The Network is Working – Next Question: How to Automate It

An update from Kent Fisher at the Dallas Morning news. His new blog continues to be the most-read non-sports blog at Dallasnews.com. But he admits that it has added to his workload – an extra two to three hours a day easily. Plus a couple of hours on weekends too.

This additional workload is to be expected. This weekend at the Computational Journalism Symposium we talked about parts of a journalists job computers can make easier and what parts humans can do better. Writing a good blog post still requires the thoughtful work of somebody like Kent.

Kent also has built a community around his blog. There is a Facebook group, but really Kent’s community is behind closed doors, being managed by himself via emails. Essentially he is following earlier examples of an email newsletter. This method works – and is very personal. But it doesn’t scale (if he wanted to grow the network) and it only adds more work to his growing load. Still – so far Kent is finding lots of success.

But enough from me: Here’s what Kent has to say:

“The network exists, but you wouldn’t necessarily see it from just reading the blog because our primary communication thus far is via an e-mail discussion group. I’ve “deputized” a few network members to be “correspondents” on issues they know a lot about (one teacher analyzes district policy changes for us, another has taken up the mantle of “dropout czar,” several network members have kept us abreast of the inside info regarding a controversial high school program change). Some of this has taken place on the blog, but most if it is behind the scenes. 

I’ll forward you a recent e-mail thread the network had in discussion of some school improvement data I shared. I’m currently working on molding that discussion into an interactive map for the blog and story for the paper.”

And just to keep us all honest – here are highlights from that e-mail thread.

From Kent: “Lots of great ideas coming back in from the blog network’s first “homework assignment” — the study of those school evaluation numbers.

Many of you requested I keep your thoughts anonymous. No problem there. But I thought I’d share a sampling of your responses with the whole group. Good ideas here, and some of you went really above and beyond with your thoughts/analysis.”

What followed was a range of information from:

• Statistical analysis of how schools are being rated.
• Anecdotal stories about urban schools that are surrounded by drug houses and prostitution
• Suggestions on how to mashup the public data in a way to show how well specific principles did during their time at any school.
• and more.

Overall – Kent is making huge strides. He is taking things slowly – in a positive way. Figuring out how to bring this into his work load. As noted above, he is reaching the upper threshold. But more can be done – and together I hope we can figure out how we can push this further.