It's clear that social networks have become a new kind of Holy Grail in the quest to build web traffic. What seems less clear is what all the tweeting, Tumblr-ing and Facebook posting is designed to do -- and how to gauge its effectiveness.

Gotham Gazette (GG), a small site that cannot afford consultants and does not have a marketing person, has worked to create Facebook pages and to tweet to try to draw readers to our pages. We've all taken this on (with varying levels of zeal) -- since gone are the days when reporters didn't also have to do marketing (alas!).

The effort has gradually been building, with many thousands (not yet millions) following Gotham Gazette and its reporters on Twitter and signing up as our fans on Facebook. What this has not done, though, is raise our traffic.

As someone who works exclusively online but wonders how I'll have my a.m. coffee when (or if) the New York Times stops printing, I've been slow to figure out why. But as colleagues and others tell me, many people who might previously have come to GG for their daily fix of NYC news, now get that from their Twitter feed. Often the tweet (or Facebook posting) of our story tells them all they want to know.

An Albany Story

Recently we ran a story by our Albany reporter David King reporting that some upstate Republican state senators were floating the idea of charging tolls on some of the now-free bridges leading in to Manhattan and using the proceeds to fund mass transit, a scheme long embraced by urban environmentalists and transit advocates. In return, though, the senators -- to the concern of many of those same advocates -- want to repeal a payroll tax that provides funding for mass transit.

It was a good story that had flown under the radar in the city. So I tweeted it on both my own feed (@GailNRobinson) and at GG's (@gothamgazette):

Of course, I hoped that would pique interest and send followers rapidly clicking to the Gotham Gazette story. No doubt some who care deeply about mass transit and/or tolls did. But probably most people did not -- the tweet told them as much as they wanted to know. Back in the pre-Twitter era, some of those people might have come directly to GG.

On the other hand, though, my hunch is many people saw the tweet who would never have come to Gotham Gazette, pre-Twitter era or not.

Assessing Results

So how do we assess this? Was it a good idea to tweet the story? Could the tweet have done more to pique people's interest? (I'm almost sure the answer to that one is yes, but I'm not sure how it could have done that.)

A similar issue exists with Facebook, where the posting can be longer. I have engaged in extensive discussions of my articles on education with Facebook friends, many of whom based their comments and arguments not on a reading of my full story but on the paragraph on Facebook.

This leads to the issue of what one's goals are. If it is to increase visibility, the social media almost certainly can help. People using social media who never would have come to your home site will now see your material, expanding your audience.

If, though, you hope that social media will increase your page visits, the answer seems less clear. Recently I heard that an organization that publishes a prestigious, expensive almost academic journal had hired someone whose job is to use social media to drive traffic not to the organizations' Twitter feed, Facebook page or even website but to subscribe to their (rather high-priced) print publication. Good luck to that new employee -- but it seems a heavy and long lift to me.

In some ways, this may be an easier issue for a non-profit site like Gotham Gazette than for a profit-making one. We are published by Citizens Union Foundation, and our goal (and theirs) is to increase awareness of local government, issues and policies. While I think the long story on the transit funding did more to increase that comprehension than the tweet, the tweet clearly is better than nothing.

But that does not mean it is not a problem for us, as I blogged about previously. We need to bring in enough money to stay afloat and -- correct me if I'm wrong here -- many advertisers and funders have not figured out how to grasp these new metrics. And that's not surprising since few of us know either.

In those weeks, we've learned a lot about what people like and don't like about the service. This information will help us improve what we think is an important tool for New Yorkers and an example other local news sites might want to follow.

Popular with People, not Politicians

First, by and large, people like it. Even though most of the information -- but not all of it -- was already scattered about on Gotham Gazette and other sites, readers appreciate having all that data in one place. As someone who, like most editors, usually only hears from readers when they have complaints, I enjoyed getting emails with comments like "love it," "great new tool," "great addition to an already fine website," and so on.

We also received favorable coverage from a number of local news organizations. The New York Daily News ran a story about Councilpedia as did the local cable news channel and some political blogs. The New York Post even used it to call out a councilmember who seems not to have done much work during the last year.

Some of the city officials did not share that enthusiasm. In particular, they did not like the focus on campaign contributions. Our information on this is not original -- we took it from the city's Campaign Finance Board, which keeps track of such things and makes them public on its own. It's a very useful site. We did, though, sort all that information in an attempt to make it more user friendly and informative. So with Councilpedia, readers can, with two clicks, find out which unions gave money to Councilmember X and which lawyers helped Councilmember Y.

What some council members really, really do not like, apparently, is that we identify contributions from the real estate industry. Real estate -- developers, brokers, construction -- are probably the most important special interest in NYC politics. Many New York politicians rely on their support. They just hope people won't notice. Councilpedia makes it a bit harder to keep that secret.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

What We've Learned

Some of the lessons are already clear to us. One is that, while people visit the site and explore it, they have been slow to post comments. Getting the public to share information and having a discussion about money and politics are key to Councilpedia, so we will try to ramp that up.

In the next week or so, we plan to add a tutorial explaining more fully how to foster user interactions. We also hope to offer some short information sessions on Councilpedia and how to use it. And we expect that fresh information on the site -- the list of earmarks for the next fiscal year, for example -- will spur more people to get involved.

We're eager for other suggestions and would appreciate hearing from anyone who has done crowdsourcing and had a good response.

The second lesson: People would like to see more of this. They wonder why we did not include the mayor (Michael Bloomberg is a billionaire, so he doesn't take campaign contributions). Other readers wanted to see the information on state legislators, judges, and possible mayoral candidates.

More Money, More Monitoring

So would we. The problem, alas, is resources.

Councilpedia has something like 31,000 pages. While some of the data was copied or downloaded, much of it required formatting and tweaking by our technical manager JaVon Rice. And every single campaign contribution to all of the 53 officials in Councilpedia had to be hand-coded by sector and location. This required a large number of interns and freelancers working under the supervision of our city government editor, Courtney Gross. Even with a generous grant from the Knight Foundation, this stretched our resources to the limit and probably beyond.

New York's state legislature, which has been termed one of the most dysfunctional in the country and is awash is questionable campaign finance shenanigans, represent a tempting target for this type of project. Now if only we had a million dollars to do it...

Councilpedia, funded in part with a News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, is a unique new tool that will let people track the influence of money in New York City politics and help New Yorkers monitor their public officials. To accomplish this it does three main things.

First, it brings together an array of information about two citywide elected officials and the members of the New York City Council: legislative records, campaign finance information, and places to go to find out more. Most -- not all -- of this exists elsewhere, but it is scattered about -- on Gotham Gazette, on the city Campaign Finance Board website and elsewhere. We've put it all in one place. This will help people easily go back and forth between the money -- who helped fund the official's campaign -- and the politics. And in the process find out how the official vote on matters might affect those contributors.

Second it expands upon the campaign finance information previously available. New York City has a tough campaign finance law with public financing of campaigns (unless you're a billionaire and so choose to opt out). As part of that, the Campaign Finance Board pulls together a formidable array of information and makes it readily available to all who come to its site. But the amount of information is overwhelming -- long lists of names of people who gave to a candidate -- and hard to digest. We've taken those lists of contributors and broken them down by categories: labor, for example, people in the real estate industry and so on.

Reader Input

And finally, we've asked our readers to connect the dots for us. Readers are encouraged, urged (even begged) to tell us what they know about contributors and their interests or about council members. If Contributor Z gave money to Candidate X who then proposed a zoning change that boosted the value of Z's property, we want to know. Gotham Gazette reporters will try to check the allegations out; we'll mark those that we can verify and take down ones we determine to be false or abusive.

We hope to have a lively online conversation that will inform New Yorkers and help them become more involved in the politics of their city. This is an experiment in crowdsourcing on local issues. We'll keep you posted on how it develops -- in case some of you want to try something similar in your communities. (And our City Hall editor Courtney Gross and technical manager JaVon Rice, who together did the lion's share of the work on this, can warn you of some of the problems and issue you might face along the way.)

So far, we have received a lot of praise and coverage for Councilpedia. (For a sample go here, here and here for a video). People already are urging us to expand it -- to judges, to state officials, to candidates as well a incumbents. One person even wanted us to delve into records of a past governor. Given how long it took us to get this far -- and given the months of data coding, checking and re-entry, we're gong to pause for now and watch what happens, fine tune what we have, see what kind of discussion develops and, we hope, follow up on some hot tips from readers.

So if you know about New York, tell us what you know. And even if you don't know New York, tell us what you think about the project.

Now, of course, that has changed. While some of us remain loyal to a few sites, we're more likely to click around, using search engines, blogs, email from friends and so on to guide us to new reading. As someone interested in education, for example, I visited a lot of Washington, D.C., local sites earlier this fall, having been sent there by searches for Michele Rhee, by Facebook friends who share my interest in public education, by friends who know of my interest and by an array of education blogs. Now that D.C. is generating less education news -- at least for now -- I'm less likely to come back. That's not a reflection on the quality of any of the sites.

Further complicating the picture is the fact that one often does not have to go to the original site to read a given item. As we all know, blogs and other online publications publish not only links but lift articles in their entirety.

Should We Yahoo?

Recently Gotham Gazette -- and probably many of your local sites as well -- was approached by Yahoo, which wanted to put some of our content in its new Yahoo local sections. The whole story -- not just a link and a teaser -- would appear on Yahoo. The massive reach of Yahoo obviously appealed to a small local site like ours, but we said no because we thought we could not afford any loss in traffic, however slight. (I'll admit another part of me couldn't see why a struggling site like ours should provide free content to a multi-billion dollar corporation, but I'll let that part slide for now.)

So where does this leave us? Do hits mean what they used to? Well maybe not, but we still need them. Advertisers rely on them and so do foundations and other donors, which are key funding sources for those of us in the non-profit journalism world.

That said, it seems marketing techniques of the past -- building brand loyalty, so to speak -- are less effective now. Or are they?

And what are the alternatives. Facebook? Twitter? What else?

Good content never hurts, but how does one spread the word about that good content? And since people reading a story are often oblivious to the name of the site they have found their way to, great stories do not necessarily ensure repeat customers.

It seems any talk about sustainability has to consider traffic. Sure, a site can have readers and still not make it. But without readers -- not necessarily millions but at least success in reaching the intended audience -- can any site survive?

This is what has confronted Gotham Gazette as we move into the final stages of creating our Councilpedia site. Councilpedia, a Knight News Challenge winner that I've blogged about here previously, will explore more fully the links between money and politics in New York City.

Councilpedia will enable visitors to the site to share what they know about politicians and their donors. It is to be powered by MediaWiki to let people flag something -- noting, for example, that one contributor to a candidate owns land she hopes to get rezoned for a Walmart. Gotham Gazette staff will then confirm -- or delete -- the comment.

Filtering Data

The core of Councilpedia is information already on Gotham Gazette, information from City Council (on earmarks, for example) and, above all, the massive records from the city Campaign Finance Board on giving and spending. The sheer magnitude of all this data has posed an array of problems.

The city data, while thorough and accessible, is inscrutable to most New Yorkers -- a list of largely meaningless names. To make it easier to search and understand, we set out to code the data (to indicate large donors, those from the city, unions, real estate industry etc.). With some candidates having thousands of contributors, this presented a massive task. Fortunately, we had some conscientious interns this summer who, between their other reporting responsibilities, dutifully researched and coded line after line of information under the supervision of our city government editor, Courtney Gross.

Readers will be able to examine this data in a number of ways. They can view by candidate. They can find out who else the contributor helped fund. They can look at intermediaries and determine whose money they bundled and then who it went to. And so on.

For the wiki, though, this mountain of information has been a bit much. When technical manager William JaVon Rice began uploading the data into spreadsheets he had created, the process took 36 hours and produced some 31,000 pages -- a sure indication no one would ever attempt this in print. The system balked, overwriting pages, for example, which required Rice to check every candidate's list of often hundreds of contributors to determine which ones had been overwritten. Then he had to undo the overwrite.

Pushing The Limits of MediaWiki

We're still planning to have this ready to show you in the next several weeks. And we think you'll be impressed. Not to boast, but the reporters, campaign finance aficionados and followers of city government who viewed our test felt that way.

But we do see a number of issues looming ahead. Councilpedia is intended as a living, breathing site, meaning data will continue to accumulate as officials collect more money, award more earmarks, pass more bills, and so on. The updating poses a challenge for a small non-profit like Gotham Gazette.

The magnitude of the new information -- added to the volumes we already have -- is likely to push the limits of MediaWiki even further.

With this in mind, we're looking for ways to automate the process more. And we hope someone -- any takers out there?-- will make MediaWiki more robust or create or an alternative.

As always, we appreciate your ideas, so feel free to share them in the comments below. And stay tuned for Councilpedia.

Currently we have a pilot for the site with the design, the structure and information for three office holders. We are not ready to release this to the world, but if you would like a sneak preview please email me at grobinson at gothamgazette.com.

Councilpedia Brings City and Candidate Information to Life

Councilpedia intends to bring an array of information about City Council members and other city officials -- the bills they sponsor, background information, member items (a.k.a earmarks) -- to one site, along with campaign finance information. New York City, which has public financing of campaigns, requires a lot of disclosure on the part of candidates as to where they get their money and how they spend it, but the information can be hard to read and comprehend.

That is one way Councilpedia will be useful. First, it sorts the donors by various categories, such as unions, major givers and intermediaries. By having the campaign finance information along with voting information, Councilpedia can help people make possible connections between money and politics. They can then comment on the site.

The city information on donors is essentially a long list of names. Councilpedia will enable readers to identify who those people are. One example would be that John Doe, who gave to candidate X, owns a lot in the candidate's district and wants it re-zoned.

Anyone who registers can -- and is urged to -- comment. Gotham Gazette staff will review comments, verify them and use the leads from our readers to inform our reporting. Overall, we hope Councilpedia will enrich the debate about money and politics in New York.

Making Tools Work

In putting this project together we have grappled with adapting two disparate -- and balky -- technical tools to our needs.

The first was the
Campaign Finance Board information. While the board provides a wealth of information (and has a very helpful staff to boot), the information can be hard to read and is not formatted the way we wanted it.

After trying various techniques to import the data, we eventually confronted the cold reality: The only feasible way -- given our limitations -- to create an attractive, user friendly site that did what we wanted it to do (and what we promised Knight it would do) was to re-input the data and code it ourselves.

This is incredibly painstaking. Luckily, we have several excellent interns this summer who pitched in to help.

The other issue dealt with adapting the wiki to our needs. While our technical manager, JaVon Rice, has pushed the limits of the wiki, we found there were things it would not do. For example, we had hoped to flag items that have recently received comment and have the comments appear along with the item.

Instead, we will have comment pages. We will indicate if a comment has been posted on a contribution or piece of legislation, but that also will not be automatic. Gotham Gazette staff will have to mark the item themselves.

Keeping the site current will also require staff intervention -- to add bills, to update financial reports, to remove offensive or simply incorrect comments.

Will it be worth it? We certainly hope so and are eager to move to the next step and engage New Yorkers in this conversation about money and politics.

That's the situation confronting the Gotham Gazette staff as we move forward with our Councilpedia project that will use crowdsourcing to probe the links between money and politics. I'm hoping you can help. (For more on Councilpedia see my earlier post.)

Monitoring Revisions

The project will enable registered users to contribute information on campaign donors and the politicians they help. Like Wikipedia, Councilpedia needs to allow readers to easily provide us with information. But we also want the ability to monitor revisions much the same way that Microsoft Word's track changes does.

Our technical manager, JaVon Rice, has found that Mediawiki simply does not do everything we need it to do and is looking for something essentially like Writeboard or Google Docs, except for public rather than just internal use.

Any ideas? Please share them in the comments.

To step back first, though, Councilpedia will provide information about New York's 51 City Council members and two citywide elected officials, including their campaign finance information, the bills they introduced, and the groups they gave "member items" -- the parlance here for pork or earmarks. (Our third citywide elected official -- the mayor -- only takes contributions from one person: his billionaire self.)

Readers will be able to search this data and tag it, providing information and, we hope, creating a dialogue about money and politics in New York City. If successful, this crowdsourcing technique could be adopted in other areas, such as city contracts, and in other cities and states.

How Councilpedia Will Work

Here's what we hope will happen. A reader in Councilwoman Z's district will go to her Councilpedia page and see that real estate developers have given large amounts to her campaign. The reader will see a $2,500 donation from Company X and tag it saying, "Company X bulldozed a building, forcing 20 orphans out of a home."

That building was in Councilwoman Z's district, another reader will say. And another astute reader will notice that Councilwoman Z sponsored a bill to exempt orphanages from city laws banning midnight building demolitions.

Gotham Gazette checks this out, leaves the comments up for all to see (marking them as verified) and does a story about the links between Councilwoman Z and Company X, and whether their actions have contributed to a sharp increase in the number of homeless orphans in NYC.

Our main source for much of the raw data will be the New York Campaign Finance Board. By most accounts, the city has a model campaign finance law, and the board gets as much information into the hands of the public as it can. That said, the lists of donors often seem to be little more than an undifferentiated list of unfamiliar names.

Thinking Like Readers

We hope Councilpedia visitors will help us make sense of the lists. But it's unreasonable to expect people to scroll through thousands of names hoping they'll see something that makes them sit up and say "A-ha!" So our first challenge has been trying to pre-digest the campaign finance data.

This involved trying to put ourselves in our readers' heads by thinking what they might search for: developers, probably; janitors, probably not. And it involves making some value judgments. Contributions from the United Federation of Teachers should be tagged as union contributions; but what about cash from an individual teacher who is almost certainly a UFT member, but not necessarily an adherent of the union's policy positions? And so on.

We've made a first cut on these issues and hope when we test it in the spring that people will tell us what we should add. In the meantime, we're plowing through the laborious grunt work of tagging all the data.

The other issue that our technical manager and web producer, W. JaVon Rice, has been grappling with is how to present this data and how to encourage interactivity and tagging, while also protecting the integrity of the site. We've already learned that wikis are far less nimble and adaptable than we had hoped.

We'll be testing out various solutions in the weeks to come, and look forward to sharing some of them with you and getting your opinion.

For our readers, we hope the redesign will create a more useful publication by making it easier for visitors to find information about New York City issues. For our advertisers -- who we hope will increase in number -- it offers more space and more options. And for the GG staff, it reflects our evolution -- and to some extent, the web's evolution -- over the past decade.

When Gotham Gazette launched in fall 1999, its publisher, the Citizens Union Foundation, wanted to use the power of the web to engage and inform citizens about local government. As part of that, Gotham Gazette included links to all the news sources in the city, as well as to government sites, a variety of organizations, and so on. Back then, that was unusual. Many sites would not link to other sources.

Aside from those links, though, Gotham Gazette in its early days resembled a print publication. We posted most of our stories at the beginning of the week and left them up for seven days. We did offer a daily news digest but rarely, if ever, updated the site during the day. And, of course, interactivity had not yet emerged.

Over the years, the web changed and with it, so did Gotham Gazette. Under former editor Jonathan Mandell, we began creating news games and added a blog -- the Wonkster -- to provide updates and short items. We increasingly focused on original reporting and commentary. Recently, we began posting more content throughout the week, offering multimedia, and creating interactive graphics.

While we continue to provide links and a daily news summary, we no longer have that field to ourselves, as even the blogs of some of the big N.Y. newspapers (such as the Daily News) link to material on our site and in other city media.

Focus on Original Work

With the redesign, we wanted to address these changes and give ourselves a more modern look. (There had been an interim redesign about five years ago, which brought us into the 21st century.) This involved an extensive effort by current and former Gotham Gazette staff, as well as valuable advice from the staff and board of our parent organization. As a veteran of several print redesigns, I found that the challenge of making one work online -- on a site with hundreds of pages -- at times seemed overwhelming.

This latest incarnation of Gotham Gazette focuses on our original work, while still offering the daily news summary and links to the best resources on New York City. We will also roll out more stories throughout the week. Articles are now listed and archived by subject area (art, environment, health) instead of labels (such as issues of the week and feature), which meant something to us but not to our readers. And we've done a major housecleaning.

The design was largely the work of former web producer, Ya-Hsuan Huang. Our technical director, W. JaVon Rice, played the key role in making her mockups a working reality.

We think our redesign represents a major step forward. Of course, we know we must continue to evolve. As part of that, we plan to launch our first crowdsourcing project in the coming months (more on that in a future post.) And, as always, we seek new ways and new formats to keep our readers informed about the city that engages, enchants and infuriates them.

PaidContent reported this week that Politico raked in more than $20 million last year, finishing with operating profits of about $1 million.

That's the good news. But as Molly Fischer wrote in the New York Observer, Politico's print publication -- something few of us outside the Beltway ever see -- accounted for 60 percent of operating revenues. This was the case even though the paper version has an estimated circulation of 32,000 compared to the more than 3 million unique visitors estimated to visit the website every month.

As Fischer said, "Even if Politico's success testifies to print's demise, print advertising remains the best way to make money."

Politico, of course, is fortunate enough to have both a print and web presence. Those of us at web-only publications (such as Gotham Gazette) cannot help but be frustrated by seeing ads -- and revenue -- going to print publications that may have fewer readers and weaker content.

People like seeing their ads on coffee tables -- particularly on the mayor's coffee table, as an ad salesperson told me when I wondered why Gotham Gazette did not get more image ads from unions and advocacy groups. So far, it seems, even the people at Politico have not been able to break that habit.

Most satisfyingly, we confirmed that for some issues, games -- or perhaps "policy simulations," just so you don't expect Grand Theft Auto here -- provide an informative and engaging way to tell a story. People who played our Garbage Game, for example, told us that it gave them a whole new appreciation of the complexity of the problem -- both how difficult it is to reduce solid waste and how expensive it is to dispose of this material.

Budget games, such as Balance (or the national one, Budget Hero), also do this. They make it clear that, whatever politicians might have us believe, closing deficits means raising taxes or cutting things most of us like, such as police officers, teachers and firefighters.

Games that are more instructional, such as ours about how the budget process works, have a role to play, too. But my hunch, based on our experience, is that unless they can be made extremely entertaining, people are less likely to try those out just for the heck of it. Instead, these games can play a valuable role for a community group seeking to inform its members, say, or a civics or political science class. (This realization owes much to a talk by Alice Robison at MIT last year.)

Building Good, Low Budget Games

Creating a good game requires a lot of work, money or both. When I spoke at a conference last year, people repeatedly expressed amazement about the low budget for Gotham Gazette's games. But for us -- and for many other small news publications -- the cost seemed huge. We never would have been able to do the games without Knight's support, and even with Knight's generosity, it often was a scramble and a struggle.

Part of this is technical: finding programmers or having one on staff. But reporting for the games is also extremely time consuming because you can't "fudge." So, for example, as we compared electricity savings for Switch, we had to insure they were all in the same units, covered the same period of time, and applied to the same geographical area. We could not use a mix of figures for the city and state, which is something we might do in a story.

If small organizations such as Gotham Gazette are to use games as one of their storytelling techniques, we need to create games with a long shelf life -- our Garbage Game gets many hits two years after its launch -- or ones that can be recycled. We are, for example, going to try to reuse Balance for the next budget cycle, by inserting new numbers. I've gotten some queries from others about how they could adapt this game to their locality.

Conclusion

Are games worth doing? I'd give a qualified yes. One great thing about the web is that it offers journalists so many tools for telling stories: conventional text, interactive databases, audio, video, and so on. Games are another valuable tool.

As the web matures, the key question we should ask ourselves is not, "Should we have an audio slide show or should we make a game?" Rather, we should ask, "How can we best engage and inform our readers about the topic at hand?"

And sometimes the answer will no doubt be, "Yes, let's make a game."

Games, at least those that entail budget numbers, carbon emissions or other figures, require a level of precision most stories simply do not. This is not to say that reporters are sloppy. But in doing a story involving numbers, we can explain differences in a narrative. Who among us who has covered demographic data has not resorted to such phrases as "statistics are available only for the entire metropolitan area," or "numbers are not available for individual community school districts."

When only a statewide figure on recidivism rates, say, exists, we use it, noting perhaps that New York City accounts for such and such a percentage of New York State prisoners. As an example a recent prominent graphic in the New York Times on voting patterns among different groups since 1980 noted that figures for Asian Americans only dated back the 1992 and left a blank space.

Many types of games simply will not allow for that. If a game asks players to balance the budget, the revenues and expenditures they can add and subtract must all be for the same jurisdiction over the same period of time. If one number is for the county and the other for a city, the game becomes confusing and even meaningless.

Right now, we are looking to create a game on electricity use. Ample data exists but the difficulty comes in comparing it. The city projects its use looking at 2030 as an end date; the state uses 2015. The city only considers the five boroughs; the state looks at the entire state and the local electric utility, Con Ed, includes New York City and some suburban counties. Some data is pegged to peak use, others to total yearly consumption. And so on.

Other than hiring a professional numbers cruncher (a suggestion we've actually received), any other ideas? How have other games dealt with this? And a word of advice to those creating games: Don't forget the reporting.

State political reporters salivated -- until they heard how DA David Soares was issuing the material. Instead of putting it on-line, the county clerk released a CD and charged $90 for it. "I'm just starting to go through it, and it's an absolute mess," complained the LoHud.com blog. "Every page is its own PDF file and not even scrollable or searchable."

Soares went somewhat further than most officials but his release that is not a release is all too common. Public officials boast of putting material on-line and then do so in ways that stymie average citizens and even Web journalists trying to review data that should be a matter of public record. Even when material is available, it is, like the Albany documents, often difficult to search and manipulate in a way that provides any kind of meaningful information.

Those of us trying to find information about New York City government encounter this again and again -- despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg's not so deserved reputation for transparency. In a recent article for Gotham Gazette, Kristofer Ri­os and Joshua Breitbart describe how difficult it can be to get information about city government -- despite a path-breaking city law requiring that city documents be posted to the official Web site promptly. "With no method for enforcement, compliance has been spotty," the authors write. Most information that is available, they say, is in the form of a PDF, "which takes information and turns it into a two-dimensional document that cannot be manipulated or transformed into other kinds of data."

And those PDFs can be difficult to find. Last fall, to much fanfare, the city Department of Education graded every school in the city. It boasted all the results would be on-line -- and they are. But finding them requires a familiarity with educational jargon, tireless fingers and a second sense about the workings of the minds of Bloomberg's educrats. Comparing schools, which is what many parents seeking a school for their kid want to do, requires repeated downloads.

And, as EveryBlock has found, some information is not available at all. The service wants to provide New Yorkers with detailed timely and local information about crime in their neighborhoods. Ri­os and Breitbart report, "In Chicago ..., residents wanting to know what crimes have occurred in their area simply type in their address or neighborhood and receive a list of reported offenses. Clicking on the crime brings more information, including a locator map. This comes directly from the police department's records. By contrast, all the New York EveryBlock site offers is a weekly compendium of crimes by precinct, with no details on the reports and no indication of where in the precinct the alleged offense occurred."

This is not for lack of trying on EveryBlock's part. But rather, Ri­os and Breitbart say, the NYPD's weekly Comp Stat report does little more than break citywide data into seven broad categories and is only available to the public as a PDF: "The department provides the information by precinct, but city residents cannot search for crime statistics by their ZIP code, neighborhood or even borough." As a final touch, the link for "Department Statistics" on the police department site has been down for weeks.

Knowledge is power and politicians or adept ones anyway (and Bloomberg is nothing if not adept) are unlikely to provide unvarnished meaningful information voluntarily. Should civic media, particularly on-line media, play a role in trying to force government's hand? And, if so, how can that be accomplished?

In some instances, the denial seems like out and out political retribution. Leonard Levitt, a former Newsday reporter who now writes the blog NYPD Confidential, lost his pass. Levitt has been a persistent police critic, dating back to his days in print. But once he moved on line, the city had an excuse to pull his credentials.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on Levitt's behalf against the NYPD, demanding it reveal the criteria for press passes. Interestingly, the department's own instruction page for getting credentials makes no distinction between on-line and other reporters saying that credentials are for "are for those individuals who are full-time, news staff employees."

The police also revoked press credential for Rafael Martínez Alequin, a bit of a gadfly whose questions apparently irritated Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Martínez Alequin had had a small print publication but switched to on-line only with a blog called Your Free Press. In denying the permit, the department reportedly said Martinez Alequin had failed to prove that he was "a full-time employee of a news gathering organization covering spot or breaking news events on a regular basis."

As for Gotham Gazette, the denial of credentials is ironic. Until a few years ago, we published a small hard-copy newsletter that went out to maybe a couple of thousand New Yorkers and was handed out free at city libraries. Our reporters had press passes. Starting in 1999, we began moving operations on-line, picking up thousands more readers in the process -- but putting our press credentials in jeopardy. We are now exclusively on-line.

As long as hardly anyone read us, we were real reporters in the eyes of the police bureaucracy; now that tens of thousands of people do, we're not. And to use the department's own words, Gotham Gazette is a "news gathering organization"; Courtney does cover "spot or breaking news on a regular basis."

In Courtney's case, the department has resorted to evasive tactics. There is a right to appeal but the department's Office of Public Information has delayed setting a date for one. Calls go unanswered.

The department's action raise a number of issues. Why does an agency headed by a mayoral appointee and replete with politics get to decide who can cover that mayor and the city government? And as the barriers separating journalists from everyone else fall, what defines a journalist? Everyone seems to have a blog. Should the NYPD give all of them press credentials. Is that realistic in light of security concerns? Probably not. So then, back to square one: Who gets to decide who is and who is not a journalist and what criteria should they use?

With challenges and a dash of humor, the game presents an entertaining way to educate New Yorkers about one of the eternal mysteries of policy and politics in the city: How the budget is determined. To make the topic engaging, we created three mazes. Players must navigate these labyrinths in a castle dungeon to try to win funding for a favored program or a tax cut. Each chamber presents a new challenge: How do you get information, who should you meet with, who holds the power?

We envision this game being used in schools, by community groups and by curious citizens. And as befits a news game, it's timely. The mayor and City Council here are in the midst of budget negotiations now with an eye toward finishing a balanced budget by the end of June. And the U.S. attorney is investigating how the City Council has spent some of its earmarks -- known as member items here. To provide more verisimilitude, players in our game face going to jail too.

Play it and let us know what you think.