We know your time is limited!

It’s a fact of life that we all have too much to do, and that great new ideas for websites often fall to the side because of time and expense. At WNYC, our producers have also encountered roadblocks caused by lack of time or resources. But we have good news: there are a lot of helpful tools–and a huge community of users–out there. From tech geeks to public radio partnerships, you can find the support you need for your story.

Get Started
If you already get Crowdsourcing and you just want some tips, you’ll just need our Quick Guide. For the rest of you, start there, but be sure to explore links and other pages. There is analysis of our success and failures, as well as soup-to-nuts case studies that you can borrow for your own story.

Make a Good Pitch for New Journalism
WNYC is action-oriented, but does not advise the Don’t Ask First, Apologize Later method. Believe it or not, all the actions taken to promote and grow the activity on Your Uncommon Economic Indicators were done in consultation with a very busy digital team and sanctioned by the higher-ups. By allowing internet-savvy producers to use outside resources and take some risks,

A year after launching our crowd-source reporting project, Your Uncommon Economic Indicators, we have been asked how we sustained an online mapping and economy project for so long. The short answer is that we value new ways to collaborate with our listeners and we constantly look for innovative methods to do that. The long answer is what you will see in these pages–a guide to a collaborative reporting project between a public radio station and its audience.

We’re glad you are interested in this remarkable new way to approach reporting stories. We hope by reading our experiences, these pages will offer you food for thought on new ways to invite audiences to become part of your news gathering process as well.

Your comments will help us build up a page of FAQ’s and show us what needs better explanation. Please offer us constructive feedback in the comment sections!

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Follow @pubmedia on Twitter or search for the tag #pubmedia

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On October 14, 2010 Tanya Ott from Atlanta Public Radio hosts John Keefe and Annie Shreffler on a webinar for PRNDI to discuss social media, crowdsourcing and interacting with the audience via text messages. (webinar link)