'Distributed Reporting' Gets Boost from ProPublica

More proof that citizen journalism's moment has arrived: ProPublica, the investigative-reporting non-profit headed by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, has hired an editor to deploy "crowd-sourcing and collaborative journalism methods." Amanda Michel, formerly the director of the Huffington Post's OffTheBus election-reporting project, becomes the start-up's first editor of "distributed reporting." She'll focus her initial efforts on the federal stimulus package.

Michel has a piece in the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review about the lessons she learned overseeing OffTheBus's 12,000 participants. She writes:

The integration of strands of the pro-am strategy into the journalism mainstream will be bumpy. It will require, among other things, a shift in journalism's traditional ethical matrix. Transparency and disclosure, rather than neutrality -- often tainted if not patently false -- must become critical fourth-estate virtues.

An interesting choice of words considering that OffTheBus's two biggest coups -- reporting Barack Obama's remarks about "bitter" small-town voters and relaying Bill Clinton's angry reaction to a Vanity Fair story about him -- were the work of a reporter, Mayhill Fowler, posing as a supporter rather than identifying herself as a journalist, pro-am or otherwise. Transparency and disclosure, indeed.