Introducing #MuckReads: A Social Way to Share the Best Accountability Reporting
Starting today, you and other ProPublica readers can share essential watchdog reporting with our reporters and readers using our newest feature, #MuckReads.
#MuckReads will curate the day's essential accountability stories, discovered and shared by our reporters and editors, and readers like you—stories about the abuse of prisoners, the education levels of our country's legislators and the laundering of public funds. Our mission is to do journalism that has real-world impact, and we're especially keen to find and promote work from others that has the same impetus.
Since ProPublica launched—three years ago almost to the day—we have been highlighting the best investigative and accountability journalism around the Web. #MuckReads is the next evolution of our "Investigations Elsewhere" feature (an archive of "Investigations Elsewhere" is available).
#MuckReads is primarily Twitter-driven, at least at the outset. You can contribute by simply including the hashtag #MuckReads when you tweet an article. (Here's an example.) If you don't use Twitter, just email your recommendation to muckreads@propublica.org. We will look through your recommendations and add our favorites to the #MuckReads page, ProPublica's homepage, and to our daily email. We will also retweet favorites from @ProPublica—all giving full credit to you.
Even though our feature's name has the word "reads" in it, we are interested in everything: stories, interactive graphics and databases, comics, podcasts, video, etc. What matters is that the journalism is essential, excellent and focused on holding the powerful to account. We also hope to turn the flow of recommendations into an ongoing newsroom resource.
Your participation is key to making #MuckReads a success. Be ruthlessly discriminating. Evaluate a reporter's assumptions and arguments. Local stories suggestive of larger, perhaps national, problems make great #MuckReads candidates.
We believe strongly in giving credit where credit is due and intend that #MuckReads will provide a transparent way to share your recommendations with our newsroom and readers. The images below show how that will work: On the right is what a published recommendation looks like on #MuckReads. The image on the left shows a recommendation on ProPublica's homepage.
#MuckReads was inspired by Mark Armstrong's @Longreads, a community-driven effort to aggregate the best long-form journalism on the web. Since @Longreads launched, we have actively contributed to its stockpile of stories, tweeting our favorite long-form journalism with the hashtag #longreads. Our experience participating in @Longreads led us to rethink our Investigations Elsewhere feature.
#MuckReads is an experiment in social aggregation. The feature as you see it is just the beginning. We've got big plans for feature upgrades and integration with Facebook, but first we want to see what works and what needs more tinkering. If you have suggestions or find problems, please email me a note or tweet @ProPublica.
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6 comments
Wayne Spiggle
June 16, 2011, 7:41 p.m.
ProPublica has been missing the boat by not reporting the facts about industrial wind. Its drain on the US Treasury is way out of proportion with other energy sources. The adverse cumulative environmental impact per unit of electricity produced probably surpasses other generation sources and the inefficiency fostered by wind availability causes the turbines to turn out 70%, maybe 80%, less than the turbine capacity. The industry could not exist without the corporate welfare coming from U.S. tax payers, often to foreign companies.
Big wind makes food based ethanol look like a good idea. Come on ProPublica look into this. The U.S. public is being scammed.
peggy maher
June 16, 2011, 9:41 p.m.
do you know how much the very early computers cost and how inefficcient they were? government sponsored i might add. but with experience and innovation look where we are today. was that a scam?
George Weyman
June 17, 2011, 4:50 a.m.
Great idea, but the big problem here is transparency. On what criteria are you going to select what is good enough for the public #MuckReads page? Can you give users clear guidelines? Can you publish everything you receive on this tag/ email so it becomes clear what you are selecting and what you are not? Can you let users help sort the feed to produce their own filter?
Morten Myrstad
June 17, 2011, 8:15 a.m.
#MuchReads, an amazing new service from ProPublica! This truly proofs the great potential in the new community and collaboration between creators, curators, readers and listeners, with ProPublica in this case as sort of a meta-curator. Interesting to see how curation is implemented, in different ways, in different news organizations like Huffington Post, The Drudge Report and now in investigating journalism. Looking forward to your new features, and the inspiration #MuchReads will be for media organizations as well as for NGOs and brands.
Steve Douglas
June 17, 2011, 2 p.m.
Just a suggestion. Maybe the term should be #Muckheads. Kinda rhymes with a possible description.
Dale M Baranoski
June 20, 2011, 9:32 p.m.
Word count 723
The only viable solution to fixing Government and its disease, corruption.
We must restore and resurrect the fourth branch of government that was stolen with the subversive stroke of ink to paper, in the form a small obscure legal note section in the court rules. While a collection of a dastardly few perverted the self-policing power of our Constitution, America was still recovering after being distracted by a little incident called WWII. While many died, were injured, and suffered, the very thing they fought for was being sabatoged by our own countrymen. They managed to do something that required a constitutional amendment to achieve, but would never have happened because no logical explanation could defeat the transparent objective and insidious design to ensure the protection and preservation of self-interest of the corrupt few.
This small group of conspirators covertly restricted the powers of the Grand Jury by denying the right of US and State citizens to police government by presenting evidence of crimes to a Grand Jury, or to allow a Grand Jury to act on its own accord, without influence by either a court or prosecutor.
Why were the higher ups so fearful of this part of the Constitution that they colluded to steal it away like thieves and charlatans?
Because it is the most powerful and honest accountability tool! The founding founders knew that those entrusted to these higher positions would need to be kept not only humble, but honest. They knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely better than anyone, having fought a war to be free of absolute power and the corruption it fostered. So they purposely included the process of “presentment” where a Grand Jury, on its own knowledge, or knowledge acquired elsewhere, having come to a determination after an investigation, “presents” a true bill to the court for signing and issuance against an accused.
In a proper “indictment” process, a prosecutor is supposed to provide evidence impartially to a Grand Jury, for it to decide if the matter warrants going to trial. This is intended to reduce false or malicious accusations from being inflicted upon the innocent or blameless as well as ensuring only legitimate cases proceed.
However, when acting nefariously and with ill-intent, the prosecutor hand-feeds the GJ only that information that will ensure an indictment, oft times against a person who is known to be wholly innocent, but who has offended the prosecutor in some way, or someone that the prosecutor knows, or is indebted to or refuses to prosecute due to malfeasance, or to punish the person for some perceived slight, real or imagined. Hence the phrase “A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.”
So why this deceit upon the People? What would cause them to fear the GJ so much as to significantly alter the actual content and purpose of the Constitution? Because the GJ has the independence and the power to investigate anyone, including politicians, judges, and U.S. Attorneys, lawyers and law enforcement for criminal act(s). Many of these positions enjoy civil immunity, which often translates to blanket protection from even illegal acts, and without the power and might of the originally crafted GJ, rarely face criminal charges. But the GJ causes criminal prosecutions and as a result, accountability. It puts fear of being held responsible to those in public offices and positions who often wield the most power as entrusted by the People. Accountability, a feeling they have been unused to for quite some time. Without the Grand Jury as wholly made, look what has happened. The higher up the public office/position food chain you go, the less one sees or hears of any public servants being brought to justice. The rules of probability and averages just don’t concur wit this improbability. The number of high ranking Judges, Politicians, Prosecutors and Lawyers don’t equal the number of arrests, indictments, prosecutions and trials or convictions of other lower, general public type, public or private positions.
The author can better describe this wounding of our Constitution:
http://www.AmericanGrandJury.org
And for those who want to continue to drink the kool-aid and give total trust to government, here’s proof that even a police sergeant, societies last line of defense, after being a victim and discovering dozens more, couldn’t access justice or the grand jury; so what chance would you have?
http://southjerseyjustice.com/GJBrief.doc
Apathy, their greatest hope, our greatest weakness.
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