This is the P2PU Archive. If you want the current site, go to www.p2pu.org!
Open Journalism & the Open Web
Course Material
- 1. Syllabus for Open Journalism
- Week 6: Audio, chat log and slides
- Week 6: Government journalism and engaging your readers
- Week 5: audio, chat log and slides
- Week 5: Business Model for Journalism
- Week 4: Assignment
- Week 4: Audio and chat log
- Week 4: Big Ugly Datasets for Thumb-Fingered Journalists
- Week 3: Assignment
- Week 3: Audio and chat log
- Week 3: Edit it. Fork it. The art of collaboration and journalism.
- Week 2: Audio and chat log
- Week 2: Assignment
- Week 2: Project Management
- Week 1: Audio and chat log
- Week 1: Assignment
- Comment on The Journalist as Programmer
- Week 1: Fundamentals of Journalism on the Open Web
- Opening Lecture with Rich Gordon & Burt Herman
- Opening Lecture with Mark Surman & Christopher Blizzard
- Logistics: How to participate in the lectures, chats, etc.
- Facilitators and subject matter experts
Week 3: Edit it. Fork it. The art of collaboration and journalism.
Week 3, October 4-8, 2010: Edit it. Fork it. The art of collaboration and journalism
Lecturers
David Cohn, founder and director of Spot.US
and Tom Grasty & Nonny de la Pena, co-founders of Stroome
Meeting Times
Lecture (audio and chat) Mon, Oct 4 at 1 pm ET
Mid-week check in (Web chat) Wed, Oct 6 at 4 pm ET
Peer assessment (Web chat and possible video) Fri, Oct 8 at 1 pm ET
Goals
Introduce programmers and journalists to the art of collaboration. With journalism schools like Medill establishing joint degreen in computer science and news reporting, a new era has dawned. This course will introduce the concept of mashing up tools and content in order to begin exploring how these two groups can work together to make richer and more exciting stories.
Core Questions
When is collaboration a boon and when is it a distraction? How can collaborative storytelling improve journalism and how can we improve efficiency? What are the best ways to delegate responsibilities on a story?
Possible tools students can use
Video capture tools: iShowU, Snapz Pro X, Frapps, Jing, Volke
Audio capture tools: Snapz Pro X, iShowU, Audacity, Stroome, Jing
Collaboration spaces: Google Docs, Pivotal Tracker, Stroome, DropBox, usendit, Basecamp, Writeboard, Ning, Pando, Zoho, Document Cloud
Platforms where final content will live such as Vimeo, Vuvox, YouTube, Stroome, Spot.us, SoundCloud, Wordpress, UStream, Ning, Publish2, Jing
Readings
Howard Rheingold on collaboration -- a 20 minute Ted talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html
Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture -- Chapters 1 and 2
www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
Copenhagen News Collaborative: is an example of collaborative curation. During the Copenhagen climate summit, a group of journalists from Mother Jones, The Nation, Grist, The UpTake, TreeHugger, and other news organizations have applied the collaborative newswire model to a major international news story. Review: http://blog.publish2.com/2009/12/08/collaborative-curation-in-action-building-copenhagen-newswire/
Read five articles -- one from each of the Copenhagen News Collaborative participants (Mother Jones, The Nation, Grist, The UpTake, TreeHugger)
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/copenhagen-news-coverage
Tips for better shooting online video
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/video/
Reaction Question (please have your responses posted before Monday's lecture)
Reflect on what you think makes a successful collaboration. How does video, audio or text help make a story more or less collaborative? How does the internet help sew together successful collaborations? What can help you be inspired to collaborate? What kinds of stories do or do not lend themselves to collaboration?
Write a short 100-300 word reaction to the piece(s) that you read and post it as a comment on this page. Due Mon Oct 4.
Collaborative Assignment for the week: Coming after the Monday lecture
Comments
It's only recently I've been
It's only recently I've been actively collaborating heavily. Up until now, as a reporter it hasn't been that necessary. Sure there have been photos, few charts, but they have definitely been secondary. But the past few months I've been doing data assignment with a developer for Boston.com who is amazing. The cool thing is that his online work can easily outpace my writing and data, which pushes me harder. I'm starting to realize how cool an active collaboration can be. We have two assignments in the early stages, and I'm excited about each. Still not all that sold on video, but that's my own prejudice. Vid is too slow for me to watch, unless it's pretty dramatic.
The internet facilitates
The internet facilitates successful collaboration by existing outside (and possibly superceding) the exchange economy. Rheingold spends a good deal of time explaining game theory concepts to illustrate our natural tendency to collaborate. But actually I think the internet renders much of that game theory irrelevant by eliminating so many adversarial relationships altogether. There's no longer an incentive to keep one's news to oneself. To provide a story or do some research and have someone else take it for free and use it for their own purposes is no longer necessarily to play the losing end of a prisoner's dilemma.
Obviously stories with many angles or deeply layered subject matter will lend themselves to collaboration (especially unstructured collaboration) because it's easy for many people to work losely around the same theme without stepping on each other's toes or duplicating work. I think that a few factors which inspire collaboration are: social reward in the act of collaborating, association with a big project (bigger/better than one could create on one's own), valuing a diversity of perspectives...
In his TED talk, Howard
In his TED talk, Howard Rheingold points out that in a wired world “every computer is a community.” There are people all over the world that are passionate about their interests, and willing to spend the time researching and writing about them. Journalists can create and tell a story using these pieces. Companies like Publish2 make this process easier for journalists. An example is the Copenhagen Climate Summit where a number of news organizations used collaborative curation to tell the story. As the Publish2 blog points out, “A lone news organization couldn’t provide the range of news and analysis covered by the stories being submitted by these sources.”
The more tiers of multimedia that are involved, the more collaboration is useful. While a single journalist can’t take video, pictures, audio and interview while covering an event, collaboration allows a story to have all these elements.
Collaboration on its own can create unique ideas and art. Google’s ‘Life in a Day’ is an attempt to document a single day on earth. The footage will be made into a documentary. Collaboration allows projects like this to show things we take for granted on a daily basis pared with areas and ideas we never thought individuals could endure.
The lecture touched a couple
The lecture touched a couple of times on monitoring police activity, especially in hostile situations where the reporter's equipment might be threatened. In my work with Copwatch we've made use of qik.com, which is a service for streaming cellphone video straight to the web. The folks at theuptake.org have used this as well.
As they alluded to, this is sort of "misusing" a tool, since it's not intended for such situations. It would be great to see some apps developed specifically for this use, to include things like disabling any delete functionality from the phone (in case it's seized), false delete (in case someone compels you to delete your footage), and uploading to a user configurable server, for example directly to your news organization, where it will be protected.
It seems that life history
It seems that life history has been always fighting between open societies and closed societies. That's what happens in the Internet also: we live between those two worlds who are battleing everyday. If in one side, open societies try to be more integratives, equals and fairs enough, closed societis are societies who discriminate thouthans of peoples. The question is, I think? Why people support closed societies and don't fight again's them? Becaming free of mind when all the environment accept as natural things that they aren't natural (like the political sistem, the internet sistem, etc) is a very difficult thing to do. As a media producer we need to support the ideas to support democratic societies, nevertheless than closed societies are not necesariously represives: capitalism as an economic system has a natural tendence to create monopolies, not democratic societies.
I realize that I'm writing
I realize that I'm writing this after the lecture, so perhaps my answer is influenced slightly by that.
That said, I believe one key thing to successful collaboration is common need. No matter what medium you tell stories in, there are always common goals.
Second, I think the key thing is realizing your weaknesses and how your collaborators can help fill in those holes. The Copenhagen Cooperative is a great example of this. For example, Mother Jones clearly played the role of in-depth analysis. Not to say the other media players in the cooperative didn't. At the same time, the other sites provided the stories different perspectives — including personal accounts, video stories and links.
Finally, I believe collaboration comes when you DO realize that you have weaknesses. As Howard Rheingold, points out, the world once functioned of survival of the fittest and competition. The goal was to beat your enemy at all costs. Now you have companies realizing that collaboration can actually improve your fortunes.
Rheingold makes a mention of Toyota's collaboration with repair shops in his speech. Toyota has a key collaboration with one of its competitors, Ford Motor Co. To sum it up, Toyota and Ford agreed to do some patent technology trading. We know that Ford was the only American car company not to take a federal bailout and Toyota, despite its challenges, is the No. 1 car manufacturer in the world as far as sales. Could collaboration have helped? I believe so!