[Nell Dhanesha at Nieman Journalism Lab]

This was fun to watch unfold in real time:

"The truck’s journey to that spot had begun a few days earlier, as an email with the subject line “guerilla marketing for sources” in the inbox of Ariana Tobin, editor of ProPublica’s crowdsourcing and engagement team. It came from reporter Brett Murphy, who was covering the destruction of USAID with his reporting partner Anna Maria Barry-Jester. They’d been tipped off about the desk cleanouts; was there any chance, they asked Tobin, that they could send a billboard truck out on the morning of the 27th?"

And this quote quietly implies what a significant chunk of my job has become more recently:

"“We’re basically treating any conversation we’re having with someone who works for or used to work for the federal government as a maximum-security tip,” Tobin said. “That, frankly, is not what we used to do.”"

Perhaps we'll write more about that in the future. For now, speaking of tips, if you want to send ProPublica a tip, we now have a number of options.

#Media

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