terms of business sense, and building a strong company from a lot of these organizations.

Hopefully we'll see more and more partnerships. From the conversations I've had, legacy news organizations and traditional news organizations are innovating at a very strong rate. They're interested in partnering with some of these smaller guys and more agile start-ups. I think we're going to continue to see that trend grow, and it's crucial to the success of both parties.

AL: What news sources do you read everyday and what does your daily newsgathering routine entail?

Rachel Sterne: My typical, everyday news sources, the way I go through my day is, I usually start off by checking out Twitter, seeing what's trending there, then I'll go to Ground Report and see what we have in the queue. I make sure there’s nothing urgent that hasn't been approved yet.

That's usually a good barometer for me, and then to compare that back to what I see on Twitter and Google Trends. I check what big stories are emerging right now and see what is the dominant dialogue.

From there, I usually open up Google Reader, and that has feeds from some of my top sources, things like Tech Crunch and the New York Times. The BBC is an important one for me, and then I check blogs like Paid Content, Venture Beat, Read Write Web to see what's going on online. The Huffington Post is also important, and I also like to track what they're doing, just in terms of how they engage their audience so well.

From there, every day is different. A lot of it will have to do either with partnering with someone, whether it's an independent producer, like Spot.us, or Breaking Tweets who, we're bringing on board to get a wider audience and help syndicate their content, to a partnership with YouTube. We worked with them on the Beijing Olympics. It’s all about getting greater indexing and syndication of what we're doing with GroundReport.

I'll also usually interact with either community members or editors to talk about our content focus for the next couple of weeks.

Beyond that, there are usually a lot of developments with the site. We’re always testing new features, exploring where we need to be investing, wire framing out how these new features will work on the site, and working with our development team to get that going.

In addition, there's the typical management and marketing and bootstrapping. Things like getting the word out there whenever we have a really great breaking story, and making sure that we are telling mainstream news organizations about it, making sure that we’re blogging about it, putting it on our Facebook statuses, and sending it out through our Twitter feed. It’s about really engaging with people, and making sure that the word gets out there about what we're doing.