#structured journalism

[endofjournalism]

The gist: Journalism needs to be structured and work in chunks to have a place in the new ecosystem.

[jillfalk-blog]

News has historically been represented (and read) as a series of articles that report on events as they occur because it was the only way to publish news. The constraints of print media meant that a newspaper was published, at most, twice a day and that once an article was published, it was unalterable. While news organizations have adapted to new media through the creative use of interactivity, video, and audio, even the most innovative formats are still conceived of as dispatches: items that get published once and don’t evolve or accumulate knowledge over time. Any sense of temporality is still closely tied to the rhythms of print. Creating news for the current and future media landscape means considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate upon itself; documents should have ways of reacting to new reporting or information; and we should consider the consumption behavior of our users as one that takes place at all cadences, not simply as a daily update.

THE FUTURE OF NEWS IS NOT AN ARTICLE  via NYTimes Resarch & Development Group

[endofjournalism]

[listendashwrite]

What if every storyline had its own URL? What if a newsroom created an in-house journalistic Wikipedia? What if articles could be parsed like code? What if the basic structure of journalism allowed users to explore every story through timelines, social graphs, and maps, instead of requiring special, one-off projects?

‘Structured journalism’ offers readers a different kind of story experience, Columba Journalism Review

[endofjournalism]

Ideas on how to better address journalists' information challenges: searching, connecting, remembering and sharing.

[endofjournalism]

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wants to create a Wikipedia for news: Infobitt.

Here’s the Infobitt model. We grab different facts from different news sources, summarize them in sentences which link back to those sources. We each drag-and-drop the facts into our preferred order, and the system calculates the sense of the community. The result is a bitt.

That’s not all. There’s a stream of new bitts arriving in the system. We put bitts in order of importance by drag-and-drop as well. We’ve made a new way to collaborate on collecting the news.

We want this done for every article about every story. And we want it constantly updated. After all, it’s 2014.

Only a giant, international, online community could make this happen. This is citizen journalism re-envisioned to include an enormous distributed editorial function. It’s ambitious, but we can do it.

[endofjournalism]

But let’s not confuse the job of moving mountains with expressing the human condition. Michelangelo famously said:

«In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.»

That’s the really exciting opportunity.  There are stories within the volumes of new data being generated all the time that just need insightful people to reveal them.

[socialmediadesk]

[social sandbox] visual stories, tools from Knight Lab, structured journalism

Hello everyone,

I was at NLGJA last week and sat in on a session about visual design. I thought I would pass along some of the interesting takeaways and links. 

1. Here’s a list of visual stories that are unique in some way (curated by Gannett designer Tyler Chance.) Not all of them are journalism stories, which I think makes it better.

I particularly like this one called The Most Northern Place — and the way they integrated radio into the piece.

2. I learned there are a bunch of tools and projects from the Knight Center at Northwestern that we could take advantage of (via Miranda Mulligan) 

StoryMap helps journalists craft stories where location is key to the narrative (Think about field reporting trips!)

Soundcite allows reporters to seamlessly drop inline audio into a story (It was designed by our own Tyler Fisher)

Also of note:

3. What is Structured Journalism? (via former NPR-er Chris Amico) (A new listserv to join if you’re interested in structured journalism: library, I’m looking at you.)

4. I noticed two things this weekend. Buzzfeed has a version of the Quotable Tool that allows them to put words over images. (Vox has one too. Their code is here.) I love these, in part, because it makes it easy to socialize stories on Pinterest, Instagram and adds more info to a Facebook/Twitter post. 

5. Also: props to Eric Deggans and Madhulika Sikka for having a conversation on Twitter. I love seeing when people who work here converse outside of here on social. It makes us look human! Also: it lets more people know about us. Have conversation on twitter!