Sure the Internet makes news faster, but it can also make your journalism better.
Over at Idea Lab, (a journalism professor and investigative reporter) just wrote a fascinating essay about how traditional tools of investigative journalism--databases, collected information and spreadsheets--can actually be shared with readers on the web.
When you are writing your next story, think of all the ways you can share your investigative work with your readers. Just last week I reported on judicial fundraising in New York state. Instead of keeping research to myself, I should have shared those fundraising calculations and spreadsheets with my readers in a spreadsheet so they could play with the numbers in their own districts.
Read this whole post, twice. It's packed with more resources:
"Taking long investigative projects written for newspapers or magazines or as TV/radio documentaries and then shoveling them online, perhaps dressed up with a little multimedia, is only jamming old media forms into a new media pipe. But understanding how to present data in an appealing way, and making that data accessible so people can mess around with it and create their own "stories," is taking advantage of what digital has to offer."
That is a great idea! Talk about a way to make citizen journalism more credit. Sharing your research is gives readers a way fact check and learn more from news than they would otherwise. I bet it would also encourage debate (although depending on the subject, that's not always a good thing).
Posted by: Kimberlee Morrison | February 19, 2008 3:00 PM | Permalink to Comment