Still, combing through nearly 1,400 pages of dense text is a long and often thankless task—which is why professional journalists get paid to do it. Volunteer reporters, for all their eagerness and their admirable sense of civic responsibility, lack the accountability that comes with a paycheck. “It’s a running experiment,” Grim says of the project—and one of the more interesting factors being tested in that experiment is the extent that intellectual interest, emotional investment, a sense of community, or some combination thereof, will yield valuable journalism.

Compare the HuffPost’s crowdsourcing approach to The New York Times’s combing of the stimulus package. Reading through the bill “is my job,” says David Herszenhorn, the Times’s Congressional correspondent. “I’m supposed to do that for the readers, not the other way around.” While Herszenhorn shares Grim’s respect for readers—”often our readers are smarter than we are about a given subject,” he says, “so we’re certainly paying attention” when a reader writes in with a comment or a tip—at the same time, “we’re not going to count on them to do the scrutiny of the bill.”

Instead, Herszenhorn and his fellow Times reporters are engaging in what he calls “a loosely coordinated, newspaper-wide effort” when it comes to parsing the stimulus package—”with some of us responsible for the whole thing from top to bottom, but then lots of different parts of the paper having particular interests in different aspects of it”: Robert Pear is focusing on the health care provisions in the package, Sam Dillon is focusing on education, etc. They share tips among each other, and also use external resources—floor debates, press releases from lawmakers and interest groups—to help navigate through the most significant (which often means the most controversial) aspects of the package.

Like the HuffPost’s approach, it’s not perfect. Even experts—whether paid to pore through the bill, or volunteering to do so—may miss things. But what matters, when it comes to the stimulus package, is the aggregate of our knowledge about it. The ability to share news across the superficial divide of outlet title and brand name means that information, in cases like these, matters more than any single organization. And quantity breeds quality: the more people we have to read the through that text, regardless of whom they’re working for, the better off we all are. The HuffPost may catch something the Times didn’t, and vice versa. As far as the public is concerned, the only thing that matters is that someone’s there to do the catching.

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