The ReportingOn Blog

In 2008, I was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to build ReportingOn, a backchannel for beat reporters to share ideas, information, and sources. The goal of the project was to provide journalists of all stripes with a place to talk about content, not craft, or process, or skillset.

I taught myself enough Django — and sought out advice from friends and coworkers with little regard for their interest or priorities — to launch the first iteration of the site in October 2008. In July 2009, with fresh design and development from the team at Lion Burger, ReportingOn 2.0 launched.

And almost immediately, I stepped away from it, buried in the responsibilities of my day job, family, and other projects. To grow and evolve, and really, to race ahead of the internal and external communication tools already available to reporters, ReportingOn needed far more time, attention, and dedication than I could give it.

Yesterday, I shut down ReportingOn.

In its last state, it only cost a few bucks a month to maintain, but it has more value at this point as a story, or a lesson, or a piece of software than it has as a working site.

To head off a couple questions at the pass:

1. No, you can’t export your questions or answers or profile data. None of you have touched the site in about a year, so I don’t think you’re that interested in exporting anything. But if you’re some sort of webpackrat that insists, I have the database, and I can certainly provide you with your content.
2. Yes, the source code for the application is still available, and you’re more than welcome to take a stab at building something interesting with it. If you do, please feel free to let me know.

And a few recommendations for developers of software “for journalists:”

• Reporters don’t want to talk about unpublished stories in public.
• Unless they’re looking for sources.
• There are some great places on the Internet to find sources.
• When they do talk about unpublished stories among themselves, they do it in familiar, well-lit places, like e-mail or the telephone. Not in your application.
• Actually, keep this in mind: Unless what you’re building meets a very journalism-specific need, you’re probably grinding your gears to build something “for journalists” when they just need a great communication tool, independent of any particular niche or category of users.

As for the problem ReportingOn set out to solve, it’s still out there.

Connecting the dots among far-flung newsrooms working on stories about the same issue is something that might happen internally in a large media company, or organically in the wilds of Twitter, but rarely in any structured way that makes it easy to discover new colleagues, peers, and mentors. Sure, there are e-mail lists, especially for professional associations (think: SEJ) that act as backchannels for a beat, but not enough, and not focused on content.

(Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.)

As for me, I’m working on another (even) small(er) Knight-funded side project a few minutes at a time these days. Watch for news about that one in the coming weeks.

(This post also appeared in similar form at the PBS IdeaLab blog.)

Those of you who have been keeping score surely noticed that I’ve saddled the iteration of ReportingOn that launched late on July 1 with a “2.0″ label when I talk about it.  Many of you might remember what the backchannel for beat reporters looked like before the clock struck “late” on July 1:

That’s what it looked like, and it did some interesting things, but not as much as I would have liked.  And so began the process of building 2.0.  And with it, the cataloging of lessons learned from the first run.

Here’s what it looks like now, almost two weeks after the launch of the new site:

So, what were the lessons that I learned to help make the jump from 1.0 to 2.0?  Here’s the key slide from the presentation I gave in a few places during the development of ReportingOn 2.0:

DIY has its limits

I was limited by my own skill and knowledge when it came to Web development on the first run.  I was teaching myself Django in the middle of the night and early in the morning over coffee, gleaning the important parts from a variety of open source Django projects and friends.  Hiring a development and design team solved that.  And it solved it well.  I haven’t touched a line of code in ReportingOn 2.0, but with the code I soaked up on the first try, I understand its structure and syntax.

What’s my motivation?

(Note the score in the lower-right corner of Joey’s avatar.)

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.

Twitter is faster than me

Right, so 140-character limits are long-gone in RO 2.0, and the straight question/answer session should (theoretically, at least) make for longer conversations with more depth to them.  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.

Translate this?

This is the Great Unchecked Box on the list of development paths to explore, and it’s pretty critical. When ReportingOn 1.0 launched in October 2008, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking journalists were among the users most excited about it. A few even translated the FAQ into other languages and made all sorts of great suggestions via e-mail, Twitter, and their blogs as to how I might implement some sort of translation tool, or a choice of language for each user.

So how do other social networks handle this?  Facebook actually crowdsources the translations of the “chatter” on their site via a Facebook application. (When I say “chatter,” I mean the documentation and little bits of stock verbiage that come in between all that content you create on the network.) Now, getting the chatter right is important, but in the case of RO 2.0, it’s the content that needs translation.

(Facebook allows users to choose from a wide range of languages to view the social network in, but they translate the text created by Facebook, not the content of your friends’ posts and comments.)

The whole point of the network is to bring together journalists in disparate places working on similar beats, so I’ve rejected any method that divides up the streams of questions and answers based on language. (Of course, a Spanish-speaking journalist would be free to use the existing open source codebase of RO 2.0 to build their own version of the site.)

That leaves something like the Google AJAX Language API as an obvious option.  How would it work?  Well, if you’re looking at a question posted in English, you might have a button that says ‘Translate This!’ which leads to a little pop-up menu allowing you to choose a language, then the translator would run and display the question in the language of your choice.  If you’ve ever used Google Translate on a Web page or a block of text, you know how spotty it can be, but I haven’t seen a better solution yet.

Public Relations Sharks

Ah, the sharks.  Well, while there’s no “tag this shark” button in the system yet, as use of the network ramps up, I’m hoping that any impositions made in answers by my friends in the public relations and marketing fields will simply not be marked as ‘good answers’ and without positive feedback, the sharks will lose interest.

(“Shark” by Jeff Kubina on Flickr.)

But, I think there’s plenty of room for a better answer to this problem.  One option I kicked around with the development team was to let users “flag” a problematic user; but one flag alone didn’t change anything; it would take five or ten flags before the user’s answers would either not be displayed to others, or perhaps their answers would be collapsed down to only display their username and a flag. Interested users could click to view their answer, or maybe set a threshold-style switch in their profile to ‘always view answers from flagged users.’

What’s next?

We’ll see.  The development team has some bits and pieces of time to finish one or two features on my wishlist, and then the network will most likely stand as-is until either I pick up some more funding to continue work on it, or until some friendly developers submit some interesting patches.  I’m eager to see what they come up with, and how the codebase is used out in the wider Web.

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!