I have now released the source code behind Help Me Investigate, meaning others can adapt it, install it, and add to it if they wish to create their own crowdsourcing platform or support the idea behind it.

This follows the announcement 2 weeks ago on the Help Me Investigate blog (more coverage on Journalism.co.uk and Editors Weblog),

The code is available on GitHub, here.

Collaborators wanted

I’m looking for collaborators and coders to update the code to Rails 3, write documentation to help users install it, improve the code/test, or even be the project manager for this project.

Over the past 18 months the site has surpassed my expectations. It’s engaged hundreds of people in investigations, furthered understanding and awareness of crowdsourcing, and been runner-up for Multimedia Publisher of the Year. In the process it attracted attention from around the world – people wanting to investigate everything from drug running in Mexico to corruption in South Africa.

Having the code on one site meant we couldn’t help those people: making it open source opens up the possibility, but it needs other people to help make that a reality.

If you know anyone who might be able to help, please shoot them a link. Or email me at paul(at)helpmeinvestigate.com

Many thanks to Chris Taggart and Josh Hart for their help with moving the code across.

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As part of a group response to  the government‘s inquiry into the future of local and regional media, Paul Bradshaw looks at the role of local authorities in regional journalism. Blog comments will be submitted to the inquiry as well as the blog posts.

So. The Committee for Culture, Media and Sport want responses on “The appropriateness and effectiveness of print and electronic publishing initiatives undertaken directly by public sector bodies at the local level”

The question of what public sector bodies should be allowed to publish, how that affects local journalism, the local economy, and local democracy, is one of the most difficult to resolve – not least because it involves so many interconnected elements.

The first problem is that any discussion runs the risk of conflating a number of separate but interlinked elements:

• local councils and local democracy are not the same thing; 
• local newspapers and local journalism are also two different things.

Whatever model emerges must recognise that papers are not the only places where public discussion takes place, and print journalists are not the only people holding power to account.

We must not prop up newspapers at the expense of the opportunity to support other emerging forums of public engagement. Any question about the future of local media must acknowledge that ‘local media’ now includes any number of blogs, websites, forums, social networks and other, distributed, media. 

As local citizens increasingly receive their ‘news’ from those forms of media, and local journalists increasingly rely on those to understand the concerns of local people, the actions of public sector bodies need to be responsive and supportive of that.

The economic role

Equally, while newspapers have an important role to play in local economies, we should not ignore the growing number of independently owned local print and online publications that have the potential to provide another source of economic growth. 

In other words, just as local newspapers protested at the potential effect BBC Local might have on their markets, we should be aware of how support for local newspaper chains might undermine the efforts of less vocal, independent news operations.

Council newspapers

The same economic argument is used to criticise the increasing number of local authorities publishing newspapers of their own.

The Local Government Association recently released research claiming council magazines were “not a threat to local media” – a useful survey, but the way it is reported by the LGA demonstrates the dangers of allowing local authorities to report on their own activities.

The statistic “Almost 60 per cent of council publications contain 10 per cent or less of advertising” is framed as part of the case that local magazines are not a threat. A casual reader would swallow that. A critical writer would point out that this means a very significant 40% of council publications carry reasonably large amounts of advertising – and even those carrying less than 10% of advertising are still having an economic impact on local newspapers. Not mentioned is whether there is an increasing trend towards carrying more advertising, which anecdotally looks to be the case. 

The move into council newspapers is a move to cut out the middleman, with little obvious benefit for local citizens: for the reasons given above it is unlikely to be informing in any meaningful sense, and even less likely to hold its paymasters to account.

The financial implications are concerning: there is the drain on public funds of of publication and distribution. There is the negative economic impact of reallocating communications and marketing budgets that might otherwise go towards local media. If indeed “People deserve to know what their council tax is being spent on” then there should be restrictions on how council newspapers do that: just the facts, please. No spin, no adverts. They used to call them leaflets.

Rather than publishing pre-packaged, pre-selected information, one way local councils could make a major difference is through publishing information in formats that make it as easy as possible for users to build media of their own from, i.e. ‘mash up’. Examples of this would include:

• RSS feeds of newly published documents
• Documents ‘tagged’ with key names, places, organisations, etc.
• The ability for users to tag documents themselves
• The ability for users to comment on or annotate documents
• Full audio or video of council meetings, etc.
• Use of microformats
• Use of free platforms that support some of the above technologies, e.g. WordPress, Twitter, Delicious

For newspapers, this would provide an efficiency not just in newsgathering (a key way to help reporters find the information they need, quickly, to interrogate it and make connections), but also production and distribution (RSS feeds and tags, for example, can be easily filtered, aggregated and mashed up).

Equally, because this makes it easier for web users to interrogate information, it helps facilitate local amateur and startup media production, including those members of the local community that journalists are increasingly relying upon to do this work.

This is obviously not to say that anyone will be able to use the data in these ways, only that it makes it possible for a wider number of people than before to create media – and to distribute it. The nature of the web is such that it also becomes easier for a wider group of people to find out about that media, and to become engaged with local issues on a social level.

In fact, there’s already an open source platform available that local authorities could look at which releases information in this way – EveryBlock.

But this is not a technical solution to a social problem, but an organisational and cultural solution. It is about openness. 

Automate, aggregate and distribute

And if councils are serious about informing their citizens I think they could go further still. They could publish relevant stories alongside their council webpages. 

If a user is on the council website planning applications page, why not have a feed from local news websites and a selection of top local blogs that have relevant tags? That information is more than likely going to be more readable and informative than the council’s own version, so it is fulfilling the council’s own stated aim of ‘informing the public’ at no extra cost. It is also helping to distribute the news and drive traffic to local news websites (a virtual version of Craig McGill’s suggestion that binmen deliver the news), not to mention the possibility of newspapers selling advertising into those feeds. 

This needn’t be limited to the council website: local authorities distribute information electronically in all kinds of ways – emails to staff, information to bus stops, text messages, local digital TV – providing a future possibility of further automated distribution.

You then have a built-in incentive for local news organisations to cover local government (needless to say this should be enshrined somehow so that councils cannot hold news organisations to ransom).

Anyway, I’ve said enough. It’s a complex area – what should local authorities do?

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Last year I had surprising success with the Knight News Challenge, making the final shortlist of 29 before the winners were announced.

This year I’m at it again, with Help Me Investigate.com – a platform for ‘open source investigative journalism’, to be actively piloted in Birmingham, UK, but usable by anyone in the world. You can vote for it here, and read more about it.

Once you’ve done that, any ideas, useful articles or funds you could suggest would be very much welcomed.

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Alex Gamela talks to Dave Cohn, founder of the non-profit, crowdfunding journalism project Spot.us, winner of a Knight News Challenge grant, and a suggested new model for the news business. On the eve of launching the Spot.us official website, Dave told OJB how he is putting his ideas into practice, and his views on the current state of journalism.

Four months after winning the KNC grant, Dave Cohn is a happy man. He started with a wiki where he presented and tested the different sides to his project, and he quickly managed to fund three stories. Now it is on its way to fund a fourth one. All of this even before having an official website.

The way it works is quite simple: someone – a journalist, a citizen, a community – pitches a subject to be investigated journalistically; the story is then open for funding, and whoever wants can contribute with a small sum; if the target amount is reached, a journalist takes the story on; finally it gets published.

So far this model has worked well:

“We’ve raised 3000 dollars from about 100 donors, about an average of 33 dollars each.

“It’s like digital poetry”

Dave Cohn has been doing his share on networked journalism for a while now, working with the likes of Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis.

He has strong beliefs on the possibilities that the web brings to journalism, the immense power of communities, and also in a change of attitude on the journalists part.

“Journalists and journalism right now is a diaspora, we’re sort of been kicked out of the homeland of newspapers, and we need to figure out where we can go from here”.

So he has been thinking about all this for a long time now, but the concept underlying Spot.us is rather recent for him: “I’ve been working on Spot.us as an idea for little over a year.”

Although it sounds simple, the task of building a platform has been complex, with all its nuts and bolts.

“Building a website in general is complex, and this is also building an organization. I have to remember this is a non-profit, so there’s a lot of framework behind that, to which I’m new to”.

But Dave Cohn is enthusiastic about it:

“I love every minute of it, because it’s like digital poetry. I have the opportunity to build this website as i envisioned it, and granted there are things that come up along the way that force me to put out some fires and do certain things, but they’re all part of this process, of , again, digital poetry.”

And who can participate? Spot.us “is not a news organization”, so he says he’s not considering hiring anyone. It’s “a marketplace, a platform that independent journalists can use to crowdfund for themselves”.

“It’s for freelance journalists, and it works on a pitch by pitch basis. We encourage everybody to do a pitch, everyone who wants to do this professionally.”

However, he recently announced that he is looking for journalists and communities to work with him.

The project has been promoted in two distinct ways: one, more traditional with the help of a marketing company. The other, based on a grassroots approach to the organized communities.

“It’s not really about marketing, but partnering with people that already have communities organized, and say: Look, you are a community, you have invested interested on something, you want something covered by a professional journalist, what is it? Lets find out what it is and how a professional journalist can cover it”

And what is Dave Cohn’s role in all of this?

“I’m an entrepreneur, strictly interested in the issues of journalism. What I’m passionate about and what motivates me is figuring out how journalism can continue to thrive, despite the death of its institutions. So I’m a journalist/entrepreneur in that sense where I’m trying to figure out how journalism can rethink itself and redefine itself so it can continue.”

Crowdfunding as a new business model

One of the most discussed issues on the new media blogosphere is how to find a sustainable business model for the news industry. Spot.us’ crowdfunding model raised some doubts over the possibility that groups with their own agenda might fund specific stories, thus skewing the journalistic goal of the project, in contrast with traditional media that appeared as the gold standard.

Dave Cohn is very clear about this:

“There’s no such thing as clean money. It’s a myth that newspapers’ money is clean. And anybody who is working in journalism knows the story of a publisher who killed an investigation because it would have threatened some advertising dollars.”

He argues that the process must be transparent every step of the way, and show “where the money comes from, limit donations.”

Besides, the names and the reputation of the professionals involved are at stake – the journalist who proposed to write the story, the editor, and the media who will publish it.

Cohn believes the role of the community is crucial, and everything changed when people got access to the new web tools:

“Maybe in the 1960′s community organizing meant gathering a bunch of people picketing, but now young people when they want to do community organizing they create media: they create a YouTube video, or a Facebook cause.

“And I think more and more you will get successful citizen journalism projects, and they’re usually led by civic leaders or community leaders, who have taken responsibility and said: look, this is an issue of my community, how can I help benefit it? Well I’ll take it online, organize online, by making media”.

One of the major shifts in the news paradigm is the growing need – and ability – that people have to claim issues that are close to them in the news agenda. And this raised questions about the effectiveness and the role of journalism, and how it served that need.

“People have serious information needs,” and “that’s what journalism should be: serving the information needs of people.

“It’s not producing a newspaper. A newspaper is a packaged product that is delivered to your door. What journalism does is to inform people, and i think people will always want information, especially about their local community.”

And now people can demand for the information that affects them and their communities, and in depth. Now that the communities know they can have their voice heard, nothing will ever be the same.

“As long as we are tied to geographical locations we’re going to want to know what’s going on in our geographical location. So that is not going to disappear, people want in depth stuff.”

Journalism on the spot

Dave Cohn has an analogy to explain what has changed in the relationship between users and media.

“If you walked into a restaurant and the waiter told you what you were going to eat for dinner, you’d walk right out. But that’s the way news has traditionally been served.

“When you look at it historically, we came out of a time where it was top-down communication, so that made sense: here’s your news, here’s what’s important.”

Now the people can order the information they want off the vast menu called the web, and the definition of what is news or not is no longer decided by a restricted number of people.

“Traditionally, 0.001% of the population determined the news agenda, and they were called editors, and the reason they were able to determine the news agenda is because they were the only ones with a freelance budget.”

Cohn has written and debated profusely about what needs to be done to improve and renew the trust in traditional media. And to him, background changes must occur.

“The way news media are structured need to be rethought or re-tooled, so it can respond more, and be more open, but it’s not their fault, it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way those organizations are structured, because it came out of this history, and it literally is history now, what worked 30 years ago doesn’t work anymore.”

The trust relationship between audience and journalists isn’t rock-steady. I asked Dave Cohn if the view of the world given by journalists wasn’t too narrow. He says it’s not about the journalists.

“I strongly believe that journalists in general, when you talk to them one on one are in general really good people, and they have strong beliefs. They’re doing what they’re doing because they believe in it, and they’re passionate about it. Individual reporters and journalists, their view is not too narrow.

“I think the problem comes in that, the institutions they’re part of – the newspapers or the news organizations – are structured in a top-down way, where orders come from the top, individuals can’t make necessarily decisions on the fly, and that caused them to be somewhat narrow, or unable to pivot rapidly or in response to the community, that now has a voice in result of the internet.”

Although he is critic about the slow evolution of traditional media, Dave Cohn is not extreme in his opinions.

“I think a lot of times in this traditional or new media debate we cast things in black and white a little too often. It’s always more complicated than that.”

The future and some advice

For now, Spot.us is based in the San Francisco Bay area. But Dave Cohn is interested to expand his project to other regions and cities, like New York, Los Angeles or Seattle, while he is probing the acceptance the project might have in other countries.

“The web code application is open source, so if you want to use it and start it in your own country or in your own city, I would be so happy and honoured. I want people to take this, it’s open source for a reason, take it and use it in your own city.”

And to those who want to start their own ventures?

“Start small, start realistic, and iterate.”

He reinforces the idea that the true power is not in technology, but in people:

“Community trumps technology any day of the week.”

That is the true spirit behind Dave Cohn’s work. He leaves one final piece of advice, both for journalists and entrepreneurs:

“Be passionate.”

And he knows what he is talking about.

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Thanks to James Thornett for pointing out this wonderful tool. MapTube allows you to select any two or maps and combine them, so: “For example, to see a map of the London Underground overlayed on top of a map of population, go to the search page and enter the keywords “tube” and “population”. Then click on the two relevant maps to add them. They will be displayed when you click on “View”.”

Not only that, but you can add your own data and combine them with others too, something which the BBC – James’ employer – has done on user surveys on issues such as the credit crunch and anti-social behaviour.

If you manage to have a play, let me know how you get on.

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