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Congress is now legislating on three important issues: health care, financial regulation and energy policy. In a series of reports called "Dollar Politics," NPR is using that legislation to examine the role of lobbying and money in Congress.

One of the first stories, which aired Thursday, focused on 200 people who packed into a room earlier this month to observe a Senate committee meeting. The journalists wondered who all those people were -- so they took photographs and tried to identify them.

Then the reporters put the question to their audience: "Can you help figure out who the rest are?"

Robb Hill/NPR NPR has asked for help in identifying the lobbyists who watched a Senate committee deal with health care legislation.

This isn't a massive, complicated crowdsourcing effort, and it's not the centerpiece of the project. But it is an example of turning a specific part of a reporting project over to the public to find out what they know.

ProPublica, which is building a corps of citizen reporters for its own work, learned of the effort and asked its readers to contribute as well. "It's both simple and clever," said Amanda Michel, ProPublica's editor of distributed reporting, "and a great way to show NPR's audience how closely lobbyists are tracking health care legislation."

I e-mailed the two NPR reporters who are working on Dollar Politics, Peter Overby and Andrea Seabrook, and asked them about the photo. Here is an edited version of our exchange.

Steve Myers: How did you decide to take photos of all the lobbyists and observers in the committee room?

Peter Overby

Peter Overby: This was a confluence of a project idea by Brian Duffy, our editor, and a photo idea that I had a couple of weeks ago. Dollar Politics sets out to examine Congress's effort to overhaul health care, energy policy and the financial system -- three huge sectors of the economy, each affecting every American. These big bills come at a time when congressional ties to special interests seem to be deeper than any time since World War II, and when Congress has gotten in the habit of kicking big issues down the road.
 
As I thought about a lobbyists photo, it wasn't in the context of the health-care debate. It just seemed like something easy to shoot, although possibly harder to flesh out with names. I've been covering the lobbying business for 15 years, and don't know why I've never come across a photo like this before.
 
Did you originally plan to seek their identities from your viewers?
 

Andrea Seabrook

Andrea Seabrook: No. But we've been watching various groups use crowdsourcing to mine and process data, and when it turned out to be harder than we'd originally thought to ID lobbyists ourselves, we thought we'd give it a shot. We're very glad we did. It seems to be making the story more interactive and engaging for our listeners, and we've already gotten quite a few great leads. Of course, those will have to be verified...
 
How are you verifying IDs?

Overby: Besides shooting the panorama, our photographer, freelancer Robb Hill, took detail shots of people or groups around the room. I showed them to lobbyists and others in the health-care policy arena -- some 15 or 20 people over several days, right up till deadline. We kept the pictures on a laptop and didn't email them.

How many people can you identify?

Overby: It's a moving number. Late last week it was 7. We had two emphatic IDs for one fellow and didn't sort that out till [last] Friday. Now the number is growing pretty quickly; we have a queue of emails that we won't get to till [today].

The 11 IDs currently on the page came from reporting, not crowdsourcing. We haven't verified any of the crowdsourced names yet. When we do, we'll add them to the photo and use them in our reporting.

What do you hope to gain by identifying them?

Overby: I'd put it as what we hope to accomplish. We look at Congress as a universe in which the members are the most prominent group but hardly the only one. There's a symbiotic relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists, certainly with campaign money but also with information, strategy and other elements of legislating, and we want to explore that. On these three big bills, our aim is to see the whole system, not just the elected portion of it.
 
What kinds of people do you think will help you identify the people in the photograph? What has the response been like so far?

Seabrook: Quite a few high-level Hill staffers and even some lobbyists have looked over the pictures for us. We've also received some good leads from listeners, through the e-mail address dollarpolitics@npr.org. The response so far has been practically ecstatic -- at least in the blogosphere and the Twitterverse. And we've gotten quite a few e-mails from listeners who love the fact that we've "turned the lens" on the real story.

The Dollar Politics series is not only about the photos though. We are interested in all sorts of data that help us grasp the influence of lobbying and special interests on this year's Big Three -- health care reform, financial regulation, and a new energy policy. We're tracking lobbying expenditures, campaign contributions, legislative language -- anything concrete.

Also, the storytelling is just as important to us as the data. It's always a challenge to make Washington stories lush and alive, especially when they include lots of hard numbers. (Numbers don’t work very well on the radio.) And it's especially important in this series that the stories are compelling. Because if we don't connect with people, show how money in politics really affects their lives, what service have we done? The world doesn’t need more journalism that sounds like math problems, read aloud.

Will you use the identities in your reporting? 

Overby: We've already done it. Three of the lobbyists in the photos appeared Thursday in our All Things Considered piece and Web story. And we've talked with some others. Usually, their first reaction is, "How did you get my name?"