Daily Archives: February 15, 2011

User generated Q & A site Quora is a journalist’s best friend


You can search for a topic and relevant questions or post a question yourself. Users can reply to the question with specific expertise and once an answer is posted it can be voted up or down depending on it’s usefulness. The Quora community act as moderators where the most useful answers are rewarded and move to the top of the pile and less useful replies are penalised.

You can follow particular areas (examples of the topics I’m following include The New York Times and Derren Brown) and your home feed gets populated with questions and answers within these topics.

You can also sign-up with your Twitter and Facebook accounts, allowing for integration of liked pages, friends and people you follow to be directly imported into your Quora topics.

It’s a bit difficult to take in without signing up and checking it out yourself. Here’s a simple demo to get you started:



I typed in the question: ‘How can Quora benefit journalists?

I voted up the answer I found most useful:



So there you have it, Quora gives journalists some indispensable strings to their reporting bow:

  • real, useful answers to specific questions
  • sparking conversation and debate in specific topics with useful and informed opinion
  • feedback

By Lucy Hewitt