EditorsWeblog.org
Posted by Elizabeth Redman
Non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica is taking advantage of the Super Bowl to dig into the fundraising efforts of politicians, Poynter Online reports.
Reporter Marcus Stern planned to use the football game, held yesterday, to spot members of Congress who were attending and figure out how they obtained their tickets. But since he knew that trying to contact 535 members of Congress would be too big a task for one person, he turned the investigation into a crowdsourcing effort and asked professional journalists and the public to help collaborate.
“To some extent, this is going to be a test of the privacy or the openness of members of Congress when it comes to fundraising,” Stern told Poynter Online.
Members of Congress are not allowed to accept Super Bowl tickets as gifts and are required to pay for them. The investigative project aims to find out how politicians who are attending got their tickets and whether they are using the event for fundraising. “It has in the past been ‘the Super Bowl of fundraising,’” Stern said. “It’s less so today.”
Citizen journalists, retired journalists and working journalists from dozens of news organisations are helping out. As some journalists had already tried to obtain part of this information to write local stories, it made the collaboration easier. Plus, some of these organisations asked their audience to help as well by contacting their Congress members.
