NBC CASE STUDY IDEASCALE IdeaScale Case Studies 2

NBC News Investigations Maximize the Power of Citizen Journalism

The Naonal Broadcasng Company (NBC) is an American commercial broadcasng television and radio network headquartered in New York City. And within the NBC family there is NBC News Investigations, which is a news blog that is for and about investigative reporting. On NBC News Investigations, NBC engages the public in sharing stories, ideas, documents, and comments about what news stories they believe deserve attention. In order to help drive NBC News' investigative reporting, NBC News Invesgaons launched their own Invesgate This! secon using the IdeaScale innovaon widget. The IdeaScale innovation widget can to be added to any online experience (including websites, intranet pages, ecommerce platforms, and more). And once it’s added, any community member can submit suggestions, vote, comment and complete all other IdeaScale tasks from within the widget without ever leaving the original digital environment. In the case of the Open Channel, the widget allowed readers to submit story ideas, browse and contribute to other stories, and grow a wealth of reportorial resources for NBC. In order to promote engagement, the Invesgate This! widget was included at the boom of every NBC News Invesgaons blog post. Readers could scroll through story ideas without ever navigating away from the article that they were originally reading. NBC also laid out some criteria so that readers would know what kinds of stories were relevant to the NBC audience. The editors wrote: “What makes for a good investigative piece for NBC News? Probably not a story on shenanigans with your local PTA's office supplies fund. Think immediacy and broad impact.” This way, readers had some sense of what suggestions would merit investigation and which ones wouldn’t. Since launching Invesgate This!, NBC’s team of editors has consistently monitored the open journalism feed and developed a poron of their coverage based on the community’s suggesons. For example, NBC News Investigations published a story about how local governments and utilities that invested in the Prairie State Energy Campus might have been disenfranchised in terms of final costs due to construction cost increases, lower natural gas prices and other factors. This story idea originated in the Investigate This! section of the site. IdeaScale Case Studies 3

“NBC is always looking for new ways to encourage parcipatory journalism. It makes for better, more relevant stories that have the possibility of generating real change within the communities we serve,” said Michael Brunker, Investigations Editor for NBC News on Investigations, “IdeaScale’s widget allows us to empower participatory journalism in all of our digital environments.” For more information about NBC News Investigations, visit investigations.nbcnews.com/