Guidelines lyrics

What is News Genius?

News Genius is dedicated to crowdsourced annotation of the lastest breaking stories. We host primary sources on topics like politics, tech, and law.

What kind of content is uploaded onto News Genius?

Primary Sources

News Genius aims to annotate primary sources from breaking stories. A "primary source" can take the form of an article at the center of a controversy (ie the Face Behind Bitcoin Newsweek piece). A few places that are often good to look for primary sources:

• If it’s a story related to a business, try to find their corporate media/investor relations page
• If it’s a story related to a government official or department, find the press page for the office in question
• Be sure to check the Twitter and Facebook accounts of the person or organization who originated the source; they’ll often post direct links
• If all else fails, try YouTube. They sometimes even have rough transcriptions in the form of subtitles, although these always require a lot of cleanup
• For breaking news stories, it is CRUCIAL that a second (or even third) source is cross-checked to ensure that the transcription is both legitimate and accurate.

Secondary Sources

Don’t poach someone else’s journalism unless their journalism itself becomes news (like it did with the Newsweek piece on Dorian Nakamoto mentioned above). Or, for longer pieces, shorter excerpts that are particularly ripe for annotation can be posted only if they clearly link back to the original article.

Public Doc*ments

Public doc*ments are any doc*ments that are intended to be publicly shared and belong to the public. These may or may not be primary sources. These doc*ments include:

• Any government doc*ments (including reports, statements, etc.)
• Public statements from anyone, whether in writing or transcribed
• Court doc*ments, like cases, complaints, and briefs
• Publicized doc*ments -- anything people intended to make public (like reports from think tanks, non-profits, or advocacy groups)

If it's public, it's news, and annotation makes it better, post it!

Long Doc*ments

For very long texts, please upload each section individually and add it to a collection page. As an example, see the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court Decision.

Get involved!

Follow us on twitter, like us on facebook, and join in the conversation in the forums.