BOB GARFIELD: As we just heard, his paper's effort relies on its reporters to find sources of color, but an experiment now underway in our world of public radio aims to cast the net far wider. Minnesota Public Radio and its affiliated programs in Los Angeles are appealing directly to their listeners. For example, here's a pitch that followed a story about the switchover to Medicare's so-called Part D Prescription Plan. [RADIO CLIP/MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER: Is the switchover affecting you or someone you know? If so, we want to hear your story. Go to minnesotapublicradio.org and under the Shortcuts menu choose Medicare Part D. Your insight on this helps us cover the story better. [END RADIO CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD: The news outlets ask listeners to share what they know. They ask them for their names, bios and phone numbers - and they're getting them. Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media have already amassed a database of almost 19,000 potential sources on a variety of stories, cataloged by profession, expertise and experience. The project, known as Public Insight Journalism, is headed by Minnesota Public Radio managing director of news, Michael Skoler. He says the database proved vital for a recent story on the gap between white and minority student scores on standardized tests.

MICHAEL SKOLER: We've gathered people for that particular story by getting students, teachers, curriculum developers, school administrators, education activists into a network. And now, when we've got a story about another issue, say, curriculum standards in the Minnesota public schools, we can go to the people who we think are likely to have expertise on that. And what we get is a range of voices and perspectives that we wouldn't get by simply going to the chief curriculum developer, kind of the usual suspects that a reporter goes after on a story.

BOB GARFIELD: But it's still a top-down way of going after a story. You've decided you're interested in curriculum standards so you start scouring your database to find out who there can give you some insight. But what about story suggestions themselves?

MICHAEL SKOLER: Well, that's the more sophisticated use of Public Insight Journalism, and the more powerful use of it, and we've been making inroads there. Increasingly, we're actually going out into communities around the region and we're having meetings, where we’ll invite 50, 60, 70 people, and we ask questions like, what have you talked about around your dinner table in the last week? What's going on in your community? Are you feeling more financially insecure than before? Tell us about your experience. And we get surprised a lot of the time. That story that I just talked about ended up immediately getting a few dozen responses from people telling us about breaking into their 401-K plans to pay medical expenses, folks who told us that they were running credit card debt for the first time in their lives. It wasn't enough for a story, but it got us beginning to look at numbers, like mortgage defaults, credit card debt in the state; looking at kind of indicators that there might be a continuing problem for a lot of middle-class folks in the economic recovery. Once we had gathered that information, we put that together with the anecdotes we were hearing and we were able to pull together a story about a new phenomenon that was under our radar screen. By doing those things, we're actually setting our own news agenda that's less dependent on the people that are constantly trying to manage the media's agenda - politicians, corporate executives, official spokespeople for organizations. They've gotten very, very good in the last decade at setting our agenda for us, much better than we've gotten at cutting through the spin, I think.

BOB GARFIELD: This is going to be stunning news for most of our listeners, but reporters are often motivated, among other things, by vanity and ego. And among the things that we are proud of is our ability to ferret out stories. Is there anyone in your newsroom who reacted badly to reporting by dossier?

MICHAEL SKOLER: [LAUGHS] Well, we had huge skepticism when we started, and I understand that. You know, the question in the newsroom was, why are we working differently, you know, we're doing fine the way we are – Hell, I’ve got my contacts -- I've got my golden rolodex of people. All you're really doing is making more work for me, because now you want me to consider all these extra potential sources for a story. What we've found over time, though, is as reporters have tried it out, they've found that often it can be faster because, you know, they can have a story idea that they want to begin on now, and within an hour or two we can have a few or a dozen sources that they wouldn't have found on their own that they can start mining. The people who really champion it say, if I want to find someone who's lived through a particular social problem, say, you know, mental illness in adolescence, instead of going to an activist group and asking them for one of their poster children, I can find those folks through this network, and I'm less concerned that they're on message and that they are fully representative of this problem or issue.

BOB GARFIELD: In order to be able to do this, you have had to amass a quite substantial database of individuals' hopes, dreams, desires, fears, concerns, which is pretty intimate information. I gather you're taking great care to make sure that none of this material falls into the wrong hands.

MICHAEL SKOLER: We promise people confidentiality. We say, nothing that you tell us will go on the air or on the Web without your explicit permission. And even within the newsroom, we've limited access to just a few journalists that we call public insight analysts, who tend to work the database, who know how to write queries to get people to open up and share their stories and know that the confidence will be kept.

BOB GARFIELD: Over the past number of years, we've heard a lot about citizen journalism, including predictions that the news organizations would become irrelevant and that the blogosphere has changed everything, giving the individual a voice and the ability to essentially replace outside filters who determine what constitutes news. How is this different from that vision of the future?

MICHAEL SKOLER: Most of the people involved in citizen journalism basically feel that old mainstream media are dead, and that what we need to do is replace it by enabling regular people, who are non-reporters, to rise up and share what they know, and become reporters. Our approach is really to say, mainstream media is good, the people who practice it are smart, they've got great skills. What we need to do is enable them to connect much more deeply with the knowledge of the public, the bigger brain of the public. I think that this is kind of the way that mainstream media can ensure that they stay relevant and have a role that people respect and will trust.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Michael, thank you very much.

MICHAEL SKOLER: It's been my pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Michael Skoler is managing director of news at Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media and the director of the brand new Center for Innovation in Journalism.