The Guardian reports on the AP photographer whose image dominated the front pages today. The following passage on how he returned to his office with a member of the public who had filmed it on his mobile phone passes by without remark:

“The adrenaline was running by now. So I turned [the flash] on and took five pictures. I realised they were important and I saw another guy shooting video on his phone.

“So I got him into a taxi and we went back to AP’s offices in Camden.”

Worth noting.

It is hard to imagine that a sports-crazed country like the US would have any dearth in sports reporting. However, while professional and major college sports get covered no end by traditional media, sports leagues and user-generated sites alike, high school and minor college sports remain largely uncovered, an issue that is being exacerbated by declining revenues.

This was one of the reasons that inspired Ted Sullivan, a former minor league baseball player and a graduate of Harvard Business School, to ease the pain of parents, coaches and fans of youth sports, literally,  by launching an application that is making the process of scoring simpler, and allowing for easier distribution of stats from the field.

“An entire category of content called real-time sports doesn’t exist for what is the enormous majority of athletic events happening everyday, whether that is organized sports from the small college level or high school and youth sports,” says Sullivan.

Having not only played the sport, but also having coached at a downtown little league in Manhattan, Sullivan understood the challenges of scoring baseball manually. Earlier this year, along with co-founder Kiril Savino, he launched GameChanger, an iPhone application that transmits data in real time from the field. Using the tool, scores and stats, as they happen, can be tapped into an iPhone by coaches, fans and parents. This is translated into a “gamestream” that appears on the Gamechanger site instantaneously so fans can access live updates, box scores, and play by plays.

Balls, strikes and hits are recorded using the tool’s menu options, and players are tracked by dragging and dropping names. In addition, a coach or scorekeeper can create a team’s schedule, roster and lineup. There is also a provision for fans to add to the stream by posting comments or uploading photos and video.

“I believe in the mobile device as a great data collector,” says Sullivan. While mobile devices are useful for content consumption, the very nature of smart phones prompts something more than passive viewing by the user. And this makes them ideal vehicles for data gathering and delivery.

So GameChanger provides an application to the community surrounding a team, which, in turn, allows the community to provide data from the field to GameChanger. In other words, it is crowdsourcing with organized content gathering.

Each team can have more than one hub based on how many people choose to use the app for scoring, but Sullivan assures me that the tedium of score-keeping restricts it to few, very avid fans or parents, thus reducing potential imposters or error-prone score keepers. Besides, GameChanger makes baseball scoring easy enough for anyone with a basic understanding of the sport, thus alleviating the need for extensive experience or in-depth knowledge.

“The key piece here that needs to be stressed is that this business doesn’t work if we aren’t providing a huge incentive to the person that is using the application and collecting the data for us for free,” says Sullivan. He explains that manual scoring takes an average of 45 minutes to an hour per game; factor in several games per week stretched over an entire season, and therein lies Gamechanger’s incentive.

Lisa Winston attests to this over at the MLB Blog, bemoaning the fact that an app “so brilliant and simple” wasn’t available when her daughter played in the little league.

All the content that is collected is available on the GameChanger site. While some content is free, more detailed information, such as play by plays, requires a subscription. Sullivan believes that the data is exclusive and time sensitive enough for people to be willing to pay for it. For a fee, a simple html code also allows local news sites to pull data from GameChanger’s database in the form of widgets. Profits are shared with news partners.

Potential other uses in journalism?

If such an application can make data gathering, analysis and distribution easier in the case of simple scoring of a little league game, could it find potential in other, more complex issues? Such as election results, exit polls or the statistics of climate change?  With the popularity of crowdsourcing, citizens are being entrusted with more and more complex tasks in areas such as citizen science and E-governance. Such a foolproof application would increase participation and minimize error.

While projects like WNYC’s crowdsourced maps have successfully used their Web sites as data collectors, the content obtained from the public in such cases has been relatively simple, such as the number of cars on a street, or the price of milk at a grocery store. In these and similar such exercises, the task of making sense of the data or painting the bigger picture has been that of a journalist, perhaps rightfully so.

But if data-specific applications could be designed to maximize contributions from the public, it would perhaps make citizen journalism more relevant and valuable while reducing the workload on news organizations. It’s debatable if it will work for areas more serious than sports or entertainment, but, if anything, such weighty topics could use applications that would make information gathering easier.

Next Thursday is the news:rewired event at City University London, which is being put on by the good people at journalism.co.uk. I’ll be on hand as a delegate.

All of the bases will be covered, it seems: Multimedia, social media, hyperlocal, crowdsourcing, datamashups, and news business models.

What I’m expecting

It’s always good to chat about different business models. However I don’t expect to come out of that with any greater insight into the silver bullet to fund journalism. Often people approach this topic like there even is one single revenue stream that hasn’t been discovered. The days of the two-channel revenue stream (ads and subs) are over.

Multimedia chat should be interesting. Personally I’m conflicted about the overall importance of multimedia. It’s an additional storytelling tool, however I’m of the opinion that multimedia isn’t the go-to tool that many like to make it out to be. If your readers won’t watch a 3 minute video, then you might want to be more selective in how you allocate those resources.

The topic of the social media session is “How to efficiently use Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools for productive journalism”. We know it’s not very successful as a one-way communication tool. However many publications are nervous about the idea of engaging so directly with readers. Since journalists are major users of social media, news organisations are needing to determine how to police the way their journalists interact with readers off the clock. It’s a tough question, so I look forward to that debate.

There’s a panel that I’m confused about. It’s called “Troubleshooting panel on online journalism”. Sounds like a Q&A session about problems faced by online journalists. However the panelists make me think it will be about a variety of things:

What happens when it all goes wrong? What tools are particularly troublesome? How to get yourself out of a digital ditch? With presentations, practical guidance and words of wisdom from a digitally seasoned panel: Robin Hamman, head of social media, Headshift; Jon Bernstein, deputy editor, New Statesman (former Channel 4 multimedia editor); Robin Goad, research director, Hitwise; and Malcolm Coles, internet consultant and media blogger.

It will be a valuable discussion, because of all the talent in the room. I just have no idea what they’ll be talking about.

The rest of the day is tied up in talks about hyperlocalism, datamashing and crowd-sourcing. Of those, the one I’m most interested in is the datamashing talk. Here’s an explanation:

How can data be used to tell a story and hold authorities accountable? What data should journalists be using? How can journalists learn new computer assisted reporting skills? What other sectors can journalists learn from? With presentations, examples and practical advice from Tony Hirst, data expert and lecturer, Open University. Francis Irving, senior developer, MySociety.org.

This is the stuff that drives innovation. Taking raw data and turning it into something that is easily understood, digested and redistributed. It takes a certain skill to be able to do it well. And when it is done well, the results are often exciting and explosive.

This will be an exciting and informative event. I do, however, have some concerns.

What I hope will happen

First, it’s somewhat disappointing that the role of community management in online journalism does not have a more prominent place in the discussions.

While it’s good to know how to use social media to further your journalistic endeavours, it’s equally important to know how to use it to engage with the community that you’re writing for. It’s a skill that many journalists simply don’t have. There’s still a mentality that once the content has been edited and posted, journalists don’t have any further responsibility towards it. Your article is your product. You’ve got to promote it.

I’d also like to see a discussion on how emerging technologies will impact journalism. Two emerging technologies in particular are eReaders/tablets and smart phones. They’re already changing the way people consume media, so it would make sense then that the way media is developed and presented would need to change, too. Yesterday Google announced the release of its new phone, Nexus One. Not to mention the newest arrival to the eReader game, called Skiff Reader. How will media need to change to fit that new technology?

I’m hoping that the topic of personal branding comes up. Journalists it seems have a love-hate for this term. Some journalists already have personal brands, while others shun the very idea of it. Regardless of your position, it’s something that needs to be talked about, especially in an open forum like this.

I’d also like to see a debate about journalism entrepreneurism. And some discussion about career paths that utilise journalism skills, but aren’t exactly journalism.

But since this is a *journalism* conference, I suspect that won’t happen.

I’ll write a post-event blog post to discuss all that did happen. I’m going to attempt to bring up some of the points I mentioned above, so I’ll also try to write about that. Throughout the day I’ll be tweeting about the from my personal account, @BenLaMothe, so feel free to follow along there, too.

Last week, the Guardian reported on a few promising citizen journalism projects in Africa that use mobile phone technology effectively to not only communicate with people but to also allow the audience to contribute to newsgathering. As opposed to the excessive – and even frivolous – growth of smart phone applications in the Western world, mobile phones in developing countries, which are nowhere near as sophisticated as ones in America and Europe, are being used as a reliable proxy for high-speed Internet access to perform basic functions, such as paying grocery bills and delivering medicines. Cell phone companies have bought into this as well, developing cheap, reliable phones with ease of use and practical functionality.

The Ushahidi crowdsourcing project that the Guardian article elaborates, is perhaps one of the best known and most successful mobile journalism exercises in Kenya. Ushahidi–which means “testimony” in Swahili–attempts to gather as much information from the public as possible and then verify this collected data with the help of computer and human confirmation. Launched during the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, Ushahidi has since been implemented worldwide — from monitoring unrest in the Congo, tracking violence in Ghaza, to reporting on the Indian elections earlier this year.

The project allows people to contribute in the form of simple text messages, photos and video delivered through smartphones, or reports submitted online; this is posted in real time to an interactive map, accessible directly through smart phone technology. This information can also be converted to formats that are readable in various communities by news organizations in developing countries. The technology itself is open source, so anyone can help enhance and develop it. In order to verify the accuracy of information obtained in the case of breaking news events, Ushahidi has also launched the Swift River Project, which helps voluntary participants worldwide to separate good information from ‘noise,’ or in the team’s own words, in “crowdsourcing the filter.”

Basically, the way it works is that once the aggregated data comes in through multiple streams, be it Flickr, Twitter, or Ushahidi, people can go in and rate the data – the information is thus verified by the sheer power of numbers, as in any crowdsourcing project. In addition, the information is filtered through machine-based algorithms to confirm accuracy. Ushahidi used a similar method to track the Indian elections earlier this year through VoteReport.in. In India, “moblogging” or microblogging, made possible through the explosive popularity of cell phones, has been growing for the past few years. Sites like smsgupshup.com and Vakow.com – Indian versions of Twitter – allow people to disseminate 160-character messages to groups, enabling amateurs to deliver personalized, customized news through sms messages. This makes up for the relative lack of interactivity from mainstream Indian news organizations.

Cell phones as tools for information dissemination are particularly valuable in countries like Zimbabwe where radio transmission is often blocked. Text messages can allow an uninterrupted flow of information in such cases. The Guardian‘s Activate 09 project sends out headlines to tens of thousands of citizens in the Southern African country through sms messaging. In addition, the paper has been crowdsourcing ideas from its global audience on the different methods available to reach thousands of people during breaking news events.

The Grameen Foundation, a global nonprofit, has partnered with Google and a Uganda-based telecommunications provider MTN, to answer important queries sent in by residents via text messages; questions range from clarifications about deadly diseases to agricultural problems. In Kenya, RSS feeds from the Internet are fed into mobile phones to educate and inform people, and text-to-speech tools that convert sms messages into audio files are helping the visually impaired. Some Western companies are encouraging Kenyans to take part in crowdsourcing projects in return for micropayments. Citizens perform small tasks such as transcribing audio and tagging photos for small sums of money. The BBC is now providing English language learning capabilities in Bangladesh through cheap audio and SMS lessons through a partnership with mobile service providers.

Despite the availability of hi-speed Internet access in Western countries, the versatility of the cell phone as a vehicle for citizen journalism is very special indeed. The ability of a phone to provide real-time, on-the-ground coverage is undisputed, whether you see an unusual occurrence on the street on your way to a mall in Los Angeles or witness a riot in a displaced community in Darfur.

One rap against citizen journalism is that there is always a possibility that it isn’t accurate or credible. Unmonitored, unmoderated blogs can get it wrong. Well, so can traditional journalists, but with blogs, it’s harder to hold someone accountable, and erroneous information is that much trickier to retract.

Would it help then, to look for ideas in a field where inaccuracy is barely tolerated, if at all? The media should be able to tap into crowd wisdom for credible content if, as Dan Schultz notes, “members of the scientific community, a professional group that arguably maintains higher standards for verification than journalism, are trying to harness the crowd in the same way that we are.”

Citizen science has been effectively used in one main way – collection of data, which is then used by scientists for contextualization, analysis and consolidation with experiments and previous scientific literature.

Be it recording the dates of Spring’s first lilac blossoms, or counting the number of eggs in bird nests, citizens are contributing in meaningful ways, so scientists can then then use this for more specialized tasks, like assessing the information thus obtained to study the impact of global warming or the influence of human activity on wildlife.

Perhaps, the closest counterpart to this use in journalism is something akin to WNYC’s crowdsourced project to track price gouging in New York City or the Shropshire Star’s map of fuel prices. In both these exercises, citizens were not expected to do much more than report their daily observations.

Since scientific research usually requires a high level of education and training, the tasks get divided neatly between professionals and dabblers. As Schultz points out, in the case of science, “professionals have bigger and better things to do; it doesn’t make sense for a PhD to use a million-dollar telescope to look at something that a hobbyist could view using a thousand-dollar one, especially when there is so much of the universe left to unlock.”

This is not to say that such a clear definition would not work for journalism. In fact, citizen journalism pioneer Jay Rosen has often said that division of labor is essential for crowdsourced journalism projects. In WNYC’s case, citizens were responsible for collecting information that was put together in a story. In more complex investigative projects, the public is given the task of perusing documents, as is happening with The Guardian’s investigation of the MP’s expenses scandal.

Another idea would be to outsource so-called “fluff” journalism to the public (self plug warning). Many sites are already implementing this, by allowing citizens to post blogs and articles on lifestyle and recreational topics. Schulz suggests hyperlocal content as one such department where citizens can often do a good, if not better, job than reporters.

One of the main problems is that unlike scientists, journalists–irrationally or not–are in constant fear of being replaced by amateurs. Hence, they seem more hesitant to solicit citizen help. The fact that journalists are losing jobs, however, has more to do with the lack of revenue-generating mechanisms on the Internet than it has to do with bloggers posting content online. In fact, by recruiting audiences to act as eyes and ears for news organizations, the latter would actually save costs and be able to divert resources toward more specialized reporting.

Secondly, in the case of scientific crowdsourcing or citizen science, there is a distinct classification of contributors and their scope of contribution–as identified by what professionals, amateurs and citizens can do. This leads to a clear division of labor, which is not quite possible in journalism, at least in the way it is being practiced right now. While there is no doubt that journalism needs a special set of skills and training, it’s not rocket science, quite literally.

Amateurs contribute toward citizen science in significant ways by performing unspecialized tasks. In the case of bloggers, on the other hand, short of traveling to a war zone (with some exceptions) they are pretty much doing–or attempting to do–what professional journalists routinely do.

The solution is not to curb bloggers and independent journalists, however. It is to produce the sort of in-depth, high-quality journalism that makes newsroom journalism “special.” In order to have clear-cut division of labor, professionals merely have to offer a product that makes use of the creativity and resources that are available to them. And in the process, they can implement projects that involve the lay public so the latter can do what they do best.

This morning the SPCK SSG News, Notes and Information campaign blog passed a total of 150,000 page views since it was established in June-July 2008.

This is a story which is an excellent example of both investigation by a network of people, and campaigning blogging. It shows how a coalition of individuals can make a significant difference. You can read a brief outline on the blog’s introductory page.

The blog is about the mismanagement and destruction of a chain of 25 Anglican bookshops, which have been around since the first half of the 20th Century, by two brothers based in the USA, J Mark – who is a lawyer – and Philip Brewer. They took over control of the Bookshops from the SPCK charity with the promise of maintaining and improving the business back in 2006. They used a charity called the “Society of Saint Stephen the Great” (SSG) as their vehicle.

Since then there has been a saga of “shenanigans”, including sackings by email, bullying of staff, “Cease and Desist” attempts to suppress straight reporting, creation of half-a-dozen business entities to confuse everyone, a fake attempt in the US at putting the core charity into bankruptcy (declaring only liabilities not assets) where the court has no jurisdiction anyway, and much much more, which I will be describing in some detail in a series of podcasts.

I (along with many others) helped promote the new campaign site in summer 2008 when Dave Walker the blogger doing the existing reporting (75 posts in about 18 months was one of several threatened legally by Mark Brewer; here is an example of the style of letter used – this one was published by Sam Norton. An instant archive of these deleted posts was of course established within days on the blog Open Debates not Libel Threats .

There have also been some lighter moments, such as the lawyer running a chain of religious bookshops being instructed by the Court to take remedial education in bankruptcy law and legal ethics, and the discovery that his brother possesses a private “hobby” aircraft painted in “Trotter Trading” yellow, which was maintained at charitable expense . However, the core objective is to make sure that the mismanagement of the chain is scrutinised, and the miscreants brought to book.

The campaign blog now has nearly 250 articles, and has received 2500 comments. Here are the visitor statistics from the WordPress stats module. You can see the initial surge, and how interest has been maintained at around 10k page views each month.

Though very respectable, this is not a huge amount of traffic, but a successful niche campaign does not need a huge amount of traffic – and it could even be a distraction to receive many more comments than we do already.

The campaign has been maintained by a network core of several dozen interested bloggers, some of whom started writing for this reason, perhaps 100-200 who have been interested enough to cover the campaign at key points, and a Facebook network of 500-700 people.

Interestingly, 250 people joined the initial Facebook Group “A group for all those people who mourn the tragic demise of SPCK Bookshops“, but twice that number joined the “We Support Dave Walker” group when Dave Walker was threatened legally. One of our tactics was to major on the easily-understood “Freedom to Report” issue as a wedge to build support for the far more complicated long-term campaign to expose the mismanagement of the bookshop chain by the SSG charity. That network of supporters is still essentially in place, and can act as a sort of “radar” if we need to find information, or need local knowledge from a particular country.

There have been a series of developments and steps forward over the last 12 months:

1. The material challenged under “Cease and Desist” notices received a far wider circulation than previously.
2. Mark Brewer failed to get his St. Stephen the Great charity declared bankrupt in the US, a court case in which Dave Walker’s resurrected posts were cited as evidence.
3. In April this year the UK Charity Commissioners took over the running of the St. Stephen the Great charity, after a formal investigation prompted by complaints from various quarters in 2008, including the campaign network.
4. Even though the Brewers had moved all the bookshops into a new organisation (ENC Shop Management) the CC’s are now taking possession of these shops as St. Stephen assets.
5. 32 former staff, whose tribunal against SSG heard earlier this year, have now started receiving compensation after an almost 2 year fight. I have published a podcast interview with the USDAW legal team to give an inside track on the Employment Tribunal case.

I’m not claiming for a minute that this is our doing alone: it isn’t. There have been a lot of different people and organisations involved, including the Trade Union USDAW which has just won an 18 month+ marathon Employment Tribunal Case, the Charity Commission (Who took over the charity after , SPCK itself, and others.

However, I am claiming that the network has made a significant difference in at least these areas:

1. Information gathering across multiple countries (there’s a piece to be written about how Facebook and other social networks can be used as an “information radar”).
2. Maintaining a public profile to the issue.
3. Providing resources that allow other people to take offence or to take action.
4. Keeping up moral among those who have been targeted by the Messrs Brewer.
5. Building formal and informal networks with a range of interested official bodies, and alerting them to developments about which they need to take action.

There are also some lessons to learn here about the possible effectiveness of niche and highly targetted campaigns run by relatively small but committed groups of people. The blog is not high as a general site on Google (it has a pagerank of 3 currently), nor is the traffic huge (averaging slightly under 400 page views a day), but it has done quite a valuable job so far.

Some traditional journalism skills are critical, such as fact checking, careful investigation, sensible legal checks, and a reasonable writing style. However, there are also a whole portfolio of skills for bloggers which do not come with a traditional journalism training.

In a future post I’ll compare the characteristics of this story with the “MP Expenses” reports in the Telegraph to illustrate my belief that investigative bloggers and investigative journalists are complementary, rather than being competitors.

Update, 2 days later: Paul lets me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going fairly well until I wrote this post … You can read my climbdown here…

The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds – and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.

(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)

The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.

And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.

Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK …

Top 3 RSS feeds at each newspaper

They didn’t all have three that showed up (full table here) …

Switch to Twitter instead

I suggest newspapers switch to Twitter instead. Twitter’s advantages over RSS include:

• Wheat vs chaff As a reader, you can see which stories other people are retweeting and so are likely to be of interest.
• Context There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline (well, there is for those that have got it and don’t just stick the first few words of the standfirst after the headline).
• Promotion Followers can RT newspaper stories, promoting the paper – they can’t do this with elements of an RSS feed.
• Tracking Stories’ development can be tracked on Twitter – you can’t usually tell what’s changed in an RSS feed.
• Conversation You can take part in a conversation on Twitter. People only talk to their RSS feed when they swear at it. The journalists behind the story can tweet, too.

Newspapers agree with me …

As I say, despite poor subscriptions for many feeds, papers pump out RSS feeds as if there’s no tomorrow – the second column in the table shows how many feeds (rounded) that each paper has.

But despite this, it’s clear some papers agree with me – and have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.

No visibility

The Mail, despite its 160-odd feeds, only mentions them in its footer.

The same is true of the Sun.

On the page but hardly visible

The FT’s RSS link does at least have a logo – but its buried at the bottom of the right hand column on each page.

The Telegraph shows relevant RSS feeds on pages – but they’re buried in a different way: above a banner ad that no one will ever look at.

Even the Guardian, which lets you mash up your own RSS feeds (hence the 000,000s in the table), hides details of its feeds under an unusual term ‘webfeed’ in the far right of its header.

The Times still has an RSS link in its main header menu on its news page. On other pages its’s at the bottom. And it mentions Twitter on its pages much more than RSS.

Visible – but not doing them any good

The Independent is alone in listing RSS feeds on its main category pages – although that doesn’t seem to get it many subscribers.

The Mirror has an RSS link next to its search box, although it took me ages to find it. Does this count as visible – it’s not exactly intuitive …

And the Express has a link and a logo prominently in its header. But as the express doesn’t update its website often (or at all on sunday), I guess that’s why no one subscribes. And some of its RSS feeds appear to be garbage – check out this theatre one …

Caveats about the data

After you’ve started writing something about newspapers, you’ll eventually discover that Martin Belam has already written about it. Having just noticed his Top 75 British newspaper RSS feeds (written before the recent explosion in Twitter use) as I was researching Google Reader’s market share, I figured I’d just repeat his caveats about his own data as they apply to mine too:

• Subscribers don’t necessarily ever read anything.
• Numbers quoted by Google vary wildly.
• Google Reader has a large market share but there are other readers.
• Newspapers have problem with the same feed on different URLs. To quote Martin: “If the papers themselves can’t work out how to set one canonical URL for their content, why should I?”
• Google Reader search is not great. There may be mising feeds.

   

 

Investigate your MP’s expenses via kwout

So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through – and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far.

Meanwhile, that process is doing much more than just finding ‘stories’. It’s generating data: the date, the amount, the type of expense, the type of document. When this stage is finished, The Guardian will have a database that will allow people to filter, mix and combine the expenses data in different ways.

It’s also about telling a ‘story’ in a different way. There’s an element of game mechanics in the site – that progress bar (shown above) compels you to bring the site to completion (it strangely reminds me of the Twitter game Spymaster). This makes it more engaging than a made-for-print exclusive – as I wrote about Help Me Investigate, this isn’t ‘citizen journalism’: it’s micro-volunteering. And when you volunteer, you tend to engage.

And when you treat news as a platform rather than a destination, then people tend to spend more time on your site, so there’s an advertising win there.

Finally, we may see more stories, we may see interesting mashups, and this will give The Guardian an edge over the newspaper that bought the unredacted data – The Telegraph. When – or if – they release their data online, you can only hope the two sets of data will be easy to merge. 

   

 

page 71 of Alan Duncan’s Incidental Expenses Provision 2006/07 via kwout

It’s finally been announced that my project Help Me Investigate is being funded by 4iP and Screen West Midlands.

Help Me Investigate (HMI) is a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. It allows anyone to submit a question they want to investigate – “How much does my hospital make from parking charges?” “What happened to the money that was allocated to my local area?” “Why was that supermarket allowed to be built opposite another supermarket?” …

But more importantly, it then enables users to mobilise support behind that question; and to pursue it.

HMI attempts to address the biggest issue facing journalism: how do we save the good stuff? The persistent slow-brewed journalism that was previously subsidised (if you were lucky) by more commercially friendly instant journalism, but which stands to lose most as commercial content becomes disaggregated and reaggregated, and audiences and their activity measurable.

How do you support Slow Journalism?

Help Me Investigate is an attempt to use the qualities of the web to pursue investigative journalism. There are various aspects to this (which I’ll be exploring, along with others, in the Help Me Investigate blog), but fundamentally it comes down to this:

• The web allows you to ‘atomise’ processes – break them down into their constituent parts. The site breaks apart investigative – often campaigning – journalism allowing users to contribute in specific and different ways. This is not citizen journalism – it is micro-volunteering.
• Investigative journalism is about more than just ‘telling a story’; it is about enlightening, empowering and making a positive difference. And the web offers enormous potential here – but users must be involved in the process and have ownership of the agenda.
• The web is more tool than destination – successful business models rest on creating a platform
• Likewise, the web is more of a communication medium than a storytelling one; therefore, we are focusing on communication and community rather than stories; process, rather than product.
• We are also focused on making the process itself rewarding, not just the end result. Journalism is a by-product.
• Online, failure is cheap; unlike a traditional news organisation, HMI doesn’t need the majority of investigations to ‘succeed’; in fact, failure is built into the design as a necessary ingredient of the site’s overall success. If you want to budget for it, put it under ‘training’ and ‘R&D’.
• Do what you do best and link to the rest: the site is networked – we’re not trying to be or host all things but will be pointing elsewhere more often than not

I could go on, and I will in the blog. But I think those points are core. I don’t expect this project will have all the answers, but I think we are asking the right questions, at the right time.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that the idea of ‘investigative journalism’ covered here is a broad one – indeed, we have no idea of predicting what questions will be pursued: the agenda will be determined almost entirely by users (including journalists) and topics could range from the very personal, hyperlocal to more national questions. That alternative to a mainstream editorial agenda will be interesting in itself: how many questions will we get that newspapers would find unappealing?

So what’s happening now?

We’re building a very rough and ready frame within which users can play. How that develops depends in large part on what the users need to do – we’ll be doing much of the development as it is being used.

Already a handful of people have used the site in its closed test form, and in the following weeks quite a few more will start to go through it. Then the site will be opened in a semi-closed beta.

To begin with we’re focusing our personal efforts on Birmingham, although people elsewhere will be able to use the site.

The site is being built by Webby Award-winning developer Stef Lewandowski, while the community side of things is headed up by Nick Booth. Both have been crucial contributors to the development of HMI. Joining us behind the site are community support Paul Henderson and investigative journalist Heather Brooke, author of the wonderful guide to FOI Your Right To Know. They will be suggesting and supporting activities to users who submit or join investigations on the site.

It’s taken 18 months to get to this point, and the hard work starts now. If you want to be involved in any capacity let me know.

The myriad numbers of citizen journalism sites that pop up everyday seem to suggest that the media can fulfill the purposes of democracy by merely offering their audiences a forum to express themselves.

However, to tap into its full potential, participatory journalism should try to do something in addition to what mainstream reporting already does – such as expanding source diversity, shifting focus to neglected sections of the population, or pursuing different angles and perspectives on a story. If not, it is not doing much more than using its readers as a form of cheap labor, and perhaps laying off journalists while it’s at it.

Citizen journalism is hardly beneficial when it merely propagates the flaws of traditional reporting. Huffington Post’s Off the Bus produced many stories on the US Presidential campaign last year – but the one we remember most vividly is Mayhill Fowler’s reporting of Barack Obama’s “bitter” comment – the story that put gotcha journalism from mainstream reporters to shame.

The paucity of good investigative reporting through citizen journalism is not surprising, considering the amount of effort such stories require from news organizations in terms of coordination and oversight. Perhaps, most importantly, they require a huge time investment from the audience. While people might be easily persuaded to relay food-item prices from their grocery bills, they are less likely to pursue public officials or make trips to government offices to retrieve information.

Which is why magazines like The Nation are allowing their audiences simpler methods to contribute to significant news stories. With its “Ask the President” feature, the weekly is encouraging readers to pose questions for the Obama administration’s upcoming press conferences. Queries that receive the most votes will get asked by Nation journalists, pending agreement from the White House. This is perhaps the digital equivalent of newspapers inviting their readers to town hall meetings to question public officials.

News organizations are also trying to encourage investigative journalism “from the desk.” With the amount of interactive tools available online, it is perhaps easiest to get readers to contribute through their computers since they already spend several hours in front of them. National news stories especially lend themselves well to this form of reporting.

The nonprofit investigative journalism site Propublica hopes to analyze Barack Obama’s stimulus package by encouraging audience contributions. Data and documents will be available on the site, and readers will be encouraged to offer ideas for stories and topics of newsworthy content. Details of how distributed reporting will be implemented have not been worked out yet, but as Senior Editor Eric Umansky reasons, the breadth of the stimulus projects and their potential effects are so huge that there simply are not enough traditional journalists to cover the subject. But with the help of citizen reporters all around the country, Propublica can do a better job of reporting on all angles of the story. When you recall that the same idea allowed Talking Points Memo to break the news about the Bush administration’s firing of eight US attorneys in late 2007, it is easy to be optimistic about Propublica’s venture.

Another idea that is gaining popularity is the coupling of journalism school projects to citizen reporting. In this fast-changing media world where every citizen is a reporter, students of journalism should be specifically trained to tap into the vast talent available in the community, writes Elizabeth Zwerling. That is exactly what the Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles is attempting to do with its hyperlocal news site, Intersections.

The project is shining the spotlight on the less privileged classes that mainstream media has long ignored with its profit-centered interest in affluent communities. Online journalism often reproduces this censorship of omission because of the inherent digital divide. Students at the Annenberg School, however, are being trained to report on hyperlocal issues affecting urban LA communities. Local residents, many of whom include working class immigrants, work with students to transmit their photos, videos and stories through cell phones.

Sites such as Texas Watchdog, on the other hand, are implementing programs to train civilians to become watchdogs of the government; the program teaches citizens to access and review public documents, among other things.

Another potential goldmine for citizen journalism at the hyperlocal level appears to be populations of retired individuals, who have both the time and inclination to perform watchdogging functions for their communities, as Jack Driscoll found with Rye Reflections, a user-generated site run by retirees in a small community in New Hampshire. The drastic reduction in local news reporting by newspapers that have cut down their resources and budgets has meant that citizens are willing to take up the slack. This sort of community reporting offers people intellectual and social stimulation while fulfilling civic needs, according to Driscoll.

In addition, retired professionals can often lend their specific expertise to investigative news stories, as former engineers and lawyers in the community of Fort Myers, Florida proved during the News-Press’ investigation of a local utility company. However, Driscoll does not succumb to the rosy-eyed view that this sort of reporting can replace hardcore investigative journalism at the national or international level, or in specialized fields like science and medicine.

It’s little surprise then that the much talked-about Huffington Post Investigative Fund hopes to tap into the expertise of seasoned journalists to kick-start its investigative reporting exercise. Down the road, it will harness the power of its citizen volunteers. As Jay Rosen, who will serve as a senior advisor on the project, writes, “the best approach is to have no orthodoxy and to support very traditional investigative reporting by paid pros who are good at it, as well as teams of pros and amateurs, students working with masters of the craft, crowdsourced investigations, and perhaps other methods.”

A tall order to be sure. But news organizations need to quickly find ways to compensate for the dearth of resources and personnel in order to continue to perform in-depth investigative reporting, lest journalism may become completely irrelevant.