Today we are announcing our partnership with American Public Media's Public Insight Network.
The Public Insight Network began in 2003 at Minnesota Public Radio as a new way to connect journalists with the community they serve -- through harnessing the knowledge and lived experience of the online audience to inform journalists. After two years in the Regional newsroom, MPR's national branch -- American Public Media -- took it to Marketplace and other national APM programs. (APM is the second largest producer of public radio programming in the U.S.) Nowadays, PIN is far more than a set of methods or tools -- PIN is a platform for collaboration between a network of news organizations and radio stations that share some of their sources and their insights with each other using PIN's technology. Among PIN's many partners are Southern California's KPCC, the Miami Herald, the Center for Public Integrity and The Washington Post.
Collaboration is in our DNA here at ProPublica. We publish our deep-dive investigations with a Creative Commons license. We openly share how we work, publishing guides and reporting recipes. Our data-driven features include technical specs. We invite readers to join our ProPublica Reporting Network and help us report from the ground up. We've even set up a matchmaker service for journalists covering home loan modification and struggling homeowners.
For ProPublica, PIN presents another opportunity to collaborate with newsrooms around the country. PIN is also a new tool we can use to further evolve our crowdsourcing methods. If you're a regular ProPublica reader, you've probably noticed our frequent call-outs for information and stories. On our Gulf Spill page you'll find a form where Gulf Spill claimants can share their stories with us. On the loan mod page you'll find a request for homeowners who have applied for a home loan mod to tell us how the process has gone (to date, close to 2,000 homeowners have).
Going forward, you'll notice that some of our requests for stories or information are in partnership with the Public Insight Network. When you respond to those, your stories and information will be shared first with ProPublica and then with other newsrooms within the network.
For more details about our collaboration with Public Insight Network and how you can become a source to journalists around the country, check out this FAQ. You can join here.
