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?
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. > >
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? :)
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.