Recruiting Shoe-Leather Volunteers
But can a call to action motivate the community to do some actual shoe-leather reporting? Wendy Norris, an investigative reporter and Knight Fellow working on web and mobile civic engagement applications at Stanford University, motivated a community to do just that with a simple tweet (shown below). Norris was investigating whether locking up condoms and keeping them stored in pharmacy shelves in Colorado was depressing purchases, especially those by younger people, who might be too embarrassed to ask a clerk for help.
Norris used Facebook and Twitter to recruit 17 volunteers to go to 64 stores in one week and find out whether the condoms were displayed freely on shelves across the state. When all was said and done, the distributed reporting actually disproved the rumors in the community. Social updates and e-mails from the field showed that condoms were stocked on open shelves in 63 of the stores canvassed. One of the stores did not sell condoms at all.
“The investigation was fun to report and a great public service," Norris said. "I've researched quite a few other stories using social media... But this was the most fun example of how it can work well for investigative reporting."
Norris outlines seven quick points that were key to her success:
1. Employ a sense of fun with the request.
2. Make the task discrete and easily accomplished.
3. Explain the purpose as a larger public service.
4. Set a reasonable time frame for task completion.
5. Allow volunteers to overlap tasks as built-in fact checking.
6. Provide immediate feedback to questions/responses and encourage retweets for additional recruitment.
7. Build public interest in, and anticipation for, the story.
Community-Sourced Mapping
There's a big difference between an audience and a community. Norris probably wouldn't have been able to convince a detached "audience" to go out and do some reporting, but because she had built a community, she was able to get them on board. It's not just about the tools journalists use, but the community they have already established and whether that community is a genuine one or just a crowd, said Rosen. Is the relationship you have with the community strong enough that community members are willing to participate with information, advice, feedback?
“It's similar to how we make a mistake if we look at the gross number of followers, because what really makes a difference is how densely inter-connected those people are,” Rosen said.
In Columbia, South Carolina, journalists of The State Media Company newsroom noticed something didn't smell right in their town. It wasn't corruption, but an actual stink that was permeating the air outside. Betsey Guzior, the features editor, decided to call on the community to help investigate the smell using an open Google Map.
“People were sharing tweets and Facebook posts, but this map let us own a different level of conversation,” Guzior said. The community helped narrow down the possibilities and the next day health officials pinpointed the source of the smell to land owned by a former city councilman.
TBD.com has been able to leverage its community during breaking news stories on several occasions, including using Twitter and Foursquare to get eyewitness info during the Discovery hostage situation. But the site has also taken advantage of social tools and mapping to investigate ongoing issues with the Metro. The site integrated Crowdmap, enabling the community to submit issues through a form, sending an e-mail or tweeting with the #tbdwmata hashtag. Mandy Jenkins, social media editor at TBD, said it has been an ongoing topic of the site's reporting.
Keeping the Powerful Accountable With Social Questions
Because the social web gives both citizenry and journalists access to officials and companies at the click of a mouse, social question and answer tools can be used to collaboratively investigate issues and keep powers accountable.
In the UK, Paul Bradshaw founded HelpMeInvestigate, a site in beta that enables users to start an investigation and invite others to collaborate on it. It often includes answers to questions that journalists wouldn't be interested in, but ones that people care about.
“It's primarily helped people investigate issues that otherwise wouldn't get investigated,” Bradshaw said. “It also connects people together around a cause that might otherwise not have connected and makes it easier for whistle blowers and inside sources to find people to pass information on to.”
And then there is the more recent example of Kommons, founded and built by Cody Brown, a recent NYU graduate, along with former classmate Kate Ray. Kommons is simple: You ask a question and get it answered. It's also built on the idea of keeping the powerful accountable by taking these questions out of private channels bringing them into a public forum, where those who answer must deal with the repercussions publicly.
The site is heavily integrated with Twitter, connecting questions to Twitter usernames. Other users on the site interested in the question can follow it for updates and contribute their own follow-ups, all of which are on the public record. “Kommons is designed to help more people ask questions, but we're also designed to help others easily find them later,” Brown said in answer to my question: “How do you see Kommons being used for investigative journalism?"
Kommons also leverages the community. Whether it's working for an established brand or having a credible personal brand, those things often come into play for journalists looking to get answers or their calls returned, Brown said. But most people don't work at The New York Times and they have to work a lot harder to get answers.
A Networked Newsroom
What if newsrooms were open to the public, where sources could drop in to give tips to reporters who are digging for a story? Social media opens it up virtually, and by building a networked community of sources on the social web, investigative journalists can get story leads they otherwise wouldn't have, and are able to report stories more quickly.
Robert Hernandez, an assistant professor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, said if journalists connect with their communities through the social web and encourage and engage in a dialogue, they'll be more likely to get tips for stories that are worth investigating. But it's all about the relationship.
"Social media has amplified our reach and network to increase the size of the of the crowd," Hernandez said. "Investigative reporters need to be committed to social media to build that brand, so that one day, the investment pays off.”
But perhaps the biggest challenge for many investigative journalists is opening up to the community in the first place. "Most investigative reporters are freaked out about sharing publicly what they are working on. They are convinced that the guy from the street will steal their story." Rosen said. "But if you can't tell people what you are working on, you cannot do any distributed reporting.”
Once you open up to that community, it takes time to build that relationship. "Social media tools are useful when you need a diverse range of knowledge, but you need an existing community to really use them well, too, and that takes time and understanding,” Bradshaw added.
The Investigative Network Effect
Having an open dialogue on social sites can encourage sources to come forward and build interest in the investigation and story. If you publicize the activity of an investigation while it is ongoing, Bradshaw said, it will help bring other potential sources with new information into the conversation. But sensitivity is the key.
“Don't use social media for the sake of it,” Bradshaw said. “It should be appropriate to the people involved and the objectives you're pursuing.”
If you're dealing with sensitive material or sources you want to protect, then you might want to deal with it offline, he said. But if you're doing a public investigation, the social web's network effect can give you a boost.
Paul Lewis, an investigative journalist for The Guardian, has demonstrated the value of the network effect in several investigations. He recently had to investigate the death of a deportee on a plane from the UK to Angola. It was suspicious because the guards that escort the deportees had been criticized for brutality in the past, Lewis said. To find witnesses of what took place on the flight, Lewis tweeted from his account, asking for anyone who was on the flight that saw what happened. He started a hashtag named after the victim, #jimmymubenga, and Lewis received several responses, including one from a man who was quite distraught in his reply.
“Could we have done that story five years ago? Probably not,” Lewis said. “Journalistically, it has opened up a whole new realm.”
Monitoring the Conversation and Sources
Though many people often joke about stalking their friends on Facebook to learn about new developments in their lives, journalists can take advantage of social search and monitoring tools to find relevant information and, in some cases, even keep up with officials' activity. Meghann Farnsworth, the distribution and online community manager for the Center for Investigative Reporting and California Watch said its reporters use Twitter to monitor government agencies, noting themes they may be emphasizing or subtle changes in policies that in reality may have a larger impact on the public.
“Our reporters can cite endless examples of key stories they caught swirling in the world of social media that may otherwise have been overlooked or were more difficult to effectively track in the past,” Farnsworth said. “For smaller investigative organizations like ours, these tools are indispensable.”
At The Washington Post, reporters are constantly on the look out for sources on social media or examples to use in their stories, said Mark Luckie, the national innovations editor. He said social tools make it much easier to connect to the community or get readers' input for a story.
“The collective wisdom on social media is far beyond the knowledge of the individual reporter or even the collective newsroom,” Luckie said.
There are many enterprise tools for monitoring conversations taking place on social media, such as Radian6 or Spredfast. But the web also offers many free and simple tools for easy social searching. Jenkins said many of TBD's staff members monitor the social web every day to follow up on questions or happenings around town.
“If I see a tweet come in, either directly to us or on a random keyword search, I can dig in and try lots of combinations to find more witnesses and more info,” Jenkins said. She also uses Facebook status searches at Openbook or Open Facebook to monitor news or dig for information. “If reporters aren't currently tapping into these two search types, they're missing out,” she said.
Creating a Transparent Process
When an in-depth investigative story is released, it often requires some transparent finessing from the journalist or editor to establish a sense of trust and credibility in the reporting process that took place, especially with controversial or sensitive topics. Social tools can help you have an open dialogue about the story after it is published, or, if created prior to its publishing, it can build some momentum as well.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, in its recent series on digital privacy, created a Twitter account that curates information from other sources on the topic and answers questions from readers. Because the series created a lot of conversation around the topic and took on criticism from media, this was a great way to help address readers' questions. The account was successful because it offered readers a destination for conversation around this topic, and even linked to pieces that criticized the series itself, creating great transparency.
Keeping an Eye on New Tools
Established social networks are great for finding sources and connecting dots more easily, “but journalists shouldn't wed themselves to a particular tool simply because it's popular at a given time," Farnsworth said. Perhaps the greater understanding comes from recognizing and reacting to the fact that the entire web is becoming social.
Tools with potential are cropping up all the time. For instance, Farnsworth said she's keeping a watch on the Appleseed Project, Diaspora and Storify to see what storytelling opportunities might arise there.
Storify is a curation tool in beta and invite-only that has generated buzz among journalists in the industry for enabling content producers to easily curate social content with context into an embeddable stream. So, what better way to tell Storify's story than by using the tool itself?
More Social Media Resources from Mashable:
- How News Organizations Are Generating Revenue From Social Media
- The Future of Social Media in Journalism
- 5 Most Engaged Brands in Social Media