Do you (or would you) document dump?

Comment

Comment by matt king on April 15, 2008 at 9:00pm

I'm all for the document dump and posting docs online when they figure in stories (or even when they don't).

I always like it when a source sends me an e-mail and says, hey, did you notice on page 14 of blah blah blah...

As long as there's a very strong accuracy filter between the sourcing and the publishing, I don't see any reason not to dump. It can only help.

Comment by Zac Echola on April 1, 2008 at 8:21pm

Good points, Jeff.

I've seen some success on the local level, though not so much with very, very large documents, rather frequent small(ish) documents. North Dakota has had some trouble with the Workforce Safety and Insurance, which covers all workers compensation issues in the past few years. There's been stretches where we have a new story every day for weeks on end.

The reporters working the beat have begun dumping all their documents online and there's been some interesting discoveries and angles from bloggers and other media outlets statewide, which has lead to some great opportunities for what Scott Karp calls link journalism.

Even if it doesn't lead to anything significant, I think it adds a lot of credibility to FOIA requests.

Comment by Jeff Thomas on March 31, 2008 at 10:01pm

My question is one of scale.

Dump even the 400-page Mitchell report on a population of 300 million, and even the fraction of that U.S. population with A) internet access and b) the interest and inclination to help is a mighty large army. Even if one person in every 100,000 answered the call, that comes to 3,000 helpers, each with .13 pages to read. Heck, if only one in a million people helped out, that's still nearly one person per page of the report.

If you dump a 400-page document of local interest on a local population of, say, 1 million -- and you're already starting at roughly 1/300th the number of potential helpers than came to aid of TPM. At the same participation rate, the 10 volunteers would have 40 pages each to digest. And we all know that some very small towns can generate very large documents.

This is rough math and many assumptions are at work, of course. The point is, the dumped document would seem to need to be the object of intense local interest to yield the same kind of results that TPM had. I don't know if the question is whether such a method might work; it may be more a question of finding the right opportunity.