03 Jul How the Guardian parlayed a rival’s scoop into its own journalistic triumph

Imagine you’re the editor of a major London daily. Your crosstown archrival has obtained two million pages of explosive documents, outing a Parliamentary expense scandal that’s rocking the nation. They’ve parlayed the document trove into a  fire hose of blockbuster stories.

What do you do?

If you’re the Guardian, you enlist your readers in a ground-shifting, game-saving exercise in crowdsourceing. The Nieman Foundation’s Journalism Lab picks up the remarkable story, complete with four crucial pointers for would-be imitators.

Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking. We wanted the details, so I rang up the developer, Simon Willison, for his tips about deadline-driven software, the future of public records requests, and how a well-placed mugshot can make a blacked-out PDF feel like a detective story.

Hat tip: Andrew B. Cochran.