Frequently Asked Questions about Public Insight Network

1. What is the Public Insight Network?

The Public Insight Network (PIN) is a new way for people to share their insights, knowledge and expertise with journalists to make news coverage more accurate, relevant, transparent and trustworthy.

If you sign up to be a source in the PIN, journalists authorized by American Public Media may contact you via telephone, texting, survey forms, email and social media to ask editorially relevant questions about topics related to their reporting.

2. What will you do with the information I give you?

We will read what you share. Your insights are important to us. We may contact you to follow up on what you have shared.

3. How will I know you have read this information.

We will do our best to let you know if/how we used what you shared. This will be through an email that will let you know we've seen the response and where we are headed with reporting.

4. Will you put this information on the air or online?

We won’t publish, broadcast or distribute your responses without your explicit permission. Unless you have given us permission to publish within your response, this means we will contact you if we want to publish what you’ve shared.

We do this for two reasons:

• We want you to be comfortable telling us information without the fear that we will immediately publish it or attribute it to you.
• We want to minimize the chance that someone is using a fake identity or scamming us. We want to know there is a real person behind the response.

5. Will you change what I gave you?

We may edit them before publishing them. Also, we aren’t required to use them, and we have the right to reuse or republish them later.

6. How do you store the information I gave you?

The data you supply via PIN is stored in a separate, secure database. It may be accessed by PIN-authorized journalists as part of their reporting. It is never combined with information that you provide as a part of other relationships that you may have with APM or participating PIN newsrooms.

6. Who else sees this information?

Your personal information and responses will only be seen by PIN partner newsrooms, APM PIN editorial and software development staff, and contractors who perform technology related tasks, research or database work for or on behalf of APM systems. All contractors and researchers are required to sign a confidentiality agreement.

7. Will I get asked for contributions to your station through this?

When you engage with a newsroom through PIN it’s about journalism – only. We will not use your information for marketing, membership or promotional purposes. The journalism-business firewall means that as a source in the Public Insight Network:

• You’ll receive no spam messages;
• We won’t send you invitations to participate in fundraising or membership activities, or other promotional events;
• You won’t be asked about any other relationship you have with a PIN newsroom; and
• When we talk about the Network with our colleagues, your personal information is kept confidential.