We at CORRECTIV are very experienced with crowd sourcing. We know about the most important challenge you will face with this kind of data colletion: data flooding. This is the reason why we developed CrowdNewsroom as a tool, that is capable of structured data collection that gives your data analysts the best changes to learn as much as possible from the information you collected with your community. Without CrowdNewsroom you may get lost in spreadsheets and forms.

Short answer: Yes. CrowdNewsroom is a tool for investigations in the public interests. As such CrowdNewsroom is exercising the media privilege as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation. This fact was approved by German authorities. But have in mind: This is also the reason, why CORRECTIV as a newsroom needs to run the CrowdNewsroom and why CORRECTIV reserves the right to decline or delete some investigations or editors.

CrowdNewsroom is a non-partisan tool in the service of a democratic society. Its goal is to contribute to an educated debate in the public interest. CORRECTIV reserves the right to decline or delete investigations or editors, when these are acting against the fundamental principles and ethics of an enlightened society. We refuse investigations or editors who promote totalitarianism.

Unfortunately not. CrowdNewsroom is a tool for investigations in the public interests. So you can’t run it to satisfy your curiosity. Please have in mind: We exercise with the Crowdnewsroom a media privilege as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation. This is also the reason, why CORRECTIV reserves the right to decline or cancel some investigations as well as some editors.

Running CrowdNewsrooms costs a lot of money. We need to maintain servers, set up databases and fix bugs. So we need to charge some fees. But we don’t want to overcharge anybody. So the fee is depending on the contributions to the CrowdNewsroom. And we give the total control over the budget to you. Before you reach the next step, we will inform you. And you decide, whether you want to spend more money on your investigation.

No. From our experience with CrowdNewsroom we know that the contributors are very interested into sharing honest data. Also, we developed our tool in a way that makes fact checking as easy as possible. So we can delete any spam created by wrongdoers quickly.

The editor in the CrowdNewsroom is the one who develops questions in the CrowdNewsroom, analyses the data collected and uses it for his reporting. This person needs to be reliable – as an editor in a classical newsroom. This is the reason, why CORRECTIV reserves the right to decline some editors.

A contributor is anybody who shares his data in the CrowdNewsroom. It can be a citizen, an expert or a person affected by the investigation. In our CrowdNewsrooms we worked together with thousands of contributors already. A contributor is not responsible for the reporting. He is a source of information.

Every editor will get access to the backend of his investigations. There he will get access to the data collected. He will be able to search the data and clean the data. He will be able to export the data collected to other tools for better analysing the datasets.

After an investigaton is finished you can unpublish all data collected in your crowdnewsroom. This is important to comply with the key principles of the General Data Protection Regulation.