About
What: ReportingOn 2.0 is a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.
Who: All journalists are welcome. Are you a reporter at a major metro newspaper? An editor at a small community newspaper? A blogger working a story about local politics? A cable news anchor looking for national trends bubbling to the surface? ReportingOn is for all of you.
If you’re in public relations, marketing, or social media and you don’t work for a news organization, we highly recommend you check out the excellent HelpAReporter.com (aka HARO) or PitchEngine, which should be better suited to your needs.
When: Now. ReportingOn 2.0 launched on July 2, 2009. The first version of ReportingOn launched on October 1, 2008.
Where: At ReportingOn.com, @reportingon on Twitter, and on Facebook, too.
Why: To improve the quality of local news by helping journalists add context to their reporting based on what they learn from their peers in other places. To connect beat reporters with mentors across town or on the other side of the continent. To take the pulse of journalism at a local level and bring to the surface issues that are gaining momentum around the world.
How: Thanks to a generous News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation to help support the development and promotion of ReportingOn for the next two years, the site has been built twice in Django. Matter of fact, you can find the open-sourced code 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.
Us: Ryan Sholin is the founder of ReportingOn. Advisers to the project include the Knight Foundation, Cynthia McCune and Richard Craig from the faculty of the San Jose State University School of Journalism and Mass Communications, and countless reporters, editors, and bloggers who have offered their help, advice, and feedback. The team at Lion Burger developed and designed ReportingOn 2.0.
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