Federica Cocco
freelance journalist
Paul Lewis
head of investigations The Guardian
Francesco Piccinini
editor Fanpage
Francesco Raiola
music editor Fanpage.it
Investigative journalism and crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing can produce remarkable results for investigative journalism. Paul Lewis of The Guardian will illustrate some of the ways he and his newspaper have used crowdsourcing recently to get to the facts on stories of major public interest. The key point here is that certain events (such as the death of London newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson in 2009) would have remained unexplained despite widespread media attention if The Guardian had not used crowdsourcing. In other words crowdsourcing shouldn’t be viewed as an add-on to standard journalism procedures just to inject a touch of colour. It has the potential to become an indispensable tool without which journalists simply can’t get the job done.
Organised in association with AgoraVox