Facilitating Collaboration in Open News Player
So this week we were given a specific question to answer over at the Mozilla News Lab. Unfortunately due to my error I missed Shana Nessa's talk but managed to catch up with the presentation.
Keeping in mind the objectives and challenges identified in this week’s presentations by Shazna Nessa and Mohamed Nanabhay, how does your project take into account the need to facilitate collaboration in the newsroom (whether real or virtual), while acknowledging that team members will have varying technological skill sets?
Which I then translated to —
What affect will Open News Player have on collaboration in the newsroom for users of varying skills and what can be done to help?
Firstly I think its important to highlight the fact that Open News Player is a platform for consuming news. This means that there is another format that newsrooms are going to have to put their content on. A commitment would have to be made to create content for ONP and that would require the effort from people who create news content.
For something like Open News Player to be a viable product I think there would need to be tighter integration of developers and broadcast. This need to work closer with developers in charge of ONP could be extended to other departments, especially Data Visualisation. Shazna spoke about the changes needed in the newsrooms, one being the development of hybrid skills. Somebody who could render an animation in Final Cut Pro as well as in a browser would be invaluable in producing content simultaneously for TV and ONP.
One thought is that broadcast could create content on the fly for ONP using the tools they are already using. By developing plug-ins for desktop video editors it could be as simple as exporting a timeline along with the assets for ONP at the same time as rendering the video. This blog post by Web Made Movies explains that this is already under way for Final Cut Pro and Popcorn.js.
I know, with my limited knowledge, that templates are used heavily in broadcast. This would lend itself to the idea of producing ONP and TV content at the same time. Using pre defined models for information means templates could be created to display in the two formats. Again Web Made Movies have already starred on a template model for Popcorn.
The 'investigate' feature of Open News Player his would require systems in place for metadata to display without intervention and tools to help with editorial content. Databases could hold metadata such as the source of the content and its date. For the editorial content It would be necessary to create tools for the editors and journalists to use.
In the Open News Player demo I made, its shows a tool tip on a graph. It would be great if a journalists could use some tools to describe the graph they are after and then using a WYSIWYG method, add extra layers of content. Also visually toggling layers of data and saving, could generate different views for users interact with. This graph definition could then be packaged and sent to the broadcast department.
The success of a product like Open News Player obviously replies on the commitment from the content creators. A change of staff would be a consideration as well as the commissioning of a system and tools for its journalists to use.