(screenshot from: http://latertodayguardian.appspot.com/)
Dan Roberts has been running an experiment over on the Guardian for the past two weeks, and it’s an experiment I wholely approve of, the Open News Lists. The idea being that we have our Open Platform API which pushes out the news we’ve already posted to the website, but this is displaying what stories the Guardian is thinking about and publishing soon.
I like to think of it as open sourcing the Guardian, even if not technically correct its a good philosophical standpoint.
The idea of seeing what a newspaper is planning (along with the chance to get involved) is I think, pretty exciting. It’s also a position that’s been made more understandable by the explosion in Twitter. You often see the comment that people saw the news on Twitter first and somehow this means that news orginisations are too slow or don’t respond quickly enough. The obvious truth is more along the lines of checking facts & trying to explain the background for context more than 140 characters will allow, which of course takes time.
An Open News List is an interesting hybrid, it’s an acknowledgement that we know something has happened or are aware of it coming up and encouraging a discussion to take place on twitter while the editors and reports put the piece together, including that feedback and those tips from twitter.
The experiment was quickly put together using the tools at hand, trying things out at it’s best! Google Spreadsheets and it looks like this…
Which is great’n'all for the raw data-ness of it, but possible not that easy to read or more importantly engage with. I figured it’s be good to have the data presented in a more approachable fashion. But being busy I did what any good developer does, build a JSON endpoint for the data and hope that someone else does all the hard work ;)
A couple hours later with Google AppEngine and an endpoint is born:
http://opennewstracker.appspot.com/api/gu.get.newslist
The output looks roughly like this…
…the same data from the spreadsheet but turned into a format that’s really easy for computer programming languages to understand and handle. In short, it’s still not pretty or good for humans to read, but a really useful mid-point between the source spreadsheets and data that can more easily be turned into something human readable.
Chris Thorpe took the JSON endpoint, worked a bunch of coding magic and turned it into the later today guardian, from which the top screenshot is taken…
“It hauls in the newslists using the very nice JSON feed created by Dan Catt and it then makes a column layout. One thing is it gives you a chance to interact with the journalists. If the story is in the “help” phase you can send a tweet tagged with #opennews to the journalist using a Twitter web intent“
This is now the part where I wrap up with comments about how this reflects the distributed network of ideas, journalists, editors, developers & users and an example of small pieces loosely joined. Along with the stressing of the “It’s all very experimental” part, Dan Roberts is experimenting with open news lists in the simplest quickest form possible, I created an experimental scraper to convert it to JSON and Chris created an experimental version 0.1 webpage that formats the JSON.
But all those rough experimental bits put together is pretty good, none of us had to do the whole thing from start to finish and no-one was in-charge & orchestrating the whole thing.
More about the Open News Lists:
This Week in Review: An open-newsroom experiment, and News Corp.’s troubles spread to the WSJ
Memo to newspapers: Let your readers inside the wall
Guardian to publish daily newslist online
Guardian: Lessons from our open news trial
Is An Open News Approach The Way To Go?
Guardian to Readers: Here’s Our Upcoming Stories ListLessons from our open news trial
Woah! This is mind boggling. I thought those spreadsheets were vaguely interesting, but I didn’t spend long looking at them. However what Chris has done has made it look great and made it so simple to interact with the reporter.
I think I need to lie down in a darkened room now until my mind is de-boggled.
I am intrigued by this process. Perhaps you and your readers would be interested in a couple of short articles of mine published in the Fall, 2011 issue of Harvard’s Nieman Reports that may add another dimension to your approach. I am proposing a new approach to online journalism merging mediation with journalism to cut through the polarization that is paralyzing our political processes. If you are interested you may find these ideas in “Consensus-building Journalism: An Immodest Proposal” and “What Mediation Looks Like for Journalists”
which attempt to involve thoughtful diverse points of view in a search for common ground.