It’s time for journalism to build its own platforms
Whether it’s combatting misinformation, being strategic in the use of our limited resources, restoring audience trust or tackling the complicated stories our audiences need us to cover, collaboration between newsrooms is no longer a luxury reserved for special projects, it’s a daily necessity. Heather Bryant is a guest writer of the Monday Note.
We’re not doing our jobs in the competitive world we used to work in. We’re working in a world where the stories are often larger than any one newsroom could do alone, where exposing audiences to stories and perspectives from other parts of the country and world is more important than ever, where a lack of diversity in our newsrooms is a serious problem, misinformation is being pushed from everywhere and where our competition isn’t truly each other, but every organization, company, troll, politician or government that now publishes on the same platforms we do but with none of journalism’s responsibility to the truth.
One of the reasons tech companies have accrued so much power is because they created the means to bring large groups of people together. Journalism must do that for itself, not only for the audiences we need to improve our relationships with but especially for the journalists creating quality journalism.
Newsrooms have more need than ever to be able to work together and to do so effectively and efficiently. Organizations that collaborate and partner, and there are more every day, are finding themselves scrambling to cobble together vaguely passable toolchains to facilitate the work, while the largest and most resourced organizations build custom, proprietary systems. We need a common infrastructure to connect us as we need to be connected, always available and flexible in its application.
Collaboration will be one our industry’s best opportunities to succeed at our work. As a toolset, collaboration addresses a wide variety of the challenges newsrooms — no matter their size — are facing.
One of the most prominent challenges, audience trust in a time of extreme misinformation, can be helped through collaboration. In a report published in November of 2017 on the CrossCheck project which debunked misinformation during the French elections, interviews with participants revealed that:
“the process of working transparently, or having to ‘show your work’ to newsrooms that would otherwise be seen as competitors, resulted in higher quality journalism. Participants explained they were able to hold each other to account. Collective, editorial decision-making allowed otherwise competitive newsrooms to make joint decisions about what to report and what to strategically ignore, so as not to provide oxygen to rumours.”
With audiences saying that the proliferation of news sources has made it harder than ever to identify what’s worth trusting, content that comes as the result of multiple organizations working together has the opportunity to present the most credibility.
Our challenge is that we never designed newsrooms for collaboration. We lack the infrastructure to manage the editorial process when it involves multiple partners.
In research with more than 50 newsrooms, I surveyed journalists about tools, editorial workflow and collaboration. Participants identified knowing who’s working on what, seeing the versions of a story (e.g. web article, a radio script, etc), getting and receiving feedback and knowing the schedule for editing and publishing are the parts causing the most friction in the editorial process. The editorial process is complex and tracking all the bits across multiple services makes it harder than it needs to be. Said one survey participant, “Too many tools in the name of greater efficiency is making us less efficient! Having one place where we can track story development, edits, questions, series proposals and updates, a futures calendar all together would be terrific.”
Project Facet is an open-source platform project designed to pull these threads together and create a common infrastructure available to newsrooms whether they are collaborating across a complicated internal structure or, even more importantly, in partnership with multiple newsrooms.
Facet is designed to help newsrooms manage the multifaceted challenge of planning and executing projects across different platforms with partners of various sizes and resources. But more than that, Facet is the needed connective tissue to help organizations, many of which were formed when the only way to operate in this industry was in competition or isolation, manage the logistical challenges of collaboration.
What we’re building with Facet is a way to discover and engage with partners and freelancers, a way to easily communicate about all aspects of a collaborative partnership from contracts and content creation to marketing and post-project evaluations. It is a neutral meeting ground that makes collaboration possible without worrying about the burden of granting CMS access to people outside of an organization and dealing with privileges and security.
With support of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Facet is currently in beta with a number of partner projects. Over the next few months, Facet will be used for a variety of use cases including collaborative project management, content distribution and contractor management. One of our partners, Alaska Energy Desk, a collaborative project covering energy issues in Alaska, is using the platform to manage the project across multiple newsrooms on different platforms. We plan to open the platform to broader use this spring.
In the meantime, we’re focused on expanding the team and continuing to work with newsrooms to tailor the functionality of Facet to the shared challenges newsrooms face whether they are a two-person operation or a global network of organizations.
The guiding principle of Facet is to be as collaborative in its development as the content and projects that are managed on it. It’s not about competing with other platforms that do bits and pieces of the functionality required to create editorial content in today — and tomorrow’s — publishing environment. The fractured ecosystem is our challenge. Facet is about creating shared workspaces and incorporating the best features and functionality either by building them natively on the platform or incorporating them via APIs, access to other open source projects and in creating a catalog of services and functionality to be available to users as they work together. This isn’t a platform that happens to work for journalism, it’s one built expressly for journalism.
If you’d like to join us in this mission with support to help keep things moving and expand our team, contributing engineering time or by talking with us about your editorial process or collaborations, please get in touch with me by emailing heather@projectfacet.org.
Heather Bryant is a journalist, software developer and the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source infrastructure project that supports newsrooms in managing the logistics of creating, editing and distributing content, managing projects and facilitating collaborative relationships. She spent her last year studying collaboration between newsrooms as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. Prior to that, she worked in public media in Alaska.
