The Liquid Newsroom platform is moving ahead and now it is a perfect time to complete some of the pure fun tasks as well. I orderd my personalized and labelled organic (and environmental friendly!!!) t-shirt at georgefrank.de yesterday - yes, frank and his team did a great job and here we are: frank presented my own "LNR, liquid news room" t-shirt in his Shop in Munich today. I really feel perfectly prepared to attend the Digital Innovator's summit and to report from there.
Link to the shop (in German) - georgefrank.de
As I wrote in one of my last Liquid Newsroom posting, the LNR requires a news stream first. If you like to cover
a topic of interest, you have to identify outstanding sources first. Sources you trust or you learn to trust and which you like to monitor on a regular base.
For "media" and "journalism" related news I currently monitor 104 sources - and I haven't mentioned Twitter, Facebook (I do not currently) and Google+ yet. It is hard to get the latest news if you don't have some kind of early warning system in place. The screenshot on the left, shows you how the current input stream will be handled by a process, which listens to what's happening waiting near to the source. The data points take care of changes in the publishing pipeline of news sources and informs the system about new entries, which might be of interest. It's finally one stream of information finding its way into the Liquid Newsroom.
Even if you don't understand, what has been visualized above, you might be able to understand that the basic method I use can easily adjusted to any kind of "setting": election reporting, sports events, and so on. I used the technology and the approach first during Japan's crisis last year (Fukushima) and the London riots.
If you like to know more or if you like to become part of the experiment, don't hesitate to get in touch with me - steffen.konrath@im-boot.de
Here's how the process of the Liquid Newsroom can be used to publish a summary (curated) article.
The last piece I published here on this blog today was a teaser for the "Sun on Sunday" article by Peter Preston. The original piece captured my interest as Rupert Murdoch's Sun on Sunday has been discussed by The Guardian for quite some days now.
The Guardian is one of the news sources I regularely monitor for media and journalism related news. That's why it is part of LNR's incoming stream of news items (left column, first screenshot next to this article). I selected the news item in the content stream in the LNR and its content appeared on the right.
Peter Preston was the first (the first I noticed) to comment and review Sun on Sunday's first edition. So there was enough reason to decide to write a teaser to be published on nextlevelofnews.com. That's my usual way of how to direct my readers to content I think's worth reading and/or, which I think should be discussed. To do so, I switched from "fast reading" to "editing" mode in the LNR.
The LNR works on an iPad as well, that's why I chose iPad views for the screenshots 1 and 2. It's quite usual for me to spend four to five hours per day on the road travelling. Time some might think wasted because it is hard to be productive. It's also not very convenient to boot my laptop everytime I like to read and edit something. It was natural to seek a mobile solution for this problem, that's why I decided to use a 1024 screensize for the LNR. That's the width Apple's iPad allows. An always-on connection (Internet flat rate) grants me access to the Internet and news, whenever I want.
The screen changes if you decide to enter editing mode (see screenshot 2). The content switches from right to left, and a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor appears. Now I can start to work on the summary. You decide upon the text for the headline and the body text. The LNR already adds a link to the original source.
There is no need to wait and to save a draft first in this case, so I click on "publish" and the article gets instantly published. A tweet is send to Twitter, and a post to Facebook simultaneously.
As you can imagine the whole process takes only a few minutes to complete.
Here's how it looks like on my PowerBook and my iPad:
The Liquid Newsroom for niches
Other scenarios: The LNR was build to provide a platform not only for collaboration but also for news curation. To start you have to set up the source map first, which becomes your input news stream. Afterwards it is quite easy to write, edit and publish news and to distribute the content via your blog or content management system in a smooth and consistent process.
What's your area of expertise?
Think of someone who would like to focus on cancer related content, e.g. research or experience reports. How easy it would be to browse through news headlines from sites providing interesting content and to provide summaries for your readers, so that they know what's worth to read from your perspective.
The content of your blog or news site gets even more traction if you add real-time sources to your source map, so that you can curate news with almost no time delay.
Do you remember what I wrote about the News3.0 flow of news among the people? - Imagine what would happen if you combine 2 or more blogs of people you are cooperating with. It would be easy to mash up content from your peers and to publish it via the Liquid Newsroom platform. That would create a whole new type of news sites. I will explain how the LNR fits into a News3.0 framework in more detail during the next days and posts.
If you like to know more or if you like to become part of the experiment, don't hesitate to get in touch with me - steffen.konrath@im-boot.de
Many have asked me to explain if the Liquid Newsroom is a theoretical idea or a real platform.
"Yes" - It is a technical platform for fast, collaborative and real-time publishing of news (or general content). I have developed the model first theoretically but started to develop it also as a web based system quite sometime ago. Here is a screenshot of the current alpha I'm testing. The LNR delivers the short articles for this blog.
The Liquid Newsroom has different sections which I plan to develop over time. The newsroom - the screenshot you currently see on the left - is the part of the LNR which is meant to assist a journalist in reading a stream of news (left column) in its content area (right column). You can save items you need for more indepth articles later in the process or you can start to comment on each item on the fly.
The newsdesk (not shown here) is the part to foster collaborative journalism. It provides with an interface for writing articles in direct exchange with journalists on the ground. You can send real-time messages to direct them asking a reporter for more footage, or an interview with an eyewitness. Messages will be send to mobile devices and back to the web. The LNR was build to receive photos, video or text information from journalists at the scene, so that you can decide which material might help you enrich your article.
I wanted the graphical user interface (GUI) to be very pure and clean. The features and functionality it provides intend to optimize the whole editing process: it was build for really fast reading, editing, commenting and publishing. The LNR at its current stage delivers an output stream either to your own blog, to another content management system. The version I have implemented pushes content to my Typepad blog, which publishes articles instantly posting to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously as well.
If you like to know more or if you like to become part of the experiment, don't hesitate to get in touch with me via email at steffen.konrath@im-boot.de
Yesterday I introduced three different roles: the sourcing expert, the beat curator, and the (data) analyst. Now it is time to look a little bit closer at how they should work together and how their work might fit into an overall process.
The Liquid Newsroom team manages and curates a constant flow of news from various sources: news organizations as much as tweets or blog posts from individuals. Not necessarily will the news enter the newsroom in chronological order. The sourcing expert is in charge to ensure a high quality of sources and she oversees the selection process of what should become part of the stream. A source can be completely unknown in the beginning. But the LNR will have a memory so that with more and more experience with a source, trust can grow over time. The little boxes in the process model on the left symbollize news items: e.g. one could be a tweet from someone in the Middle East, the second an article published by AP a few minutes ago and a third item might be a post on any of the most common social networks or video platforms (e.g. YouTube). Note: click the image to enlarge.
Therefore the whole LNR publishing process starts with some kind of input stream from a pool of sources. If you search for "Syria" on Google News you might get 28,000 results. But how do the articles differ? What additional information will a reader get if she doesn't only read "Activists demand ceasefire, aid access in Syria" (MSNBC) but also "'Friends of Syria' consider ultimatum to Assad"? (Seattle PI). The Google News search for "Syria" e.g. provides with an input stream. The beat curator decides about which parts of the input stream should become part of the topic (related news) stream. She also decides how to summarize or how to comment on news, tweets, etc. Readers should get an idea of what's happening taking into account different sources in one view. The Topic Stream is already the first stream to be published, whereas the input stream only represents LNR's internal flow of information.
Because the Topical Stream is published on a website, the (data) analyst can start to collect the first data in real-time. The analyst is keen to understand how the audience or the readers might interact with the news. How much will a news item be redistributed, retweeted, shared, liked? She's also in charge to manage the process of how to deal with comments and feedback, with concerns or questions. Most of the information from the feedback channel is invaluable. The feedback channel demands real communication: its main task is to foster two-way exchanges between the members of the newsroom, the readers AND the authors. What would happen if newsroom members would pass on the questions to the original authors of the news pieces, so that they can develope their story even further? - Based on the first analysis of readers' feedback the Edited Stream is also already a first mirror of the interest graph of the news consumer.
Enriched and Extended Stream are closely tied together. Both steps in the news editing value chain will help to enrich the news experience for the readers. Additional video footage or graphical material might help to gain an understanding of the story. The LNR instead will focus on the first three steps: Input Stream, Topic Stream and Edited Stream. The LNR team will pass the information on to another team of journalists and editors, who will work together closely to provide the reader with more background information etc. to be read on either appropriate devices (e.g. tablets) or any other publishing channel of interest.
If you like to know more or if you like to become part of the experiment, don't hesitate to get in touch with me - steffen.konrath@im-boot.de
The Liquid Newsroom addresses the need to manage large flows of information at very high speed. That said, it implies that the roles will change as well. But let us have a more in-depth look at the new challenges lying ahead.
First of all, you need someone who really knows, which sources might be of interest, e.g. to cover news about what's happening in Syria right now, the student protests in Spain or in the streets of Greece.
Note: You can click on the image on the left to enlarge it, otherwise it will be probably hard to recognize the details.
The "sourcing" expert knows which news outlets should be included in the information stream, how to set up a process to evaluate tweets and how to verify the people behind the 140 characters. She's also the one to distill the knowledge in a "blueprint", a reusable map of sources, their ratings and value.
The beat curator is the one who has a clear understanding of the story behind the articles. She's the one to find the beads, to distinguish between opinion and facts.She is a knowledgeable person, with extraordinary fast analytical skills. She separates original content from copies. We (and we are all readers as well) need to understand what additional information will be provided by whom and their chronological order. In short: how to make sense of mess. The beat curator has the duty to figure out the best way to navigate on huge information oceans if a horizon is out of reach - and yes the flood of information is unbelievable and hard but not impossible to handle.
The analyist is the third team member. At the time short pieces of information will be posted the analyst and the beat curator are the ones first to look at the reading numbers in real-time. What's sticky? What will be redistributed more than any other piece? What kind of feedback, comments, questions are coming in? What story is worth to explore further and to be passed on to the colleagues in all the other rooms? (Don't forget that we will publish along a 24/7 hours timeline and information needs are different in the morning hours, around lunch time and in the evening.)
Current status: I heavily tested the roles above for over a year now. They are crucial for this blog as well. Real-time analytics support me to understand which stories are interesting for a majority of people. The news/tweets published by the most important sources are manually selected and flow constantly into the editing process in the LNR. - Don't worry. We all know that traffic figures should not always and only drive the storytelling process. It's not a one size fits all approach. It's still a human decision, which stories to include, where to provide with more details, and what pieces were better excluded at all. Feedback from readers is and can be invaluable so that 's also part of a continuous reading process.
Another major characteristic of the journalistic process I describe here is to be transparent: readers can follow the news stream, the exchange between the members of the newsroom and reporters on the ground as much as they can interact by sending questions, concerns if they require more information or contribute if they have something important to share. I know that I still have to deliver a real world example of how that transparency might be visualized, but believe me, I'm working to close the gap.
Tomorrow I will write more about how the LNR will alter the value chain of the editing process in more detail.
Don't hesitate to write me if you like to know more or if you like to become part of the experiment - steffen.konrath@im-boot.de
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