This experiment of the Guardian’s and Neiman Lab’s succeeding review of it are incredible. It used to be almost unthinkable for newspapers to be this outwardly engaged with their audience, and today, it seems almost every news outlet out there is scrambling to get their audiences involved. Still, the Guardian stands out for the brashness of its approach: for making hundreds of thousands of pages of government expense documents available to the British public, and putting it on them to weed through the pages to come up with the story.
This is perhaps one of the boldest experiments I’ve seen so far in journalism, and it ranks up there with how reputable media organizations resorted to using amateur footage and street photography by civilian Iranians to tell the story of the Iranian election and the aftermath. My only qualm with it would be quality control. Dare we trust the wisdom of the crowds? Then again, even if it fails at what it originally set out to do — pore through all these documents more efficiently — it has already probably done more for the story than the Guardian’s editors could probably have hoped for at the start.
Filed under: journalism
