ReporTwitters Blog

Crowdsourcing tools are a lot of fun to visit, but a lot of time will have passed by the time you’re done researching which ones are interesting to use for reporting.

Tips For Efficient use:
Crowdrules.com has a dedicated politics section which you can browse.The question Let’s find the best Barack Obama videos on YouTube yielded various responses. How President Bush was doing was less popular: just one reply. Another question ‘The Next President?’ was most popular on the site this week.
Don’t hold out too much hope for getting answers to complex issues.

Newassignment.net. Way heavier in appearance is the initiative led by a major figurehead in citizen reporting, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. Newassignment recently completed its first major project. Together with a large number of citizens, Assignment Zero tested various aspects of citizen journalism, most notably the ability of series of people working together on fact collating and checking issues. On its site citizens compiled information about and interviews with operators of over 80 crowdsourcing platforms, specialising in various issues ranging from people ganging up together to achieve low prices in shops to government initiatives for obtaining opinions to crowdsourcing secret policies of the US government (!) The project was an experimental way of researching, which was extremely well organized and edited. Punch Cntl F on your computer, enter a searchword and find the US crowdsourcing site you are after.

Yoosk.co.uk: Is a UK startup crowdsourcer. It is very well structured and its supervisors have a keen sense of judgement. It lets crowds vote, but sound journalistic fundamentals at work here. Even though it has just started and voter numbers are low, the questions are sometimes asked after only 3 people vote to make up for that. What’s more, these guys encourage journalist questions. Keith there told us that they employ freelance journalists to make appointments with high profile people that citizens or journalists ask questions to. ReporTwitter’s quest into what European consumers get to know (or not) about cloned meat, is listed there too.

Profnet
You can request interviews with experts on a wide range of topics. Schedule an appointment with that really authoritative professor on micro biology but be prepared to wait two days before you are interviewing. You must also be prepared to answer questions from the site’s editors about your queries.

Expertsources Once you have registered, you can search for expert sources by keyword. Very useful for finding people that have committed to talk to journos. You can find just about any expert on any topic and get a response in a matter of minutes.

Mechanical Turk. Amazon’s tedious tasks site. Search under a keyword and see if you drop lucky. This is also a great idea to get thousands of facts scanned in a matter of hours; the volunteers are simply lining up to read emails, look for clue words, count facts etc. Many people work free or for next to nothing.

Skype Perform a searchword on the directory and find registered experts on just about any topic. If you find that there are numerous experts, put up a hit at Mechanical Turk. Some Skype experts charge a fee though.

Media with more money to spend use other technologies that match issues with people and sometimes come up with great ideas. A good example is CNN and YouTube’s collaboration hosting a presidential debate in which citizens used YouTube to ask questions.