When Citizen Journalism Doesn’t Steal Jobs
(flickr user kylemay)
We’ve been really interested in this ProPublica Adopt-A-Stimulus Project and others of its ilk. A while back, we sorta-kinda joked that it was a great project, but “citizen journalists are stealing our jobs.” That may be the case with other citizen projects, but the results are in from ProPublica’s “Stimulus Spot Check” and we have to say we may have erred on the side of snark in our last post.
Here’s what this project’s all about:
“ProPublica pulled a random sample of 520 of the roughly 6,000 approved projects to examine stimulus progress around the country. That sample is large enough to estimate national patterns with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent. ProPublica asked members of its reporting network to find out if states had advertised the projects, awarded contracts or actually started construction work.”
The citizen journalists in some cases drove to the sites to check up on the work; some of these places were fairly remote.
This is not something a journalist could reasonably do; we can’t think of a single newsroom that would pay a guy (or girl) to drive or fly to each of these 520 sites to see if, for example, Carbon, Wyoming has finished installing its deer underpass.
The resulting story, written by a Propublica editor using the raw data from its citizen journalists, puts all these numbers in context.
And as of yet, that Propublica editor, Amanda Michel, is, y’know, a paid oldschool journalist. Not to say that an unpaid volunteer couldn’t do the same thing, but so far that doesn’t appear to be PP’s goal.
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