#buildthenews

[lsnewsdev]

Build the News

@jasmith93

Last week London Student went to #BuildTheNews, and what a lovely time we had. Rupert Murdoch put on a great platter for us and we didn’t even have to walk past the #OccupyMurdoch protesters because they kindly let us in the side door.

Once inside we formed a team of seven, so decided on an idea that was especially ambitious (something we’d been told explicitly not to do...) - a tool for foreign correspondents and journalists abroad to report instantly when they were in danger. Ross was aware of tools we could use to build it and Ed thought it would be well fun. Along with the “Interhacktives” from City Journalism, we thrashed out an idea and put it to someone from Wikileaks.

Claiming a breakout space next to some admin staff who clearly had nothing to do with any of this, we spoke on Google Hangouts and our idea was confirmed. In fact, we were encouraged to think even bigger: journalists in the field, though often told not to, bring their smartphones. This would allow us to build our idea even bigger. If a journalist can use a smartphone, they can generate GPS data to send, use their data connection and more.

We were surprised to hear that though there are processes for journalists to report to their news desks, generally reports are informal and simply given to a fixer on the ground. There is a long chain of correspondence before a report could reach the Foreign Office, or a journalists’ family member for example. We wanted to cut this down and make sure anyone in trouble could call for help almost instantaneously. After toying with the idea of a dedicated device (Ross had worked with wearable tech before) we decided simple SMS was the way to go.

SMS is widely available around the world: even in conflict zones, where there might be widespread disruption to other services. The overall plan of course would be to develop a system that could be fed into (and feed out) in many different ways, but SMS provided us the simplest implementation and the proof of concept we needed.

Ross suggested Twilio as the tool to use for SMS.

Ed set to work reading up on Twilio API documentation, I started designing a dashboard and site for SitRep users, and Ross thought about how to tie this all together. The Interhacktives mapped ideas for a community site, ways to raise the profile of journalists in trouble and drafting our presentation, which would be required of us by 3pm the next day.

After a good amount of time discussing, going over and over our idea and trying to find ways of working together on this, we didn’t have much to show by 6pm Saturday: the end of the first day. We were ushered out of the News UK building and got the bus to a pub in Liverpool Street, where we were given free food, free booze and a chance to network with both journalists and devs. 

Ed left early, I left late, and Ross left later.

The next morning, everyone was feeling rough. Two out of four of our Interhacktives were out of action, Ross was throwing up and working from home, and Ed was chirpy which made everyone even more upset. As we went into the News UK building, dread began to set in.

Ed was (at the time) a fairly new developer, I could only just play around with HTML, CSS and a bit of PHP, and Ross was the only one who knew how to use Twilio. We took an office room, stared at our screens and did the very best we could, but by 1pm we had 3 quarters of a presentation and no build to speak of. It was then we got a call from Ross: he’d Git pushed everything he had, jumped on a tube and made for London Bridge.

We were astonished: Ross had built a working Alpha in the space of a morning, with a hangover, without any help. The Interhacktives went into overdrive on the presentation, and by the time we took to the stage Ross was there and ready to present.

A Twilio number went up on the presentation board and we had all the staffers and journos text it: sure enough, there on the screen, red reports started appearing. SitRep worked!

We ended the day with an honourable mention. The Times told us that it was an excellent idea and brilliant we were thinking about how to protect journalists but they didn’t think it was how things worked on their foreign desk. That was something we did account for: the smaller, less established publications were who we were aiming at, like Vice or even freelancers.

We were happy with our honourable mention, and decided it would be a great thing to follow up on. Follow our blog, here, for more updates.

[formulabuildsthenews]

YAY! 

Our team Formula received a Special Commendation at Build the News for our idea.

We developed a bookmark service that allows readers to save their place in a long article on a mobile web browser. Here is a link to our work on GitHub. 

The winners at the Student category was the group CrowdTrip. 

The Staff winners was the team Duel, from The Times. 

It was a great weekend. Thank you The Times for providing such a great atmosphere and environment for our ideas to flourish.

Hope to see you all soon. 

Keila x

[formulabuildsthenews]

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Ow well, this #buildthenews hackathon is driving us craaazy 😄

 Keila x

[interhacktivesbuildthenews]

FUNnel times at Build the News - The benefit of our idea

An important part of any journalistic innovation is considering how it is going to benefit you in financial terms. It's all very well making something look smashing but it has to make 'business sense' as well.

This is an engagement funnel. It represents the activity of a reader on any given article with the majority of readers (subscribers) at the top of the funnel simply reading the article. The number of readers that then engage further with the article by rating comments or commenting publicly on the article themselves is far less than the number of people who simply read the article and bounce straight out again.

As a producer of content you want your readers engage with your stuff as much as possible. This is important if you run an advertising based business model because your content becomes more valuable to advertisers when people spend a longer time reading a page. It is also important from a subscription-based perspective because the more a subscriber comments and gets involved in the community of the publication, the more likely it is that they will then go on to re-subscribe.

Our Build the News project seeks to make this engagement funnel shorter and wider by allowing readers to recommend and annotate an article privately or semi-publicly. We believe that people will be more willing to comment on an article if they can determine who sees their comments. In this way the number of people who become involved will increase and result in more people returning or re-subscribing to your site.

With this system in place we think the engagement funnel will look more like this.

[interhacktivesbuildthenews]

News built? Here's our idea

After a couple of hard days of deliberations, plenty of changes in our approach, our planning and even in the core idea, we are almost there. 

Here's the main outline our idea, which is in the 'tactile' category of the Build the News competition. 

Using desktop, tablet and mobile, we want to emulate the way in which families and friends share print articles around the breakfast table on a Sunday morning.

Circles, recommendations and annotations

Essentially, within the website a user would be able to create Google+ style circles of individuals they would want to share articles with. These could be, for example, “family”, “colleagues”, “close friends”, or even just another individual. A user could create as many circles as they wanted, and each circle could have any number of people in it.

On each article there would be an option to “recommend”. This is like a share, but it is meant to be more personal, and would be directed at specific circles or individuals, rather than everyone that a user is connected with on a social media platform.

As well as being able to recommend the article, the user would be able to incorporate annotations intended just for the individual or group of individuals receiving the recommendation, such as “mum and dad, I thought you would find this paragraph really interesting”. Each annotation would be max 400 characters, to avoid reading them becoming a task.

Once the user has added all the annotations they want, they would click “save and recommend”, which would generate a unique URL making the annotations visible only to the recipients. A search tool, similar to that on Facebook, would allow the user to find their intended circles or individual recommendees by typing in the name of the circle/individual.

In terms of how the recipients would be notified of the recommendation/annotations, there would be three possible options. In each case, the clickable, unique URL would be included:

- “Notify via email”: the recipient(s) would receive an email notification at the address associated with their account.

- “Notify via Facebook”: the recipient(s) would receive an Facebook notification. This would only be possible if the recipient(s) have Facebook accounts associated with their account.

- “Notify via Twitter”: this is for those who want their annotations to be more open to the general public. They would tweet the link at specific individual(s), but the openness of Twitter means that anyone could click on the link if they see the tweet.

The conversation would then continue if the recipient(s) decide to add their own annotations to the article. In the same way as the original recommender, they would be able to click anywhere on the article and add an annotation. Pressing “save annotation” would generate  new unique code and all those involved in the conversation would receive an automatic notification.

[redbrickdev]

It's the final countdown #buildthenews @redbrickpaper @timesdevelops

[interhacktivesbuildthenews]

This is how we are *kinda* attempting to build the news

As excitement ran high, we came up with this awesome idea of a Sunday paper (tablet-first) app that would deliver content tailored to your lazy needs and emulate Sunday newspaper sharing by members of a family sitting at a table.

It was meant to classify news stories and features in four categories:

1) Recommendations by the Sunday Times based on  what you read during the week

2) “Save for Sunday” articles you decided to skip during the week and come back to on Sunday

3) Recommendations by the members of your network (family, friends, fellow subscribers) 4) “Silly Sunday” - a choice of randomly selected stories should you feel whimsical and tired of the other three.

It was meant to look like that:

And we loved it.

As the pitching hour struck, we rustled the papers and presented the idea to the panel of judges.  

And they loved it, too. Kind of. “Narrow down the scope of the idea” was their best advice. “Oh, and focus on the annotations, no one has yet come up with a good way of inserting in-line comments.” And for a reason, we thought. Slightly defeated, we came back to the table to reconsider our plans. After all, annotation were just a fun bit of our bigger project. We felt stuck.

One hour and seven cups of coffee later, we were well into developing something new.

[interhacktivesbuildthenews]

Brainstorming is fun, most of the time...