- When
- 2009
- Stage
- Handed on to others
- Role
- Co-founder, designer, developer
- Outcome
- NUJ Regional Journalism New Media Award Finalist; since open sourced.
Help Me Investigate was a website for people who wanted to investigate a question in the public interest and needed help doing it. You posted the question, built a team around it, and the team broke it into challenges to work through. Paul Bradshaw had the idea and brought in Nick Booth, me and others; I did the development work for a few months. It launched in July 2009 with funding from Channel 4's 4iP fund and Screen West Midlands.
Investigations run on the site uncovered a £2.2 million overspend on Birmingham City Council's website, the worst places for parking fines, and police claims of sabotage against Climate Camp protesters. Heather Brooke, James Ball and Colin Meek were among the journalists involved. In February 2011 the code for the original site was released under an open source licence.
Coverage
PBS MediaShift“Help Me Investigate: Paul Bradshaw on Crowdsourcing Investigative Reporting”2009
“announced that a project he's been working on for 18 months called Help Me Investigate won funding to build a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism”
Journalism.co.uk“Help Me Investigate: How working collaboratively can benefit journalists”2009
“it was the first piece of journalism to come out of the Help Me Investigate project, a couple of months after it was kickstarted with public funding from 4ip and a local media body”
Columbia Journalism Review“Q & A: Paul Bradshaw, Founder of Help Me Investigate”2010
“CJR assistant editor Lauren Kirchner spoke with Bradshaw about Help Me Investigate, a project he launched last summer that invites readers to suggest local governance issues for each other to investigate”
Journalismfund Europe“Not like an old-fashioned journalist”
“In Birmingham Paul Bradshaw and his team behind the website Help Me Investigate is playing with the idea.”
Around the same time
- The search is on – we’re hiringWriting · 2009
- Ruby GEOAPIProjects · 2009
- London C-all-in-gWriting · 2009
- Black To Comm — Alphabet 1968Music · 2009
Earlier in projects: Debillitated. Later in projects: Modern Love.