Tag Archives: Ryan Sholin

Journalism Daily: AutoTrader tips, Technorati’s ‘original content’ and the online anonymity debate

A daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site. You can also sign up to our e-newsletter and subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

News and features:

Ed’s picks:

Tip of the day:

#FollowJourn:

On the Editor’s Blog:

Wired Journalists: The #followwomenjournas movement

In response to a blog post by Kevin Sablan that suggested male journalists were three times more followed than their female counterparts (in the sample of 37 news organisations he looked at), a hashtag movement built up: ‘#followwomenjournas’, with suggestions for the best female journalists to follow.

Wired Journalist’s Ryan Sholin has gathered some in this post, and suggests that users of the link journalism application Publish2 use the ‘followwomenjournas’ tag when they save a related link, tweet, or video, to show up in the post’s stream.

ReportingOn – end of Knight News funding and the next stage

Back in February last year, Journalism.co.uk caught up with Ryan Sholin, director of News Innovation at Publish2, about his project ReportingOn, which had received funding from the Knight News Challenge.

“I call ReportingOn ‘the backchannel for your beat,” Sholin told us.

“This isn’t about the craft of journalism – this is about the nuts and bolts of finding angles, sources, and data to bolster local news reporting.”

Today the funding from the initiative comes to an end, but that doesn’t mean ReportingOn will – in fact Sholin is gearing up for the launch of version 2.0, which will see the base of the platform, built using Django, go OpenSource

You can follow developments with the project on its blog or Twitter account. But we thought it was time for an update from the man himself:

What changes are being made that will affect the user?
[Sholin] It’s an absolute re-imagining of the network.  The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on.  That didn’t happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years.

So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions.  There’s no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network.  You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in. [See Sholin’s demo of the service as it stood on June 17 below]

Why was it necessary to make these changes?
Although the first version of ReportingOn was a great proof of concept, a fun experiment, and a solid first iteration of the network, doing all the development myself didn’t produce a feature-complete, extensible codebase that I could open-source and let the community build on.  I wanted to take the next step to develop a backchannel for beat reporters that could be used as is, or reproduced as a question & answer tool for any purpose, especially by a news organization.

Has this involved significant amounts of back-end work/technological change?
Most definitely.  The site has been completely rebuilt.  It’s still built on the Django platform, but rather than me teaching myself this style of programming in the middle of the night and at the crack of dawn to demonstrate what one curious journalist might be capable of, it was built by the professional team at Lion Burger, who are also responsible for tools like Snipt.net and recently built afeedapart.com for the popular ‘An Event Apart’ series of Web design conferences in the US.

Publishing 2.0: Swine flu coverage online – and how to filter information

Looking for news and information about news trend as big as the swine flue outbreak can be a daunting task – while the introduction of hashtags, for example, can make this easier online, how can readers and journalists filter the facts from the disinformation, asks Ryan Sholin.

Full post at this link…

Invisible Inkling: Why the Philadelphia Inquirier is moving away from web-first publishing

Ryan Sholin speaks to Chris Krewson, executive editor of online and news at the Philadelphia Inquirer, about why the paper is shifting away from a web-first publishing strategy.

Feature pieces, big name critics and restaurant reviews, for example, will be published in print first, as part of changes aimed at understanding the differences between the paper’s print and online audience.