Are you interested in crowdsourcing but afraid to give away that scoop? No need to. This is a shopping spree for online sources at your –almost immediate- disposal:
Shopping Tip 1)If you want to find ‘vetted’ crowds by topic, try Media Giraffe. This US based site has listed details and/or profiles of 300 Giraffes, individuals who stand out from the crowd because they are knowledgeable about a wide variety of categorized topics.
Shopping Tip 2) If you want to get comments, intelligent opinions about foreign affairs, economics, the US Democrat party, Media, Culture, the US Supreme Court and Healthcare, go to TMPCafe’s discussion tables. The participants on this collaborative/distributed journalism platform are all profiled and tend to be authoritative people. They discuss and share information lavishly. You’ll find excellent sources here. If you quote comments on the tables make sure you attribute.
Shopping Tip 3) If you want comments on anything US or foreign affairs/Iraq war related, go to Daily Kos. Is similar to TMPCafe, and its diarists include President Jimmy Carter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, plus dozens of other senators, congressmen and governors. You can search topics and find diary posts, articles and comments on up to the minute news. If you want to interview someone, check that they list their details. You can also register yourself and put up issues for comment. Make sure you disclose your aims though.
Shopping Tip 4) For a wide variety of topics, try Meetup.com. It is a good site for finding people that share a passion for the most unexpected topics, from cars to investment clubs to witches, writers and obscure music-related stuff. Check if your beat is on the list. Even if a group doesn’t meet in your home town, you can still get in contact with participants.
Shopping Tip 5) If you need to find out about new European research issues relating to science, arts, technology, health, society and humanities, tryAlphaGalileo.com. On this platform, European research bodies publish their news to an audience of 6,000 media outlets, so the news is generally fresh. The site also publishes future calendar events in these categories. Plus you can also search for experts to interview, a feature for which you have to register.
For more tips on saving time by using general crowdsourcing platforms, read this blog’s recentarticle about this topic.
Still have doubts about the validity of your crowdsourced information?
Check that you generated it along the lines of wiki logic. Socialtext - a wiki provider, preaches the merits of a wiki structured product on its site as follows; “By encouraging broad participation in content collaboration, wikis do an effective job of tapping into the collective knowledge, insights, and creativity of communities of people both inside and outside an organization. The key benefit of this type of “crowd-sourcing” process is generally faster creation of higher-quality content. Information created in this manner tends to be more insightful and relevant than information created by fewer people, either an individual or a small team.”
This article on OJR shows how best to incorporate various new journalistic approaches into your reporting, from Open Source Reporting, to Distributed Reporting, Traditional Reporting to How to find story ideas.