Something (gasp) not related to the election

Hello again, reporters! I almost sent an election-flavored TFR this week… but I decided I wouldn’t do that to you guys. (Although did you hear about the tools that are free til election day, like IRE training videos and Deepgram audio searches?)

Instead, let’s look a nice little tool that never made you want to move to a cave until November 9th. You may already know about Genius, a crowdsourcing website mostly known for debating rap lyrics. Did you know a civic group used it to crowdsource an understanding of Chicago’s police reform report?

A few groups worked together to create “an annotated, updated and independent hub” of what is a pretty static report. It’s like DocumentCloud annotations, but allows for crowdsourcing and annotations on a webpage rather than just an uploaded document.

I like it because it makes the police reform report less of a one-way conversation, and it’s the first tool designed for rap to get appropriated for journalism. (As far as I know?)