Advertisement

Jun 29, 2009

NPR crowdsourcing project: Who is that lobbyist?

For its coverage of health care reform legislation being drafted on Capitol Hill, NPR News launched Dollar Politics, a series examining how lobbyists seek to influence the debate. The reportage includes an NPR.org crowdsourcing project, "Turning the Camera Around," that starts with a panoramic photograph of the audience attending a June 17 Senate hearing where lawmakers began working on the overhaul. Reporters Peter Overby and Andrea Seabrook did some legwork to identify a few of the lobbyists in the photo and they turned to the audience for help in naming others. "The response so far has been practically ecstatic--at least in the blogosphere and the Twitterverse," Seabrook says in this Q&A with Poynter Online. " And we've gotten quite a few e-mails from listeners who love the fact that we've 'turned the lens' on the real story." But lobbyists who have been identified respond quite differently, according to Overby: "Usually, their first reaction is, 'How did you get my name?'"

No comments: