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Knight News Challenge 2009: Paul Bradshaw's Help Me Investigate.com

Posted: 13/11/08 By: Laura Oliver
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This year's Knight News Challenge, the competition which awards up to $5 million for innovative, community news projects, closed for entries on November 1 and 446 projects are open to scrutiny in the challenge's 'Garage' development space.

Journalism.co.uk caught up with one applicant, journalism lecturer and blogger Paul Bradshaw at this week's Society of Editors (SoE) conference, to ask about his proposal Help Me Investigate.com - an 'open source investigative journalism' platform for members of the public and journalists to pursue answers to local questions.

Bradshaw's Help Me Investigate, supported by social media consultant Nick Booth and web developer Stefan Lewandowski, is asking for $452,000 from the challenge.

"It's a platform for anyone, that includes journalists and also active members of the public, to propose something they want to investigate, to organise, to pursue it and then to report on it and repeat the process," Bradshaw told Journalism.co.uk.

"Investigative is a pretty heavy word: I'm not necessarily talking about digging through government files, I'm essentially talking about good, proper journalism, which is asking the question and then looking to find the answer."

The platform, which would be piloted in the Birmingham area, would help support journalists wishing to participate in investigative journalism on a local level, said Bradshaw.

"The advantage to a journalist is quite obvious. Most journalists don't have the resources to pursue investigations, they're processing content, so it's a way for a journalist to call for help," he said.

"It's also a way for journalists to see issues that are of interest to their community that they might otherwise have missed."

While journalists will be involved in the projects, Bradshaw said members of the public will be essential to making the process work, because of the different skills they can contribute.

"You take that process and then break it up and say we have a team of people who want to pursue this. Some of those might have research skills, fundraising skills, organisation skills, awareness-raising, contacts, video - it's about taking those skills and breaking it apart and letting people contribute in any way they can," he explained.

Bringing the offline, local community online is another crucial part of the plans, he added. A community manager for the site would fulfil this role by setting 'challenges' or ideas for how to pursue a question submitted by the public and going into the local area to get contributions and questions submitted.

Bradshaw said that while there were similarities between Help Me Investigate and last year's Knight Challenge winner community-funded news site Spot.us, there is a key difference: "Spot.us is about donating money, this is about people donating time."

"Spot.us got funding and it really helped me clarify the idea. Spot.us is single story focused and generally journalism driven," said Bradshaw.

"This [Help Me Investigate.com] has a lot of scope for failure and that's intentional: you might have 100 questions submitted to the site and only 10 per cent of those might get pursued.

"The web allows you to have that failure for free and that's one of things this is built on. One of the intentions is that people will use the site in different ways as they gain an idea of what works and what doesn't."

If successful, the pilot project and the platform could be opened up to other areas of the UK, said Bradshaw.

Here's Bradshaw's own video introduction to the project:

The full project proposal can be read at the Knight News Challenge Garage.

Got a story? Email our news team: Laura Oliver; Judith Townend or telephone +44 (0)1273 384290. You can also follow us on Twitter: @journalismnews / @LauraOliver / @JTownend.