Ryan Sholin’s Knight News Challenge funded project ReportingOn just hit version 2.0 with a new design and some new features that Sholin hopes help journalists improve their reporting by connecting journalists on like beats together.

The site itself looks similar to Twitter and Yahoo! Answers and is centered around people asking questions and receiving answers from knowledgeable people. For example, technology reporters can get together and seek help from each other. The site is also a great tool for journalists to discover knowledgeable people that they don’t already know.

In fact that discovery of new people is one reason Sholin isn’t currently allowing people to important contacts from Gmail and other services. He wants journalists to meet new experts and sources, and believes that meeting new people can only help journalists’ reporting.

Asking and answering questions is the heart of ReportingOn. For instance Chris Amico recently asked, “I’m looking into US foreign aid funding and spending. Anyone know a good source for data on the subject? Especially which agencies/departments (USAID, DoD, State) distribute funds?”

That question was met with a response from Chrys Wu, “Start with foreign aid data from U.S. Census Bureau: http://tr.im/sm4e . Information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis may also be useful to you: http://www.bea.gov/scb/index.htm”

Users have profiles that show their recent activity, how many questions they have asked, how many questions they have answered, whether people liked their responses and more. Users now get points based on whether or not people like their answers. This point-based system is an incentive for users to submit quality answers and is also a way for people to see how knowledgeable and helpful a user is.

Sholin said on the ReportingOn blog that the point system will be expanding in the future:

A points-based system in RO 2.0 helps feed the egos of power users while acting as a guide, beat-by-beat, to who might have a good answer for your question.  There are still leaderboards to be built, and I’m thinking up other ways to use the points system to motivate users, especially as the network gets off the ground.

ReportingOn originaly had a 140-character limit like Twitter, but Sholin got rid of that feature/limitation. He realized that it works well for Twitter, but ReportingOn questions and answers sometimes needed more space:

As has been pointed out more than a few times, Twitter is a good place to start an argument, but a really poor place to finish one.  Although I’d hesitate to frame the sort of exploratory, qualitative Q & A that could happen on ReportingOn as “argument” or “debate,” I’d like to believe that highlighting a “good answer” as noted by the person who asked the question will help lead to a permanent archive for reporting resources in a way that Twitter simply doesn’t do.

To put a finer point on it, if I ask a question of my followers on Twitter and I get a great answer, I get it in a stream of replies that are useful to a certain subset of Twitter users at that moment, but fly right by in the stream and never come back unless I pull them out of the flow of Twitter and display them somewhere.  At this particular moment in time, Twitter’s search functionality is highly ephemeral in nature, as it starts and stops indexing from time to time, and rarely dips back in the chronology as far as might be useful.  So where the quick-answer utility of Twitter stops, the long-term archive of ReportingOn begins.

ReportingOn is still young and doesn’t have a large user base, but it does hold promise to help connect journalists from around the country who cover similar topics and beats. Journalists working together can be exponentially more powerful and impactful than journalists working alone. Collaboration is here to stay.

Some topics discussed in our conversation:

• How can ReportingOn help improve a journalist’s work?
• How does Sholin envision ReportingOn being used after it becomes more popular?
• What’s next for ReportingOn? What new features may be developed?
• ReportingOn’s code is open source. What could news orgs do with that code?
• Why would someone want to leave an answer?
• And much more.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.