5.3: Your ‘so-called digital life’

If your company doesn’t provide a slick, simple-to-use tool for capturing notes, lists and calendar items, use a free Web service like Backpack (backpackit.com). This will enable you to manage your time by adding meetings and appointments to a calendar while simultaneously managing a to-do list. You can access it from anywhere via the Web and even share it with others in your newsroom. An electronic system like this is better than paper because it’s easy to edit and modify lists, change the order or priority, and store your calendar items and lists as an archive.

If you can, use a database: At the Ventura County Star, Howard Owens built a database for news sources and set it up so that all the reporters could share it over the Web. “All source information was stored there and was accessible by the entire newsroom,” Owens said.

Many newsrooms have set up similar databases, but not enough of them. Ideally, it would store a source name and contact information, background information and the file name and location of a mug shot if one exists. It should contain personal information such as birthday (for age purposes), spouse, children, title and affiliation. Affiliations (school, business, agency) can be stored in a separate table so they could be entered once and related to a source. Then anyone in the newsroom can search by name, specialty or agency.

As more journalists go digital it will make it easier to share information. Derek Willis of The Washington Post wrote in the first of his series of essays on his blog “humbly titled Fixing Journalism”: “Can you imagine another information-based business that permitted its employees to build walls around their information? Can you imagine it succeeding today?” (Read the entire series at www.thescoop.org/ thefix.)

Think of all the information that passes through a news organization every day. Now think how little of it is accessible to those who work there, or more importantly, to the public who would like to access it. This is a problem for news organizations going forward. And it needs to be fixed now. You can start by storing your information electronically and pushing for data-sharing tools like internal wikis and shared databases.

Event calendars are the obvious place to start in your newsroom. If staffers are still entering each event by typing it into a Word document, you have a problem. If you had a database, such information as venue name, address and phone number would only have to be entered once, thereby cutting the workload (and the chance for typos).

There are many other opportunities where keystroking is being repeated year after year in flat files that aren’t searchable or sortable by the audience. Here’s a few areas we’re databasing (or planning to) in Tacoma:

• Summer camps lists.
• Sports team tryouts and camps.
• Restaurant and movie listings.
• Vital statistics (births, deaths, divorces).
• New businesses and business hires and promotions.
• Hike of the week.
• Guide to local ski areas.

Each of these types of content has been entered by newsroom staff for years, if not decades. We can maximize the value of the data by providing it to our audience in a database format while streamlining our own operation and cutting down on the amount of data entry we do.

Can you database news coverage? Yes, you can. Many newspapers have adopted the “alternate story form” for basic news coverage, where a narrative is broken apart into easily digestible chunks with labels like “what happened,” “what it means” and “what’s next.” The Oregonian in Portland has standardized its meeting and process coverage with “update boxes.” This new story form, with labels like “At Stake,” “Update,” “What’s Next,” and “Learn More,” means the data is already being published in consistent fields that could be easily converted to a database.

An example of an Update Box from The Oregonian.

Think of city council or school board meeting coverage. If you had a database that stored all the pertinent data (date of the meeting, top agenda items with a quick summary for each, the votes and maybe a field for analysis) you could pull from this to populate such an alternative story form for the print edition. Online, the audience (and your reporters) would be able to search and sort previous meetings.