Sarah Hartley

I made a thing…..

I’d like to think that when I use those four words in the subject line of emails it provokes a little spark of interest in my colleagues (possibly they just evoke a fearful uhoh!) but this time I’ll try it out on you.

The latest ‘thing’ I’ve messed with is an experiment to distribute news from the north into the mobile space using some of the tools available at the platform I’m working with, n0tice.com.

It means that any mobile phone user who has the n0tice.com app downloaded will discover the news headlines and links from their local newspaper to click straight through to the provider to find out the full story, explore their site etc.

It runs off the news organisation’s public RSS feeds with the addition of geo-tagging to the town or city where it is based so – a person walking around Manchester will be able to serendipitously receive news from the MEN, in Newcastle the Journal, Sheffield The Star and so on.

The content is created via the app Feedwax.com and then fed into an online noticeboard which becomes the way the stories are ultimately accessed via a mobile site, Android app or iPhone app.

All of the content can be seen in one go at this noticeboard although it’s unlikely that anyone (perhaps with the exception of journalists for monitoring purposes) would want to view it in that rather random way. Instead, it really is intended for mobile discovery where the location of the user provides the context.
You can download the apps to test it out here – android, iPhone.
Once logged in you can set your location and see all that’s been geotagged around you (notices) or restrict to everything via the Northerner noticeboard (boards).
A few things I learned from doing it:

• some news sites make it really difficult to hunt down the RSS feeds – why? They’re the building blocks for people to make things which have the potential to find new audiences.
• it wasn’t possible to tag the stories to the locations mentioned in the copy due to a lack of geo-tagging at source. This is an area I’m working with on a few different projects (including augmented reality) and one which I’d be interested to hear from anyone looking to incorporate it in their regular journalism work or content management systems.
• The feeds currently included are: The Guardian’s Northerner blog, MEN, Middlesbrough Gazette, Newcastle Chronicle, Liverpool Echo, Lancashire Evening Post, Yorkshire Evening Post, Carlisle News and Star, York Press, Sheffield Star, Northern Echo.
• should it include local blogs? Any newsy-based bloggers out there who’d like to be included, please give me a shout and I’ll add you in. Likewise, anyone currently included who would rather not have their content exposed to a mobile audience – just let me know and I’ll drop it out. It’s an experiment, I don’t want to annoy anyone.

If you’d like a similar thing for your own blog or website – basically it’s like having your own mobile app – the tools used are available to all here www.n0tice.org and I’m on hand to offer some help or advice if needed.

Contacts – in the end, they’re all there is. If Mae West had been a journalist, rather than saying ‘keeping a diary will keep you in the end’, I like to think she might have instead spoken about keeping a contacts book with the same reverence.

Any time spent on creating and building contacts is never wasted, which is why I’ve included it so early in the process. It also won’t stop here, this post is simply a process to get started.

So where to start?

Setting up a website or blog from scratch is just like starting a new beat as a reporter. You’re looking for contacts who know everything that’s going on in their field. Well-placed people. Some of those will be people who are paid to communicate with the public eg. Press and PR but many will be people who hold a position of authority, or have volunteered for a role and who don’t necessarily know about public participation. Your contact with them will need to be handled slightly differently to explain clearly the context of what you are trying to set up.

Begin by listing any personal contacts you have as these will always be the strongest ties – family and friends. Then start with the main institutions in your town. Here’s a fairly typical list I’ve started for my town:

Mayor and councillors
Council press office
Police, fire and ambulance press offices.
School principles and heads of governors
Existing bloggers/tweeters
Leisure facilities – cinema, theatre, operatic society, sports centre
Museums – Green Howard’s , Richmondshire
Neighbourhood policing panels
Town council clerk
Church representatives
Trading groups
Local MP’s constituency office
Existing campaign groups – Friends of Richmond CCTV
Civic Society
Allotments organisation

Having identified some of the local structures, time to put some research into finding the people behind the organisations and starting to build that contacts book.

Back in the day this meant a succession of well-guarded index tabbed notebooks – these days it means a database.

Taking the time to set up a spreadsheet right at the start of the process means an invaluable resource that can be easily updated as you progress. If there’s a group of you working on a project, it also makes it easy to share resources too. One word of caution on that – do ensure you understand the implications of the Data Protection Act when dealing with any data which isn’t in the public domain.

Using excel, googledocs or similar, layout your new contents database with column headings something like this.
Organisation. Name. Email. Phone. Notes. First contacted. Response.

If there’s a group of you doing this, you’ll need a column for who is to make the 1st contact too.

The heading ‘notes’ is for anything useful to know about contacting the person eg.’ Don’t call on Thursdays as child-minding’ or ‘strict vegetarian’ if you’re likely to be arranging a venue to meet.

The column first contacted is for recording a date so you can easily set a date for follow up conversations to track without bombarding someone with annoying repeat information.

All set – time to hit the phones and introduce yourself. Far better in person or over the phone as these are people you need to build relationships with.

If you do find a need to email to many people, just remember not to reveal people’s email addresses to everyone else in the list (without their prior permission). Use the BCC field of email to keep those addresses private.

The next instalment in this series will be some ways to approach ‘competitors’.

Seeing as this is the first post of the year it might as well be a dangerous one.

Bloggers and media commentators spent so much of 2008 hand-wringing over the future of the news industry and  journalism that some of the thought-provoking suggestions of things that could be done to improve the situation were often drowned out in a sea of doom and gloom.

But maybe,  just maybe, this means that 2009 will be the year of the dangerous thinker, the year when radical solutions get air time.

Take these hopes for the year from  from Save the Media blogger Gina Chen who describes a sweeping away of the current newsroom structures

Along with nine other very constructive hopes for the new year, Gina makes point 8 Cut through the bureaucracy of the newsroom.

” …as a story slips through the assembly process, each person in the line shares only a bit of ownership. What if we turned that on in its head and used a more collaborative approach. A writer — who may be an editor or a reporter — gathers facts and writes a piece and is involved in the headline and the layout. A series of editors still read the piece, but those editors may also write stories that go though the same process. I guess what I’m saying is a lot of talent gets wasted waiting for the stories to show up in rim.”

She doesn’t propose that any of  the actual processes – researching, contact-building, writing, copytasting, fact-checking, subbing etc – are dropped, just that the old hierarchical structure is scrapped in a move to a more modern, collaborative management approach.

Taken together with the advice to think of the newsroom as an online environment which may (or may not) have a print edition, this re-think call is a timely one.

With the recent rash of news organisations dropping print editions in favour of the cheaper distribution option of online-only, will newsrooms this year be looking more closely at their own infer-structure? Think the previously unthinkable?

After all, doesn’t the standard structure have as as much to do with the legacy of unionised job demarkation as anything else – drawn up at  a time when the web-first publishing cycles would have been as alien a concept as telecommunications that didn’t require operators to make connections?

For example, the web world has proved over and over that people can organise themselves and collaborate to produce content without any organisation to put such formal structures in place. This can be as true for reporters/photographers planning the day’s diary as it is for activists planning a global campaign.

Getting people across the newsroom involved in all steps of the process rather than just a  few could not only lead to a faster, leaner story cycle but also more creative and transparent newsgathering.

As Gina says: “A copy editor could blog; an editor could write; a reporter could suggest a headline. Our journalistic boat is sinking, and we need everyone baling out the water.”