The Reporter’s Lab
Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy has launched The Reporter’s Lab to modernize the difficult, often drudging work of deep-dive investigations. “For professional and pro-am journalists who specialize in public affairs, the technological revolution passed them by sometime in the early millennium,” writes Sarah Cohen, formerly of The Washington Post and now a professor at Duke and the head of the lab. She describes the lab this way:
“It aims to do for modern reporting what photocopiers did in the 1970s, and e-mail, the Web, spreadsheets and databases did in the 1990s. It will go beyond the hype to test, create, commission or apply new methods to make the hard work of original reporting easier or more effective. It will guide reporters to the right tool for an immediate job, from sorting a handwritten government sign-in sheet to finding the contractor’s testimony in the school board meeting webcast.”
Cohen writes that the lab will identify the right tools and build them when necessary. She’s also looking for a developer.
