3 Steps to Building a Distributed News Organization

Posted on | June 23, 2009 | View Comments

I was talking with Glenn Platt, the director of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami (Oxford) University, about what a distributed news organization would look like today. He’s intrigued by my ideas and asked me a simple question: so what does this (functionally) look like.

Sans drawing paper, I couldn’t show him. But it started my train of thinking and I wanted to continue it here.

We started with the basic premise of my thesis about storytelling and data which is this: there is a functional decision that a company makes about information that determines how that organization grows.

1. data is the key (e.g. databases and structures)
2. information is the key (e.g. stories and presentation)
3. communication is the key (e.g. communities, talk, relationships)

The functional difference is Google (1), The New York Times (2), FriendFeed (3). It’s a very basic, rough sketch but if you can buy that each group has made a decision that one of the three is the most important (resources, management, decision-making, deal-making infrastructures) then you can better begin to understand what a modern organization should look like.

Some very smart company – and per my discussions with MIT’s Jason Pontin, smart also means able to – will determine that their organization needs to favor all three equally, build teams around those three and move forward to solve a second problem, archiving and retrieval.

POD TEAMS

If you buy the premise that you need all three, the look of that organization becomes clear. Imagine, for example, one central body – programmers, top level editors and commuinity managers – working to create the back-end systems, presentation and communication functions for a working CMS/SAN to handle the flow of data and information.

You can imagine setting up data structures that put all the stories in big buckets (no more than say, 5) with tags used to separate content along with other important visualization data (e.g. addresses, ages, ect).

The editors could set tags, the programmers could allow tag clouds to be added to the data collected (but you wouldn’t have to see those tags, they could be used by individuals to self-group content) which could be passed along to the editors setting tags and community managers would be hand-picking vibrant tags/communities that are forming.

Of course, setting up the CMS structures would be more involved with just tags, but by creating a pod-team of various interests at the start of the build – focusing on OUTCOME and USE instead of “what we want to do” – the programmers would have a first-hand knowledge of what the system should do.

1. DATA IS THE KEY

Armed with functional, first-hand knowledge, the programmers can go about building a flexible solution for the CMS, building with oversight from their Pod Team, ensuring that as many functions as necessary for each group are build into the system.

The key is allowing maximum flexibility in the data.

The system would also need to be set up to allow for the importing of multiple feeds from other places – Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter, YouTube, Ustream – that can be simply tagged and placed alongside originally created content to create ecosystems of information.

The CMS will also need to have a way to aggregate like content (original, RSS and comments) so that it can be archived and manipulated by the information teams.

2. INFORMATION IS THE KEY

Once the CMS is set, there will be two functions of editorial. They go together but I want to address the traditional journalism aspect of this first.

Community Managers (from the third part) will work with editors to over the mass of feeds and media being pumped into the system. They will create story ecosystems (say an Iraq page) with information displayed from various sources in one place.

The editor/reporter role will be two-fold: make sense of the mass of information flowing in, providing an ever-constant stream of updates that give context to what is happening, giving people easy access – at least easy initial access – to this mass of incoming information.

One thing the Alternate Reality Game folks realized (which applies here): you can make these really great, intense games, but keeping all the players up to speed on the minutia is impossible (and it greatly restricts the number of people involved).

These top-level filters, trending tags and targeted pieces are meant to give the Iran community page some simple, 5-second navigation as to what is important.

This also gives editors the opportunity to find the holes, the area of information that is missing that reporters can then dive into. It’s a targeted journalism, sitting on top of the information flow and using their expertise to figure out what isn’t or can’t be reported.

Then you start having a very powerful information page built not around a section, but a specific topic.

3. COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY

Which brings us to the third aspect of the news, which is intertwined with the second.

The community managers will be monitoring the individual pages that readers can set up (in the same way that there is a main INFORMATION page done by the organization, readers must have the ability to create their own IRAN page, complete with the same import features and communication features the main page has).

Community managers can tap the communities that are gaining traction, direct editors and reporters to those areas, cull ideas and maybe even highlight some of the best conversation/work on the main organization INFORMATION page.

EPILOGUE

This would require a few things:

1. an understanding that you can’t train your way into this; it functionally requires that organizations invest equally in all three areas of the business and demand teams work together, none above the other;
2. a core belief that all three areas are intrinsic to the success of the other;
3. a flexible outlook on presentation instead of a designed look to build for maximum screen optimization.

And it also would allow for a rather amazing archiving system around topic areas so that people can sift through information quickly instead of retro-fitting old models (International, Metro, Sports, Arts) onto this.

I’ve covered before the business models that can arise out of this and I’ll likely do this again in the future as the model does nobody any good if it’s pie-in-the-sky. But, as Glenn said, if you built this…people would come back every 15 minutes.

Comments

Where am I?