Crowdsourcing the news: Help a reporter out

 Posted by on 29 June 2009  Modern Life
Jun 292009
 

Now this is an intriguing idea for a web-service: Help a Reporter Out. From the site’s description:

Each day, you’ll receive up to three emails, each with anywhere from 15-30 queries per email. They’ll all be labeled with [shankman.com] in the subject line, for easy filtering. If you see a query you can answer, go for it! HelpAReporter.com really is that simple.

I built this list because a lot of my friends are reporters, and they call me all the time for sources. Rather than go through my contact lists each time, I figured I could push the requests out to people who actually have something to say.

…

This is really the only thing I ask: By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you’ll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn’t send the response.

In the end, we could probably all stand to do this a bit more, huh?

I sent it out to some of my journalist co-workers, because I think it could be a useful service. Of course, I’d be skeptical of any individual source, but somewhat like Wikipedia, I’ll bet if you were looking for a consensus on something, this could be a fast way to poll a few dozen people who consider themselves experts in the area.

Grant Hamilton

  • http://www.helpareporter.com Peter Shankman

    Thanks for the post – We’re about 15 months old now, and well over 100,000 sources. We’ve actually become the largest source repository for journalists on the Internet.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    Thanks for noticing — and thanks for the site’s conception and execution, by the way!

    I appreciate the fact that you’re keeping it free, and also that you promote a “don’t be a jerk” philosophy. If you come back ;) I’d be interested in your thoughts on how to weed out astroturfing and FUD if it does appear.

    Your site is probably at the sweet spot right now, where it’s large enough to be useful, but still small enough to be made up of genuine people, and not spammers and trolls.

    Any ideas on keeping it manageable by breaking it down via subject area, or instituting a “reliability” or “trustiness” meter on contributors?