Crowdsourcing can be less complicated than people think and it is an asset very few newsrooms think about now. That is the experience of Marcelo Träsel, a journalist and lecturer on Digital Journalism at Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
His experience in data and his fight for transparency made him a well-known journalist in his homeland and also a whistleblower for corruption cases. Now he teaches some of his techniques and innovations to future journalists in one of Brazil’s most prestigious universities.Â
Mr Träsel gave “Interhacktives” some of his time to talk about how easy it can be to get to really helpful contacts by using very simple skills.
On the bottom you can watch a series of videos by “The Crowded Room,” made by a group of people who are very keen on crowdsourcing.
Marcelo Träsel
Not a lot of time ago, blogrolls would take you a long way into finding resources about pretty much anything. Of course Google is nice, but truth is no search engine can really match human skills in curation. Unfortunately, not many people seem to care about blogrolls anymore.
When I was researching for my PhD on Data-Driven Journalism in Brazilian newsrooms, a discovery struck me. That was the absence of a comprehensive database or any resources to list websites and weblogs according to different categories; visualizations, investigative techniques, CAR (Computer Assisted Reporting, very popular in the nineties) and other practices.
So I decided to start myself a list of weblogs and sites about data-driven journalism. You can see it here.
I soon realized it would be impossible to get all the resources alone. So crowdsourcing was the obvious answer to the problem. The list has been open for about three weeks now, and there are already more than 70 entries — seven times what we had at first. There is no spam at all in the list.
We often think about crowdsourcing in a gigantic fashion, with complex applications — excellent user experience, gamification (the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems), Amazon Web Services. But sometimes a simple spreadsheet hosted at Google Drive will do the job even more efficiently.
So, please, share your references, and let’s crowdsource a public domain database of websites and blogs on data-driven journalism. It is simpler than you think.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keo7H6gzDY&list=UUDjfQ1UKNizVFOD-reLm0EA”]
I am a journalist. But that is not my fault, I assure you. I am also from Sao Paulo, Brazil. That is probably my fault.