Specifically, by doing the rebuild, they want to: share more insights, offer better tools for sharing, enable sources to update their profile within the system, offer sources more granular privacy controls, instantly publish insights, create credibility systems for sources, offer a better user experience, and integrate with existing sites.

The prototype dashboard for the reporter-facing Audience Insight Repository is project-based and focused on collaboration.

Journalists can search through a huge database of sources based on demographic metadata.

Once they’ve found a worthwhile lead, the journalist can click through and get contact information, background on the source, and a record of prior interactions.

The project also has plans for a user-facing site tentatively called MyPIN where they’d be able to engage more fully with the news organization’s reporting process or update their profile information.

There’s a certain amount of friction, however, in requiring sources to manually update their profiles every time a bit of their personal data changes. As the system exists now, American Public Media requires readers to submit full contact information every time they fill out a form. If the contact information on the form is different than what is in the database, then that discrepancy is flagged and an analyst has to manually address that conflict. In the future, in addition to enabling users to update their profiles on their own, it might also be worthwhile to explore integrating with LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. With LinkedIn or Facebook, the user could update their resume, contact information, etc. and have it automatically pulled into the Public Insight Network. By integrating Twitter, for example, journalists could easily find sources for a given story by having search localized to updates from users within the network.

We also discussed user privacy, which getting correct is of significant interest to American Public Media. More importantly, what control users have over their privacy and how to make policy changes without surprising or alienating them. An idea I suggested is that, rather than presenting just a list of options for the user to choose from, they should instead try a Hunch-style approach. With this, they’d be presented a series of questions detailing scenarios about their data and how it might be used. The decisions the user made responding to each scenario could then guide their privacy options. At some point, American Public Media would like to start sharing source information amongst all of their media partners using the software, but it will be critical for them to execute that move right the first time.

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.

The first is to fulfill the needs of the newsroom in regards to managing story workflow. Stories can start as pitches, get approved and become drafts, and, once completed, go through the editing process to become published pieces. The Open Assignment Desk fills things in by tracking all of the meta data associated with this process, including when the story is due, whether there will be associated photography, the location of the story, etc. Each newsroom would be able to fine-tune their workflow as well. If the publication was going for speed, then their editing process might just be one stage. If the newsroom was more concerned about the accuracy of their content, then they might have a three stage editing process. This idea isn’t really that unique; Max has a product he’s working on for the Courant News CMS called Nando, and CoPress has a currently stalled project called Edit Flow that will soon be back on its feet.

Once the newsroom has adopted the tool, then you roll out stage two: the ability to make this editorial flow public. The newsroom has granular control over which parts of the editorial process are transparent. If they decide to be open about the decisions within the newsroom, the news organization can build engagement with their community and, ideally, the community develops a greater sense of ownership of its journalism as process.

The third act is to allow the community to contribute to the reporting flow in a meaningful way. There are two specific things I’m considering at this point:

1. The editorial process is exposed in such a fashion that, at any point along the way, the community can contribute content they think is relevant and useful. “At that concert last night?” the news organization asks. “We’re working on a story about it and would love to feature the best of the photos.” The community can also submit notes and opinions on the story in progress much like commenting on the final product. The comments they add when the story is in progress can be used (and linked to) as sources for the story.
2. The community is able to pitch story assignments. If they see something they don’t think is being covered, they can pitch it as a story and start on the reporting process by identifying the questions that need to be asked, attaching images, and so on. One positive side effect of this functionality would be the ability to dump “all” of the stories that the community thinks need to be covered and then deduce the percentage that the news organization is actually covering. The abstraction of this is the ability to identify all of the information the community thinks it needs, and then use that as the foundation for the reporting process.

News Community Relationship Management (nCRM)

News CRM acts as an open, participatory rolodex. The goal is to capture common knowledge about sources based both on what the journalists of a news organization know, as data generated by how the source interacts with the news organization.

The best way to describe this is by doing a mental fly-through. When a journalist is interviewing someone the system has never seen before, they create a new profile in the system. The profile contains fields for contact information, location, occupation, etc. and a free form wiki text area for notes about the person. The journalist doing the interview can also create an association between their text notes, audio file from the interview, and other content within the CMS to the source profile. By doing this, journalists who need to pull information about the source in the future will have access to the sum of news organization’s knowledge.

Assuming the source interacted digitally with the news organization on a regular basis, the CRM application would also be responsible for extending their profile by tracking those interactions. For instance, in step one the journalist would record any or all email addresses regularly used by the source. If the source comments on an article where they are quoted, then the comment could be flagged as a clarification in relationship to their profile. If the source comments on another article, then the tags of that article would be applied to the source profile as topics of interest. Based on how the community reacts to the comment, by voting it either up or down, the source’s authority on the topic would change dynamically.

The goal with this tool is really to structure information about a news organization’s community such that when the reporter needs to do interviews on, say, water, they have an entire database of the “right” people to seek out.

This data generated by ranking the freshness of information would immediately begin to build profiles of what the reader knows. If they’re logged in, the news organization could put this information on what they’re indicating they know and don’t know in a database, start aggregating it, and then feed the reader related links and stories on similar topics. Related information, however, would now be determined by both topical metadata and a virtual profile of their knowledge base. On the front end, the data that the readership is contributing could go towards a rating of how “fresh” the article is. If the organization were really forward-thinking, the content of the article could then depend on this profile of how much the reader knew.

Voilà. Another new format for news.

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.

To provide fodder for this discussion, listen to the most recent installment of Dave Winer and Jay Rosen’s Rebooting the News. One of the ideas that I think will “save journalism” is the digital assignment desk Jay starts talking about near the end. His part of the idea is this: a tool to map out all of the particulars that might need to be reported on in the coverage of any given issue. Once the editorial team has this laid out, they can then decide what resources they want to apply and where.

I’d like to take this two steps further.

Let’s both open this up, and allow the community to get involved. Opening this up would mean that all of the information in the database would be transparent, accessible, and machine-readable (by marking information up with meta data). There would be an API so that others could build applications on top of the digital news assignment database (or hack the information into a legacy CMS). A J student could build a visualization comparing the number hours spent covering sports versus ASUO as an independent study project. The list goes on.

The community should be involved with the journalism requirements of a city through two means: contributing to the database of things that need to be reported on, and taking on assignments as they fit their expertise. For instance, and I may have used this story before, my dad considers himself a photographer and enjoys capturing local high school sports games. He’s not the only parent in this geographic community or in the community of the high school that would fit this bill. Using this digital news assignment system, my dad could indicate that he’s wants to go to the game and make images. He’d submit 10 of what he thinks are the best at the end of the night, and the professional photographer on staff at the news organization would select the top two or three to run with the blog post or paper article, while at the same time giving feedback to my dad on what he liked about the images and what needed to be improved. Visitor participation and voting on the website would tell the CRM side of the database that they liked my dad’s work, thus making him more eligible to be the one covering the state playoffs.

If the community had access to what the news organization was planning to assign, they could give feedback and further suggestions. With Spot.us, the community has power to decide what is reported on with their dollars. This community news assignment open platform thing, beautiful name I know, would empower members to suggest assignments, vote on them, and then brainstorm all of the different variables that needed to be reported on.

This just needs to be built, and I’d much rather have the discussion at BarCamp Portland focused on how to experiment with ideas like these.

Step one: hold a transparent weekend (or weeklong) jam session to develop a strategic plan. Invite as many intelligent stakeholders as you can to a retreat, and put together a website for that retreat with the agenda, list of everyone involved, and goals. It might also be useful to have a open community forum in the week preceding to hear strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of the audience, or launch a website where the community and submit and vote on ideas for the news organization. When retreat happens, however, make it open and participatory. Make sure everyone at the retreat is documenting the discussion on Twitter, and livestream as much of the discussion as you can. Have a designated “community manager” for the retreat who looks for suggestions from watchers and brings those to the meeting. Tap the intelligence of the digital crowd, especially because you’ll be able to bring even more smart brains from afar.

Step two: campaign over summer 2009 amongst the Daily Emerald alums to raise the funds necessary to implement the strategic plan. Shop the plan out to them to get their feedback and insights, and use CRM (or customer relationship management) software to track these interactions. When I left, they were using a FileMaker database system and analog mail. I would ditch this system immediately, and my first investment would be software like Salesforce.com (which a news organization could also use to sell advertising more effectively). Using the new CRM, it would be wise to fundraise amongst the alums who want to see their old newspaper experiment with this platform called the internet. Including them in the process, by sending them the strategic plan and a link to the website with an archive of all the video, will make them more invested in the process (if they like what you’re doing at least).

Step three: implement the strategic plan starting in Fall 2009. If I were the publisher of the Daily Emerald, these three are of many things I would attempt to drastically right the direction of the news organization:

• Quit the College Publisher habit. Being on a locked, proprietary content management system is probably the worst foundation you could have for a digital news organization. Focus heavily on recruiting a few developers out of the computer science program, and build a basic website on Django that you can grow from. If you ask nicely, the Daily Gazette at Swarthmore or Daily UW might be willing to lend enough code to get you started.
• Move to once a week in print. I know that this would be very, very difficult, especially because the bulk of revenue comes from the print product, but it needs to happen nevertheless. Necessity is the mother of invention. Do it, and publish daily online.
• Empower your community. Break down the ivory tower, and hold workshops to teach interested community members how to report on the issues they’re passionate about. I am quite certain that club sports at the University of Oregon don’t get the coverage they deserves, and there are probably at least several people who could tweet at games and submit high quality images for a photo gallery.

Right now at the Daily Emerald, though, they’re going about it the API emergency meeting way, and this is just one of the many reasons I think startups make more sense in this climate. I mean, look at all of the effort it’s going to take to turn this ship around, let alone reinvent it.

There’s also been discussion that student news will be largely unaffected by the tornado ripping through regional newspapers right now. Even if that is the case, I would like to propose an analogy: if you’re driving towards the cliff of irrelevance, your direction is what is most important. It doesn’t matter that your car’s engine hasn’t seized up yet.