I’m working now on ways to convert the news gathering process into a public stream. One of the challenges is to create at the same time fact-paced interactive streams of information, ideas and connections on the one hand and in-depth and thoroughly researched pieces on the other hand. Virtual environments and video could be important here.
Here is an overview of what I thought up so far:
- Newsrooms should announce media projects, starting already in the early planning phase, or even better: asking the community what it is they would like to find out.
- As soon as newsrooms gather material, stuff such as bookmarks should be made publicly available using social bookmarking (Diigo, Delicious). The bookmarks would be tweeted of course, as we would tweet about the news projects as the evolve (using hashtags). Our blogroll would of course be published, and converted into a Twitter list.
- We would almost certainly also gather pictures, videos and audiofiles, using Tumblr and Posterous to quickly disseminate that stuff, also using some central blog giving an overview of all this activity plus more long form reporting. Location based gaming services such as Gowalla and Foursquare could be used for projects where location is important.
- A forum would enable the community to discuss the project, and we would use some wiki to work collaboratively (or Google Wave as soon as it’s in open beta). Second Life would be great for geographically dispersed teams and for in-depth discussions, for creating video artwork (but then again, newsrooms and their communities probably don’t have the skill of a Draxtor Despres) and to visualize things (again, there is a skills issue here).
- For easy access, I would also use CoverItLive for chatsessions and liveblogging, and ustream for live streaming video with chat backchannel.
- Using synchronous discussions (virtual environments, text chat…) and video would deliberately slow down the discussions and thought processes and also reinforce the community aspects.
- If the story is of a developing type, we could use a “living story format”, one url which is constantly used and re-used and where people could see immediately what is new and what they already know. The living story format (see Google experiments with the NYT and the Washington Post) would enable us to have not only a fast-moving news and interaction stream, but also an in-depth development of what we’re doing.
Feel free to suggest other possibilities!
Roland Legrand
