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Month December 2010

Entries 3 Total

So long, ReportingOn

Dec 29, ’10 7:55 AM

In 2008, I was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to build ReportingOn, a backchannel for beat reporters to share ideas, information, and sources. The goal of the project was to provide journalists of all stripes with a place to talk about content, not craft, or process, or skillset.

I taught myself enough Django — and sought out advice from friends and coworkers with little regard for their interest or priorities — to launch the first iteration of the site in October 2008. In July 2009, with fresh design and development from the team at Lion Burger, ReportingOn 2.0 launched.

And almost immediately, I stepped away from it, buried in the responsibilities of my day job, family, and other projects. To grow and evolve, and really, to race ahead of the internal and external communication tools already available to reporters, ReportingOn needed far more time, attention, and dedication than I could give it.

Yesterday, I shut down ReportingOn.

In its last state, it only cost a few bucks a month to maintain, but it has more value at this point as a story, or a lesson, or a piece of software than it has as a working site.

To head off a couple questions at the pass:

  1. No, you can’t export your questions or answers or profile data. None of you have touched the site in about a year, so I don’t think you’re that interested in exporting anything. But if you’re some sort of webpackrat that insists, I have the database, and I can certainly provide you with your content.
  2. Yes, the source code for the application is still available, and you’re more than welcome to take a stab at building something interesting with it. If you do, please feel free to let me know.

And a few recommendations for developers of software “for journalists:”

  • Reporters don’t want to talk about unpublished stories in public.
  • Unless they’re looking for sources.
  • There are some great places on the Internet to find sources.
  • When they do talk about unpublished stories among themselves, they do it in familiar, well-lit places, like e-mail or the telephone. Not in your application.
  • Actually, keep this in mind: Unless what you’re building meets a very journalism-specific need, you’re probably grinding your gears to build something “for journalists” when they just need a great communication tool, independent of any particular niche or category of users.

As for the problem ReportingOn set out to solve, it’s still out there.

Connecting the dots among far-flung newsrooms working on stories about the same issue is something that might happen internally in a large media company, or organically in the wilds of Twitter, but rarely in any structured way that makes it easy to discover new colleagues, peers, and mentors. Sure, there are e-mail lists, especially for professional associations (think: SEJ) that act as backchannels for a beat, but not enough, and not focused on content.

(Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.)

As for me, I’m working on another (even) small(er) Knight-funded side project a few minutes at a time these days. Watch for news about that one in the coming weeks.

Here’s what a “beat” page looked like. Note the PR/spam in need of a “flag as PR/spam” button.

Here’s a single question page. (Thanks Joey, Chris, etc.)

Here’s a profile page. (Thanks, Greg.)

Film History 101 (via Netflix Watch Instantly) « Snarkmarket

Dec 14, ’10 3:59 PM

Great list/links to a whole mess of movies I watched in film school, now available streaming on Netflix.

Film History 101 (via Netflix Watch Instantly) « Snarkmarket

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Where we write, where we blog, where we share

Dec 7, ’10 8:49 AM

Yes, this is going to be one of the posts where the person writing says something along the lines of: “Gee, I don’t really blog much anymore. You should follow me on Twitter.”

Sorry about that in advance.

At the beginning of this year, I resolved to “write more, but not here,” where “here” equalled Twitter.

Didn’t really happen.

Efforts to blog every day trailed off and failed, and in all honesty, I’ve had plenty of good excuses, given the busy-ness of buying a house, having another kid, and switching jobs, in that order.

When I started this blog, in its first incarnation, days after starting grad school, I followed a simple formula that lasted for a long time: Read blogs, link to them, react to them. I’ve done some original writing from time to time, sure, but so much of what I think of as “blogging” is about the read-link-react/debate/dispute/fisk space.

And that’s fine and good and necessary and conversational.

But I do most of that on Twitter these days.

And when it comes to sharing personal stuff (we moved! we had a kid! we bought the house!), most of that lives on Facebook, where I have more control (believe it or not) over who sees what.

Throw Foursquare and Instagram into the mix — and for legacy photo sharing from my dSLR workflow, Flickr — and I’m able to pretty selectively share what I’m doing, what it looks like, who I’m with, and how I feel about it.

So what’s this blog for?

I suppose its best remaining purpose is as a professional-looking archive of everything I’m thinking about next. More about the future, less about the present. Not engaging in the daily volleys of what passes for current future-of-news events (Wikileaks, #3 on your list is wrong/right/different, it’s a paywall/not a paywall, etc.) but writing now and then about the advances and movements in media and technology that seem to be just past the horizon.

That’s a goal, anyway. I won’t call it a resolution, but it’s a direction.

Now if I could just find some time to write…

…or maybe you should just follow me on Twitter.

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