Faculty instructions: Public Insight Network

You’ve found the page with instructions to use the Public Insight Network, for University of Colorado Boulder faculty and staff in Journalism & Mass Communication. JMC and the CU Independent are PIN academic partners.

---

 Consult with a JMC “PIN analyst” 
If you want to use the Public Insight Network for a class, or you are supervising JMC students who are doing reporting assignments, please consult with a JMC program PIN analyst for guidance.

PIN analysts are faculty or staff of JMC who have been trained and approved to access privacy-sensitive areas of the system, which your students cannot access directly themselves. We will keep this page updated as additional people are trained as PIN analysts and can help you. Current PIN analysts are:

• Gil Asakawa, faculty advisor for student media: gil.asakawa@colorado.edu (Armory – CU Independent office, 3rd floor)
• Steve Outing, program director of Digital News Test Kitchen: steve.outing@colorado.edu (Armory 1B27)

We hope that additional faculty members will want to get trained on being PIN analysts, in order to work directly with their students in leveraging the power of PIN. Please contact Steve Outing at the address above if interested in getting trained as a PIN “analyst.”

 Schedule a PIN overview presentation for your class 
A JMC PIN analyst (see list above) should visit your class to give a presentation to you and your students about the Public Insight Network: how it is useful to journalists, examples of its use in reporting, and rules and etiquette for using PIN to find and contact potential sources.

 Understand the PIN source privacy rules 
Maintaining our status as a Public Insight Network academic partner means following PIN’s rules, especially regarding privacy of sources’ data. Please read and understand what’s covered in the PIN FAQ (frequently asked questions) page.

 Help your students fill out and submit a request form 
Students are asked to fill out the PIN submission request form, on which they will explain specifically what they are looking for in terms of sources, and/or write a request that relevant potential sources will receive as an e-mail message. (The form is self-explanatory; however, your students probably will need your guidance in creating an effective source questionnaire and/or search query.) … Go to the PIN request form

 Await search results 
If your student has asked for a search to identify relevant sources based on specific criteria, a PIN analyst will run the search on the student’s behalf and e-mail the results, for use in reporting.

 Await responses from willing sources 
If your student’s PIN query includes sending out an e-mail to a group of targeted people with requests for answers to questions, or requests to be contacted by sources willing to communicate with your student via e-mail or phone, wait for responses to appear in your student’s e-mail inbox or for willing sources to call the student journalist (depending on how your students instructed willing sources to respond).

Can you have your students recruit PIN sources? (Please!!)

An important part of making JMC’s academic partnership with Public Insight Network valuable is recruiting new PIN members (a.k.a., sources). Anyone can sign up to be a PIN member/source by filling out a form and sharing information about themselves, including about their expertise, interests, and personal experiences. In fact, we encourage CU faculty to become a PIN members!

Even more important is to get your students to recruit PIN members in and around the CU and Boulder communities. If you can work it into your class, please consider assigning an extra-credit project for each of your students to recruit 10 PIN members. They can recruit anyone, from fellow students, to research scientists, to public officials, to athletes, and so on.

>>Click here to go to the PIN sign-up form.

Need a short URL to share with your students? Use this: http://goo.gl/jl94F