Ink is giving way to nodes and networks, ledes and inverted pyramids are being swallowed up by a tsunami of blogs and memes. Amid the din and aggressive edge of the digital conversation, how do we figure out what’s really going on in the world? The aim of NewAssignment.net is to harmonize these worlds, do a mashup of the best of each. On the one hand, there’s traditional shoe-leather reporting, where you call people up, assemble data and information, extract insights and ultimately a storyline that says something interesting. Though oft-derided these days, this is a craft, and done well it can have a tremendous impact – on individual lives and the political process. On the other hand, you have the digital world, where distance is obliterated (reducing, in some ways, the wear and tear on shoe leather), distinctions between “journalists” and “everyone else” are blurred, any curious citizen can post insights and ideas, and the pool of available digital data is growing exponentially.
So far, few people have managed to skillfully straddle these worlds; Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation is one of them. He worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a researcher for investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele; afterward, he spent nearly a decade at the Center for Public Integrity. At Sunlight, he has placed himself at the emerging nexus of citizen journalism and national politics, specifically Congress. Since starting at Sunlight last year, he has had a run of interesting stories and projects that capture something of how journalism will look like in the future – and, while it looks quite different, the fundamentals are the same.
He broke the story of $207 million in earmarks that Dennis Hastert obtained for a highway called the Prairie Parkway – a project that would spur development on land Hastert holds a stake in. Teaming up with bloggers and readers, Allison and his Sunlight colleagues helped out two Senators who’d put an anonymous “hold” on a bill requiring the government to create a searchable database of government contracts. (Not surprisingly, the two were champion pork appropriators Robert Byrd and Ted Stevens.) He has run several projects that utilize citizen journalists – or, more commonly, curious readers with a little extra time on their hands – to gather information on Congress.
I sat down recently with Allison to get his insights on the Internet and reporting, social networking, data and other topics – his remarks are excerpted below.
Bill Allison: I certainly don’t think that we’re at a point yet where the Internet could do something like the series you did on what was going to happen to New Orleans. They certainly can’t do a Barlett and Steele type investigation. There’s things the Internet isn’t capable of doing yet. There are bloggers who have expertise in a certain area who will write about their area of expertise, but that’s the opinion of one expert…this is just one person’s experience, and journalism is trying to put together, the joke is, two people’s experiences.
