During my professional sabbatical in the month of April, I had the opportunity to travel to Moscow, Russia to talk with Eurasian journalists about community engagement.
This is my name in Cyrillic!
On April 22-24, the New Eurasia Media Program held its annual International Conference, where I, along with other journalists and bloggers from around the world, shared experiences and tools around the theme of “The local newspaper in the middle of the action”. I also gave a post-conference workshop on social media tools to a smaller group of Russian journalists (but that’s another post).
My presentation looked at the idea and launch of TBD, focusing specifically on ideas that worked and what, ultimately, led to it’s shift away from the original mission. I wanted to give attendees some good ideas they could try out at their newspapers amid the doom and gloom of a startup that didn’t exactly go as planned.
As one attendee put it, “We only ever hear about big projects that worked. It’s as if they think we have noting to learn from ideas that failed.”
Today is my last day at TBD – so you’ll have to forgive a little bit of sappiness. I’m one of the last eliminated employees to depart and sticking around to watch everyone leave has been something of an emotional roller coaster.
The early days here, around when TBD launched, will always be a treasured bright spot in my professional life. The group of people assembled for that original staff was one of the brightest, most energetic and creative collections of journalists I think I’ll ever meet. Each person, from the reporters to the community engagement team to the editors, seemed to have been searching for a place that would set them free. For a little while, they had it.
Technically, TBD still exists, but it won’t ever be the TBD it was meant to be without those staffers who created it. It was an honor and a privilege to work with these people. I hope to someday look back at this list of names and, upon seeing all these people have accomplished, be amazed we managed to once work under one roof. Maybe we were meant to be sort of a new media version of “Freaks & Geeks” – promising, well-cast and sadly short-lived.
I owe a big thank you for the career boost TBD has given me – and it wouldn’t have ever happened without Jim Brady and Steve Buttry. I don’t know how I can ever repay them.
I’m going to miss my almost-daily interactions with some particular TBD Twitter followers and the great members of TBD’s Community Blog Network. I hope we’ll still be friends on the interwebs.
Thank you to the tireless TBD editors: Erik Wemple, Andrew Beaujon, Sommer Mathis and Julie Westfall.
And the creative, wonderful reporters: Sarah Godfrey, Maura Judkis, Ryan Kearney, Ally Schweitzer, Sarah Larimer, Kevin Robillard, Jenny Rogers, Sam Chamberlain, Mike Jones, Amanda Hess, Rebecca A. Cooper, Elahe Izadi, Dave Jamieson, John Metcalfe and photographer Jay Westcott.
Also,thank yous go out to the TV folks who managed to teach me a thing or two: Steve Chaggaris, Melissa Reyes, Katherine Amenta and Morris Jones (aka Mojo).
Hail to the unsung heroes that made TBD tick: Bageshri Ghate, Mitch Schuler, Carol Touhey, Jen Dreyer, Ryan Mannion (& co.), Nicole Young, Maya Carpenter, Justin Karp, Allene Bryant, Markham Evans and Heather Farrell.
And finally, the community engagement team:
TBD's Community Engagement Team (R-L): Lisa Rowan, Jeff Sonderman, Nathasha Lim, Steve Buttry, Dan Victor, Eliot Kort and me. (Photo courtesy Dan Victor)
There’s been all kinds of stories, analyses and blog posts written by journalism thinkers about “why TBD failed” or “things that went wrong at TBD”. While these have made some valuable notes for those who want to launch or work for startups in the future, they ignore a few critical points, the biggest of which is that TBD didn’t fail, per se.
Despite how it all ended, there are positive lessons to be gleaned from TBD’s build, launch and brief initial life. Here’s a few things TBD did that I hope other news orgs won’t shy away from trying in the future.
Threw out the org chart
It’s not to say TBD didn’t have an organizational chart of who reported to who, but it had very little bearing on our actual jobs. Being in a small shop of any kind means a lot more multitasking and a lot less adherence to job descriptions. Everyone edited someone else’s work at some point, everyone wrote headlines, took photos, sent tweets, assigned stories and had a hand in developing new products. While some took on one role more than another most of the time, you never, ever heard “that’s not my job” from a TBD staffer when something had to get done.
At the time of last week’s layoffs, TBD’s web traffic was growing, Twitter followers were at nearly 10,000 and (anecdotally) I’d actually have someone recognize the name of my employer more often. Baby steps, I know, but if we hadn’t talked up our work on-site and off, been transparent with our build-out process, held meetups, aggressively followed and interacted with local people on social media and appeared at meetings of all kinds – we’d never have even had that.
Let others in
With only a handful of reporters available to handle breaking news most days (not counting those who covered arts, entertainment and sports), TBD had to reach beyond the newsroom for information on a daily basis. Be it from social media or aggregation, the world outside our walls had a huge impact on what news we could provide.
Sometimes it woud mean highlighting the work of our blog network, who are routinely miles ahead of larger media. Other times, we’d have to (at least initially) link to the work of our competitors. On social media, we’d regularly ask for help when we needed info from a scene we couldn’t reach. We’d regularly (multiple times a day) receive news tips and photos of interest via email or Twitter that would serve as the basis for a breaking news post (pending verification, of course). We could utilize Twitter searches to find out info and eyewitnesses from fires, shootings and events – before ever sending a reporter.
Hired for mindset over pedigree
Despite what’s been said about the pedigree at the top, TBD had some of the most unconventional hiring practices that seemed to be more qualitative than what I’ve seen at most journalism organizations. TBD’s hiring editors evaluated recruits based on their personalities and approach to news as opposed to journalism’s typically myopic ideals of merit and value.
I’m sure even Erik Wemple, Jim Brady and Julie Westfall couldn’t really put into words what they were looking for, but they knew it when they saw it. And they saw a LOT of people. I’d estimate about 20 percent of the hundreds who applied to TBD were interviewed in house.
This meant an exhausting cavalcade of interviews with editors and a 30 minute writing test for every position (not just reporters) in which the applicant could write anything they wanted. What people chose to do during this time, I’m sure, revealed a lot about them. Some froze without direction and wrote next to nothing. Some wrote personal essays. Others picked up the phone and reported stories. Somewhere in all of that they revealed something that made them right for TBD.
I didn’t see it when I first started, but as the staff was hired and gelled over time, it was easy to see we all had something in common in our views of the world and how we do our work. We came from a wide variety of places, academic backgrounds and work histories – but we all had something in common that I could never put my finger on. Whatever it was, it made it very easy to collaborate on stories and share ideas.
Nobody was hired because of where they’d worked or gone to school and nobody was automatically shut out for being from out of market. From a lot of past hiring experiences (on both sides of the table), I know that happens at a lot of news outlets – and it pops up in newsroom divisions and ridiculous office politics all over the industry.
I’ll be chatting with Joe Grimm and the good folks at the Poynter Institute at 3 p.m. ET today about the role of the social media editor in the newsroom. I expect to get questions about what I do and possibly some inquiries into what’s going on at TBD.
If you’ll be around, hop on to the chat or read the transcript afterward and we’ll see how it all turned out.
In a wjchat a few weeks ago, we were brainstorming ways to use non-traditional new media tools for news. One of those tools was Xtranormal, an animation site that allows you to make cartoon videos with no offsite tools or experience. In that chat, I had suggested using it to re-enact conversations or press conferences.
Today, I put that idea into action at TBD, using Xtranormal’s tools to make a cartoon re-enactment of a phone transcript from the FBI investigation of an indicted public official in the D.C. area. I had enough free credits to build the most basic video (though it doesn’t cost much to buy more), so I built the one you see around the web where animals talk to one another.
Xtranormal’s tools made it very fast and easy. You pick a package, background and characters. You enter the dialogue as text in the order you want from the characters you want. To add pauses, sounds, camera angles and movements, just drag and drop them into the text at the right place. All told, it took me about 40 minutes – and that’s just my first try at a long transcript.
Jack Johnson, the former county executive for Prince George’s County, Maryland, is talking to his wife (also indicted) about hiding money and destroying evidence. The video is after the jump.
As social media editor at TBD (and still employed!) I figure I can briefly lay out what’s really happening, as far as I know right now.
WJLA, the Allbritton sister site whose website had been replaced by TBD, will be getting its own website back – in addition to TBD.com.
TBD Editor Erik Wemple and most editorial staff will now fall under the management of WJLA News Director Bill Lord. The way that structure looks isn’t all that clear right now, but then again, we were never big on org charts at TBD.
TBD TV will have its branding reverted to News Channel 8, though it’s website will still be TBD.com.
Nobody was laid off, though a few jobs are changing. For instance, I’ll likely be working social media strategy for the new properties in addition to TBD.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll write more about this when I get a better handle on it myself. For now, I just wanted to explain what I know and share a bit about how it all went down.
And if you’ll allow me to get a little personal for a moment, I’d like to share a favorite anecdote about TBD.
We had a staff meeting on the morning of TBD’s launch that has particularly haunted me lately. We were all exhausted from being up all night for the final switch-flip (I had briefly napped in a shower stall at the Allbritton gym), but triumphant smiles were everywhere. We’d been working for months to build this idea and were antsy to get started on executing it. It was a great moment.
Erik gave us a rallying speech that especially resonates right now. He told us to look around the table and savor the moment. We should remember the team as it was right then and there, because it wouldn’t always be that way. Some people would leave, we might get dismayed along the way, but on that day, at least, we were all together and we’d just started something we’d all poured our hearts into.
That’s the whole reason I’d gone into TBD to start with – I wanted to work toward common goal with people who inspired and challenged me. I still do. Though we’ve lost far more of the people around that table than I ever thought we would by now, I know I don’t regret any of it for a second.
Despite all the changes – and I acknowledge they may look bleak externally – we have a great group of people who were brought together around the same dream. You don’t just drop something like that overnight. We’ll see how it all goes.
Sorry it’s been so long, but it’s been crazy busy as TBD’s preparing for the holidays and other events. This’ll be a quick one, just a few links I’ve been reading of late. Have a happy Thanksgiving, folks.
Social media roundup
How Investigative Journalism Is Prospering in the Age of Social Media – Great ideas from several resources gathered by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable on how to use social media in investigative reporting and newsroom projects. Includes tips on Crowdmap, Storify, Twitter crowdsourcing, data searches and more. A great post to pass on to the social media haters in your newsroom.
RockMelt: The User Manual– If you don’t know about Rockmelt or want to know more on how to use the new social browser, here’s a great guide from the NY Times.
In this disturbing bit from FishbowlDC, a Washington Post editor says “crediting the original source of a scoop isn’t “a requirement or even important” because “all news originates from somewhere” and “unless one is taking someone else’s work without attribution (that is, plagiarizing it) any news story should stand on its own and speaks for itself as an original piece of work.” Hm.
As promised, I’m reporting back on TBD’s election day experiments.
The Voting Issues Crowdmap seemed to be successful. We had a lot fewer reports than in the primaries, but considering D.C. turnout was lower and there were fewer issues reported overall, I’d say that’s accurate. We got 20 accepted reports in and some were very intriguing. Take this one:
My husband & I were told that we could not vote unless we left the children (11 month old & 3 year old) in the hallway. Then the security guard…told us we could take the 11 month old, but had to leave my 3 year old unattended in the lobby & if we didn’t want to do that, then we were unable to vote!
The Foursquare experiment was interesting, though it didn’t yield overwhelming participation. This was kind of expected, considering we didn’t have a lot of lead time and, it turns out, the venues were not easily found on the Foursquare mobile app. Next time, we’ll have to try enlisting Foursquare’s help instead of going out on our own. Here’s how it went down:
At the Virginia venue, 21 people checked in after voting and two left tips about their votes. D.C. had 66 people check in, Maryland had 51 check-ins and six tips about who they voted for in the governor’s race. Those who checked in at both the Maryland and D.C. election venues ended up earning a Swarm badge (if they didn’t have one already). All who checked in and said they were voting got Foursquare’s custom “I Voted” badge. If you missed it, Foursquare also set up a special site to track these voter check-ins as a measure of turnout.
With the midterm elections coming tomorrow, lots of news outlets will likely be launching their fanciest new toys and social media ideas to best pull in that coveted election night audience on the web. TBD’s no exception, though our election day experiments are based in off-site crowdsourcing to better inform our on-site coverage.
As we did with the Washington D.C. primary elections, we’re launching a Crowdmap to track voting problems across the District, Northern Virginia and parts of Maryland. We’re asking readers to report long lines, broken machines, ballot refusals, electioneering and such at the polls using email, Twitter hashtags or on-site reports. It worked pretty well in September, though this time I’m a bit worried about Crowdmap’s servers holding up. Right now as I post this, they’re struggling to load any of our maps.
While these check-ins and tips won’t be any kind of real measurement, it will give an interesting look at how many people on Foursquare are voting in local races and how those votes are leaning – if people use it. If enough people check in, they could earn a Swarm badge, at least.
There are similar curation tools out there, like KeepStream and Curated.by, though they focus primarily on collecting tweets (Correction: KeepStream also allows for Facebook integration). Storify, on the other hand, allows a user to organize various media (text, documents, video, images) and social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into an orderly, linear presentation. The story pieces retain all of their original links and functionality – and the full presentations are embeddable on any site. It has a very easy-to-use search for social media keywords and works using a drag-and-drop functionality. In other words – it’s easy multimedia for even the most technologically challenged journalist.
It has a couple of downfalls, the biggest of which, to me, is the lack of hard timestamps on content from Twitter (though that’s largely Twitter’s fault).
In the weeks since the Nieman Lab actually used Storify to explain Storify, many journalists and bloggers have taken the opportunity to experiment with the tool – with incredibly varied results. Here’s a few interpretations of just how Storify has been and can be used in journalism.
1. Organizing reaction in social media. The Washington Post gathered reaction from Twitter and Facebook to the resignation of Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee last week. While there are a lot of tools once could use to do this (Quote URL, Twitter search, Cover it Live), the Storify approach looks very clean and was likely very fast to put together. It’s a great tool for on-the-fly curation from various social media sources.
2. Giving back-story using past content. PBS NewsHour had a different take on Rhee’s resignation. Going beyond the basic topic archive page, their piece created a summary of Rhee’s past challenges with DCPS, weaving in stories, videos and scripts from their archives with some curated social media reactions. It is similar to a traditional story in its scope, giving the full background on Rhee’s tenure with reaction quotes via social media.
3. Curating topical content. NYU Studio 20’s East Village used Storify and a very sharp web presentation to create SocialDiningNYC, a site that has collect and curated information on NYC restaurants. Each venue has it’s own Storify line collecting reviews, reactions, media and info – and each file is linked from a primary hub site. The key to making this look nice was the consistency with which each Storify file was built and worded.
4. Displaying a non-linear social media discussion or chat. Penn Professor and Wired blogger Tim Carmody used Storify to illustrate an amusing Twitter quest he took on to get a few key social media contacts to follow him. He pulled together the entire back-and-forth between him, the people he was trying to engage and his current followers. It looks a lot better than TweetSpat (and involves more characters) and it makes the conversation seem more linear than it likely did in real time. This is a fun idea – and it could be great for archiving Twitter chats into some modicum of sense.
5. Creating a multimedia/social media narrative. Last Friday, I used Storify at TBD to make sense of an ever-changing series of events involving a death outside popular Washington D.C. nightclub DC9. In the course of one day, the story took a lot of twists and turns, illustrated in the narrative by tweets (from both news orgs and those reacting), photos, video and documents. Reading down the story, you can get a feel for how the events developed and evolved in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar to more traditional narrative stories. I talked a little bit more about the story behind this piece to the Nieman Storyboard, if you want to know more.
6. Organize your live tweets into a story: Michael Margolis of GetStoriedused Storify to tell the story of his time spent at the National Storytelling Festival. He weaves in quotes and experiences from the scene as tweets from throughout the day. I could see this as being very useful for reporters who live tweet press conferences, government meetings and events. Using this method, those reporters could focus on Twitter in real-time, then build a story from those tweets (and others’) when the event is over.
7. Collaborate on a topic with readers. Seamus Condron of ReadWriteWeb tested out Storify with RWW’s Twitter followers. He posed the question “My day would be a lot easier if Twitter…”. The story builds out from there with responses to the prompt from followers, @RWW replies and contextual info from other media in response to reader contributions.
These are likely just the beginning of what’s been done or could be done using Storify. I have dreamed up a few more ideas if you’d like to think about using this tool on your site.
8. Create a timeline of events. I know from experience that it can be a big pain to build an attractive online timeline without the aid of a designer. I think Storify’s interface would be a quick way to pull in text and other content into a timeline format that could look nice without any fancy HTML.
9. Display audience content from across platforms. Say you’re asking your readers to give you photos, videos and reactions based around an event or topic. You put out this call on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and on your site. Instead of gathering all of this content and re-publishing it on-site, you can organize all of those updates, comments, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitpics and emailed-in multimedia into one Storify file without any CMS nonsense.
10. Live curate live tweets from the stream. If you have multiple reporters or sources live-tweeting a news event, pull them together quickly and in an order that makes sense in Storify. Sure, you could pull all of their tweets or use a hashtag using other means, but this way you could choose to select only some tweets – and it wouldn’t matter who used a hashtag or not, as you can search for tweets via keyword.
So you’ve got a great idea for a user-contributed map you need to launch RIGHT NOW. Ushahidi’s Crowdmap makes it pretty easy, and hopefully this post makes it even easier. All examples shown are from TBD’s Crowdmap for D.C.’s election.
First of all, if you’re mapping a crisis, Crowdmap recommends checking our their Emergency Response Strategy first (pdf).
Also, check and see if anyone else has done your map idea with a Google Search. If someone else has already built a map of what you want to do in the same area, maybe you should just help them out instead of replicating the work.
2. On the deployment setup page, pick a url, name and tagline for your map. Keep SEO in mind here to make it easier to find. (You can edit this later, so don’t sweat it too much). Click Finish.
3. Click on admin dashboard for your map or go to http://yourmapname.crowdmap.com/admin
This is your map’s Dashboard. Bookmark it. Your map is now live and activated. If you need to launch it right now, you can – though there’s further additions and customizations you can do. Note: With the default settings, people will only be able to submit reports on the site.
