Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

maxcutler: 3 journo devs and 6 hours to work. Please give us project ideas! Tomorrow with @danielbachhuber and @davidestes

The question isn’t what are we going to build, but really what aren’t we going to build?

Open Assignment Desk

The Open Assignment Desk (formerly known as the Virtual Assignment Desk) is a tool for leveraging openness in the story creation process. Hat tip to Jay Rosen and Dave Winer for talking about the left side of the same idea in episode #12 and episode #18 of Rebooting the News.

It brings the funk in stages.

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Not to throw too many tomatoes, but the Daily Emerald made a very “newspaper” mistake today with their website. I’d like start a discussion about “the better way to do it.”

Case in point: The Daily Emerald, I believe as a part of their magazine edition for IntroDUCKtion, created a campus directory. The directory includes dozens upon dozens of email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers for student organizations and sports at the University of Oregon. In the print magazine, which I don’t have access to because I’m in Portland, I’m sure this list of contact information is beautifully presented in an approachable, useful format. Unfortunately, this same list made its way into the website as a long, ugly, flat text file:

In my humble opinion, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

What if, instead, we approached this directory as the database that it really should be? This web-native directory would have profiles for every student organization much like students can have profiles on Facebook. I’d be able to search for organizations based on the name, the location on campus, people currently involved, the mission of the organization, tags, etc. If I found a organization I was interested in, I’d click through to their profile. The profile would then give me access to all of the contact information I might need in addition to the most recent or popular articles, images, videos, updates from the campus’ microblog, etc. There’d be a small wiki section for the organization or sport where I could read up on its history and know that the information I was getting was true because it had been curated by the beat reporter.

I see at least two advantages to this approach, in addition to making all of the information much more accessible (versus the flat text file). One, you’d only have to build this once. Two, you’d save the reporter or designer a lot of time having to search for the most up to date contact information because they could just pull the information from the database as they’re creating the print product.

Think of role of the student news organization less as a newspaper and more as a platform for impartial, accurate community information to be shared.

This afternoon held in store for me a fast, engaging conversation with Andrew Jesaitis, a former business manager and colleague at the Whitman Pioneer, who I hear might be getting back into the journalism and media industry. He’s worked for Goldman Sachs since graduating, but will be starting an internship with The Ski Journal in the next couple of months.

I did my best to explain my understanding of how the business is changing, the forces driving the change, and what trends are solidifying for the future. Newspapers and journalism are under the influence of longer-term change because of more ubiquitous ICT, but the current cacophony of crisis is largely due to the biggest recession in half of a century and over-leveraged debt. A lot of the discussion has been centered around the lack of leadership in redefining newspaper business models, but I think Michael Nielsen deserves merit for saying that newspapers might also be failing because their institutional structures are too optimized for an old paradigm. They are too good at what they used to do, and the jump into experimental and uncertain territory is nigh impossible.

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Every so often, I have one of those runs where I listen to a super inspirational podcast and come back with more ideas than I have the time to write them down. Tonight was one of those nights.

Dave Winer and Jay Rosen in the 12th edition of Rebooting the News explore a concept Dave refers to as a “coral reef” for local information. The importance of a coral reef in the sea is that it is a habitat for many other species to prosper. His argument for starting In Berkeley, what he thinks is the first local blog for Berkley, is that it might provide a coral reef for a lot of tremendous local data to grow from. Given the right formats for information storage, it can become a repository for community knowledge that everyone within the community can both contribute to and benefit from. What got me thinking, though, was what these formats might be.

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Tomorrow morning will find me headed to Philadelphia for Saturday’s BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. Needless to say, I’m super stoked for this opportunity. Not only will I be able to finally meet my boss, my new colleagues, and the rest of the CoPress team I haven’t met, but I’ll get to spend an entire day, and probably much of the weekend, discussing the future of journalism with some of the smartest news folk in the country. If my flight doesn’t get laid over in Atlanta, I’d like to spend my time taking about at least a couple of different things:

Designing a News Startup From Scratch in 60 Minutes

The goal would be to rapidly prototype what a news organization of the future might look like by walking the hypothetical startup from concept to a year after launch and covering things such as:

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Mark Briggs wrote a post on Journalism 2.0 about how a reputation system could be applied to comments on a newspaper’s website. It got my brain in a party. A reputation economy is something we’re taking very much into consideration as we develop some of the core ideas behind the Connection Engine, the platform CoPress will eventually build to power our community, and I think the concept has tremendous potential as a tool to evaluate the map of expertise within your community.

In Mark’s scenario (borrowed from Stack Overflow), the reputation system would be used to identify the good comments from the cruft. If you post a good comment other people think adds to the conversation, then they might vote you up. You’d earn reputation points from that transaction. If you were trolling to derail the conversation or intentionally trying to provoke, then the community could vote you down and you’d lose reputation points. The author of the post, furthermore, could use his or her super reputation to bestow blessings upon really intelligent feedback. All of this information about the quality of content would be useful to the CMS and webmaster, and editor I suppose, in trying to determine what gets placement where.

The kicker is when you tie this reputation system into the database that’s tracking people in your community. This is where things could get really interesting. By adding semantic information to the reputation system (i.e. recording the topic that the commenter is writing on and saving structured data about the nature of their response), you could build a super useful for finding the diamonds in the rough. For instance, if Marcus Doe (a fake name to protect his identity) commented often on articles about climate change and water access issues, and his fellow commenters rated his insights highly, then Marcus’ profile in the database would indicate that the crowd seems to think he makes fair arguments. The news organization would then invite Marcus to contribute a guest article. If the readers then found that contribution valuable, it would increase Marcus’ profile as a source of knowledge about climate change and water access within the community. This would only work with real, verifiable commenters, of course.

This reputation system would be the engine to empower the community to evaluate information and sources for merit.