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Trinity Mirror to launch crowd-sourcing project

Posted: 17/10/07 By: Oliver Luft

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Trinity Mirror Regionals is to launch a crowd-sourcing pilot project at one of its Liverpool newspaper titles.

Speaking at the Journalism Leaders Forum, at the University of Central Lancashire yesterday, Trinity Regionals editorial director, Neil Benson, told attendees the group was taking its first step into crowd sourcing with its 'Making the News' project.

Speaking over a telephone link Benson said the project had been inspired by US crowd sourcing site Assignment Zero.

The project will be piloted at the Liverpool Daily Post, he added, and would focus on experimenting with 'at least half-a-dozen' crowd-sourcing stories, looking at different subjects and aimed at different audiences.

"One of the audiences we will be looking at is a very general one, from the overall readership of the Liverpool Daily Post," he said.

"We will also be looking at a particular professional group who can help us with their specialist knowledge, in terms of an investigative story."

Benson, who did not outline when the project would see the light of day, added that they were looking to engage a large number of the paper's readers by asking them for their contributions to the, as yet, undisclosed story projects.

Over the course of the next year the Trinity Regionals group will enter a phase of greater experimentation with editorial products on its websites, Benson added, as he felt that development was not keeping pace with the web.

"The bigger issue for us is to get some of our journalists comfortable with the idea that this kind of contribution can be as important, or more important, than their own work," he said.

"One of the things we are keen on is changing the outlook in the newsroom and getting our journalists to behave more like radio producers and orchestrating the contributions that they get, getting away from the idea that they have to generate everything themselves from their own desktops."

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