Open Journalism Project:

    Better Student Journalism

   We pushed out the first version of the Open Journalism site in January.
   Our goal is for the site to be a place to teach students what they should
   know about journalism on the web. It should be fun too.

   Topics like mapping, security, command line tools, and open source are all
   concepts that should be made more accessible, and should be easily
   understood at a basic level by all journalists. We’re focusing on students
   because we know student journalism well, and we believe that teaching
   maturing journalists about the web will provide them with an important
   lens to view the world with. This is how we got to where we are now.

  Circa 2011

   In late 2011 I sat in the design room of our university’s student newsroom
   with some of the other editors: Kate Hudson, Brent Rose, and Nicholas
   Maronese. I was working as the photo editor then—something I loved doing.
   I was very happy travelling and photographing people while listening to
   their stories.

   Photography was my lucky way of experiencing the many types of people my
   generation seemed to avoid, as well as many the public spends too much
   time discussing. One of my habits as a photographer was scouring sites
   like Flickr to see how others could frame the world in ways I hadn’t
   previously considered.

   topleftpixel.com

   I started discovering beautiful things the web could do with images:
   things not possible with print. Just as every generation revolts against
   walking in the previous generations shoes, I found myself questioning the
   expectations that I came up against as a photo editor. In our newsroom the
   expectations were built from an outdated information world. We were
   expected to fill old shoes.

   So we sat in our student newsroom—not very happy with what we were doing.
   Our weekly newspaper had remained essentially unchanged for 40+ years.
   Each editorial position had the same requirement every year. The big
   change happened in the 80s when the paper started using colour. We’d also
   stumbled into having a website, but it was updated just once a week with
   the release of the newspaper.

   Information had changed form, but the student newsroom hadn’t, and it was
   becoming harder to romanticize the dusty newsprint smell coming from the
   shoes we were handed down from previous generations of editors. It was, we
   were told, all part of “becoming a journalist.”

  We don’t know what we don’t know

   We spent much of the rest of the school year asking “what should we be
   doing in the newsroom?”, which mainly led us to ask “how do we use the web
   to tell stories?” It was a straightforward question that led to many more
   questions about the web: something we knew little about. Out in the real
   world, traditional journalists were struggling to keep their jobs in a
   dying print world. They wore the same design of shoes that we were
   supposed to fill. Being pushed to repeat old, failing strategies and
   blocked from trying something new scared us.

   We had questions, so we started doing some research. We talked with
   student newsrooms in Canada and the United States, and filled too many
   Google Doc files with notes. Looking at the notes now, they scream of
   fear. We annotated our notes with naive solutions, often involving
   scrambled and immature odysseys into the future of online journalism.

   There was a lot we didn’t know. We didn’t know how to build a mobile app.
   We didn’t know if we should build a mobile app. We didn’t know how to run
   a server. We didn’t know where to go to find a server. We didn’t know how
   the web worked. We didn’t know how people used the web to read news. We
   didn’t know what news should be on the web. If news is just information,
   what does that even look like?

   We asked these questions to many students at other papers to get a
   consensus of what had worked and what hadn’t. They reported similar
   questions and fears about the web but followed with “print advertising is
   keeping us afloat so we can’t abandon it”.

   In other words, we knew that we should be building a newer pair of shoes,
   but we didn’t know what the function of the shoes should be.

  Common problems in student newsrooms (2011)

   Our questioning of other student journalists in 15 student newsrooms
   brought up a few repeating issues.

     * Lack of mentorship
     * A news process that lacked consideration of the web
     * No editor/position specific to the web
     * Little exposure to many of the cool projects being put together by
       professional newsrooms
     * Lack of diverse skills within the newsroom. Writers made up 95% of the
       personnel. Students with other skills were not sought because
       journalism was seen as “a career with words.” The other 5% were
       designers, designing words on computers, for print.
     * Not enough discussion between the business side and web efforts

   From our 2011 research

  Common problems in student newsrooms (2013)

   Two years later, we went back and looked at what had changed. We talked to
   a dozen more newsrooms and weren’t surprised by our findings.

     * Still no mentorship or link to professional newsrooms building stories
       for the web
     * Very little control of website and technology
     * The lack of exposure that student journalists have to interactive
       storytelling. While some newsrooms are in touch with what’s happening
       with the web and journalism, there still exists a huge gap between the
       student newsroom and its professional counterpart
     * No time in the current news development cycle for student newsrooms to
       experiment with the web
     * Lack of skill diversity (specifically coding, interaction design, and
       statistics)
     * Overly restricted access to student website technology. Changes are
       primarily visual rather than functional.
     * Significantly reduced print production of many papers
     * Computers aren’t set up for experimenting with software and code, and
       often locked down

   Newsrooms have traditionally been covered in copies of The New York Times
   or Globe and Mail. Instead newsrooms should try spend at 20 minutes each
   week going over the coolest/weirdest online storytelling in an effort to
   expose each other to what is possible. “Hey, what has the New York Times
   R&D lab been up to this week?”

   Instead of having computers that are locked down, try setting aside a few
   office computers that allow students to play and “break”, or encourage
   editors to buy their own Macbooks so they’re always able to practice with
   code and new tools on their own.

   From all this we realized that changing a student newsroom is difficult.
   It takes patience. It requires that the business and editorial departments
   of the student newsroom be on the same (web)page. The shoes of the future
   must be different from the shoes we were given.

   We need to rethink how long the new shoe design will be valid. It’s more
   important that we focus on the process behind making footwear than on
   actually creating a specific shoe. We shouldn’t be building a shoe to last
   40 years. Our footwear design process will allow us to change and adapt as
   technology evolves. The media landscape will change, so having a newsroom
   that can change with it will be critical.

   We are building a shoe machine, not a shoe.

  A train or light at the end of the tunnel: are student newsrooms changing for
  the better?

   In our 2013 research we found that almost 50% of student newsrooms had
   created roles specifically for the web. This sounds great, but is still
   problematic in its current state.

   We designed many of these slides to help explain to ourselves what we were
   doing

   When a newsroom decides to create a position for the web, it’s often with
   the intent of having content flow steadily from writers onto the web. This
   is a big improvement from just uploading stories to the web whenever there
   is a print issue. However…

    1. The handoff
       Problems arise because web editors are given roles that absolve the
       rest of the editors from thinking about the web. All editors should be
       involved in the process of story development for the web. While it’s a
       good idea to have one specific editor manage the website, contributors
       and editors should all play with and learn about the web. Instead of
       “can you make a computer do XYZ for me?”, we should be saying “can you
       show me how to make a computer do XYZ?”
    2. Not just social media
       A web editor could do much more than simply being in charge of the
       social media accounts for the student paper. Their responsibility
       could include teaching all other editors to be listening to what’s
       happening online. The web editor can take advantage of live
       information to change how the student newsroom reports news in real
       time.
    3. Web (interactive) editor
       The goal of having a web editor should be for someone to build and
       tell stories that take full advantage of the web as their medium. Too
       often the web’s interactivity is not considered when developing the
       story. The web then ends up as a resting place for print words.

   Editors at newsrooms are still figuring out how to convince writers of the
   benefit to having their content online. There’s still a stronger draw to
   writers seeing their name in print than on the web. Showing writers that
   their stories can be told in new ways to larger audiences is a convincing
   argument that the web is a starting point for telling a story, not its
   graveyard.

   When everyone in the newsroom approaches their website with the intention
   of using it to explore the web as a medium, they all start to ask “what is
   possible?” and “what can be done?” You can’t expect students to think in
   terms of the web if it’s treated as a place for print words to hang out on
   a web page.

   We’re OK with this problem, if we see newsrooms continue to take small
   steps towards having all their editors involved in the stories for the
   web.

   The current Open Journalism site was a few years in the making. This was
   an original launch page we use in 2012

  What we know

     * New process
       Our rough research has told us newsrooms need to be reorganized. This
       includes every part of the newsroom’s workflow: from where a story and
       its information comes from, to thinking of every word, pixel, and
       interaction the reader will have with your stories. If I was a photo
       editor that wanted to re-think my process with digital tools in mind,
       I’d start by asking “how are photo assignments processed and sent
       out?”, “how do we receive images?”, “what formats do images need to be
       exported in?”, “what type of screens will the images be viewed on?”,
       and “how are the designers getting these images?” Making a student
       newsroom digital isn’t about producing “digital manifestos”, it’s
       about being curious enough that you’ll want to to continue
       experimenting with your process until you’ve found one that fits your
       newsroom’s needs.
     * More (remote) mentorship
       Lack of mentorship is still a big problem. Google’s fellowship program
       is great. The fact that it only caters to United States students
       isn’t. There are only a handful of internships in Canada where
       students interested in journalism can get experience writing code and
       building interactive stories. We’re OK with this for now, as we expect
       internships and mentorship over the next 5 years between professional
       newsrooms and student newsrooms will only increase. It’s worth noting
       that some of that mentorship will likely be done remotely.
     * Changing a newsroom culture
       Skill diversity needs to change. We encourage every student newsroom
       we talk to, to start building a partnership with their school’s
       Computer Science department. It will take some work, but you’ll find
       there are many CS undergrads that love playing with web technologies,
       and using data to tell stories. Changing who is in the newsroom should
       be one of the first steps newsrooms take to changing how they tell
       stories. The same goes with getting designers who understand the
       wonderful interactive elements of the web and students who love
       statistics and exploring data. Getting students who are amazing at
       design, data, code, words, and images into one room is one of the
       coolest experience I’ve had. Everyone benefits from a more diverse
       newsroom.

  What we don’t know

     * Sharing curiosity for the web
       We don’t know how to best teach students about the web. It’s not
       efficient for us to teach coding classes. We do go into newsrooms and
       get them running their first code exercises, but if someone wants to
       learn to program, we can only provide the initial push and curiosity.
       We will be trying out “labs” with a few schools next school year to
       hopefully get a better idea of how to teach students about the web.
     * Business
       We don’t know how to convince the business side of student papers that
       they should invest in the web. At the very least we’re able to explain
       that having students graduate with their current skill set is painful
       in the current job market.
     * The future
       We don’t know what journalism or the web will be like in 10 years, but
       we can start encouraging students to keep an open mind about the
       skills they’ll need. We’re less interested in preparing students for
       the current newsroom climate, than we are in teaching students to have
       the ability to learn new tools quickly as they come and go.

  What we’re trying to share with others

     * A concise guide to building stories for the web
       There are too many options to get started. We hope to provide an
       opinionated guide that follows both our experiences, research, and
       observations from trying to teach our peers.

   Student newsrooms don’t have investors to please. Student newsrooms can
   change their website every week if they want to try a new design or
   interaction. As long as students start treating the web as a different
   medium, and start building stories around that idea, then we’ll know we’re
   moving forward.

  A note to professional news orgs

   We’re also asking professional newsrooms to be more open about their
   process of developing stories for the web. You play a big part in this.
   This means writing about it, and sharing code. We need to start building a
   bridge between student journalism and professional newsrooms.

   2012

  This is a start

   We going to continue slowly growing the content on Open Journalism. We
   still consider this the beta version, but expect to polish it, and beef up
   the content for a real launch at the beginning of the summer.

   We expect to have more original tutorials as well as the beginnings of
   what a curriculum may look like that a student newsroom can adopt to start
   guiding their transition to become a web first newsroom. We’re also going
   to be working with the Queen’s Journal and The Ubysseynext school year to
   better understand how to make the student newsroom a place for
   experimenting with telling stories on the web. If this sound like a good
   idea in your newsroom, we’re still looking to add 1 more school.

   We’re trying out some new shoes. And while they’re not self-lacing, and
   smell a bit different, we feel lacing up a new pair of kicks can change a
   lot.

   Let’s talk. Let’s listen.

   We’re still in the early stages of what this project will look like, so if
   you want to help or have thoughts, let’s talk.

   pippin@pippinlee.com

   This isn’t supposed to be a manifesto™© we just think it’s pretty cool to
   share what we’ve learned so far, and hope you’ll do the same. We’re all in
   this together.
