ProPublica experiments with “show your work”

LINK: www.propublica.org ➚ | Posted by: Joshua Benton | December 15, 2011

Check out this Marshall Allen ProPublica story and switch on “Explore Sources.” Cited facts get a highlight and an an onclick popup showing the DocumentCloud annotation that supports it. Pretty cool. Built by Al Shaw on the ProPublica end and Ted Han on the DocCloud end.

Two thoughts: The hooks built for this are available to other DocumentCloud users to build similar tools. (ProPublica plans on open sourcing the annotizer, but it may be a while.) And this on/off UI makes me think it could be useful to built a generic UI for this sort of optional annotation (with links to supporting documents instead of embeds).

Show tags

Charles Ornstein, ProPublica

How ProPublica reached workers while reporting on dairy farm conditions

“We plan to do more than simply expect that readers will find the story and find us. We plan to take the story to them.”

Sophie Culpepper

Last Night at School Committee distills hours-long public meetings into half-hour podcast episodes

“We have created this podcast as an easy way for any parent, citizen, or interested party to get the highlights, and our take, on what happened last night at School Committee.”

Francesco Zaffarano

How Seen’s mobile journalism reaches 7 million people across platforms

“Three years ago, I would have said that every platform is super different from the others. Now they’ve all become quite similar.”