title: Unable to use simplejson.loads() on a string
body: <p>I am trying to use <code>simplejson.loads(source_urls)</code> to turn <code>JSON</code> into a Python object.</p>
  
  <pre><code>source_urls = [u'http://www.google.com', u'http://www.yahoo.com', u'http://www.facebook.com']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That line is from logger output. As much as that looks like a list, it is actually stored as a string in the database. </p>
  
  <p>I get the following error: </p>
  
  <pre><code>JSONDecodeError:
  Expecting object: line 1 column 1 (char 1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Anyone have any thoughts?</p>