Crowd-sourcing Guardian Shows Telegraph How to Do It

So this is how The Telegraph should have done it. Instead of drip-dripping the MP expenses’ information in the way they have done – all generated while holed up in some all-hands-on-deck war room – they could have got everyone involved like The Guardian has done.

They’d never have done it, of course, as it would have meant selling considerably fewer papers over the last six weeks.

But what the Guardian is doing is demonstrating just how powerful the crowd can be – as a data-gatherer, news-maker, journalistic tool, or whatever. In just over 24 hours so far, over 92,000 pages of expense documents have been reviewed (with plenty still to do).

And they’re not just hunting for stories – reviewers are sorting the vast amount of data by date, amount, type of expense and type of document. By the end of the process, the Guardian will have a searchable database that will prove far more useful and permanent than the Telegraph’s sensationalist headlines.