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New-Media Tools for Breaking News
May 3, 2008 12:29:36 PM

This Journalism That Matters conference is what some call a non-conference.

Organizers followed the principles of Open Space Technology to foster creativity and flexibility.

That is, we convened for the people who are here, rather than for a program or a keynote speaker. There is a certain amount of trust that the people and ideas in the room will give the conference its structure and value.

Thursday was designated as a day for exploring ideas and we began the day with a blank agenda. Quickly, people began signing up for sessions they wanted to host. Some were clearly self-promotional or self-serving. Some wanted to host sessions in which they hoped to harvest ideas, clients or investors. But that was OK. There was enough variety, receptivity and passion in the schedule that began to populate on the whiteboard that we had ample choices. Everyone was free to join or leave any group at any time. Some opted to group up informally, no topic necessary.

I found myself gravitating toward social-media groups. After I had attended two -- one on conversations through devices like story chats and onlne forums. Jon Garfunkel, a software architect at Civilities.net led it. The next was on journalism wikis and led by Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy. I started to get the picture. The nature of the conference means it is unlikely that any two people attended exactly the same set of sessions. This combination of social media sessiosn worked for me.

At the Merc on Tuesday, a photographer had spoken about how she chose what mix of stills and videos to use in her multimedia productons. It is all about matching the tools to the content.

A news story also has a life or an arc. Its identity one minute after news breaks is not the same as its identity at one minute and one hour and one day. The tools change depending on the story and how it develops.

When a wildfire ignites, for example, it can instantly be boroadcast with a 140-character Twitter posting. A photo, shot with a cell phone, can be e-mailed immediately to Flickr. A video can get to YouTube almost as fast.

One of the folks in the session, Charlotte-Anne Lucas of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, has posted a comprehensive Twitter 101 that explores the crowdsourcing nature of Tweets as crowdsourcing and how stories are broken or unfold.

A story might start to grow into a series of blog posts, longer than the Twitter's micro Tweets.

As people, trying to get out of harm's way, take to their cars or on foot, the most useful medium for routes to safety might be Tweets or texts to their mobile devices.

We start to map the trouble spots. More photos. Longer story. Sidebars. Video first-person accounts. A news Web site organizes this best.

Time to analyze and assess brings in the story of causes, containment, previous fires.

The stories, photos and videos begin to migrate to their archival homes. They become part of wikis about wildfires generally and the area's history. Names, addresses or geocoded locations -- anything we can categorize or describe -- go into a database so we can study the story of that place.

That will inform the next story.

And the "we"? Who is that? Who is providing the reports, the photos, the quotes and videos? All of us. Paid journalists and community members alike. Editors edit and so do community experts as correct, refine and deepen the information in the wiki -- which will cycle back when future news stories draw from them or link to them for historical or topical context.

It is going to take a lot of foresight and planning to start gathering, at step one, everything needed for the full trajectory of the story. It will also take a mindset shift in which paid and citizen journalists begin to respect and trust each other and collaborate more.

Each of these tools and ideas was something I had thought about before. What was new for me was the big picture -- the ways in which tools flow together, have fuzzy overlaps and cycle back. The day's conversations, pieced together, helped me see the evolving context.

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