At IdeaLab: Paul Bradshaw on crowdsourcing investigative journalism

⚠️ This post is more than five years old. Links may rot, opinions may change, and context might be missing. Proceed with cautious optimism.

Over at IdeaLab, I’ve been way past deadline for a post, after (again) making all sorts of promises about helping out more over there.  Until now.

After playing the modern equivalent of phone tag (Twitter DMs and e-mail across two operating systems and one ocean) for a week or so, Paul Bradshaw and I landed on Skype at the same time for 15 minutes for a quick chat about his freshly funded project, Help Me Investigate.

Here’s the post at IdeaLab, where you’ll find the full video interview.

If you want to head directly to the background on this, read Paul’s post about the funding and the next steps for the project.

Here’s why I’m so interested in this project, and in my Knight News Challenge project ReportingOn, and David Cohn’s efforts with Spot.Us, and in the Collaborative Reporting tools we launched at Publish2 recently:

I really, REALLY, REALLY want there to be easy ways to gather structured data from readers, users, journalists, and editors, and I want that data to be attached to their identity whenever possible.  I want that data to be portable and exportable, so it can be displayed in any and all useful formats. I want profiles for everyone so I can track their participation, reliability, and levels of knowledge about different topics, beats, locations, and stories.

I’m becoming more and more passionate about this, with my level of surprise that no one has built the right tools for this job yet growing by the day.  But we’re getting closer.  Platforms are emerging.  Standards will follow.  Collaboration is key.


Comments

2 responses to “At IdeaLab: Paul Bradshaw on crowdsourcing investigative journalism”

  1. Totally agree. It is strange to me that nothing has emerged so far.

    Looking forward to something…… Spot.Us could certainly use it.

  2. Hear hear. I’d be totally down to stretch my time a bit thinner and help get this off the ground 🙂 It might’ve been you that told be this, but APM has the Public Insight Network and I believe OPB in my local area has something similar. This built on top of my people database I want would be really frickin’ sweet.