Tag networked-journalism

Entries 13 Total

The Internet is for democracy

Sep 10, ’06 6:09 PM

The Center for Citizen Media has lifted the curtain on what it’s planning to do with a Sunlight Foundation grant.

It’s a political transparency project, with the goal of gathering everything there is to know about this year’s race for the 11th congressional district here in California, featuring incumbent Richard Pombo (R-Tracy).

All nonpartisan caveats aside, the presence of Pombo will make this a great example of what can be done with online tools when citizens decide to make a difference.

Why? Because Pombo has Jack Abramoff connections and favors the always-popular-in-California duo of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and undercutting the Endangered Species Act.
It should be an interesting, well-funded, moderately ugly election campaign, which makes for good copy and better research.

The kicker for me, of course, is who is going to be managing the whole online citizen-reporter shindig:

“The material we collect will be posted online. The site will be designed, built and initially maintained by the students in an online journalism class (J298) this fall at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. Assisting the students will be co-instructors Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, and Bill Gannon, editorial director at Yahoo!, as well as Scot Hacker, webmaster at the journalism school.”

That’s right, the Berkeley online journalism class will be playing with real live political information, audio, video, and most certainly databases.

Sounds like fun.

Two takes on the storypushing idea

Jul 26, ’06 5:46 AM

…wherein the readers push the story ideas up the rankings until a pro journalist takes over to do some reporting on the topic and turns out an article…

So I was imagining this Digg-ish thing where readers would vote for story ideas, adding their own research and insight along the way, preferably with some data wherever possible.

And I’ve now seen two sites that, well, don’t do that exactly, but they do something.

First, I heard Jason Calacanis on the Bloggercon lunch Gillmor Gang this morning talking about the new Netscape.

It’s essentially a Digg clone, but after hearing Jason lay out the reasons why that’s okay, I’m not going to worry too much about that. The point is this: Calacanis has a posse of “anchors” who supposedly are doing bits of fact-checking and follow-up on stories that are posted. It’s an interesting approach, but trying to get a comment from the congressman who told Colbert that he’s into cocaine and hookers is not exactly what I’d call performing a useful public function.

Nevertheless, Jason promises more, so it’s worth keeping an eye on this.

Then I noticed a link to something called AskQuestions.org in the comments of Jay’s post.

Readers, er, ask questions, then vote for the story ideas they like. The folks behind the site seem familiar and credible enough, and I like the simple feel of the site, especially the “Me Too!” button, which is a far more human touch than just coming up with another made-up word for “Digg.”

It looks like they’ve got a pair of writers and a crop of researchers, but no articles have been posted since June 2005, so maybe this is a bit dormant at this point. Either way, it looks like they tried a piece of what Jay is talking about.

The key to this might be keeping it local. Is it really feasible to have a reporter tackle a national issue based on user requests? Maybe, but the army of distributed researchers would have to stretch pretty wide to give any credibility to the results of an investigation. On a smaller, local scale, the information from contributors should be far more detailed and accurate, not to mention easier to confirm, plus you’d have the advantage, hopefully, of a more passionate core of researchers who care about their neighborhood. Maybe.

What do you think?

Are you prepared to ask your readers to help generate and research stories? On what scale? Does this belong on the front page of your newspaper, or off in a hyperlocal corner where the folks most interested can get at it without disrupting anyone else’s ideas about credibility?

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A framework for networked journalism

Jul 25, ’06 6:51 AM

Jay Rosen lays all his cards on the table, posting his plans for NewAssignment.net, a to-be-constructed site where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience can party together.

And by “party together,” I mean the masses can use all their social bookmarking/tagging/networking power to point to the stories they want to see covered more and/or better.

So instead of using all these great new Web 2.0 tools to let “users” point other people to the already-extant content they like (a la Digg, Newsvine, etc.), Jay is proposing we use the new toolbox to let “readers” be the assignment editors, pushing for the stories they want to know more about.

But more than that, now the “readers” get to play along at home, doing some distributed journalism of their own, for example, tracking the price of a prescription drug in their neighborhoods to figure out whether it’s being priced differently in different parts of the country. From Jay’s example:

The users help find out what a drug costs “everywhere.” It would be hard for a reporter to do that alone. Journalists are hired to get answers to questions developed by users, filtered through editors, who in turn enforce a certain standard of excellence, fairness and transparency that is indistinguishable from New Assignment’s reputation.

The masses of interested citizens drives not only story selection, but provides a paid journalist with information and ammunition to seek out the answers to their questions.

There’s plenty more of this in Jay’s post.

For even more, listen to the Citizen Journalism session from last month’s Bloggercon.

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