Crowdsourcing Journalism

An element of NG's culture of participation is "crowdsourcing", outsourcing by open call a task traditionally performed by a specialist. It is a way to leverage the mass collaboration potential of online communities. The Fort Myers News-Press used this technique last fall to investigate large and unexplained increases in a local municipality's property tax assessments.; On the Media reports:

"The paper didn't just deploy a few reporters   . . . it also asked readers to get involved [and] information came pouring in, from assessment letters to blueprint analysis, to you name it.  "Sixty-five hundred different individuals in the community contributed information. On the second day of this project, we got an email from someone several states away who saw it on our website and said, did you know that an audit had been done and not released?" [said the executive editor] They posted the audit, whereupon all hell broke loose, immediately - and pretty much ever since. It's an ongoing investigative story, a collaboration between the professionals at the paper and citizen deputies documenting, so far, pending official investigations of malfeasance or worse, lack of oversight on a grand scale. It was also a textbook example of journalistic crowd-sourcing to produce a story the News-Press could never have gathered alone."