Online Journalism Blog

Since I wrote the Five W’s and a H that should come *after* every story post I’ve been responding to the hugely helpful posts and leads, and developing the idea further. As the deadline for Round 2 of the Knight News Challenge looms on Friday I thought I would post the latest on how the idea is shaping up, including a mockup (click for full size):

So here’s what’s happened since that first post:

• A hugely productive brainstorm with creative agency man Stefan Lewandowski
• Meetings with news organisations about running the pilot
• Dialogue with a web specialist in the Ukraine who has experience in advocacy and may be able to source additional funding
• And lots and lots of useful leads and tips from blog readers. Thank you.

Here’s how the model is developing:

• Developing on the ‘what’ part of the original model, central to the whole is a unique ‘tag’ accompanying each story/issue so that readers can tag other content and it be pulled… 
• Aggregation becomes an important part of the technology, as it finds related feeds and tags (and comments by the journalist elsewhere)
• A ’story cluster’ which identifies tags related to the unique one
• The idea of ‘completeness’ to encourage user participation
• Mobile phone and email alerts
• RSS feeds for all elements, feeding back into aggregation.
• Because we are aggregating, we are also opening our content up for others to distribute.

As always, these ideas are open for discussion, development, improvement and criticism. The wiki is here if you want to edit directly. And if you’re a designer, please feel free to draft a mockup that’s more lovely.