What is Wikileaks? Conceived in 2007, Wikileaks has this year become a household name after a series of controversial publishings of confidential military and diplomatic documents. To be precise, its sensitive publishings are submitted by mostly anonymous sources; within its first 12 months it had already accumulated a database of more than 1.2 million documents.
on June 24th, 2009
Crowdsourcing News: The Guardian and MP expenses
I just got passed this article from Nieman Lab, which looks at the way in which the Guardian quickly built a system to allow a crowdsourced analysis of the recently released MP Expense Claims in the UK. Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents [...]
Everyone is weighing in on whats wrong with the publishing business model. Several potential solutions are being proposed, but all of them require a significant cutting of content-creation costs – especially investigative journalism. And yet everyone values the journalistic fact-checking and dirt-digging that keeps business leaders, organisations and government in check.