This is the first survey of how information moves through a journalistic operations, large and small. At your organization, for instance, when a story moves from research to writing to editing to publication, what is saved?
- Are you able to enter/upload research notes, source locations (URLs and addresses), and interview transcripts, with links permanently associating it with the story?
- Can you indicate source material original to the story, such as interviews you collected, to preserve its provenance?
- During editing, is it easy to track revisions and display differences in versions?
- After publication, how does the story update and evolve on the web, and how do your site visitors know what’s been changed?
In surveying a representative sample of media outlets, we’ll find solutions at one that others may want to adopt. And we’ll reveal system-wide needs — some that can be solved with simple tools. But these “research/storytelling resources” are byproducts of this project. The larger goal is to document the way we journalists work with information, and how programmers might help us do our work.
This project gives journalists conceptual handles to evaluate how their info flows, to imagine improved processes, with smoother flows and less lost info, and to communicate their insights with programmers. For example, here’s an interactive “mind map” (link and screenshot) that can help stimulate that conversation: