Jumat, 23 Maret 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

How the rest of the world caught up to what C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb started in 1979

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 11:52 AM PDT

Don’t ask C-SPAN founder and outgoing CEO Brian Lamb about the future of journalism.

“I have no idea,” he told me. “None.”

What he knows is that technology has transformed journalism in a way that’s “magic,” and that the Internet has enabled individuals across the world to adopt the mentality he had when C-SPAN first hit the airwaves in 1979.

“The barrier when we started in 1979 was enormous,” Lamb says. “You had to ask permission to get in this business — of the people on Sixth Avenue in New York. If they didn’t want you in it, you didn’t get in the door. Nobody would hire me. I didn’t have the right pedigree. I didn’t go to the right schools.”

So Lamb, 70, built his own network, and did things his own way.

“Virtually every new venture it has undertaken has been in defiance of conventional broadcasting practices,” The New York Times wrote of the still-fledgling network in 1985.

C-SPAN has long been an early adopter, live streaming its content online before anybody else in the business, Lamb said. Earlier innovations that may now seem obvious include when C-SPAN began to take calls from listeners in 1980 (following the lead of trailblazers like Larry King, Lamb said) and the network’s decision to preserve rather than erase its recordings in 1987. That was also the year of the Iran-Contra hearings, which longtime C-SPAN fans often point to as the coverage that first drew them to the network. In 1988, C-SPAN enabled a presidential campaign to be “fully wired for sound” for the first time. The network was more ubiquitous than CNN that year, and it was still novel for a camera crew to follow a candidate (remember Pete du Pont?) into a Dunkin’ Donuts.

C-SPAN produced live, unprocessed coverage, and introduced the idea of reality TV before the genre warped into something that defied its name. Lamb’s approach and the direct access it gave the public to the nation’s halls of power made C-SPAN “the real miracle of television,” as Russell Baker put it in 1994. (Of course, the network has wrestled with issues tied to the government’s control of camera angles. Recall a young Newt Gingrich bellowing passionately to a House Chamber that was — unbeknownst to viewers — mostly empty. Then-Speaker Tip O’Neill famously called out Gingrich by ordering the cameras to pan across the chamber.)

In the mid 1990s, C-SPAN began live streaming online. In 2007, it changed its copyright policy to allow sharing and online posting of its videos. And in 2010, it posted its complete archive online (if you want to watch every second of original footage in the archive, it will take you more than 20 years straight — and counting). MSNBC host Rachel Maddow equated the move to “being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time.” Buzz-worthy video researcher Andrew Kaczynski calls the archive “incredible” for his political digging.

Three decades since the first C-SPAN broadcast, Lamb says the network’s central goal is the same: empower citizens, the people who pay for government, to track what’s happening to their money. But that doesn’t mean Lamb expects his network to stay the same.

“You can’t rest on your laurels in this business,” he says, “because this thing is flying with the new technologies.”

Here’s our lightly edited conversation.

Adrienne LaFrance: Broadly speaking, how have technological changes informed the way C-SPAN approaches its mission?
Brian Lamb: Our goal really hasn’t changed. The world has changed, as you well know. At the moment, we’ve added tweeting and Facebook and all that. We use our website to cover events when we don’t have room on our three channels. But basically our mission has always been the same, and we still live with that mission today.

If you had watched us in 1979, we’ve added a tremendous number of events — in the beginning it was just the House — but it really looks the same. Sometimes we get criticized for that, and sometimes we think maybe we should [upgrade]. People who watch us tend not to care about sets and stars.

LaFrance: Looking back to 1979, talk a bit about the equipment you were using at the time, and what was considered state-of-the-art.
Lamb: The first year we didn’t have any equipment. We owned a 1,000-character generator that we put names on a screen with. It was elementary. We tend in television to spend a lot of time and money on what things look like because it’s television. But we’re not what people define as television.

We happen to use the television medium; we also use the radio medium. The journalism for us is what we choose to cover. A lot of people don’t even consider that journalism. We are a primary-source network.

LaFrance: It seems as though when you launched, the idea of a primary-source network was radical, whereas now with the Internet and other technologies, the mainstream has caught up.
Lamb: It’s a frightening thing about getting older. You find yourself as a member of the establishment, which I never considered myself to be when all of this started. Technology has moved in a wonderful direction, meaning that people everywhere can now create events or programs or documentaries for almost no money.
LaFrance: One thing I’ve noticed in watching C-SPAN develop is the extent to which it has been an early adopter. For example, you offered free online streaming in — I think it was 1997.

Lamb: I’m 70, and most people here are 15 years younger than I am, and they started when they were 22. They’re all vice presidents now and they’ve always been early adopters. We can take a risk, and can always take a risk. We don’t have numbers to sell to anybody. The spirit of the place is to experiment. One of the more difficult things is when people stop experimenting.

We were the earliest people in this business to stream everything, and it was streamed free in the mid 1990s. There’s not a huge audience for this. It is serious information, and some days it’s not exciting at all.

One of the things in television is people can create their own thing and they have to create every day, they have to make it interesting. We are just there everyday. We created this archive back in 1987, 180,000 hours that’s available for free to anybody in this country or the world to see. For instance, what did Ronald Reagan look like and sound like? Instant access to it. The beauty of a place like this is we can innovate and change on a dime.

LaFrance: One could argue that the decision in 1987 to create that archive is as important as recording the material in the first place.
Lamb: I think you’re right about that. I remember how it started: I went out to my alma mater, Purdue University, and I asked to meet with some political science professors. I did not know what I was doing, I was just at the table saying, “You know this would be a great idea for this school to do, create an archive.” One guy sitting at the table by the name of Robert Browning decided he was going to try to do this. He’s the inventor of the archive. That was one individual coming up with an idea and making it happen. That’s often as it is.
LaFrance: I read an interview from 1999 in which you talked about the importance of the Internet but said that you yourself didn’t really use it. How about now?
Lamb: Every minute. I’m totally hooked into the Internet. I have an iPad. I don’t watch that much television, but I have the iPad to call up facts that I want to know about anybody from a musician to a political figure. It’s absolute magic. Today I don’t do Twitter or Facebook. I’m behind the curve. Part of the reason is there’s only so much time in the day. But we use [social media] here a lot. We use it to alert people to what we’re doing, we use it to support background material on events we want to have. And where is this all going? I have no idea. None.

LaFrance: Before you started C-SPAN, you worked in politics and public affairs for a bit. How did those years inform what you envisioned C-SPAN could be, and why it was needed?
Lamb: I did do that, and I did it in three different locations. I did it in the Johnson White House — I’ve never been a member of a party and never will be — and just got to see up close what was going on. And then I did it working for a United States senator [Peter Dominick, R-Colo.] and the most interesting part of that was to see how the networks — he was in the minority — so to see how the major networks treated the minority.

And then the next step was in the Nixon Office of Telecommunications Policy. I worked with — his full name was Clay Whitehead, and he was one of the great revolutionaries of all time when it came to changing television. He changed everything from the satellite use in this country to the breaking up of AT&T and the opportunity for people to make telephone calls that you never could under the old AT&T. It used to cost over a dollar a minute to call long distance! All of that changes with the policies he developed in those years. Watching that up close, it all added up for me to say there is more out there going on that the public can’t see and there ought to be a way to do it. A lot people would say now there’s too much.

LaFrance: Do you believe that?
Lamb: I do not. There can never be too much.
LaFrance: Last year there was an FCC report on the information needs of communities, and one of the recommendations was to create a network of state-level C-SPANs. I wonder what you think about that.

Lamb: There are already a number of state-level C-SPANs. Probably the most successful is in Pennsylvania and it’s a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week network. It’s run by the second person I ever hired here. He charges [cable operators] more per month than we do and he provides a service like no other, and he’s just gotten the Supreme Court to go on television there. My own opinion is if the rest of the country would follow his example, which is independent of the government, this kind of thing would be a bigger success. When you wait for the state to pay for it, it’s going to be a long wait.
LaFrance: We talked about C-SPAN as an early adopter, but is there a technology or innovation that, looking back, you now wish the network had adopted earlier?
Lamb: One of the great media innovators of all time has been Phil Donahue, and he’s not gotten the credit for a lot of stuff. The call-in. He was the first that I know of that did the faxes [reading on-air comments faxed in from viewers]. We thought at that time that this was the most magnificent, the most unbelievable thing.

All these things start somewhere. Talk radio started in small communities and moved to Larry King, and now talk radio and calls are everywhere. We’ve been among the first almost in every case to jump on new technology. We’ve been slow on high-definition, and that’s hurt us on some of the cable systems. We’re still behind. That’s something that we probably could have done quicker. In the early days people would say, “Why would you care?” The answer is, we don’t — except everybody else is doing it. People will not watch that one non-high-def channel. But information is information.

LaFrance: Is there any area of the political arena that you believe should be off-limits to a camera or microphone?
Lamb: Not really. Anything that happens in public should be on-limits. It’s our government. We pay for it. They all figure out funny little reasons why you can’t televise this and you can’t televise that, but if it wasn’t for the public, these places wouldn’t exist. The Supreme Court is the best example. You can’t walk into a justice’s office. They get an enormous amount of privacy, but it’s easy to put it on television without disrupting anything. They make decisions based on briefs filed. To think that television would spoil that seems to me to be off the mark.
LaFrance: You said that when it comes to the future of journalism you have no idea what’s to come. But what steps are you taking, and what steps must C-SPAN take, to remain viable in this changing media landscape?
Lamb: We have to be there in every medium. We have to constantly think about how we’re going to be paid for. We don’t have advertisements. Maybe in the future you have to, to survive. We don’t charge anything for access to our product on the web. Maybe that has to happen at some point. But up until now, the industry has been very supportive.

Who knows what the future is going to be? What we get a month compared to ESPN — we get about $0.06 and they get $7.00. The money part speaks more than anything as to what value people have supported. You can’t rest on your laurels in this business because this thing is flying with the new technologies.

LaFrance: Business implications aside, when you think about how fast it’s moving, what’s your first reaction, on an emotional level?
Lamb: My emotional reaction is I love what’s happening. I didn’t get in to this for any particular industry reason. I got into it for societal reasons because we just didn’t have enough openness. Now the opportunity to create is extraordinary. I watch old people, young people, people my age, creating things that they couldn’t imagine back in the days that I was growing up.

The thing that keeps this nation at all up to speed is creativity. In the television business, unlike the print businesses, it’s been isolated to just a few individuals, and that’s no longer true. You can create your own channel on YouTube and feed that every day. It’s magic.

In the end, you’ve got to keep your eye on who pays for it. There’s a lot of strange companies being created with a huge amount of power, and they’re all very nice today, but at some point Google won’t have the foothold it does toda. The same thing with Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. The bigger they get, the more I would be concerned, because in the end government doesn’t like people who overwhelm. That’s how we got here. ABC, NBC and CBS were too powerful and people’s creativity was being pushed out.

MIT’s Open Documentary Lab: part think tank, part incubator for filmmakers and hackers

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 10:37 AM PDT

Screen shot of 'Welcome to Pine Point' interactive documentary

Documentary filmmaking — the medium of Dziga Vertov! Richard Leacock! Werner Herzog! Errol Morris! — has struggled as much as any medium to find its place in the Internet age. Does the linear narrative have staying power in this crazy, mixed up, disaggregated world?

“There’s this perception that documentary is this staid medium,” said Sarah Wolozin, a longtime filmmaker and director of the new Open Documentary Lab at MIT. “It’s not. It is this place of innovation. And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers have lost their connection to that history.”

The Open Doc Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and academics together in a place that has been home to pioneers of direct cinema, interactive cinema, and French realism. For all the worrying we do about technology and platforms, the story — that atomic unit of human communication — does not seem to be going anywhere.

William Uricchio, director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a documentary scholar, is the Open Doc Lab’s principal investigator.

“MIT can be a very technocentric place — technodeterminist place, even. And we’re not that. I mean, we understand technology, we’re surrounded by colleagues who work with it, but we do bring a kind of humanistic entry,” Uricchio told me. “As much as it’s about pushing the envelope of the new…it’s also about finding ways to put the traditional documentary filmmaker into conversation to let them understand what the implications are.”

The Lab formally got underway this week with a day-long summit called “The New Arts of Documentary.” Afterward, I sat down with Uricchio and Wolozin for a brief but fascinating conversation about their work. An edited transcript is below.

Wolozin: I’ve been out at conferences, a year ago or two years ago, and you have this documentary filmmaker and then you have this technology world, with maybe people working in games, or on the web or data visualizations, and the documentary filmmakers don’t really know how to cross over. And I think that’s where we can step in [at MIT]…We often broker between the engineers and the humanists. That’s what we do. And so I think we can do that with narrative.
Uricchio: …As much as it’s about pushing the envelope of the new…it’s also about finding ways to put the traditional documentary filmmaker into conversation to let them understand what the implications are, to help them broker that space…

We have the legacy of direct cinema here with Leacock, Pincus, et al. We have the folks who are doing all the work in interactive cinema. Glorianna Davenport’s work has been superb there. And then MIT’s commitment to openness, open courseware, open software, open source code. We sit at the kind of intersection of those three elements.

Wolozin: Where we sit at CMS, we have the Center for Civic Media, so they’re right there, and we’re actually part of them. And we have the Media Lab…and then we have the Community Innovators Lab, which is — they have a long history of working in communities.
Uricchio: And Mobile Experience Lab, which is location-based storytelling.
Wolozin: And excellent data visualization.
Uricchio: Education Arcade, which is game-based…They did a project with the Smithsonian called “Vanished.” I don’t know, tens of thousands of kids working together basically trying to understand the environment and science within a fictional conceit that they’re in contact with the future somehow with this web portal. This web link that got out of control. That ran for eight weeks. I mean, it’s a remarkable achievement.

You were just at South by Southwest, and you said that “transmedia” was a buzzword there, where for us, I wouldn’t quite say it’s history, but it’s been around.

Phelps: And for someone reading a transcript of our conversation, what is transmedia?
Uricchio: Many things to many people!…The term actually has a lot of origins here…back from 2003 or 2004, with Henry Jenkins. And Henry’s understanding of it was having different elements of a narrative put in different media forms. So “The Matrix” would be a great example, where the films had material not contained in the graphic novels, which had material that was not contained on the website. And to really understand the universe, you’d have to kind of sniff it all out and move around those forms.
Wolozin: And then the other key part of transmedia is audience engagement and very much creating that interactive and that conversation with your audience that’s key to it.
Uricchio: And that’s one of the take-home lessons for documentary makers, that in the old days you’d have your thing on TV, and it would air once or maybe twice, and you got whatever audience you got. Or you might’ve tried to show it non-theatrically — good luck. Now you can put stuff on the web that leads people. It might even be outtakes or the peripheral stories to your main linear documentary…

All these become conduits that drive audiences to the main event. Or you can understand all of them as equivalent events. It’s actually a really old concept…Just look at a thing like institutionalized religions, and most of them have songs that are not prescribed in their bible, or whatever their main text is, and they might even have iconography, artifacts, behaviors that are all different and yet conduits to the main message of your system. So it’s a really ancient practice that we found a new language for.

Phelps: There’s a lot of discussion in journalism, obviously, about platforms. New platforms being created every day. And journalism organizations rightly being fearful of what these new platforms may bring. “Oh, well do I jump on this bandwagon now, or will it not matter in a year and I’ve wasted a lot of resources?” A year ago you might have looked at something like Pinterest and said, “This is just another startup.” And now, suddenly, it’s this massive website and it’s like, “Why weren’t you a part of it a year ago when it was starting up?”

I think that discussion came up tonight a little bit…[Sundance Film Festival senior programmer] Shari Frilot said it’s about the story. Conceptualize the story and then figure out the platform. But it’s easier said than done, when you’re talking about a business and a business plan.

Uricchio: [holding up a phone and a cup] One of our colleagues, Scot Osterweil, from the Education Arcade, said something today that I thought was great. It was an observation that if you watch little kids, they’ll take a cup and a phone, and they will begin to tell a story about what the cup said to the phone.

There’s a sense in which storytelling is really a deep part of our behavior — the way we relate to objects and experiences in the world. And it’s not that we have to wait for someone to tell them to us — it could be that we have to give people the building blocks and the tools to assemble and make sense of their own thinking.

Now, I think a lot of us probably unlearn. It could be it’s a developmental phase and we grow out of it; that would be tragic. Or it could be that we abandon ourselves to better storytellers. Or we’re just lazy. But it’s interesting, I think, what some of these documentaries are doing — some amount of interactive cinema, certainly games, some of them are very much about giving users the tools to tell their own stories.

We just had a game that’s done quite well called Snow Field. You wander around, it’s World War I, desolate, after the battle, burned-out landscape with a few things that you find, and your job is to basically entertain yourself and tell a story. … And it’s been getting terrific reviews.

Wolozin: I would say that storytelling is fundamental to human nature, your whole life. I think people are always telling the stories, I just think now we can create the campfire again because we have the Internet, because we can actually have a way to listen to other people’s stories that we didn’t have before. Before it would happen in a living room. Now it can happen in a virtual living room.
Phelps: So what do you tell the budding documentarian who says, “I want an audience for my story. What do I do? I don’t know where to begin. I know about the linear form. I can create a seven-minute piece of film. But how do I get it in front of people?”
Uricchio: Look at “Kony 2012.” And for all the problems and serious problems with that, they got 100 million-plus viewers in two weeks. And 20 million bucks or whatever. Now they were using social media tools…
Wolozin:…And they were very well funded.
Uricchio: …They’re well-funded, they’re well-rehearsed…
Phelps: But they’ve also been doing this for 10, 12 years and haven’t ever gotten any traction until now.
Uricchio: Well, they’ve been building, they’ve been learning. But that’s a hell of a learning curve.
Wolozin: They never got this kind of traction, but they’ve been working grassroots with Christian communities for, yeah, 10 years, and building that community, so that when they actually went viral, they already had this huge community…

Just as you’re building your story and building your idea, you’re building your audience at the same time. So that’s the difference between linear documentary, where you used to make your story and then put it out there. It’s not like that anymore. You start from the beginning, building your audience — it’s iterative from the beginning — having them work with you, impact you, help you build it, help you spread it.

Phelps: Storytelling as a process.
Uricchio: One of the great affordances of this interactive online stuff is that you can sort of see how people are using it, see where the stumbling blocks are, see where the barriers are, and rebuild. And it’s not a problem. Whereas with the linear, once that’s out in the world, it’s sink or swim.
Wolozin: When I worked in documentary, you didn’t show it to anyone till you were ready. I mean, no one. And here it’s a whole completely different world, where people put it up there right at the beginning. And not only do you see it, you influence it.
Urrichio: And I’ve been seeing this with dissertations. Dissertations on this topic — for example, on new directions in documentary — are, every piece of a chapter is popping up as a blog, and they’re getting a lot of responses and smoothing…It’s a really crowdsourced Ph.D. at the end of the day.

Broadcasters don’t want to put campaign ad data online, so ProPublica pitches work-around

Posted: 22 Mar 2012 07:18 AM PDT

Earlier this year, when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a multimillion-dollar television ad blitz for (and against) candidates running for federal office, I wanted to know how much it spent to broadcast ads supporting a U.S. Senate candidate in Hawaii.

A spokesman for the Chamber wouldn’t provide the figure directly, but it’s the kind of information that’s public two times over: You can get it from the Federal Election Commission or the Federal Communications Commission. My options:

1. Wait months for the next round of campaign finance reports to be filed, and get the data from the FEC then; or

2. Fly 5,000 miles Hawaii to physically walk into local TV stations and request the “public file,” which includes FCC-mandated information about the campaign ads that candidates and groups buy.

Maybe you’re thinking there has to be a better way.

The FCC thought so, too, when it proposed requiring stations to post their public files online. But the National Association of Broadcasters pushed back, saying the new rules would be “very burdensome” to local stations, especially during election season when such files are frequently updated. The NAB went so far as to say it doubted “many if any” members of the public would choose to access such information online. (There’s also a potential financial interest for stations; in comments to the FCC, the association expressed concerns about requiring the television industry to upload “potentially hundreds of thousands of pages containing commercially sensitive information, such as rate information.”)

It’s still up in the air. All this as the 2012 election season rolls on, and into the uncharted super PAC-fueled reality wrought by Citizens United.

The only way

So ProPublica decided that reporters and citizens should take matters into their own hands. Instead of waiting for broadcasters and the FCC to figure things out, ProPublica is crowdsourcing a nationwide effort to collect the public files that trace the money spent on televised campaign ads: “If TV Stations Won’t Post Their Data on Political Ads, We Will,” the headline read.

“We,” in this case, means anybody who’s willing to help. As of 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, 74 people from 49 television markets — in 32 states and the District of Columbia — had volunteered to join the project.

“While [the information] is public, it’s not really accessible in an easy way for people, so we saw a crowdsourcing opportunity,” ProPublica social media editor Daniel Victor told me. “The only way to get this information is to crowdsource it.”

But just because crowdsourcing could work when traditional reporting isn’t a viable option doesn’t mean that it will. In 2009, for example, ProPublica acknowledged how difficult its Stimulus Spot Check public reporting assignment was. When Amanda Michel, then ProPublica’s director of distributed reporting, introduced that project — which was designed to track state-by-state stimulus spending — she called it ambitious but “doable.”

“All you need to do is rummage around on the state's Department of Transportation Web site and make several follow up-calls over the next week,” she wrote at the time.

That proved to be an understatement. Tracking contracts between local governments and contractors can be a difficult task even for seasoned reporters. In a report released earlier this month, the consumer group U.S. PIRG found that only one state — Illinois — keeps online information about the projected and actual benefits created from economic development subsidies. Only six state government websites post contracts between vendors and the state, the group said.

“We want to make sure we’re not asking people to assemble mountains and mountains of papers.”

In a 2009 interview with Poynter, Michel said that ProPublica ended up learning just as much about citizens’ access to information in different states as it learned about stimulus spending.

ProPublica was still able to collect data, and to provide a snapshot of various stimulus projects in states across the country. But it was a lesson on what Jeff Howe, ex-Nieman Fellow and author of Crowdsourcing, called the sixth rule of successful crowdsourcing: “Keep it simple, break it down — give the crowd something each individual can work on, yet can aggregate into something great.” Some of the site’s other crowdsourcing collaborations have been more straightforward (like calling a member of Congress to get her or his position on a piece of legislation), and ProPublica has earned acclaim for the distributed reporting projects it conducts under the ProPublica Reporting Network banner.

One recent example was the site’s project to determine where members of Congress stood on the controversial SOPA and PIPA legislation that aimed to curb Internet piracy but caused a public outcry over how the bills might stymie free speech. These kinds of undertakings are valuable not just to the public but to reporters in regional newsrooms who can mine state-specific data to localize a story. (ProPublica took another step in that direction with the Wednesday announcement of a partnership with Digital First Media that will give MediaNews Group and Journal Register newspapers pre-publication access to ProPublica news apps so that reporters can use it to write local stories.)

Similarly, Victor says he hopes the latest crowdsourcing project will produce enough good data for a collection that local reporters can tap for regional coverage. The tricky thing about journalistic collaborations with the public is that you never know what you’re going to get. That’s true, too, in professional reporting, but with crowdsourcing you’re potentially dealing with data on a larger scale.

Deciding when to crowdsource

To determine whether crowdsourcing was the way to go this time around, ProPublica first conducted a small experiment. The site enlisted a team of graduate students from Northwestern’s Medill journalism school to request public files from Chicago-area stations. Here’s how Victor explains it on the site:

For our experiment, we asked our Chicago volunteers to check on spending by five super PACs that individually support Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. There were no records of spending in Chicago by four of them, but Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC, advertised on all five stations. The super PAC paid the five stations about $800,000 in the past month.

Now, ProPublica wants help getting the same kind of data from TV stations across the country. For this to work they’ll need help from more people — journalism students, professional reporters and anyone else who’s willing. For now, the focus will remain on money paying for ads related to the presidential race rather than state or local races. (“I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to anything, but initially presidential, because it would get out of hand fast,” Victor said. “We want to make sure we’re not asking people to assemble mountains and mountains of papers.” Keep is simple, break it down.)

At one point in the project planning, Victor says ProPublica considered having people text message line-item data from public files to the site. But that seemed both unnecessarily complicated and risky, introducing the possibility of errors while also eliminating the possibility of sharing the reports themselves. Properly framing a project — from the scope of data involved to the steps necessary to obtain and share it — is key to an effective crowdsourcing effort. Ultimately, Victor says volunteers need to feel like they are actually accomplishing something.

“There is very, very much value added. If we're getting all this great data, they know we have this great reporter who can write great stories."

“I really focus on the personal incentive,” Victor said. “My big concern with this particular project is will this be too difficult? Are they going to get to the office and be totally frustrated?”

So before even asking Medill students for help, Victor personally went to five TV stations in three states. He says he found slight variations in forms that stations used, but getting the data was straightforward and required little time. A small sample size, sure, but Victor’s personal experience was encouraging enough to email Medill to ask for help. (Victor says he also experimented with posting a Facebook message only visible in Illinois to see how many volunteers the request would yield, but that only a handful of people responded.) When the test run with grad students went “swimmingly,” ProPublica decided that it was time to make the open call to the public at large.

“It has to be presented as: ‘You’re not doing our work for us — you’re doing work that will enable us to do great work,’” Victor said. “There is very, very much value added. If we’re getting all this great data, they know we have this great reporter who can write great stories.” ProPublica reporter Kim Barker, news apps developer Al Shaw, and Victor will be among those working on the data and the stories that result from them.

Some elements of the project are still up in the air. Will volunteers all be able to scan-and-email the documents, or will some have to resort to other means of transmission? How often will volunteers be expected or asked to check in at stations? (Victor: “If we build up an energized group that wants to do weekly checks in every market in the U.S., wonderful. If targeted efforts in specific markets at specific times works better, that’s fine too. No way to know yet.”)

The kind of scoops on Victor’s wish list would require comparing information from public files with FEC reports to see if there are advertisers who aren’t complying with campaign finance disclosures, for example.

“There are certain tasks that you do need a reporter for and there are certain tasks that you do not need a professional reporter for,” Victor said. “Sometimes you’re talking to a relatively smaller community that is already passionate about that issue. Sometimes that community doesn’t exist and you need to create it, which is something I think we can do.”

(If you’d like to help out at your local TV station, click here to sign up for the ProPublica Political Advertising Project.)
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