Monday, August 08, 2011

#MozNewsLab Proposal: The Infinite Story

The Infinite Story is a tool for opening up reporters’ notebooks and encouraging others to re-mix, mash-up, and extend news stories. Kind of like GitHub, but for storytelling.


MoJo Pitch: The Infinite Story from Jordan Wirfs-Brock on Vimeo.

BUSINESS BRIEF

The Problem
The news-cycle is dominated by an antiquated artifact: the article. Stories are imprisoned within this format. A story is a living, breathing entity that exists within a thriving idea-rich community. An article is a bounded, disposable snapshot of an unbounded story.

The Solution
The Infinite Story frees stories from the constraints of the article by hosting news on in a collaborative storytelling and engagement platform. It’s unique because it doesn’t treat writing and reading as two separate acts, but as elements of a single, iterative storytelling process.

Why would newsrooms use it?
To move forward in the digital age, newsrooms must collaborate - with fellow journalists, other newsrooms, and engaged readers. The Infinite Story helps journalists do their jobs while simultaneously fostering sticky engagement with a community of readers.

Who will benefit?
The Infinite Story is a tool for both readers and writers of the news. The storytelling process isn’t “report, write, publish, repeat” - it’s information gathering, synthesizing and sharing in a continuous loop. By opening up this process, The Infinite Story benefits news-makers and news-readers.

Competitors + existing tools/platforms
Tools for storytelling and information sharing exist, such as wikis, Wordpress, SharePoint, Dropbox, Buzzdata, DocumentCloud, Floss Manuals, Booki and Storify. Content management systems are designed to facilitate collaborative storytelling. There are opportunities for leveraging these tools, instead of competing with them, through feeds and APIs.

What will distinguish The Infinite Story, and be the key to its success, will be its ability to engage a community of open and collaborative storytellers.

DESIGN DOCUMENT

How does it work?
The Infinite Story has three components:

1. An open digital reporter’s notebook
Professional and citizen journalists can upload reporting materials - notes, audio interviews, video, photos, data files, links, documents, contact information. It helps reporters visually organize and tag information during the reporting and writing process, helps co-authors share materials on collaborative projects, and helps readers see how a story was created by getting a deep, behind the scenes view.

2. A visual story builder
Reporters can drag and drop elements from their notebook to construct a narrative and write around it, the same way Storify lets you write around tweets. Many writers use some kind of visual structure - for example, notecards with quotes/themes/scenes they can move around. This is a digital version of that process.

3. A community for social reading mirroring the functionality of GitHub
Readers can share a story or contribute primary sources of information. Highly engaged readers can “fork” the story by cloning the raw materials into a new projects they can extend by adding their own reporting and writing. The original author can track the life of the story - who’s sharing, adding, or forking.

Explore a prototype of The Infinite Story created around a real article + raw materials. [Caveat: I’m neither programmer nor designer. This is a *very rough* mock-up.]

When you are viewing a story, you can see a story view or a notebook view. This is the story view.
This is the notebook view.
Once you've forked a story, you see a "dashboard" view that includes a notebook and a story builder.


How could this leverage newsroom infrastructure?
Articles published in traditional online formats could link to The Infinite Story. The traditional article doesn’t need to disappear: It’s the window through which readers access the back-channels. The Infinite Story will create modular, exportable content. Writers composing articles can feed that content back into a newsroom’s CMS.

How would it be integrated into newsroom operations?
Many journalists I’ve spoken with expressed the need for a tool to organize their materials, both for their own personal writing process and for collaborative projects where they need to share materials. Because The Infinite Story integrates the writing and reading processes, reporters can use it at all stages storytelling. If they are using it to organize their reporting notes and raw materials, no additional effort is needed to share those with readers.

How would this be built collaboratively?
In the prototyping process, I incorporated story notes and media from a working journalist to guide the project design. This should be done on a broad scale with reporters, editors, newsroom developers, and news readers. The Infinite Story will be developed using an iterative process centered on user experience. The design process should recognize that writers become readers and readers become writers.

Challenges
The biggest challenges surrounding The Infinite Story are behavioral, not technological. Although reporters’ notes are designed to be open and transparent, there are reasons newsrooms might object to sharing them:

1. Sharing notes and interview recordings might compromise a story.
It could violate the trust or safety of a source. Or make it harder to continue reporting on the story by clamping up other sources. In some cases, competition might be a legitimate concern for limiting transparency.

2. Reporters’ notes are often cryptic and hard for anyone other than the author to read.
Reporters need to write things quickly, and don’t always have time to type up notes or transcribe interviews.

Issues related to (1) can be addressed with fully controllable permissions and access controls. Notes could be shared internally during newsgathering and writing, then publicly after the story goes live.

Issues related to (2) can be addressed by integrating tools journalists already use to do their work. The Infinite Story should free up time, not consume it. For example, if journalists are already using Flickr or Dropbox, pictures and files from those accounts should be fed directly into The Infinite Story.

Questions
How is this different from a wiki or CMS?
An essential part of journalism is taking complex information and turning it into a clear, coherent narrative. The Infinite Story values the integrity of narratives by allowing stories to be cloned/forked. A single story can give rise to many narratives. Each one should be respected.

Do people really want to mash-up stories?
There’s only one way to find out: Give people the tools to do it and see what happens. Story mash-ups present new opportunities for user engagement.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Reading list time!

Here are some things that have inspired my thought process for #MozNewsLab (many suggested by fellow labbers):

Use Cases for The Infinite Story

Participating in the #MozNewsLab is an amazing resource. It gives us an opportunity to open up our ideas - and our process - to scrutiny in the best possible way.

Here's some feedback I got from one Pippin Lee on my second blog assignment:

If you have time, here's a fairly quick, but interesting challenge that may help you focus any ideas you have...The goal: to give your product/idea a specific use case (don't be afraid of the edge-case subject either!). Here's an example. You can easily do this for all ends of the spectrum, but you'll begin to see how you are able to get deeper into understanding how and what you idea/product will face.

The goal: Define, "What is your point of view?"
The formula: [USER] needs [VERB] because [INSIGHT]

Here's what I came up with as use cases for my project [click to biggerize!]:


And here's a text version:
  1. A team of journalists collaborating on a story needs to share, catalog and organize files and information because writing a story together requires melding of the minds on a tight deadline.
  2. A writer working on a long or complex story needs to digitally organize reporting materials to track themes, insights and connections because she is working on many stories at once and wants to be able to dive back in to her thought process right where she left off.
  3. An interested reader needs to connect to raw materials and resources because she wants to go deeper after reading a story and has questions that aren’t answered fully in the published story.
  4. A newsreader-turned-newsmaker needs to access to reporting materials and deep background information because she wants to reinterpret them in the context of her own community by writing an expanded story on the same theme.
Are these the right use cases? What other ones can you suggest? As always, I'd love any thoughts/feedback.

Monday, August 01, 2011

Baking a Journalism Cake...Together


When Mohamed Nanabhay said this, he was talking about creating an environment for readers of news. But I think the same principle can and should be applied to and creating an environment for journalists and gatherers, tellers and sharers of news.

Simultaneous serendipity and purposefulness is the heart of any creative process. This is especially true for collaborations. Collaborations are so powerful - that is, when they don't succumb to hazards - because:
  1. The sum truly can be bigger than the parts. (This is where purposefulness comes in.)
  2. News ideas proliferate when disparate elements (people, ideas, circumstances, experiences) collide. Unexpected juxtaposition fuels creativity. More people, more new ideas.
Here’s the really exciting part: These features of the creative process happen whether collaborations are in-person or online.

This was my serendipitous Sunday.

My project - The Infinite Story, GitHub for Storytelling, whatever you want to call it - revolves around collaboration. It’s about freeing the journalism process from things that bind stories to one person or one team or one publication, ending stories' lives when that person or team or publication moves on to the next project.

So how do technology skills come into play? In a great (spontaneous and directed) Twitter-sation with @ChrisLKeller and @knowtheory last week, we discussed the collaborative processes and tools that teams of journalists use.

We realized: In journalism, in order to share the storytelling process, you have to share the news gathering process. You can’t bake a cake if you don’t have he ingredients. (You might still be able to frost a cake, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
data cake
Image by EpicGraphic

In my experience with collaborative investigative journalism, we've used a muddled system of Google Docs to aggregate reporting materials. It wasn’t a “new” technology for anyone on the reporting team. But logging and sharing all of our reporting material in it was new.

Adopting a new technology-based newsroom tool isn't necessarily a question of technical capacity, but a question of time and workflow.

If a tool is useful, usable and desirable, newsrooms will take the time to incorporate it into their workflow. If it's not, they won't. Infinitely more important than how technical you have to be to learn it is whether it enhances journalistic processes (does it reinforce the good habits, eliminate the bad ones).

So that is how I hope to address varying technical capacity. Yes, I want to make a tool that's as easy to use as possible (I'm thinking of a visual organization for story materials, plus a visual way to share/fork them), but ultimately the tool must enhances the newsroom flow:
Another project sketch...does visual = easy to use?

If adopting a new technology - and adapting your process to it - takes so much time that it doesn’t afford room for spontaneous discovery (and the targeted exploration of those discoveries), than it does more harm than good. But if it frees up time for spontaneous discovery, it's an invaluable addition.