ProPublica has launched the citizen-journalism portion of its operation, or at least the first iteration. By posting The Obama Team’s Disclosure Documents and asking readers to help figure out any potential conflicts of interest or other facts that are worth knowing, the site is doing what newspapers could have been doing years ago but haven’t bothered to do. This crowdsourcing follows key early journalistic adopters, notably Josh Marshall and his team at Talking Points Memo.
Amanda Michel is leading ProPublica’s citizen component. This is a great start.
on Apr 13th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
re: “the site is doing what newspapers could have been doing years ago but haven’t bothered to do.”
In theory, yes, hundreds of readers *could* outperform a handful of professionals.
In practice, this didn’t happen here. The follow-up report, based on input from 179 readers, for the most part uncovered that a few top staffers had loans to pay off.
The Times, meanwhile, through the reporting of Jeff Zeleny and Lousie Story, got the scoop on Summers’s involvement with D.E. Shaw.