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.

I’m proud to announce that ReportingOn won a Knight News Challenge grant. I’m in Las Vegas at the E&P Interactive Media Conference for the announcement of all the winners.

Yesterday, Brein McNamara, another News Challenge winner, said more or less that we’re all in over our heads to some extent.

That’s the right idea.

We’re supposed to take a good idea that we don’t necessarily have the resources to polish into a great idea on our own, then use the funding from the Knight Foundation and the growing network of winners to finish the process.

And that’s the challenge.

I’ll add a link to the full list of winners when I have a free moment, but I’m betting you’ll be able to find it at newschallenge.org.

There are some awesome projects on the list, including Radio Engage (Margaret Rosas and the whole Quiddities crew are seriously representing Santa Cruz out here), Spot.Us (David Cohn’s community-funded enterprise journalism project), and a CMS/front-end system project headed up by the editors of the Daily Bruin.

Nothing about ReportingOn has changed today. Follow reportingon on Twitter, send a tweet about what you’re working on to @reportingon, and find journalists working on similar stories.

Then, the easy part: Help each other out.

Huge congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to everyone involved in making this happen so far. Now the real fun starts…

Just a glance of the mockup I built tonight.*

Click to enlarge…

This might give you an idea of how I’ve been imagining (and diagramming in mindmaps/on napkins) the structure of the site.

*(…in Coda, not Photoshop. HTML and CSS that I can build into a Drupal theme.)

From the message I sent to members of the What Are You Reporting On? Facebook group yesterday:

The initial, humble little piece of integration with Twitter is live now at www.reportingon.com.

If you look at the right side of the page there, you’ll see a list of all the recent tweets sent to @reportingon. If you have a Twitter ID, try it out by posting a message like “@reportingon working on a review of There Will Be Blood.”

Your message will show up at reportingon.com.

I’m working on ways to let you subscribe to all those replies by RSS or Twitter.

Thanks for participating – I hope to see you all making connections with other reporters at reportingon.com.

If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, sign up for free at www.twitter.com.

The next step will be a site with groups where you can share your strategies and sources for working your beats with peers at other news organizations, in other towns and around the world.

I’m going to leave it at that for the moment.

In the immediate future, I’m still working on:

• Using the Twitter API to get this done instead of piggybacking on existing services that use the API themselves.
• Pushing the @reportingon tweets back out to users following ReportingOn, which in turn would make it easy to…
• Push @reportingon tweets out by RSS

Please feel free to add your feedback here, in the comment thread at reportingon.com, or e-mail me about it at reportingon@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who noticed the pillow-soft launch of ReportingOn.com in the only link in my Resolutions post, and especially to those of you who commented, e-mailed, tweeted, or blogged about the project.

At the moment, it’s just an URL, an idea, and a comment thread, but it’s building momentum, and that’s pleasant.

A few thoughts:

1. I’m not doing this for any sort of financial gain, although I may get a grant or two to help pay the server bills, if there ever are any.
2. I am hoping to use this as my Master’s Project to finish the graduate program I’m (still) enrolled in at San Jose State University.
3. I’m no one’s competition. I’m doing this because I want to, because I think it’s necessary. If it’s successful, I’ll be happy; if no one ever uses it, I will have had a good hunk of practice at trying to do this sort of thing, and hopefully learned quite a bit in the process.

Initial feedback on the idea:

David Cohn:

“Ryan’s idea, as I understand it, is to take the new found obsession with instant conversation (and gratification) and aggregate these conversations in order to improve local reporting.”

Greg Linch:

“I’m a competitive being, as most journalists are, but the purpose of our profession is to inform. If you don’t want to be scooped, don’t give away the scoop. We must continue to adapt how we do our job to better inform readers and this site would be a great way to help do so.”

As the idea evolves, I’m thinking strongly that the Twitter tie-in and a Facebook application are the two places to start.

Dave Cohn is right: Herding a boatload of journalists – pro or amateur – over to a redundant social network feels forced. I’m not going to encourage reporters to seek out their sources in popular social networks in one breath, then ask them to join another network in the next.

Or maybe I will, I don’t know yet. Tell me, what would you want out of this?

My basic thought, the tagline for the site, service, app = The backchannel for your beat. I want this to be a place/way for reporters in far flung places to talk to each other – quickly and relatively publicly. A rising tide lifts all bylines. Seriously.

A wildcard: Poynter Groups?

I’m not sure the Poynter idea is exactly what I’m picturing — actually, I know it isn’t, but I still think it’s a good idea. Is Poynter the best possible place for a social network for journalists?

Many questions. Answer what you can. Thanks.

I gave someone a bit more detail about my nascent ReportingOn concept via e-mail late last night. Talking these things out in public always helps, so here’s a fresh draft of what I’ve been mumbling about:

This post was the beginning of the idea.

In short, ReportingOn.com would be a social network for reporters looking for others on the same beat (in different towns).

Make it easy for everyone reporting on “sea lions” to find each other, perhaps as part of a larger group of people reporting on “science.”

It’s one thing for a reporter to subscribe to a listserv for environmental reporters; it’s quite another thing to be a reporter writing a story on a surge in sea lion deaths in Monterey Bay (I’m making this up – the windows are open and I can hear the sea lions 1+ miles away), and to quickly find a list of other journalists working on sea lion stories.

I’m at a point where I’m starting to learn Drupal, building a gray box mockup of the site, and sketching out what the relationships would ideally look like in the database. One of the next steps is getting a clear idea of how to use the functionality built into Drupal and its modules to surface the data the way I want to.

I briefly considered using this project as a focal point to learn Django around, but that just doesn’t seem to be the correct hammer for the job. I’ll get to Django eventually, I promise.

Before twelve people flame me talking about how this has nothing to do with networked journalism or citizen journalism and it just reinforces the barriers between professional journalists and people who don’t get paid to observe the world around them, rest assured that there is a second column to the idea, as I see it in my head, in which ‘readers’ can vote for the topics and categories they want to read more about.

Should there be groups just for readers, or should they be integrated into the Reporter groups?

The latter, I think. But I’m trying to keep this pretty lean: A social network for beat reporters. A backchannel for your beat.

A stream of short updates that answer the question “What are you reporting on?” leads to longer discussions about issues, sources, and beats.

There’s a Facebook group where you can start answering that question.