## Open Journalism Project:

#### *Better Student Journalism*

We pushed out the first version of the [Open Journalism site](http://pippinlee.github.io/open-journalism-project/) in January. Our goal is for the
 site to be a place to teach students what they should know about journalism
 on the web. It should be fun too.

Topics like [mapping](http://pippinlee.github.io/open-journalism-project/Mapping/), [security](http://pippinlee.github.io/open-journalism-project/Security/), command
 line tools, and [open source](http://pippinlee.github.io/open-journalism-project/Open-source/) are
 all concepts that should be made more accessible, and should be easily
 understood at a basic level by all journalists. We’re focusing on students
 because we know student journalism well, and we believe that teaching maturing
 journalists about the web will provide them with an important lens to view
 the world with. This is how we got to where we are now.

### Circa 2011

In late 2011 I sat in the design room of our university’s student newsroom
 with some of the other editors: Kate Hudson, Brent Rose, and Nicholas Maronese.
 I was working as the photo editor then—something I loved doing. I was very
 happy travelling and photographing people while listening to their stories.

Photography was my lucky way of experiencing the many types of people
 my generation seemed to avoid, as well as many the public spends too much
 time discussing. One of my habits as a photographer was scouring sites
 like Flickr to see how others could frame the world in ways I hadn’t previously
 considered.

topleftpixel.com

I started discovering beautiful things the [web could do with images](http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/13/02/06/timelapse-strips-homewood.htm):
 things not possible with print. Just as every generation revolts against
 walking in the previous generations shoes, I found myself questioning the
 expectations that I came up against as a photo editor. In our newsroom
 the expectations were built from an outdated information world. We were
 expected to fill old shoes.

So we sat in our student newsroom—not very happy with what we were doing.
 Our weekly newspaper had remained essentially unchanged for 40+ years.
 Each editorial position had the same requirement every year. The *big* change
 happened in the 80s when the paper started using colour. We’d also stumbled
 into having a website, but it was updated just once a week with the release
 of the newspaper.

Information had changed form, but the student newsroom hadn’t, and it
 was becoming harder to romanticize the dusty newsprint smell coming from
 the shoes we were handed down from previous generations of editors. It
 was, we were told, all part of “becoming a journalist.”

### We don’t know what we don’t know

We spent much of the rest of the school year asking “what should we be
 doing in the newsroom?”, which mainly led us to ask “how do we use the
 web to tell stories?” It was a straightforward question that led to many
 more questions about the web: something we knew little about. Out in the
 real world, traditional journalists were struggling to keep their jobs
 in a dying print world. They wore the same design of shoes that we were
 supposed to fill. Being pushed to repeat old, failing strategies and blocked
 from trying something new scared us.

We had questions, so we started doing some research. We talked with student
 newsrooms in Canada and the United States, and filled too many Google Doc
 files with notes. Looking at the notes now, they scream of fear. We annotated
 our notes with naive solutions, often involving scrambled and immature
 odysseys into the future of online journalism.

There was a lot we didn’t know. We didn’t know **how to build a mobile app**.
 We didn’t know **if we should build a mobile app**.
 We didn’t know **how to run a server**.
 We didn’t know **where to go to find a server**.
 We didn’t know **how the web worked**.
 We didn’t know **how people used the web to read news**.
 We didn’t know **what news should be on the web**.
 If news is just information, what does that even look like?

We asked these questions to many students at other papers to get a consensus
 of what had worked and what hadn’t. They reported similar questions and
 fears about the web but followed with “print advertising is keeping us
 afloat so we can’t abandon it”.

In other words, we knew that we should be building a newer pair of shoes,
 but we didn’t know what the function of the shoes should be.

### Common problems in student newsrooms (2011)

Our questioning of other student journalists in 15 student newsrooms brought
 up a few repeating issues.

- Lack of mentorship
- A news process that lacked consideration of the web
- No editor/position specific to the web
- Little exposure to many of the cool projects being put together by professional
 newsrooms
- Lack of diverse skills within the newsroom. Writers made up 95% of the
 personnel. Students with other skills were not sought because journalism
 was seen as “a career with words.” The other 5% were designers, designing
 words on computers, for print.
- Not enough discussion between the business side and web efforts
From our 2011 research

### Common problems in student newsrooms (2013)

Two years later, we went back and looked at what had changed. We talked
 to a dozen more newsrooms and weren’t surprised by our findings.

- Still no mentorship or link to professional newsrooms building stories
 for the web
- Very little control of website and technology
- The lack of exposure that student journalists have to interactive storytelling.
 While some newsrooms are in touch with what’s happening with the web and
 journalism, there still exists a huge gap between the student newsroom
 and its professional counterpart
- No time in the current news development cycle for student newsrooms to
 experiment with the web
- Lack of skill diversity (specifically coding, interaction design, and
 statistics)
- Overly restricted access to student website technology. Changes are primarily
 visual rather than functional.
- Significantly reduced print production of many papers
- Computers aren’t set up for experimenting with software and code, and
 often locked down


Newsrooms have traditionally been covered in copies of The New York Times
 or Globe and Mail. Instead newsrooms should try spend at 20 minutes each
 week going over the coolest/weirdest online storytelling in an effort to
 expose each other to what is possible. “[Hey, what has the New York Times R&D lab been up to this week?](http://nytlabs.com/)”

Instead of having computers that are locked down, try setting aside a
 few office computers that allow students to play and “break”, or encourage
 editors to buy their own Macbooks so they’re always able to practice with
 code and new tools on their own.

From all this we realized that changing a student newsroom is difficult.
 It takes patience. It requires that the business and editorial departments
 of the student newsroom be on the same (web)page. The shoes of the future
 must be different from the shoes we were given.

We need to rethink how long the new shoe design will be valid. It’s more
 important that we focus on the process behind making footwear than on actually
 creating a specific shoe. We shouldn’t be building a shoe to last 40 years.
 Our footwear design process will allow us to change and adapt as technology
 evolves. The media landscape will change, so having a newsroom that can
 change with it will be critical.

**We are building a shoe machine, not a shoe.**

### A train or light at the end of the tunnel: are student newsrooms changing for the better?

In our 2013 research we found that almost 50% of student newsrooms had
 created roles specifically for the web. **This sounds great, but is still problematic in its current state.**

**We designed many of these slides to help explain to ourselves what we were doing**

When a newsroom decides to create a position for the web, it’s often with
 the intent of having content flow steadily from writers onto the web. This
 is a big improvement from just uploading stories to the web whenever there
 is a print issue. *However…*

1. **The handoff**  
Problems arise because web editors are given roles that absolve the rest
 of the editors from thinking about the web. All editors should be involved
 in the process of story development for the web. While it’s a good idea
 to have one specific editor manage the website, contributors and editors
 should all play with and learn about the web. Instead of “can you make
 a computer do XYZ for me?”, we should be saying “can you show me how to
 make a computer do XYZ?”
2. **Not just social media**  
A
 web editor could do much more than simply being in charge of the social
 media accounts for the student paper. Their responsibility could include
 teaching all other editors to be listening to what’s happening online.
 The web editor can take advantage of live information to change how the
 student newsroom reports news in real time.
3. **Web (interactive) editor**  
The
 goal of having a web editor should be for someone to build and tell stories
 that take full advantage of the web as their medium. Too often the web’s
 interactivity is not considered when developing the story. The web then
 ends up as a resting place for print words.


Editors at newsrooms are still figuring out how to convince writers of
 the benefit to having their content online. There’s still a stronger draw
 to writers seeing their name in print than on the web. Showing writers
 that their stories can be told in new ways to larger audiences is a convincing
 argument that the web is a starting point for telling a story, not its
 graveyard.

When everyone in the newsroom approaches their website with the intention
 of using it to explore the web as a medium, they all start to ask “what
 is possible?” and “what can be done?” You can’t expect students to think
 in terms of the web if it’s treated as a place for print words to hang
 out on a web page.

We’re OK with this problem, if we see newsrooms continue to take small
 steps towards having all their editors involved in the stories for the
 web.

The current Open Journalism site was a few years in the making. This was
 an original launch page we use in 2012

### What we know

- **New process**  
Our rough research has told us newsrooms need to be reorganized. This
 includes every part of the newsroom’s workflow: from where a story and
 its information comes from, to thinking of every word, pixel, and interaction
 the reader will have with your stories. If I was a photo editor that wanted
 to re-think my process with digital tools in mind, I’d start by asking
 “how are photo assignments processed and sent out?”, “how do we receive
 images?”, “what formats do images need to be exported in?”, “what type
 of screens will the images be viewed on?”, and “how are the designers getting
 these images?” Making a student newsroom digital isn’t about producing
 “digital manifestos”, it’s about being curious enough that you’ll want
 to to continue experimenting with your process until you’ve found one that
 fits your newsroom’s needs.
- **More (remote) mentorship**  
Lack of mentorship is still a big problem. [Google’s fellowship program](http://www.google.com/get/journalismfellowship/) is great. The fact that it
 only caters to United States students isn’t. There are only a handful of
 internships in Canada where students interested in journalism can get experience
 writing code and building interactive stories. We’re OK with this for now,
 as we expect internships and mentorship over the next 5 years between professional
 newsrooms and student newsrooms will only increase. It’s worth noting that
 some of that mentorship will likely be done remotely.
- **Changing a newsroom culture**  
Skill diversity needs to change. We encourage every student newsroom we
 talk to, to start building a partnership with their school’s Computer Science
 department. It will take some work, but you’ll find there are many CS undergrads
 that love playing with web technologies, and using data to tell stories.
 Changing who is in the newsroom should be one of the first steps newsrooms
 take to changing how they tell stories. The same goes with getting designers
 who understand the wonderful interactive elements of the web and students
 who love statistics and exploring data. Getting students who are amazing
 at design, data, code, words, and images into one room is one of the coolest
 experience I’ve had. Everyone benefits from a more diverse newsroom.


### What we don’t know

- **Sharing curiosity for the web**  
We don’t know how to best teach students about the web. It’s not efficient
 for us to teach coding classes. We do go into newsrooms and get them running
 their first code exercises, but if someone wants to learn to program, we
 can only provide the initial push and curiosity. We will be trying out
 “labs” with a few schools next school year to hopefully get a better idea
 of how to teach students about the web.
- **Business**  
We don’t know how to convince the business side of student papers that
 they should invest in the web. At the very least we’re able to explain
 that having students graduate with their current skill set is painful in
 the current job market.
- **The future**  
We don’t know what journalism or the web will be like in 10 years, but
 we can start encouraging students to keep an open mind about the skills
 they’ll need. We’re less interested in preparing students for the current
 newsroom climate, than we are in teaching students to have the ability
 to learn new tools quickly as they come and go.

Another slide from 2012 website



### What we’re trying to share with others

- **A concise guide to building stories for the web**  
There are too many options to get started. We hope to provide an opinionated
 guide that follows both our experiences, research, and observations from
 trying to teach our peers.


Student newsrooms don’t have investors to please. Student newsrooms can
 change their website every week if they want to try a new design or interaction.
 As long as students start treating the web as a different medium, and start
 building stories around that idea, then we’ll know we’re moving forward.

### A note to professional news orgs

We’re also asking professional newsrooms to be more open about their process
 of developing stories for the web. You play a big part in this. This means
 writing about it, and sharing code. We need to start building a bridge
 between student journalism and professional newsrooms.

2012

### This is a start

We going to continue slowly growing the content on [Open Journalism](http://pippinlee.github.io/open-journalism-project/). We still consider this the beta version,
 but expect to polish it, and beef up the content for a real launch at the
 beginning of the summer.

We expect to have more original tutorials as well as the beginnings of
 what a curriculum may look like that a student newsroom can adopt to start
 guiding their transition to become a web first newsroom. We’re also going
 to be working with the [Queen’s Journal](http://queensjournal.ca/) and [The Ubyssey](http://ubyssey.ca/)next school year to better understand how to make the student
 newsroom a place for experimenting with telling stories on the web. If
 this sound like a good idea in your newsroom, we’re still looking to add
 1 more school.

We’re trying out some new shoes. And while they’re not self-lacing, and
 smell a bit different, we feel lacing up a new pair of kicks can change
 a lot.

**Let’s talk. Let’s listen.**

**We’re still in the early stages of what this project will look like, so if you want to help or have thoughts, let’s talk.**

[**pippin@pippinlee.com**](mailto:pippinblee@gmail.com)

*This isn’t supposed to be a****manifesto™©*** *we just think it’s pretty cool to share what we’ve learned so far, and hope you’ll do the same. We’re all in this together.*