Engaging Readers for Better Journalism

The best thing about growing CrowdVoice.org is being able to pay close attention to how stories are being told and ultimately re-angled in the media.

That gave us the idea of creating a platform enabling news consumers to offer journalists alternative viewpoints on existing stories. We wanted to find a way to encourage readers to share different perspectives on issues while also tracking mentions of these events across social media hubs to measure immediate momentum.

After we mocked it up, the idea started to look something like this — with a clear comparison of local vs. international coverage of stories:

At the bottom of each news item, readers were given a space to share their perspective:

We wanted to partner closely with journalists looking to expand their reporting repertoire; journalists would be able to sign up for alerts for specific issues of interest, providing them with access to a range of different viewpoints without much extra work.

Pairing journalists and readers served to fill out a more comprehensive snapshot of particular topics, while also driving further transparency and credibility within mainstream reporting. The project would encourage readers to stop taking news at face value and to become actively involved in the reporting process, thereby improving the quality of news and journalism on both a local and global level.

Enriching today’s mainstream reporting on social and political developments across the world is why we were eager to build something that could integrate users’ personal perspectives. In the new age of cost-cutting journalism, quality has become second to quantity as reporters move to be the first to snatch up the hottest buzz.

The oversaturated media market has resulted in many global and local stories falling to the wayside in favor of the day’s most clickable stories. We wanted to bridge the gap between journalists and readers to help create alternative narratives, regardless of a reader’s cache, an organization’s budget, or a specific point of view.

How it worked:

• The web application would chart various topics by tracking topic mentions on social media platforms, namely Twitter and YouTube, as a way to visualize the popularity of certain topics vs. the lack of coverage of others. Other sources would be introduced gradually, allowing users to further interact with the data.
• Stories would be categorized under “recent”, “under-covered”, and “covered” (meaning stories that are currently receiving international coverage). Each story would include a space for readers to share their input. Readers would be able to search through issues and see how various mainstream media organizations and local outlets cover each topic, and looking into how the world is reacting to it via social media.

The end result ended up looking like this — showing a quick overview of the topic’s social media traction at the bottom:

Everything you click expands to show more specific content or relevant feeds to give a user a thorough understanding of how each issue is being written about in local and international outlets, before adding a perspective or an “angle” that has yet to be explored.

As we started mapping this out, we realized it was a pretty massive undertaking and we didn’t have enough resources to handle all the data mining work necessary for its success. Though we could no longer maintain the project, its goals remain critical to improving today’s media. But we hope someone reading this will be inspired to try something similar.