Pulling a post from Paton

By jrcdigital

If you haven’t seen John Paton’s latest blog post, we’re going to be having some fun in the next 30 days.

What tools should we added to the tool shed?

Here’s a quick excerpt if you haven’t given it a full read:

The Ben Franklin Project: A Bold New Experiment … In the next 30 days, we are going to attempt to produce one single edition of one of our newspapers using only tools available for free on the web. Using social media and other digital tools available to us we will crowd source the news assignments, creation, editing and publishing of content. And we will do all of this in real-time with constant updates to that newspaper’s website … We’re looking for volunteers. Will it be your newsroom?

Aside from looking for volunteers to participate in the “BFP” … we’re also looking for tools.

More tools to research

What have you used? What can you offer feedback on?

From Mark Lewis

We should start this project with a direct survey of our audience. Google Docs has a handy form that would work well for our purposes. We can send it out as an email link as well as embedding it on a site page. After a week or two run, we can collate our results into numerical and text data sets.

Throughout this period we should also be using social to promote a UGC “blitz” for the week we publish the experimental edition. This could include everything from general appeals to distribution of assignments (ex. We need a perfect image of the new courthouse. Who can help?)

We may also want to start basic blogs or forums where readers can rant for or against us. Our worst customer is our best friend. We could simply call it “feedback.”

Some good free tools:

Google maps — we’ve all used them but that doesn’t lessen their greatness

http://www.jaycut.com — free online video editor (just got out of beta…again)

http://www.swivel.com — free graphics and spreadsheets

http://www.aardvark.com — shows promise for crowd-sourcing

http://www.photopeach.com — free audio slideshows; very similar to Soundslides

http://www.flickr.com — photo galleries with social functionality; journalists tend to shy away because of ownership limitation, but it’s still a valid tool. Great example: http://www.flickr.com/groups/consumerist

What tools should we use?

As Journal Register moves forward with the Ben Franklin Project we’re looking for suggestions of what tools we can use for this project.

Here is a partial breakdown of the tasks. What tools do you think would work best?

— Story/photos/video assignments: What should we cover?

— Story budgets: Tracking staffers as they produce content

— Photo editing: Toning, sizing, etc.

— Video editing: Prepping video content

—Video players: Showing video content

— Publishing (digital): What platform do you prefer?

— Publishing (print): What should we use to paginate the print product?

— Ad design (digital & print): Static and Flash banners

From Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine

News(paper) in the cloud

I think it’s possible today to run a news organization — up to the point of publishing — from the cloud, changing not only the production process of news but also its culture. John Paton, CEO of Journal Register, is about to prove it with his Ben Franklin Project.

Getting Started

From John Paton:

The Ben Franklin Project: A Bold New Experiment

If going forward, we are going to be part of the new ecological system for news then we need to learn how to harness the power of that system and earn our place in it every day.

How do we learn about the arguments in our community? How do we work with the people we used to call the audience and who are now participants in the collection and dissemination of news? What is our role here? Is it to add context and our expertise as journalists? And do we bring value to the community by creating a place for ideas and stories to be shared and discussed with a mixture of professional and amateur content? And always how do we do this when the deadline is right now?

Well, in our case we are just gonna try. And if we fail we are gonna try again. And we won’t stop until we get it right.

In the next 30 days, we are going to attempt to produce one single edition of one of our newspapers using only tools available for free on the web. Using social media and other digital tools available to us we will crowd source the news assignments, creation, editing and publishing of content. And we will do all of this in real-time with constant updates to that newspaper’s website.

Our focus will be on working the new news ecology to see where we as professional journalists fit in this new system and how we best serve our communities. We will also use free software available on the web to create tools to help us manage our relationships with advertisers and readers as well as invoicing tools.

We’re calling this The Ben Franklin Project and it will be led by Jon Cooper, our head of digital content. Coop will be joined by me, Dan Sarko, our chief digital officer; Adam Burnham, our head of sales and Bruce Hollows, our director of planning and development. Jay Rosen (www.pressthink.org) and Jeff Jarvis (www.buzzmachine.com) from our Advisory Board will be helping us along the way.

We’re looking for volunteers. Will it be your newsroom?