Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for journalism. It can help fuel reporting, provide answers, and engage community participation. Jess Ramirez, who works as an engagement reporting fellow at ProPublica, lists the questions you can ask yourself when approaching an engagement project.
The German nonprofit news site Correctiv wanted to cover important issues — such as property ownership in German cities — that didn’t have accessible public data. So it created CrowdNewsroom, a platform that enables it to empower readers to contribute to investigations.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from February 25 to March 3 finds a @nytimes profile of its much admired data editor @amandacox; a flu tracker by @morgenpost; and a double dose of skepticism in @amandabee’s roundup of bad data interpretations and @albertocairo’s “How Charts Lie” book.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 16 to 22 finds @UpshotNYT confirming Nike’s claim that their Vaporflys really do give runners an advantage, @FinancialTimes visualizes Trump’s escalating trade war, Britain’s digital divide and introduces their new charting tool and @MilesMcBain makes some data journalists very happy by creating Datapasta.
De Correspondent has been tapping into the experience and expertise of its readers to build and research their stories. But instead of one-off engagements with their audience, they are reinventing their approach to the conventional rolodex: verifying their readers expertise and inviting them into conversations surrounding their stories.
Peter Gosselin at ProPublica has a very different investigative beat: Americans 60 years and older. More specifically: age discrimination and the treatment of older workers. Read how he recently exposed such practices at IBM by leveraging on crowdsourcing.
OpenStreetMap is the self-proclaimed Wikipedia of maps. It’s a free and open-source sketch of the globe, created by a volunteer pool that essentially crowdsources the map, tracing parts of the world that haven’t yet been logged. But despite its democratic aims, it’s still much like the mapping world overall — overwhelmingly dominated by male cartographers. That’s starting to change.
The creative use of social media has given journalists new ways to solicit tips as well as tap readers’ expertise, opinions and personal experiences. GIJN’s Toby McIntosh has rounded up some of the best examples of community engagement in stories as well as a list of resources and ideas for crowdsourcing.
There is power in a crowd, and harnessing crowd contributions have become increasingly useful in investigative journalism. New York-based ProPublica shows how newsrooms are integrating crowdsourcing as a routine reporting tool, using it for data collection and to connect with and gather personal stories from readers.
