What does your dream newsroom look like?
  • Vote Up2Vote Down Adam ThomasAdam Thomas
    Posts: 313Member
    So... a Superdesk starter for ten points! If you were building a newsroom from scratch (no horrible legacy CMS, no creaking contacts database or cracked licence office suite) what are your must-have features? What tools would it have to work alongside? What platforms would you need perfect delivery to? What drives you crazy about your current system and what would you love to see implemented?
    Post edited by Adam Thomas at 2011-11-09 05:09:21
  • 11 Comments sorted by
  • Vote Up4Vote Down Mugur RusMugur Rus
    Posts: 132Member
    Superdesk will support creating stories that follow the event in time and
    adding context to them like: articles related, knowledge items (e.g.
    authors bio, description of places where events happen etc.), maps etc. SD
    will also support forward planning in relation to this feature.

    On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Ilja
    wrote:

    > Again: following up on my last post: Instead of news being a snapshot in
    > time, it would be great if NR would facilitate news/reality being an
    > ongoing event that has changing contexts and needs continuous updates. Not
    > sure how this sh/could look like, but for sure not a simple relevant
    > twitter stream or a list of related news-items.
    >
    >
  • Vote Up1Vote Down Adam ThomasAdam Thomas
    Posts: 313Member
    Hi Boštjan,

    All good points for improving a CMS interface, but what about the newsroom as a whole? What tools are journalists using to their jobs and what does a newsroom software need to do to integrate them seamlessly into the workflow?

    For instance, I was in a Data Journalism booksprint with Simon Rogers of the Guardian on Saturday (at the Mozilla Festival). He's one of the leading data journalists around and the range of tools he used was amazing. Pdf readers (for reading info that needed to be scraped), Excel for data cleansing, Google Fusion tables, Tableau, Max, Many Eyes (for word mapping).... the list went on.

    His workflow went from Excel to a data visualisation programme, whilst simultaneously having the newsroom CMS open and trying to build an article. He would constantly re-viz the data in order to help him shape the story and then once he got it down, he'd embed the viz neatly into the article and hit publish. After that, it was all about pushing to social media (up to 50% of Data Guardian article traffic comes through Twitter).

    So, I guess my question to everyone is, how can we make this easier for journalists? :)
    Post edited by Adam Thomas at 2011-11-09 07:32:35
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Boštjan JerkoBoštjan Jerko
    Posts: 68Member
    - image drag and drop
    - drag and drop positioning text
    - click and write

  • Vote Up0Vote Down Adam ThomasAdam Thomas
    Posts: 313Member
    Great points over in this open letter to the Superdesk team on Digital Delivery.

    The most important aspect of a digital narrative is the amount of
    different multimedia assets that can be used to build a story. With
    these different assets, the need for full collaboration between
    different professionals within a newsroom is born. Any editorial system
    that aims to enable digital storytelling must provide a complete set of
    tools for the collaboration of these different professionals, many of
    whom have not been used to work within an editorial system, until now.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Marius LupuMarius Lupu
    Posts: 4Member
    I'm a newsroom manager. Our publication is a start-up, and my team is a mix of professional and less/non-professional people. I was about to implement this solution, but for some of my men this would be still complicated. They just want to email the articles they write in Word :) So, for now, one of the key features should be this: uploading all the stuff by email :)
    Another must would be a good flatplan maker; and another one would be Facebook integration (I created a group there for the newsroom discussions). People could, or could not be signed in to various platforms, sites or whatever - but you're pretty shure you'll always find them available on Facebook :)
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Adam ThomasAdam Thomas
    Posts: 313Member
    Really interesting points Marius!
  • Vote Up0Vote Down IljaIlja
    Posts: 18Member
    What I would really find innovative is the ability to easily group, link, verify, contextualize and embed online sources, all from within one interface. This would include a searchbox which can search rss, twitter, flickr, youtube, etc on certain keywords. Then group and interlink those results on certain topics and provide meta-information about the trustworthiness of each source. And in the end including those searches with simple click or drag-actions. Clicking a tweet would result in either a link or an embed, same for a youtube movie. An blog-source would become a quote or a link, etc...

    All of this should be possible collaboratively of course.

    Swiftriver is a tool that does something similar: http://ushahidi.com/products/swiftriver-platform
    Post edited by Ilja at 2012-04-25 07:17:10
  • Vote Up0Vote Down IljaIlja
    Posts: 18Member
    Oh, and the ability to link to sources in a way that visiting them would instantly highlight some pre-selected quotes or show annotations. Not sure if this would be possible, but there are some pretty cool highlight/annotate tools on the web.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down IljaIlja
    Posts: 18Member
    To come back on my previous points: a universal way to embed third party sources would be very neat. oEmbed might be a way to start: http://www.oembed.com. embed.ly is a commercial version.

    I think a combination of collaboratively curating, verifying, contextualizing web and social media sources, giving them meta information ((geo)tagging, scores on journalistic quality, etc) and linking them together in order to provide the bigger picture (look at Storify for instance) would be great. Plus the ability to embed sources in your story by a simple click and/or drag and everything would be in there.

    A way to make articles more interactive, less static and easily to be updated when new insights when sources/updates arrive. The problem is that news stories are often disconnected from context and old stories can be horribly outdated, while still popping up within google as 'news'. If there would be a way that newer stories/sources/insights could be automatically attached to relevant older stories in terms of context Superdesk would break new grounds I think
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Mugur RusMugur Rus
    Posts: 132Member
    Dear Ilja,

    The "ability to easily group, link, verify, contextualize and embed online
    sources, all from within one interface" was in our plan from the beginning.
    All the other ideas were noted in our wiki and we'll take them into
    consideration.

    Thank you for your feedback and for some very good suggestions.
    Post edited by Adam Thomas at 2012-05-10 04:46:49
  • Vote Up0Vote Down IljaIlja
    Posts: 18Member
    Again: following up on my last post: Instead of news being a snapshot in time, it would be great if NR would facilitate news/reality being an ongoing event that has changing contexts and needs continuous updates. Not sure how this sh/could look like, but for sure not a simple relevant twitter stream or a list of related news-items.
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