The Networked Journalism Summit brings together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism. It's about action: next steps, new projects, new partnerships, new experiments.
Chris Densmore, Chris Peck and Leonard Witt spent a big part of yesterday with our Northfield, Minnesota collaborators at Locally Grown, where the first Representative Journalismexperiment will take place.
Representative Journalism is Leonard Witt’s project to experiment in new business models of journalism. You can listen to the podcast where Leonard and the rest talk about the idea here.
Bringing technologists and journalists into closer orbit with other is one longterm goal of the Networked Journalism Summit, and several of NetJourn’s participants are now hard at work on an event in Silicon Valley to do just that. NewsTools2008.org is a project of the Journalism That Matters collaborative set for April 30-May 3 at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale corporate training center.
It’s an opportunity for journalists and programmers to share part of their cultures and find a common ground where they can build and develop tools that will benefit journalism and community.
Our major focus now is leveraging our new social networking tools across the company to engage communities, improve crowdsourcing and watchdog reporting. We’ve developed deep resource sites with examples and best practices. The Democrat and Chronicle just launched today with a networking site for Young Professionals and Wine Lovers. Check out the new design and format at The Young Professionals site includes blogs, photo galleries, forums, links to places to volunteer, calendars, etc. We’re engaging schools, community civic and ethnic groups, nonprofits, churches, etc. to help build their own networked sites and connect.
Since the summit, GroundReport has focused on international coverage and syndication. We’re syndicating content so that people can find GroundReport stories wherever they live online. One tool that helps people get GroundReport is our news widget, which works on iGoogle, Apple dashboard, Netvibes and Vista. We’ve also integrated with Technorati and are working to do the same with Topix and Daylife.
For groundbreaking international reporting, we are working with Columbia University Professor Anne Nelson, who studies new media and the developing world at SIPA. We’re looking forward to publishing her latest investigation of new media and development, creating an ongoing collaboration with her students and evolving GroundReport’s platform with her guidance.
One more addition, we’ll be part of Netvibes’ sponsored search results for Ginger, their new, more social news platform. You can find us in the press release.
It’s a very small project, I admit, but the CUNY Conference inspired me to start a new (hopefully, eventually, collaborative) blog: JournalismSchool.wordpress.com. The origins of which are detailed here.
From Current TV – We’ve re-branded our citizen journalism program as “Collective Journalism,” emphasizing the collaborative nature of our work, and we’ve begun to focus our efforts on producing group investigations from different contributors around the world.
We’ve been working in earnest to put several Networked Journalism ideas into effect; foremost has been getting our “Parade Partner News” pipeline off the ground.
Parade’s print pub is distributed by more than 400 newspapers nationwide. We’re working to deepen those partnerships online, as well. “Parade Partner News” is a chance for us to promote our partners’ reportage
and brands, help us better surround our stories on parade.com, and give our readers a deeper, localized well to draw from.
Our first foray was with our All-America High School Football coverage: Parade’s been picking and promoting top high school athletes for 45 years. In addition to our own coverage of these players, we invited our papers to share their local stories about our All-America players, coaches or program.
We then let our readers read, vote on and comment on those stories using tools from our sister site at reddit.com.
This “pipeline” is exclusive to our partners; that allows us to get them more attention then they might otherwise in the general Reddit, Mixx, or Digg story queues.
The next editorial features for which we’ll request partner input on are “What America Eats” (inviting partners to provide links to their healthy recipes or other features regarding healthy diets [or desserts, if
Janice K. decides to go that way, instead, with her in-book story], and “What People Earn” (inviting partners to provide links to their features re the job market in their area, career advice, etc.).
It¹s very much a process: we’re working closely with our Newspaper Relations Group, finding the appropriate contacts within our partners’ organizations, and addressing issues and inertia as we find them. In my mind, this is Win-Win-Win for our partners, our readers, and ourselves, so we’ll keep on working at it and getting better with each iteration.
We’ve got other distributed tools for the ProAm set in the works and in Production as well. I’ll be happy to share more if you’re interested in hearing about it.
Since the Networked Journalism Summit:
Global Voices created a new website called Voices Without Votes together with Reuters. It’s a pretty massive task to undertake an overview of what world bloggers are saying about the US presidential election, but we are doing it bit by bit with the help of volunteers and colleagues at Global Voices. The project launched on super tuesday, and new content is added around the clock. Reuters are going to be using the RSS feeds on their website election pages, and we welcome anyone (everyone!) else to do the same too.
I think our most interesting development right now in Bakersfield is the digital revolution happening in our newsroom.
As of a few weeks ago, the 80-some person newsroom in the Calfornian reorganized to focus on around-the-clock online coverage. Any story that ultimately appears in print (and a lot more than that) is blogged first, with updates going up throughout the day. That’s a huge change from how things used to work, with only a few reporters posting live updates at all and most stories not showing up online until 11 p.m. (before appearing in print the next day).
It’s a truly interactive experience for the audience because they can post comments to talk to the reporters as they file updates. I’ve noticed that they sometimes ask for more details which the reporter then investigates and reports back on. This really takes the concept of “news as a conversation” to a new level, because the conversation does impact the focus of the news coverage. At the end of the day, the “final” version of the story is created for print and posted online.
You can watch this happening in real time on the “Bakosphere” page.
I love that the newsroom is using the blogging engine that we created for the community 18 months ago, and that they started doing this on their own with no prodding and very little consultation with my team. I think the lesson there is that if you provide tools that lets ANYONE participate and contribute content whenever they want to, your traditional newsroom will eventually get involved and create something that is far more interesting than technology. The relationship between reporters and readers is evolving all on its own — a true revolution rather than something that was forced or mandated.
Here are a few recent examples of reporters posting news and updates to stories online as users converse with them:
From Brian Kroski who was interviewed at the Networked Journalism Summit here.
“Observer Media Group, the parent company of The New York Observer, is launching a project covering local politics through a distributed network of reporters, editors and columnists. This project will put reporters on the ground in all 50 states of the US, covering local politics news and national stories with a local perspective. This distributed network of reporters will be provided with tools to allow them to file photos, stories, and videos immediately - directly from their locations. These individual states will be their own news media sources and also contributed to a national aggregated, built from the bottom-up politics news site. This project was recently profiled in the New York Times.”
So it seems the New York Observer’s parent company is moving into networked journalism in a big way: Politicker.com
