Podcast: ReportingOn allows journalists to ask & answer questions for better reporting

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.

Why we link: A brief rundown of the reasons your news organization needs to tie the Web together

Ryan Sholin is the Director of News Innovation at Publish2, a co-founder of Wired Journalists and a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner for ReportingOn. You can reach him at ryan[a]publish2[dot]com or @ryansholin.

Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How and Why.

Well, conveniently enough, I work for Publish2, and we build tools that help answer the question of How. If your problem is that systems make adding links directly in the text of your story a difficult task, let’s solve that by adding links in widgets, sidebars, scrolling across the bottom of the browser window, blinking in 96pt red Helvetica, pushed to Twitter — wherever and however you want them.

My standing offer on How is that if the question comes up, you can talk to me and I’ll help you out.

So back to the question of Why.

Why we link: Five reasons your news organization should tie the Web together

1. Because we owe it to our readers to give them as much information as we have at our fingertips.

Don’t we? Of course we do.

If you’re a journalist, a huge part of your job is to filter all the information relevant to your community or your beat and pass along the important parts to your readers. Think about all the press releases you get by fax or e-mail, all the phone calls, voicemail, and messages that land on your desk, and think about how you act as a filter for that flood of information. Do the same thing with the Web.

Bring your readers the best links related to your story, and they will thank you. How? By treating you like a first-class citizen of the Internet, and coming back to your news site, which is no longer a dead end backwater in the river of news, but a point of connection where they can find other interesting streams.

Chris Amico took it one step further in a tip he submitted via the Publish2 Collaborative Reporting form I used to gather some ideas for this post. “Humility is healthy,” Chris wrote. “The more we get out of this mindset that we are the sole producers of useful content, the better off we’ll be in the long run.”

You might think your news organization is super-duper-Web-savvy because you put your stories online, have RSS feeds and push links to your own content out via social networks, including Twitter.

That’s Step One. And it’s a good first step.

But, if all you provide your readers is flat content that doesn’t take them anywhere else on the Web, or back up statements with direct sources, or provide resources for those who want to explore a topic beyond what you’ve been able to provide with original reporting, you’re just shoveling text into another bucket, one labeled “Web.”

If, on the other hand, you want to embrace the traits that make blogs, Twitter, and so many other online communication tools a vital part of the daily life of your readers, your news site shouldn’t feel like an endpoint in the conversation. It should feel like the beginning.

Asteris Masouras put it this way in a Twitter reply to my query about why we link:

If you’re writing about human beings, businesses, organizations, government institutions or any other life form with a presence on the Internet, linking to them in the stories you publish about them is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to participating in your local online community.

Skipping the link to the city council’s calendar when you mention the next meeting, leaving out the link to the Little League’s online scoreboard when you write a story about its resurgence or not bothering to link to the full database of restaurant inspections when you choose three to write about — these are all easy ways to miss an opportunity to connect with your community and your readers.

Start simple: If you mention a person or organization, link to them.

Many, many bonus points to be awarded if you dig deep enough into the local online community to link to relevant content created by the people in your story. Did that angry neighbor’s crusade for a new zoning law to govern branches that hang over someone else’s driveway start with an image posted to a photo-sharing site and a determined comment? Link to it.

There’s a huge upside to linking out to community members, of course. Sometimes they link back.

Wenatchee World Web Editor Brianne Pruitt dropped a tip in my form including the following statement: “The link economy is real, and important for anyone who wants to be a part of the Web ecology.” I’d translate that as: Give some, get some.

And here’s how Web developer Pete Karl answered the question of why news organizations should link to external sources:

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.

David Cohn of Spot.Us offered up the now-classic Jeff Jarvis line in my tip form: “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

I know, I know. Everyone is asking you to do more with less. It’s extremely easy to tell people like me that you just don’t have time for another toy, another tool, another camera, another social network or another task.

I’m here to tell you that bringing your readers the best of the Web can save you work.

How? By opening a two-way channel to let your readers tell you what you should link to next, you’ll cut down on the time you spend looking for that next thing. By maintaining a real presence in the local link economy, you’ll make it easier for sources who know the answers to your questions to find you, and you won’t spend as much time trying to find them.

By sending your readers to the best information available on the Web, you’ll keep them coming back for more, drawing more traffic to your news site. Last time I checked, more traffic is one way to make more money, and with any luck, that’s still how you get paid.

• Josh Korr, my colleague at Publish2, explores what happens when a group of news organizations collaborate to curate links when regional news breaks
• David Cohn from Spot.Us asks whether bookmarking links using social news services is an act of journalism
• Jeff Jarvis explores the ethic of the link economy

Thanks to everyone who replied on Twitter or in the Publish2 Tip Form when I asked for some of the best reasons to link out from your news site.

Jane Stevens: Mini-metros will replace metro newspapers

Jane Stevens predicts residents of at least one metropolitan area will wake up sometime with the next 12 months and realize that the daily newspaper that they received news from for years is no longer there.

In its place “mini-metros” will form where metros once reigned supreme, Stevens said. These mini-metros will be niche products run by a small team that focus on part of a metro area. These products will focus heavily on core local issues like schools, government, roads and health. Perhaps the biggest change from the metro model will be how these mini-metros will incorporate beat blogging as part of their core product.

They won’t just report on the community — they’ll be apart of it. Input and information from citizens will be vital to the success of these mini-metros. They’ll be built around a collaborative model.

For Stevens, Web journalism demands a greater degree of interactivity, and larger papers that fail to deliver this will fall to those that are more interactive, often being local and/or topic-based.

Stevens highlighted four elements that news organizations will need to be relevant in the future: creative storytelling, social networking, beat blogging and basic essential information, such as schedules, maps, and other need-to-know information, depending on the topic.

She cites the example of West Seattle Blog, a site run by former print journalists that welcomes contributions from readers and is ultralocal in its coverage.  These blogs include “serial” reporting on certain issues: they’ll update every hour on a certain event as things go on.  They can serve their communities well on local issues of schools, roads, health, local arts and public policy.

They can also serve their community’s small businesses by providing advertising space.  As many of the larger papers have become corporatized and bought out, Stevens noted that small businesses have often gotten priced out of advertising space to larger corporations like Budweiser. Local blogs like West Seattle can give the little guys better attention.

Stevens has been covering computer innovations for decades, and she headed the San Francisco Examiner’s computers column when it first began in the early 1980s.  Over the years, Stevens stayed up to speed with new media and she became dissatisfied with how news organizations used the Web.

“They just took everything that they had put in print and copied it onto the Web,”  Stevens said. “It was shovelware.”

Stevens didn’t understand why news sites were creating separate sections for multimedia content. She believed then and now that all possible media — text, video, audio and more — should be weaved together as the story demands.

“With web journalism it’s all about the storytelling, not just the writing,” Stevens said.

She noted Luis Sinco’s “Marlboro Marine,” a commendable portrait of an Iraqi Marine veteran struggling with his demons online at mediastorm.org.

“You figure out the best medium or mediums for the story, and if your story’s good enough, they won’t even be conscious of the medium when they’re watching it,” Stevens said.

Interweaving media is one of many benefits Stevens sees in online journalism.  On her site rejurno.com, she spreads a positive view of the future of journalism.  She says the future belongs to “jurnos,” an Australian term for journalists that Stevens has appropriated for the future journalist.

“A jurno goes beyond the traditional I write-you read kind of journalist,” Stevens said. ” They’re part storyteller, part community manager, organizer, watchdog, fact-checker and mythbuster. They are really there to serve their community, whether it’s a topic-based or geographical community.”

This year, Stevens is working at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) in Missouri on two major projects: first, her team there has created the RJI Collaboratory Network, which Stevens describes as an “incubator” for start-up news organizations that want to use social networking and beat blogging technology.  Second, her classes are constructing a health site for the city of Columbia, Missouri. Rather than just looking for trendy health stories, the site will examine the major public health risks in Columbia and investigate the residents’ biggest health concerns, using all the media and interactive technology at their disposal to make the site creative and relevant.

Stevens is optimistic about the future of journalism.  She sees the Web as forcing us to be intimately involved with the people we serve, and that intimacy forces us to be public servants as much as creative artists.