NYT Bids For Crowdsourcing Funds

The New York Times is looking to launch a crowdsourcing initiative enabling the public to read and analyse government documents.

In partnership with the investigative journalism outfit Pro Publica, the Times is seeking $1 million (£640,000) from the Knight News Challenge to fund DocumentCloud, according to Nieman Journalism Lab.

The project would encourage news media to upload their source materials into a document viewer where members of the public could read, share and store pages and paragraphs.

This interactive DocViewer software was developed by the NYT’s technologies team to create a searchable database of schedules relating to Hillary Clinton’s spell as first lady.

According to the grant application, DocumentCloud “will accelerate the daily work of investigative reporters, and will make investigative reporters out of every citizen, by improving the way we find, share, read and collaborate on source documents online”.

[HT – Editors Weblog.]