The idea of harnessing an army of citizen journalists continues to generate buzz. The concept of "distributed reporting" seems ripe with potential, not just as a way to send out troops of researchers after typical government targets but as a way to go after more elusive prey.
For instance: Nonprofit organizations always have been undercovered by MSM. It's a resource issue. It takes a great deal of time to penetrate organizations that have limited public reporting requirements. But what if an investigative reporter or editor who is experienced in covering nonprofits could devise a litmus test. It might start with a call to the army of citizen journalists to take a set of standards, as Jeff Jarvis suggests here, and methodically gather information from nonprofit groups nationwide.
That first test could result in a report simply on how well the organizations are complying with requests to provide documents that are considered public records, such as IRS tax filings. Then, based on certain criteria, red flags would come up for some of those nonprofits, and the lead journalist on the project could send the citizen army back out for more digging.
Not only do I believe these kinds of efforts are possible, I think they are inevitable. Is anyone doing anything like this yet?
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