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ProPublica reporter Marcus Stern will don his press badge at the Super Bowl this Sunday, but he won't be covering the game. He'll be looking for members of Congress who are there, figuring out how they got their tickets and trying to attend whatever fundraisers they're holding.

Stern, who plans to reveal his findings in a ProPublica story on Monday, has had some reporting help along the way. Knowing it would be too much for one person to contact all U.S. Congress members, ProPublica turned its "Super Bowl Blitz" investigation into a crowdsourcing effort and asked professional journalists and the public for help.

The project is an example of how one news organization can tap into professional journalists nationwide to turn an 11th-hour idea into a collaborative investigation.

"Any time you try to survey 535 members of Congress it's going to be daunting," Stern said. "To some extent, this is going to be a test of the privacy or the openness of members of Congress when it comes to fundraising."

When I first wrote about Twitter in September 2007, few news organizations were using it, much less taking advantage of its potential. Now, many have embraced the social networking service, using it to attract new audiences, share content and create a conversation about the news they produce. But some are looking to do more.

The New York Times, The Austin American-Statesman and The Huffington Post are all experimenting with ways to generate ad dollars using Twitter and Facebook. This new approach, they're finding, has benefits for both parties: News outlets reap the benefits of cultivating audiences on social networking sites, and advertisers engage in new ways with prospective consumers.

"Another benefit is that newspapers can reach out to advertisers that are smaller businesses who may have seen the cost of advertising in the newspaper as a barrier," said Robert Quigley, the Austin American-Statesman's social media editor. "There's a low-cost entry into this for the advertisers."

The Austin American-Statesman recently began letting advertisers pay for tweets that appear on two of the Statesman's Twitter accounts -- @Statesman and @Austin360...

After seven days of reporting in Haiti amid unthinkable misery, Byron Pitts, chief national correspondent for CBS News, boarded a chopper last week, homeward bound via the Dominican Republic. Looking down at the landscape, he saw some of the toughest creatures on the planet and noted in an e-mail, "Just passed a few crocodiles."

"What a blessing to be a journalist," Pitts continued. "Having worked with people who trusted me with their truth, their country. I trusted them with my life and they trusted me. They felt like family. Most likely I will never see them again."

Pitts arrived at the Haitian border at 5 p.m. the day after the earthquake and filed a report for the CBS Evening News 90 minutes later.

What Pitts and all the other journalists did in Haiti took guts -- something Hemingway called "grace under pressure."

Read on for a Q&A with Pitts.

The iPad is now official. It does a lot -- Web browsing, photo viewing, games, videos, apps. But what about news and information?

I asked Poynter faculty and staff for their five-minute analysis on what the iPad means for their areas of expertise in journalism...

When Katie Couric accepted the Alfred I. duPont award last week for her series of interviews with former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign, she said, "The much derided MSM -- main stream media -- clearly still has a role in these increasingly partisan times."

I spoke with Couric, "CBS Evening News" anchor and managing editor, by phone on Monday to hear more about that role, what she learned from her interviews with Palin and her thoughts on political journalism and the future of network news. An edited transcript of our talk appears below.

Mallary Tenore: Congratulations on the duPont award for your Sarah Palin interviews. What did you learn from interviewing Sarah Palin that other journalists should know?...