Can the crowd help find 243 refugees who disappeared somewhere between Libya and Italy?
Bobbie Johnson hopes so. CPNN’s Q&A with the senior editor at Medium leading the crowd-powered investigation, Ghost Boat.
Welcome the Crowd-Powered News Network’s first Q&A. CPNN is a group of engagement-minded folks coming together to compare notes and workshop crowd-powered journalism projects. One of the ways we will do that are through these CPNN Q&As, where we will talk to someone about their crowd-powered project — maybe it’s an editor, maybe a reporter, maybe a researcher, maybe it’s you. We’ll publish full versions of these in our Google group (sign up for access!) and shorter versions of them here publicly. If you have a project you want us to take a look at, tag it #CPNN.
Last year, 243 refugees — mostly from Eritrea — disappeared somewhere between Libya and Italy. They were among the 219,000 refugees that crossed the Mediterranean in 2014, and among 3,500 refugees who died or went missing along the way. Already in 2015, more than 400,000 have crossed and nearly 3,000 have died. As winter threatens to escalate the refugee crisis, Medium has been focusing on the 243 people from one Ghost Boat who went missing last year. Who were these people? Who was helping them? And how did they die? It’s a big project with a huge ask for the community: “Help us solve this.”
As a crowd-powered news nerd, this project is fascinating to me in three major ways:
- The scope. I think sometimes we get caught up in the, “Is anyone really going to do this?” conversation, which, yes, is extremely important. But sometimes we have to think bigger to break new ground — and Ghost Boat is big in this regard. The call to action is ambitious.
- Creating an avenue of action. The migrant crisis is so huge. The numbers are so big. Those missing, drowning, dying are so many. And stories are coming out daily about the numbers, the borders, the routes they’re taking. When a reader is moved by a picture or a story about the crisis, what can they do? How can they help? How can they channel their outrage, compassion, desire to act? Bobbie Johnson and the Ghost Boat team may have offered up one way to channel that motivation.
- Reporting out. When conducting a crowd-powered project, it’s super important to show you’re listening to your contributors. You have to have a strategy or content plan for reporting out these stories, contributions, tips, advice, etc. Ghost Boat is doing a good job of that. Here are some examples:
So, for our first CPNN Q&A, we go behind the scenes on this project. We discuss what using the crowd adds to an investigation like this, what the team said when Bobbie Johnson pitched this idea and what he’s learned so far in the weeks since launching. Also, Bobbie has some questions for you, CPNN readers. Take a look and let him know what you think.
Who are we talking to?
My name’s Bobbie Johnson, I’m a senior editor at Medium, and part of the team running Matter — the site’s flagship publication, which I started independently three and a half years ago. Before that I was a tech reporter and editor for the Guardian. Most of the work I do now is focused on how to do interesting, exciting, new journalism inside a tech company that’s trying to build new tools of expression.
Set it up. Tell us about Ghost Boat.
Last year, a boat with 243 refugees on board went missing somewhere between Libya and Italy. Nobody’s heard anything from the occupants since. Of course, the refugee crisis is in full swing right now, and lots of boats disappear or sink — but the confluence of information, lack of evidence, and some unusual clues that suggest maybe it didn’t sink after all grabbed my interest. So now we’re trying to find out what happened to the boat and explore the situation on the ground as we find out about it.
Where did the crowd-powered component come from and what do you think it adds to the investigation?
The more we dug into the story, the more I realized that it was too big and, frankly, too uncomfortably unknowable to do a straight treatment. We knew we might have access to large datasets — geodata, satellite imagery, names, places, social media profiles — and I knew that it would be beyond our reach as a tiny editorial team. The two things combined to suggest a way forward.
I think it adds two things: First, a closer sense of involvement for the people who are contributing, and second, a higher likelihood of finding a resolution.
One of the reasons for starting CPNN is to create a space for crowd-powered project support and an exchange for ideas. I hear from engagement-minded folks across the country that getting reporters and editors behind some of these ideas can be pretty difficult. So, yes, you’re the co-founder of Matter, which makes you the boss in some respects. And Matter itself is a bit of an experimental and social platform. But what was it like in the room when you pitched the engagement component?
When I explained the project to the rest of the team here, they were fully supportive. Medium is a platform built on community, built on engagement of ordinary users, so this slots straight in. (One example: Our COO, Andy Doyle, responded to by saying, “Who does stuff like this?” In lots of newsrooms that might have been a remark made out of shock, instead it was an exclamation of excitement.) My remit and my ambition is to try and do work you won’t find somewhere else. I’m lucky in that respect, but you have to build the culture you want to see.
The project is asking a community to help solve what amounts to a cold case that no one seems to care about. It’s a pretty lofty ask. That will require time and skill from the reader. How are you supporting participants? You’re partnering with First Draft that will share guides and tools for some of this — like verifying social media. But what kind of support can a participant expect from your team and First Draft?
I think we’re learning a lot about the levels of support required as we go. Obviously it’s a difficult, specialized arena, and we’re trying to do something hard. But there are ways to slice and dice information to make it more accessible (this past weekend, we asked people to contribute one line of data to a spreadsheet we’re building of boat-related incidents. It’s now at 70+ entries). But we’re trying a few different approaches to help them get what they want. One of them is to put great information front and center and give credit where it’s due: One of our readers, Kirk Pettinga, negotiated access to an amazing dataset of maritime tracking logs; we made sure everyone who gets our updates knew he was doing something amazing.
And we’re trying to make sure that we’re connecting with people who have expertise. Over the next few weeks we’ll be holding workshops with grad students at Columbia, CUNY, Berkeley and Stanford who will be trying to apply their skills to questions we’re posing in focused, direct, and hopefully productive ways.
First Draft have been a useful sounding board, and helpful in guiding us in decision-making. I feel like we haven’t yet dug into the eyewitness media that sits closest to their set of skills, so things have been driven by my group more than I expected, but by the end of the project I think that we’ll have got there.
I’m also curious about the iteration of this project. It might be too early in the process, but have you had to iterate yet? What have you had to change up — or plan to change up — since the launch?
At the beginning I thought people would be more engaged if we had enough surface area for them to connect to — so we pushed out a handful of different pieces of evidence at the same time: e.g. a list of smugglers we wanted to know more about, data on boat incidents, a timeline and so on. What’s become clear is that you’re either into it, or you’re not… so we’re focused on pushing out small, digestible things on a regular basis.
…and the five burning questions we will ask at every CPNN Q&A:
Why do you think people will participate and how do you plan on engaging them?
I think that people will participate because they feel compelled to do something. That necessarily limits us to a small subsection of the audience, but we’re giving them information, direction and tools… and trusting them.
How will you report out the participation to show that you’re listening?
As we move forward with the investigation, we’ll be weaving what we find into the narrative episodes. We also send out daily updates detailing the ideas, information and progress that individual users are making.
What’s your measure of success?
There’s a very obvious potential success here: Can we find out what happened? Aside from that, it’s a case of: Can we build something that has impact, and a following. I think we’ve already managed some of those things, but we’re trying to build on them as we go.
What have you learned?
Lots! People care, they want to be involved. Clarity is important. Remaining focused and driven over a long, live process is hard. A team of good journalists has enormous capabilities and huge potential. Communication is the most important thing, whether it’s between you and the reader, or inside a team.
Where do you need help?
I’ve been around the block, but I always feel like we’re making things up as we go along, it’s not an uncomfortable position to be in, but it’s also pointless to reinvent the wheel. So, are there ways we could be smarter about this? Ways we could be reaching people who have something powerful to contribute? Are there obvious answers I’m missing? Opportunities I should be seeing?
If you have any questions for Bobbie about Ghost Boat or have some insight you’d like to share, let us know in the responses below. And again, if you have a project you want us to take a look at, tag it #CPNN.
