After searching through the different winners of the Knight News Challenge, I came across an interesting project that won $250,000 in New York in 2009.
Gail Robinson, the creator of this project, created the Web site Councilpedia, which shows the various expenditures made by politicans in New York City. Now she hopes that people who have more time will go through and scrutinize every single expenditure that they received from people and organizations and where it goes.
Some questions she would like answered are “Did a candidate take money from a developer charged with building code violations? Click on that contribution and tell us. Does another council member introduce legislation at the beck and call of a particular union? Connect those dots for us.”
This is a super interesting way of going about finding any suspicious details about the transactions that your own politician makes. In fact, this is a way of crowd-sourcing – The Gotham Gazette will utilize these suspicious transactions found by regular people and can then use it for their own investigative piece. Journalism is changing in such a way that news is so immediate and timely that journalists lack the time to search through hours and hours of documents.
I think this is a great idea to allow others to do the work for you – they just have to really interested in the topic. This is basically what need this fills because it’s allowing journalists to work more on the quality of their current projects, while letting others with more time to do the research for a potential really great investigative piece on NY’s politicians.
Also, the Web site is really interesting in showing the exact details of where the politician went, where it is located, and how much they spent there. Any New York resident would probably want to see where the money is going anyways – to determine if the politicians on the right track in the politics world.
I think this ties to Tom Rosentiel’s speech about the Future of News and how his major theme is that journalism is more robust now than ever. People/readers are now allowed to comment, interact, discuss the news. In fact, they’re able to create their own news. He also mentioned that it was originally that it has gone from a “journalist as lecturer to the consumer as its own editor.” More people are able to investigate the news and find out for themselves what seems to more right and more credible versus suspicious and possibly wrong.
Gail Robinson explains that readers learn from “Gotham Gazette about coverage and context about campaign contributions and voting record.” But now, with Councilpedia, readers can see where exactly these campaign donations from people and organizations are going to. Oddly enough, it’s not surprising to see a bit of it going to salons or restaurants, such as Inez Dickens.
Councilpedia is an aggregation of all the expenditures made by politicians, Inez Dickens, John Liu and Bill de Blasio. The Web site is not very technical or established as there are only three politicians to investigate. Some of the Web site even seems like it’s unfinished. It’s not exactly aesthetically pleasing, but provides really good information on the politicians – when it’s finally found.
I think it would work if the Web site was changed up a bit (physically.) If it included more politicians and had links on the left for each politicians, then the information would be easy to find. Right now, it just says “Explore” underneath the introduction, which is incredibly obscure. After changing the physical Web site to look more appealing and easy to use, readers can better navigate the site.
Next, it is already known that a lot of New York citizens are highly interested in politics, which only means that they want to know more about the state’s politicians. If they’re able to scrounge up interesting or suspicious expenditures that their politicians made, they would feel rewarded if they were to see their suggestion appeared in the newspaper’s Politics news.
Overall, everyone wants to know that the money is being utilized in a fair way – The way money is spent can really tell you something about the character of someone.
Councilpedia is an interesting concept and certainly capitalizes on the crowd-sourcing trend. It could even lead to some great stories.
Nevertheless, it seems to be a project people will check out but not one in which many will participate. Right now the site and its direction are too vague to inspire enough readers to puzzle out what’s going on and what they’re expected to do.
It seems like a good idea to be able to track donations. It does sound like there may be similar databases to access this type of information already though.
Interesting concept behind this site. I love the name Councilpedia too. I’m eager to see whether it will expand its bank of politicians, as a mere three offers little to no variety.