Crowd sourcing helps a journalist tackle a big story

Joshua Micah Marshall made news in the blogosphere today. The founder of the popular political blog Talking Points Memo, he won a George Polk Award for legal reporting on the firing of eight United States attorneys— reporting that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.” Talking Points Memo is the first Internet-only news operation to receive the Polk, but to me that’s not the big news. It’s the new model of online reporting that underlies Marshall’s achievement.

Talking Points Memo directly involves its readers in its reporting: thousands of readers contributed information to the coverage of the U.S. attorneys story. Dan Kennedy, a media critic who teaches at Northeastern University, calls this, a different kind of journalism, based on the idea that my readers know more than I do.”

That’s my plan too. I’m a generalist; I know you know more than I do about different aspects of my very broad topic. I hope to use this blog to tap into all kinds of knowledge (though, unlike Marshall, I promise not to ask any of you to wade through Bush administration documents on my behalf). And I think that by working together we, too, can open some eyes and change some policies.

2 thoughts on “Crowd sourcing helps a journalist tackle a big story

  1. Ashton: I turned 79 yesterday and although I have a year to go to qualify as content for your book, i have an idea for the book that may interest you.

    I have been working with a number of talented visual “interpreters” who create “murals” in real time as people speak or from recordings – and these murals are then postproduced to serve as graphical interfaces to selected clips of the speaker”s audio or video recordings.

    Here is a rough example:Thoughts Illustrated: MuralCasting – Improving ROA (Return on attention)

    If you are interested contact me at the email address provided.

    1. I think you have a great page here? today was my first time coming here.. I just happened to find it doing a google search. anyway, good post.. I?ll be bookmarking this page for sure.

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