NYT and ProPublica seek $1 million to put news source docs online
ProPublica and NYT seek $1M to put everyone’s documents online (Nieman Lab)The pioneering investigative-reporting non-profit ProPublica and The New York Times are seeking $1 million from the Knight Foundation to launch an online repository of primary-source documents. The project could lead to greater information sharing among news organizations and their audience. As they put it in their grant application:
Documents are the foundation of investigative journalism, but today’s newsroom is a throwaway culture. Too often, reporters gather reams of information, do their stories, then chuck rich source documents into a dusty corner, never again to see the light of day.
The project, which is called DocumentCloud, would let news organizations upload their materials for public consumption and analysis. (”Readers will also be able to quickly search, annotate and bookmark documents — and for the first time link directly to specific pages or passages.”)
The proposal relies on a piece of software called DocViewer, which was developed by the Times’ Interactive Newsroom Technologies team. The head of that team, Aron Pilhofer, recently confirmed that the Times will release DocViewer as open source “sometime after the election.” Brian Boyer, the blogger who broke that news, said the software was created by the Times for its searchable database of Hillary Clinton’s 11,000-page public schedule as first lady, which was a journalistic marvel.
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That is a great new use of the internet.A real game changer. The USAF is changing some rules too. Should be interesting.
Gary Webb is rolling in his grave.
This sounds great on paper but it falls apart when you consider the details. Namely, the copyright implications would be massively restrictive. Public documents are largely (but not entirely) free of copyright restrictions but the vast majority of information is not. It may be marginally useful for public documents that are not otherwise available from the government but that's about it. Although news reporting helps bolster a fair use claim, it would be a big stretch to include all source documents. The financial resources that would be required to sort out copyright issues, even when a fair use claim is arguable, would make adding most source documents to such a repository too expensive. The result would be a niche repo for oddball government documents like a first lady's travel schedule.
First documents went the way of the dodo in the time when everyone got their information from secondary news corporations. I think this is one of the biggest boons to society which the internet will become in the long run. No longer will we be relying on someone else to tell us what happened, we will be able to see it the video/read the press release/etc. ourselves. It is these exact reasons why I still have the Saddam hanging vid stored somewhere - other than what the news and gov't tell us, this is the only proof we have that things happened like they said they did (and it's pretty grainy proof at that).
I've been enjoying ProPublica for a couple of weeks now.
pro publica is gr8! it is one of my daily webstops. non-partisan, just the facts.
I thought this might be a good spot to pimp my own submission: Albuquerque Food Shed News.