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Distributed reporting

11 comments on Distributed reporting

Distributed reporting

: Finally catching up with email and read a neat notion from Jay Rosen. He noted that Josh Marshall was getting his readers to call their representatives to see whether they had voted for the DeLay Rule since (a) the votes weren’t recorded and (b) the reps would be more likely to level with voters than with reporters. “Great example of blogging doing journalism one better,” says Jay. Right. It’s distributed reporting: The people do the digging.

I can imagine a score of stories where this would work: You ask your readers to call their congressmen to find out a stance and put together a chart (a wiki would work better for this than blog comments, by the way). You have your fellow bloggers each tell you whether the newspapers and TV and radio stations in their town covered a story you think is important and even have them all call the papers’ editors to ask why not. I think a lot of our open-space tax dollars are wasted on space nobody’d want anyway, so I could ask people to take pictures of stupid open space purchases near them. But it’s not restricted to bloggers alone: A smart reporter could start a blog and ask readers what’s happening in the communities they cover.

11 responses to “Distributed reporting”

  1. Ed Rusch Avatar
    Ed Rusch

    A smart reporter could start a blog and ask readers what’s happening in the communities they cover.
    An even smarter reporter — of which there are many more than you give credit for — haul their butts out of the office all the time and chat with folks important to their beat.
    Yeesh, Jeffo, you never worked as a daily beat reporter, did you?

  2. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Ed:
    Oh, I most certainly was. And I still think that the people — readers, users, whatever you want to call them — can get you to information you could not get on your own.
    For example…. I was an energy reporter during the ’70s oil embargo. Had online existed (a wonderful parallel-universe kind of question), I could have asked people for their stories of crowded gas stations and price gouging and such… It would have improved my reporting so I would not have been so dependent on the standard spokesmen.

  3. Jay Avatar
    Jay

    What Josh has done with the DeLay vote could, with some effort and I guess some investment, be the start of a citizen-media website where the behavior of all members of Congress can be tracked.
    People in their communities can simply (always politely but resolutely) be in constant contact with the office of their representatitives and post their votes, whereabouts and attendance. Let’s see who shows up for work, who they hang out with, how they vote and whether they’re doing their jobs.
    A site can be categorized by State, and within the State each district can follow the quality of work of their reps. Great come re-election time.
    The lazy and crooked members of Congress (and state and local governments) depend on their constituencies’ not following their actual day-to-day work, or lack thereof. With today’s technology and some participation at the local level, we can put an end to that.

  4. Mark Tapscott Avatar
    Mark Tapscott

    Exactly the kind of blog application that illustrates the (potentially) superior ability of the Blogosphere to “surround a story” – as a character says in one of the New York Times’ tv spots that run periodically here in the D.C. market – with a depth and credibility that is beyond the MSM. I think this approach will work on any action in government in which the participants or beneficiaries would rather keep things behind closed doors or otherwise off the record. It will be fascinating in coming years to see how the Blogosphere creates these new approaches to reporting.

  5. Ed Rusch Avatar
    Ed Rusch

    For example…. I was an energy reporter during the ’70s oil embargo. Had online existed (a wonderful parallel-universe kind of question), I could have asked people for their stories of crowded gas stations and price gouging and such… It would have improved my reporting so I would not have been so dependent on the standard spokesmen.
    Sounds like you made the choice to be dependent on the standard spokesmen. Those stories were out there; you needed to get out and find them. In the 1970s, it wasn’t exactly difficult to leave the office and find a gas station with long lines.

  6. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Ed:
    I absolutely did get out there.
    I worked in a gas station to understand what it was like on the other side of the lines.
    I toured refineries to understand why it took so damned long to pump out gas when supply increased.
    But STILL it is valuable to hear reports and facts from the people. A reporter can’t be everywhere and we should stop acting like we can. The public had eyes and ears too and why the hell shouldn’t we find the way to enable including what they see and hear? That is news.

  7. Charlie (Colorado) Avatar
    Charlie (Colorado)

    I’ll get excited about the DeLay rule — which, by the way, says “an indictment won’t require automatic removal, but instead will automatically require an outside committee to consider removal”, rather than what’s been reported — when the Democrats add a rule that requires removal on conviction, as with, eg, Jim McDermott.

  8. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    Exactly the kind of blog application that illustrates the (potentially) superior ability of the Blogosphere to “surround a story”
    I think a wiki-based medium is far superior to a typical blog in many cases. It allows for more collaboration on equal footing. Blogs can be too limiting becuase (a) I can’t actually start a thread at Buzzmachine, (b) The comments are linear, (c) If I want to “fact-check” Jeff I have to create my own blog and link to his entry, which only works if he and others actually go to my blog and read my response.

  9. Christopher Carfi Avatar
    Christopher Carfi

    I have a feeling the “distributed reporting” concept is just the beginning of this trend. see more examples

  10. Dexter Westbrook Avatar
    Dexter Westbrook

    Josh Marshall’s premise is flawed. Does he really believe a member of Congress would be more likely to lie to a journalist than to a constituent?
    If he does, he’s more naive than I thought.

  11. Dexter Westbrook Avatar
    Dexter Westbrook

    Yeah, distributed reporting! That’s the ticket! Take a bunch of stuff contributed by people you don’t know, whose identities you can’t verify, whose penchant for truth or lying is unknown, and publish it as if it were factual.
    Mr. Jarvis, your hypothetical reporter wouldn’t be smart. He/she would be incredibly stupid to do something like that.