Announcing: ReportingOn 2.0 is live

July 2, 2009

ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers.

It’s still the backchannel for your beat, but it’s an absolute re-imagining of the network.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it’s a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

ReportingOn 2.0 on the morning of launch, July 2, 2009.

(You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts at the PBS Idea Lab blog.)

The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on.

That didn’t happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years. So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions.

There’s no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network.

You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in.

I think you’ll like it.

And, as the grant year for ReportingOn comes to a close, we’re also making the source code for ReportingOn available here under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. You can use that to build your own backchannel question and answer tool for the journalists in your news organization, or even let your readers ask and answer questions.

I want to repeat that and extend it a bit…

Here are four things that could happen next:

  1. ReportingOn.com itself is a stunning success, with thousands of journalists asking and answering great questions every day, finding peers and mentors, improving local news by adding context and insight gleaned from others working similar angles on stories in far-flung locales.
  2. A media company uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build their own internal backchannel, probably on an intranet, or requiring authentication so they can limit it to members of their own organization.
  3. A single news organization uses ReportingOn to do the same thing — build an internal backchannel.
  4. A single news organization uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build a public tool that allows readers, sources, and reporters to ask and answer questions in a sort of open forum.

What else could you do with ReportingOn? Give it a shot, and let us know.

What’s next for 2.01 and beyond? We’ll let the dust settle over the next few days and figure out which additional features we want to build first, then we’ll take a look at our budget and consider the options. Feel free to check out feedback.reportingon.com to get an idea of where we might go next, and add your own ideas, too!

Thanks to everyone who helped get this launch out the door on time and on budget, especially the Lion Burger development and design team, all the friends and colleagues who gave me their input over the last year, those of you that answered my last-minute call for beta testers, and the Knight Foundation staff for supporting the first year of ReportingOn.

So… Any questions?

Five Keys to Authenticity

June 29, 2009

A few days ago at the annual APSE convention, I led two sessions on Networked Journalism.  On the way down to Pittsburgh from Rochester in the car, I tried to work out an idea I’ve been playing with for a while.

Authenticity.

Not authority, or reliability, or popularity, but a more difficult to quantify metric that I think is crucial for news organizations trying to engage their community in the social media world.

Here’s a few links I referenced in the discussion as I flipped back and forth between Keynote and Firefox. I’d post my slides, but as usual, my use of slideware rarely tells the whole story.

Later in this post, I’ll include the mp3 I recorded of me talking through the presentation in the car (if you can deal with my hoarse/coughing voice and a couple tollbooths on the Thruway, you might find it interesting, albeit rambling).  That certainly tells the whole story, and a few others as I change lanes and wander off on tangents.

So that’s the backstory.

Five Keys to Authenticity

  1. Be Human
  2. Be Honest
  3. Be Aware
  4. Be Everywhere
  5. Show Your Work

Simple, right?  OK, more details…

1. Be Human

Look, if you’re going to jump into Twitter and Facebook and whatever comes next, in an effort to report or to engage with the community on your beat, or just to have a conversation, you need a name.  And a voice.  Preferably your own.  @nytimes isn’t human, but @pogue certainly is.  @chicagotribune isn’t human, but @coloneltribune absolutely is, which is a bit of a twist since he’s a somewhat fictional character with more than one Tribune employee behind his avatar.  @ricksanchezcnn might be the most human journalist on Twitter.  Using your own name, image, and voice is step one to engaging with the online community on your beat or in your town.  Because if you’re not human, you’re just another robot.

2. Be Honest

It’s easy to treat social media channels like a comment thread or a letter to the editor or an e-mail inbox if you’re not careful.  And if you’re not careful, you might find yourself as defensive and unwilling to admit to a mistake, or a conflict of interest, or an oversight as you might in those other spaces.  Try that on Twitter and you’ll be eaten alive.  Own up to your errors, correct them in public, and disclose whatever needs disclosing without a whole lot of preamble.

3. Be Aware

If you’re the last one to know that your community is profoundly interested in a particular issue, you’ll look like a latecomer when you ask them what they think.  “Be Aware” means this: Listen.  Listen to what’s happening in your online community.  Do it using tools like Google Reader and Tweetdeck, or set up an online nerve center for your department or news organization.  Try using iGoogle, Netvibes, or even FriendFeed to build a one-stop bookmark where everyone in your newsroom can take a quick look at what’s hot in the local blogosphere and social media channels once or twice a day.  If you want to be an active node in your local network, it’s critical that you know what’s important — right now — in the community.

4. Be Everywhere

Once you’re listening for mentions of issues, beats, towns, and people you cover, it becomes infinitely easier to jump into those conversations.  Every time your name, a story you wrote, or your beat comes up in conversation online, you should have the option to drop in and answer questions, ask new ones, follow up, or high-five a member of your community.  Being ubiquitous is a huge part of succeeding in social media.  When every reader is themselves a producer of content and a manager of their own network of friends, followers, and fans, you need to show up like Beetlejuice when they say your name three times.

5. Show Your Work

In print, it’s your job to attribute quotes and information to your sources and provide readers with resources to find out more about the story.

On the Web, and especially in the short-form statusphere, links are the essential means and currency of sourcing your reporting, adding context, and providing your community with a curated stream of complementary content.

If your newsroom’s content management system allows you to add links directly into the text of your own story, you’re in luck.  Go for it.  If not, or if you want to integrate your stream of links into section pages, topic pages, blog sidebars, your Google Reader, Twitter, and Delicious accounts to bring your readers the best of the Web on any social media platform where you engage with them, the collaborative journalism tools at Publish2 have you covered.  [Full disclosure: I work for Publish2.]

Thanks to everyone who came to the sessions at APSE, asked great questions, and shared their successes and failures with the rest of the room.

As promised, here’s the audio of me talking to myself in the car fleshing out the presentation:

 
 Five Keys to Authenticity, a conversation with myself in the car [75:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Further reading

Some of the items in this list might look familiar if you spotted my social media guidelines post a few weeks back.  It’s short and sweet, if you’re interested.

If you still need background for newsroom conversations about why you should link to your sources and resources, here’s something I wrote as a guest post at BeatBlogging.org recently on that topic.

Most of what you’ll find on the Web re: authenticity in social media comes from a marketing/PR point of view, but even so, there’s a lot of solid thought on social media for businesses that applies to your news organization.  Try Jeremiah Oywang’s February 2008 post on what it means to be authentic, transparent, and human, for starters.

What’s next?

Get started.  Sign up for Twitter, use Twitter Search and Google Reader, among other tools, to find and follow the online community on your beat.

Participate, listen, and engage with the community every chance you get.  You’ll get as much out of it as you put into it, so find the workflow that works for you, and get started today.

New at IdeaLab: An interview with Baghdad Brian

June 25, 2009

Over at IdeaLab, I’ve interviewed Baghdad Brian, who I met in October 2007 at the first Networked Journalism summit Jeff Jarvis threw at CUNY.  At the time, Brian was raising money to keep Alive in Baghdad going, and we did everything but pass a hat around the room to try to back him up.

The next time I remember hearing about the project was two months later, in December 2007, when one of the citizen journalists working with AIB was killed.  At the time, it wasn’t clear whether or not his murder (he was shot 31 times) was related to the story he was working on.

Brian popped up on my radar again over the last two weeks or so, as he quickly ramped up Alive in Tehran, exploring different communication channels to get stories out of Iran during the current post-election upheaval, protests, and violence.

I spoke to Brian by phone a few days ago. You can listen to the audio at IdeaLab or read the full transcript.  Here’s a sample [emph. mine]:

“…I don’t really have any contacts there. I have a couple of contacts, it’s sort of funny, because we did look into trying to set this up, back in…a couple of years back, sort of looking at doing a project in Iran, with a couple of filmmakers who are known over here and in the blogosphere. I got the impression that nobody wanted to be associated with a project called “Alive in Tehran” because it was too political. It seemed political, inherently. And it is to some degree political, because we’re making this statement that we don’t necessarily need the foreign press to go and say “Live from Tehran, this is what you need to know.“

Check it out.

Highlights from four days with my head in a blender full of wildly intelligent people

June 22, 2009

What follows is intended as a brief personal braindump from the four days I spent in Cambridge, Ma. last week, most of it deeply entrenched in the guts of #KNCMIT, a conference hosted by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media featuring Knight News Challenge winners from 2007-2009, and the announcement of this year’s winners.

Tuesday night, Margaret Rosas (of Radio Engage) and I took the train out to Harvard’s end of Cambridge to sit in on a conversation Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Jonathan Zittrain, and a classroom full of brilliant people were having about the 10th birthday (and a new edition) of the Cluetrain Manifesto.  (For an actual idea about what was said at the proceedings, see Ethan Zuckerman’s notes here.)

Made it to the Cluetrain talk at Harvard with @mrosas - Searls, Weinberger, and Zittrain talking.
That’s Jonathan Zittrain, David Weinberger, and Doc Searls leading the discussion about Cluetrain at Harvard.  Fact: Zittrain is a very funny guy.

Cluetrain

I read the Manifesto at the beginning of my research as a grad student at San Jose State, when I was following the oversized head of the blogosphere, rather than the long tail of my interest group. Doc and David W. and Scoble and Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen and Dave Winer and, for different reasons, Romenesko, formed the core list of names I paid attention to and used as hubs for my initial explorations of the intersections of media and technology.

So Cluetrain, for me, was a list of clues that led from one node in the system to the next like a scavenger hunt — or maybe, more accurately, a geocaching game.  Now I feel like I travel (or traffic?) in the diaspora of clues, learning from a corporate media refugee here, an unemployed reporter there, a blogger with 16 nonprofit affiliations over there, and running through cycles of employment and organizations myself, as I bounce from node to node in the evolving media system.

KNCMIT

I spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday bashing heads together with Knight grantees and friends old and new, as we all tried to accelerate the evolution of that aforementioned media system.

When you’re in a roomful of geniuses, I recommend you try to get them to shout out their ideas.  They tend to oblige.

Then, get the people-who-physically-build-things (I sometimes call them Web developers around these parts)  to help them translate those awesome ideas into action.  Every idea can be a work in progress.

Knight News Challenge 2009 winners
The 2009 Knight News Challenge winners.  And @agahran’s Tweetdeck lower-right.

Everyone present came up with some awesome ideas.  And we started translating some of them into action.  Interested in a hackathon to build social tools for SMS services?  There’s a group working on it.   How about a way to track (and score) the predictions made by sources in the news, including pundits, officials, and so-called experts?  Ask Dan Schultz about that.  And lastly, what if you could get a Twitter notification every time legislation related to your interests gets close to a vote in Congress?

How about a few lists of people who inspired me?

Inspiring as always: Lisa Williams, Susan Mernit, David Cohn

People I want to collaborate with, soon: Matt Thompson, Aron Pilhofer, Nick Allen

Great conversations with editors: Tom Fiedler, Owen Youngman, Anders Gyllenhaal

One of the most personally satisfying experiences of the whole week for me was showing off ReportingOn 2.0 (coming soon!) to real live journalists of all stripes who might be interested in setting up backchannels for their beat, or their organization, or their company.  Just like it says in my script, right?

Hint: There is no script, but I’ve spent more than a year honing that pitch.

Of course, if you want to check out ReportingOn 2.0 for yourself, I posted a screencast tour on IdeaLab, though it will cost you eight precious minutes of your life.  You have eight minutes free, right?

Thanks to everyone who made my week so inspiring, and to the Knight Foundation and Knight News Challenge staff as always for funding ReportingOn’s first year.  Have an innovative idea for local news?  Apply for a grant, and I’ll see you on stage next year.

Why We Link: Your answers to why news organizations should tie the Web together

June 12, 2009

Last week, I asked for some on tips on why news organizations should link to external sources.

I wanted your best reasons, and you happily provided them.  Six of you answered via the Publish Tip Form I embedded in that blog post, and seven of you replied on Twitter.

You can find my favorite answers in this guest post published yesterday at BeatBlogging.org.

Here’s an excerpt:

“4. Because we absolutely do not know everything, but we know where to find out most of what we don’t know.

The days of your news organization existing as a monopolistic source of local information are over, and your readers know it. They browse local, national, international, and topical news and commentary in more places than you call “news.” And if they don’t, they hear it from their friends on any one of a dozen social networks. They know that you don’t know it all. And so do you.

But you’re the journalist.

You’re the filter. You’re the person in town who knows everyone who knows everyone. You’ve got the sources, whether they’re people you talk to at the community center, the city council meeting, the police station, or their Live Journal page. Bring what they know to your readers as directly as possible: Link to them.“

Lots more where that came from…

…and check out the conversation on Twitter about the post.  It’s mostly RTs, but in that mix you’ll find some great journalists to follow.

Awesome Bonus Link: Wilmington StarNews Editor Robyn Tomlin steps up to answer her colleagues who might think of linking to your rivals as some sort of “journalistic blasphemy.”