June 22, 2009
The British news site asks its users to help it examine thousands upon thousands of pages of expense reports of members of Parliament.
The Guardian is conducting a massive crowdsourcing experiment that invites users to help it investigate nearly a half million pages of expense reports and documentation submitted by members of the British Parliament.
The instructions are simple:
You’re amply justifying our hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others - perhaps you? - are still using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.
Some pages will be covering letters, or claim forms for office stationery. But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked “investigate this!” and we’ll take a closer look.
How to get involved:
Step 1: Find a document
Step 2: Decide what kind of thing it is and whether it’s interesting
Step 3: Copy out any individual entries
Step 4: Make any specific observations about why a claim deserves further scrutiny
Examples of things to look out for: food bills, repeated claims for less than £250 (the limit for claims not backed up by a receipt), and rejected claims”
And the results are starting to show. Readers who combed through nearly 100,000 of 457153 pages of documents in the first two days of the experiment were turning up numerous questionable expenses or documentation.
The effort may not turn up any major fraud. But it’s a great way to engage a community as watchdogs and to increase awareness of how lawmakers spend public money. I bet the MPs will be more careful with their expenses if they know someone will actually look at them - and be able to post about them on the Web.
Could this be a model for local news organizations in the United States? Government expense reports, bids and contracts, and political contributions all seem ripe for crowdsourced scrutiny. The key may be to find a way to engage people with limited time in something that will end up worthwhile.
What’s your idea for a crowdsourced investigation in your community?
By Michele McLellan, 06/22/09 at 2:08 am
Posted in Audience development | Interactivity | Emerging roles and jobs
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June 09, 2009
Paul Gillin sees big opportunities for traditional news organizations to play a critical role in the new media ecosystem
What are three critical ingredients of successful social media projects for traditional news organizations? I’ve asked faculty of Knight Digital Media’s “Using Social Media to Build Audience” class to offer their lists.
Here’s social media marketing expert Paul Gillin:
- Inclusion. News organizations must realize “You’re not the oracle any more. You are part of a community and a critical, central part of a community of information providers that include people form all walks of life,” Gillin says. “A lot of people have news to publish these days. And your role, increasingly the vital role of news organizations is to assimilate the information they are contributing ... Nad to realize to… so you need to include a lot of different voices in what you’re doing and reposition your role as being the one who makes sense of it all.”
- Aggregation.“We an’t afford to be too tied to our own original content any more as the be all and end all. There’s lot of good content out here and the value that we can provide to our audience is to point them to the best content. .. We’ve gone from an information desert to an information deluge and the role of media organizations, a very critical one, will be to aggregate lots of options, lots of observations, first hand accounts, analyses, the stories told by people who are players in the news and to form a holistic picture of what happened based upon this very rich and these multiple sources of information.
- Engagement. The key to engagement, Gillin says, is “playing to people’s particular interests. So the special interests that they have in what’s going on in their town, on their block, in their school system, in their local businesses, at the chamber of commerce, in the park system, in their local museums, that’s what gets people really excited, that which touches them at a very personal level.” And today, online groups and other digital tools offer the capacity to gather people of like interests like never before.
What’s on your list of critical ingredients for creating communities online? Please share your ideas in the comments.
Here’s a full podcast of Gillin’s remarks. I’ll have additional installments from JD Lasica and Amy Gahran coming up.
Gillin also will be presenting the third and final installment of the KDMC/NewsU Webinar series on social media and building audience next week. “New Revenue for News Organizations” will air Tuesday, June 16 at 2 p.m. Eastern. Gillin will discuss ways that publisherrs can diversify their revenue sources, including highly localized advertising, information services, demographic editions and alternative delivery mechanisms such as audio, video and mobile devices. You can register here.
By Michele McLellan, 06/09/09 at 3:44 am
Posted in 09 Class: Using Social Media to Build Audience | Interactivity | Social Networks
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May 25, 2009
Steve Yelvington drafts an excellent list of features for topics pages on your news site
In “A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)”, Steve Yelvington looks at the two major groups of users for news Web sites: The far flung occasional users who may visit once or twice a month and the loyalists who visit 20 times or more per month.
Yelvington journalistic prescriptions for serving each group.
The occasional users need topics pages, and Yelvington has this nifty list of features:
The topics page is the piece that offers the greatest opportunity to connect with the big circle. A good topics page has several obvious components:
1. An editorially crafted synopsis. Who/what is this about? Why should I care? You won’t get the answers by throwing together a link barn and calling it a day. This is where a reporter’s expertise pays off.
2. Images, maps, or infographics. A picture is worth a thousand words, so choose the best that help a casual visitor understand the framework surrounding a story.
3. Links to Web resources. Be part of the Web, not just on the Web.
4. Links to conversation. If this is significant, won’t people be talking about it? Where do I find them?
5. Links to multimedia components.
6. Links to incremental coverage. Let the drill-down begin.
7. Who covers this topic? How can I reach this person?
Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too.
And there is more for the loyalists: the beat blog.
The beat blog focuses on the small circle, offering speed, depth and conversation among the reporter and people with high interest in the subject matter. While regular users are the primary beneficiaries, there is a secondary benefit to the casual user: the reporter gets better at his or her job. Better leads, better feedback, better ideas can lead to more interesting journalism.
By Michele McLellan, 05/25/09 at 6:22 am
Posted in Audience development | Blogging | Interactivity | Structure and Workflow
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May 11, 2009
A Webinar with JD Lasica and more sites to explore are featured this week in KDMC’s class on social networks for news organizations
This is a busy week for the KDMC class, “Using Social Media to Build Audience.”
On Tuesday, social media pioneer JD Lasica presents a Webinar, “Social Networks: Engaging Users with News,” that explores how news organizations are using social media tools on their Web sites. It’s not too late to sign up at News University. The Webinar starts at 2 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday and will last about one hour. We hope to have time for a few questions at the end.
JD also chose five sites for class participants to explore this week. Here are his picks:
NEWWEST - This site, covering the Rocky Mountain West and run by Jonathan Weber, former editor of the Industry Standard, is setting the bar for innovative journalism for organizations with few resources. News managers hold training workshops as a supplemental revenue source. You won’t find the phrase “citizen journalism” here, but they regularly engage readers throughout the site, including a Flickr photo gallery.
POLITICO - This startup took the political mediasphere by storm last year with scoops, smart analysis, a lean staff, clean design, use of video on the front page, and a fair amount of mirth and opinion. Blogs and polls are front and center.
TECHCRUNCH - This upstart has supplanted the San Jose Mercury News and CNET as the go-to place for all things tech. The vibrant comments on each article, where the authors mix it up with readers, are a good starting point for conversation.
APPSFORDEMOCRACY - This is a great site for seeing the creative technological ferment bubbling up from the grassroots. See if any of the proposed projects resonate with you and your staff.
HURRICANE INFORMATION CENTER - This Ning site, developed by NPR’s Andy Carvin and dozens of readers over the course of a weekend, is now a permanent site that serves a singular function well. Carvin is now looking into whether such projects can be engineered at a local level. (Note: Ning is a free social application.)
By Michele McLellan, 05/11/09 at 1:16 am
Posted in 09 Class: Using Social Media to Build Audience | Audience development | Interactivity | Social Networks
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