How does De Monitor work?

• published: 02 Apr 2015
• views: 6

We are an online research program, researching social issues in an innovative manner. As opposed to many other television shows, we work together with you: the viewer. We use the knowledge and experiences that you share with us. But how does that work? On our website, demonitor.nl, we open a file with a clear question: what are we going to be researching? Through our Facebook page and our Twitter account we call on you to give us input. What is your experience with this subject? Do you know more about this subject? Could you give us any tips or pointers? So de Monitor is based on tips and leads that are given to us. You can contact us through a form on our website-- but you can also call us, e-mail us and communicate with us through Twitter and Facebook. We do thorough research into any useful tips. We collect all of the information and check out whether there are any connections. Is there a story to be made from this tip? If there is, we’ll record it and put that movie clip on our website. We ask you whether you recognize something of your own situation in this story, and whether you have any further information. Each file on our website has its own timeline. On that timeline, we post video clips and articles. What kind of tips have we received? Where else do we see these problems developing? Thanks to the timeline, you’re able to follow the entire research process, from start to finish. We’re able to share this information with you through social media, so you never have to miss anything! After shooting and editing the story is ready to be broadcast on television. We bring you a report that has been developed thanks to you. During the broadcast, we are able to share extra information on the subject using Twitter. For example, we can share a longer interview, more of the tips that we’ve received or an interesting document. We can read reactions to the story and engage you in conversations on Twitter and Facebook. At the end of the show we call on you to give us more tips: “Do you have any further information? Let us know!” After the broadcast we receive a lot of telephone calls and e-mails from you, the viewer, and we’re able to go back to work. We’ll place a video update on our website, in which we’re able to tell you what other information we’ve received and what the next steps will be. Often it’ll be possible to continue researching the subject thanks to the tips that keep on coming. Sometimes a certain tip will be so interesting that we’ll open a new research file, and we can ask you to give us tips about this new subject. De Monitor works based on your tips: crowdsourcing. And it works, because we know more when we work together. There’s a reason our motto is: your input starts our story!