Channel 4 News digs up bad news with crowdsourcing

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Channel 4 News asked online followers to participate in a crowdsourcing experiment yesterday to detect 'under the radar' news.

As reports of the G20 dominated most media's news agendas , the channel investigated if other government departments were using the event to bury bad news. Equipping them with a list of government office and press release websites , users were asked to email or tweet their findings. Under-reported announcements included the closure of 44 district and county councils in the UK, and the resignation of former Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Tom McKillop from the board of BP.

The experiment was one of the site's many attempts to add colour and use its social media presence to cover the summit, Jon Bernstein, multimedia editor at Channel 4 news, told Journalism.co.uk.

Using a combination of Twitter and CoverItLive , the news site has been running a liveblog of G20-related events, which peaked during the morning meeting of Obama and Brown and during the RBS building protests.

"There was a formal G20 going on - lots of politics and diplomacy etc - and an informal G20 going on. So we were trying to offer something that was a narrative of the day," Bernstein said, ahead of the launch of today's liveblog.

"What it allowed us to do is take in contributions from our journalists - Alex Thomson, Andy Davies, James Blake, Faisal Islam and Jon Snow - and pull in things from the newsroom [ via its own Twitter account ], where you can often get a better overview and some sense of the anarchy and panic that happens when your trying to pin down a story like this."

Images from ITN and mobile phone footage from Channel 4 News reporters have been interspersed throughout the blog to 'give people a feel for what it's like on the ground'.

Filming using Blackberries and communicating via Twitter has enabled the site to produce something that wouldn't have been possible two years ago, said Bernstein.

"You can have this two-way conversation at the same time as doing that one-to-many broadcast thing," he said.

"The danger with the popularity of tools like Twitter is that the signal to noise ratio gets uncomfortable. It's being able to work your way through some of the stuff that's irrelevant and get to the really good stuff - which doesn't just come from mainstream media."