The ReportingOn Blog

ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions.  And answers.

It’s still the backchannel for your beat, but it’s an absolute re-imagining of the network.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it’s a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

(You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts at the PBS Idea Lab blog.)

The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on.

That didn’t happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years. So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions.

There’s no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network.

You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in.

I think you’ll like it.

And, as the grant year for ReportingOn comes to a close, we’re also making the source code for ReportingOn available here under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.  You can use that to build your own backchannel question and answer tool for the journalists in your news organization, or even let your readers ask and answer questions.

I want to repeat that and extend it a bit…

Here are four things that could happen next:

1. ReportingOn.com itself is a stunning success, with thousands of journalists asking and answering great questions every day, finding peers and mentors, improving local news by adding context and insight gleaned from others working similar angles on stories in far-flung locales.
2. A media company uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build their own internal backchannel, probably on an intranet, or requiring authentication so they can limit it to members of their own organization.
3. A single news organization uses ReportingOn to do the same thing — build an internal backchannel.
4. A single news organization uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build a public tool that allows readers, sources, and reporters to ask and answer questions in a sort of open forum.

What else could you do with ReportingOn?  Give it a shot, and let us know.

What’s next for 2.01 and beyond?  We’ll let the dust settle over the next few days and figure out which additional features we want to build first, then we’ll take a look at our budget and consider the options.  Feel free to check out feedback.reportingon.com to get an idea of where we might go next, and add your own ideas, too!

Thanks to everyone who helped get this launch out the door on time and on budget, especially the Lion Burger development and design team, all the friends and colleagues who gave me their input over the last year, those of you that answered my last-minute call for beta testers, and the Knight Foundation staff for supporting the first year of ReportingOn.

So… Any questions?

If you’ve been waiting patiently to get a look at what’s coming next from ReportingOn, put on your headphones and take a short tour with me for eight minutes.  I recorded this about a week ago, so many of the things that look undone are actually finished now, and I’ll be releasing another screencast just before we launch, most likely on or about July 1, 2009.

Mash the button at the bottom right of the player that looks sort of like a monitor to go full-screen for the full effect.

Over at IdeaLab, you’ll find a fresh post with notes and feedback from ReportingOn presentations in San Jose and Philadelphia last month.

Here’s an annotated version of my presentation from BCNIPhilly:

Over at IdeaLab, I’ve posted an update on what I’m calling “Phase 2″ of ReportingOn’s development.

The short version:

If ReportingOn is the backchannel for your beat, and journalists of all stripes are welcome, it’s time to put some solid definitions behind the terms backchannel, beat, journalists, and all stripes in order to draw some straight lines from ideas to functionality on the new site.

Here’s a sample:

Beat:

In the most traditional newspaper sense of the word, a beat is the topical or geographical area a journalist covers. In a university town, a reporter might cover higher education. A neighborhood blogger might consider a radius of a few blocks their geographical beat. Connecting journalists covering similar topical beats across all barriers and borders remains one of the key goals of ReportingOn.

Read the whole thing at IdeaLab.

…and I do mean brief.

If you happen to read this, that means you are or were pretty darn interested in ReportingOn, which has been largely dormant since I slowed and then stopped development work on the first draft of the network at the end of October 2008.

Here’s the deal: ReportingOn is in development again, or at least it will be, shortly.  I’ll have a great deal of help this time, and I think this second run at building out the network with all the necessary and obvious tools is going to be, frankly, awesome.  Matter of fact, I’m convinced of it.

And, the help will be on the development and design side of the equation, which means I’ll have more time to talk about what we’re doing, why, and how we can help.  Or how you can help.  Or how you can help each other.

It’s not that hard; it’s just a matter of time.

For some ideas about where to go next and the challenges I’m getting over, check out this post I wrote a while back at IdeaLab.

So, coming soon, ReportingOn will be the proverbial “back and better than ever.”  With your help.

Thank you.

This week’s new features at ReportingOn:

• A list recent comments now shows up on the homepage, when you’re logged in.
• There’s a new RSS feed for recent comments here.
• A list of recent comments posted by each user shows up on their updates page.

And, a new feedback forum hosted by Uservoice.  I’ll be using that as a feature queue and a way to add notes on what I’m thinking as I add new features to the network.  Please do check it out and vote for the features you think I should work on next.  Also, please add your own suggestions and feedback there.

Check out the new feedback forum for ReportingOn, powered by Uservoice:

Vote for the features you’re most interested in, follow our progress, add your own suggestions, ideas, and bug reports.

If you’ve been checking ReportingOn frequently, or keeping up as I cross off items on my to-do list, you’ll notice that I spent some time today playing with Django’s absolutely awesome syndication framework.

So, there’s now an RSS feed for all the latest updates (which is neat right now, but will be useless to you as the traffic scales upward later on).  That was easy.

More interesting, if you’re using the site or trying to figure out how to share your updates there with your Twitter followers or your blog readers or anyone else:  A feed just for you, of just your updates.

While I might not be interested in subscribing to the RSS feeds of individual users, individual users certainly might be interested in taking their feeds and displaying their updates in the sidebar of the blog, or routing them through Twitterfeed, or posting them to Friendfeed, or building themselves little widgets if they please.

Sounds good to me.  If you do something cool with your updates feed, let us know!

It’s alive.  ReportingOn — the Django-powered open beta backchannel for your beat, not the Twitter account — is up and running.

[UPDATE 10/21/08: Most of what's on this list has been added to the new ReportingOn feedback forum.  Check in there to vote for features, suggest new ideas, and report bugs.]

Here’s a brief glance at my list of the first additions and revisions to be made, not necessarily in order:

• On individual beat pages, a list of related beats.
• On individual beat pages, a list of the users who file updates on that beat most often.
• Add e-mail signals (optional?) when a user comments on an update.
• Add redirect from /comments/posted to the single update page.
• Direct messaging, or a way to indicate how you want to be messaged. (Twitter? E-Mail? Carrier pigeon?)
• Users input a few beats on signup.
• Friends
• Suggest friends on sign-up based on your beats.
• Address book import option.
• Groups?
• Add location metadata to each update. (By user location or by option to add a location to each update?)
• Post your update to Twitter.
• Implement standard microblogging API.
• Add Terms of Service (Written as of 10/8/08, but considering whether it’s necessary.)
• On user pages, links to recent comments they left. (Done 10/08)
• Add permalinks for each comment. (Done 10/08)
• On user pages, a list of the tags they use most often. (Done 10/27/08 8 a.m.)
• Move this list and all feedback to uservoice. (Done 10/21/08 11 p.m., added list items, added Feedback widget to RO template, changed /contact template.)
• Translate the FAQ into Spanish. (In progress on 10/10/08 with both unsolicited and solicited help.  Posted at reportingon.com/faq_es on 10/21/08 5 p.m.)
• YUI autocomplete for tags. (Done 10/20/08 5:00 p.m. although only works with the first tag in the beat field for now.)
• Merge the updates-by-user page with the profile page. (Done 10/17/08 noon.)
• RSS feeds for all updates, users, individual tags, what else? (RSS for latest updates added on 10/12/08 11:30 a.m., RSS for users added on 10/12/08 10:00 p.m., RSS for every tag added on 10/14/08 9:00 p.m.)
• Repair the stylesheet of this blog, which was nuked when I accidentally deleted and then restored the database recently. (That was awesome.)  (Switched to a different theme for now, 10/9/08)
• Permalinks for individual updates. (Done 10/4/08 11 a.m.)
• Comments on individual updates. (Done 10/9/08 12:30 p.m.)
• Add Google sitemap functionality. (Done for updates at 10/7/08 8:30 a.m., but still could use additional maps for static pages.)
• Add Creative Commons license (Done 10/7/08 1 p.m.)
• Yikes, tags with multiple words — as in “global warming” in quotes — are broken at the moment. (Please use underscores to connect multiple word tags for now, like so: “global_warming” — Use as many single word tags as you’d like, such as: awesome, cool, excellent OR awesome cool excellent.) (Fixed on 10/14/08 8:00 am)

OK, maybe that was in order after all.  Not really. As I think of easy-but-necessary things, I’m adding them to the bottom top of the list.

Either way, please report any bugs using the feedback form and I’ll add them to the list to be squashed!

[This post was also published at IdeaLab.]

I’ve been writing about ReportingOn, my Knight News Challenge project, in fits and starts for 11 months now, but it’s time to backtrack for a moment and answer some simple questions about what I’m up to here.

Q: So, what’s ReportingOn?

A: ReportingOn.com will be a simple way for journalists to update their peers on the stories they’re working on right now.  Tag your 140-character-or-less updates with the beat you’re on, and find peers reporting on similar beats to make connections, introduce yourself to potential mentors, or discover an unsung hero.

Q: When you say “journalists,” who are you talking about?

A: Anyone who publishes news, information, or commentary at a relatively stable spot in print and/or online.  That umbrella should cover reporters at the Washington Post, photojournalism students with a blog and a school paper, and independent bloggers who focus on a certain topic.  Ideally, the journalists in question have a definable beat, whether it’s geographical or topical, and they’re doing original reporting of some sort.

Q: So it’s a social network?  I already belong to a few of those…

A: You can call it that if you want.  If it’s a social network, it’s one based on beats, which doesn’t exist just yet.  There are plenty of blogs, social networks, and discussion boards based on craft, and there’s Wired Journalists for general professional networking, but no public place for journalists to flag themselves as, say, an education reporter who frequently writes about standardized testing, and find other reporters working the same beat.

Q: So what am I supposed to say about the story I’m working on?

A: As much or little as you want.  Maybe you just want to mention something general about your story and tag your update with your beat to let your peers know what you’re up to.  Or maybe you have a question that needs an answer, or you’re bored with all the “usual suspects” sources and you’re looking for an introduction to an expert with a different point of view.  You’ll probably get exactly as much information out of ReportingOn as you put into it.

Q: What if my competition picks up on what I’m working on and beats me to the story?

A: Really? You’re still worried about the paper across town? OK, no problem, just don’t included much specific information in your updates.  But really, ReportingOn is probably going to work much better if you’re writing an investigative/enterprise story or a feature.  I’m not sure how well it’s going to work for breaking news, unless you’re just looking for a source or some help making sense out of freshly released data.

Q: OK, where do I start?

A: So glad you asked. ReportingOn is currently in development, but you’re more than welcome to follow ReportingOn on Twitter and send it updates.  Also, there’s a spot at www.reportingon.com to enter your e-mail address.  I’m collecting those, and when there’s news about the site, I’ll send it out to the list.