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Q&A: Hyperlocal voting for stories at The Patriot-News

Posted: 10/03/09 By: Judith Townend

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Daniel Victor, a reporter at The Patriot-News, a newspaper based in Central Pennsylvania and online at PennLive.com, has turned to his readers for ideas with the launch of Central PA NewsVote. Readers pitch stories to Victor via the comments section of his blog posts; they then vote on which ideas they like best via an online poll; whichever one gets the most votes, he does. Journalism.co.uk asked him how he plans to make this attempt at crowd-sourcing journalism work, and why. Victor will also be charting his successes via his personal blog, ByDanielVictor.com.

So what is Central PA NewsVote, in more detail?
[DV] Central PA NewsVote asks readers to submit their story ideas through the comments on a blog, sifts through them for the best handful of ideas, then puts them in poll form. Readers decide which one they like best, and that's the one I'm assigned to.

They don't have unlimited control. This is meant for community news and features, not investigative or municipal reporting. We still have plenty of other reporters for that. This is intended to be a way of finding the next-door stories that we haven't been finding.

It came about because we were restructuring our newsroom after buyouts, and the bosses decided to create three 'mojo' positions. Two would be cops-based, one would be features-based, and I tried to envisage how I'd go about finding all those features. I figured it was all about creating a better pipeline for story ideas from readers, and this seemed like the best way to do it.

It's been likened to Spot.Us, the Knight News Challenge funded initiative - is that a fair comparison?
Only in the sense that Spot.Us has demonstrated how important it is to experiment. I admire the heck out of what David Cohn is doing, but this wasn't modelled directly after it.

There's a much different level of investment between my audience and the Spot.Us audience, and they're pitching far different stories. And my blog is financially backed by an established news organisation, while he's figured out a way to operate outside of one.

What we do have in common, though, is an acknowledgment that democracy and reader involvement has a place in the news process. Our missions are similar, but I think we'll learn different lessons from the two ideas.

Did you get support from your editors, and did they need persuading of its economic viability as a scheme?
I walked into the corner office, told the editor my idea and he was very receptive to it. I followed up with pitches to my more immediate editors, who were supportive as long as I could produce consistent stories for the print product, which I assured them I can.

And that's still largely what it's about. For my personal satisfaction, I'm thrilled to be trying something new. But I'm employed at a newspaper for a reason: to write stories, and as many as I can do well. As long as this delivers, I think they'll continue to support it.

It's picked up interest from the journalism community but is there enough interest from the community? Are you pleased with the poll results so far?
Tough to say since it's so new. It's gotten rave reviews from just about everyone I've pitched it to personally, but that probably doesn't mean too much.

In the general community, it's been mostly positive with a predictable amount of skepticism and snarkiness. I'm ok with that. I just hope there are enough people contributing productively that the snarks get more satisfaction going elsewhere.

The initial entry was promoted very well on the website, and we got a lot of response from it. The second entry, in which I put the ideas into poll form, was never promoted so the voting numbers were pretty low. But once this thing gets going, we're going to be doing much more promotion both online and in the print product, and I expect it to develop loyal readers.

What are the pros of sourcing news in this way?
Lots of story ideas I'd never come up with myself. It gives readers a real piece of the paper and encourages them to participate in the website. It disallows any reader from saying 'You never write this story'.

And the cons?
The chance that an organisation could game the system. The possibility that a small sample size leads to a not-so-valid cross section of readers. Maybe they just won't pitch good stories.

Are you worried about community members trying to hijack what you're doing?
A little. I suspect that may have happened in this first entry, as one story idea quickly shot up the ranks.
But my hope is that when I gain momentum and we've got hundreds or thousands of people voting on each entry (hey, it's possible!), it'll be much more difficult to game.

How will you balance what you're doing with your other day-to-day work?
It'll become part of the normal work flow to periodically check in with the blog and interact with readers. I'll set aside time to write new posts. At some point I could see getting to the point where the blog grows from a simple give-and-take ideas into something bigger, recommending other stories from PennLive, posts from local bloggers, the latest viral video, etc. But we're going to take it one step at a time.

Otherwise, I'll still be performing my mojo duties, searching for my own feature stories, responding to breaking news and lending a hand as a general assignment reporter when help is needed in the newsroom. I'll want to make these blog-created stories a priority once they're voted on, but it's just one part of what I'll be doing for the paper.

What would you like to see come of out of this, other than the pieces themselves?
I'd like to see other newsrooms trying something similar. I'm dying to compare notes.

I'm sure I'm going to screw it up in some ways; I'm sure I'll hit a spot or two. I want other reporters to try it so we can converge on what works.

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