Though it may seem like a product of the Internet, crowdsourcing has been around for ages.
Take, for example, an experiment run by The New York Times in 1896, when the newspaper decided it was time to replace its famous motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print."
The Times asked its readers to send in their ideas and promised $100 to the person who came up with the best new slogan. That was a ton of money back then—enough to buy more than 600 pounds of coffee or hundreds of dress shirts. They received thousands of postcards with suggestions. Many entries rhymed ("We use all news fit to peruse") and fixated on the newspaper as a "pure" or "clean" "family paper." There were also plenty of metaphors ("The Wheat of News Threshed of Chaff") and at least one acrostic:
The
Information
Mankind
Earnestly
Seeks
The Times wrote that it had received entries from nearly every state in the union—there were 45 of them in 1896—and singled out entries from women. Many contestants "wholly ignored the request for a motto or phrase of only ten words of less," the Times wrote. Some of the other ideas that readers sent:
"The New-York Times. Pure and truthful; clever and sound."
"What it doesn't print, you don't care to read."