The New York Times and ProPublica Want to Give You Access to Their Primary Sources
By Ned Resnikoff - Nov 4th, 2008 at 11:40 amVia Boing Boing, the New York Times and ProPublica have a really interesting idea.
The project, which is called DocumentCloud, would let news organizations upload their materials for public consumption and analysis. (”Readers will also be able to quickly search, annotate and bookmark documents — and for the first time link directly to specific pages or passages.”)
The proposal relies on a piece of software called DocViewer, which was developed by the Times’ Interactive Newsroom Technologies team. The head of that team, Aron Pilhofer, recently confirmed that the Times will release DocViewer as open source “sometime after the election.” Brian Boyer, the blogger who broke that news, said the software was created by the Times for its searchable database of Hillary Clinton’s 11,000-page public schedule as first lady, which was a journalistic marvel.
This is a promising sign that the Times really gets what Internet journalism is all about; don’t just report what you dig up in documents, but give those documents to the reader so they can see for themselves. This makes the Times not only a better news source, but also a fantastic resource for amateur and freelance journalists.
And while I’m talking about the Knight News Challenge, I would be remiss if I did not self-plug vote to give a grant to the exciting New Media enterprise which I happen to be an editor for.
Anything else going on today? Seems pretty slow.
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