“Windowless rooms”

Week 6 of Structured Stories: Could we do this from a warehouse in Durham?

Students on the team explore whether they could actually work from a remote location far from the city they're covering.

By Natalie Ritchie & Rachel Chason – July 14, 2015 | Print this article

Field notes by the Structured Stories NYC team: Ishan Thakore, Natalie Ritchie and Rachel Chason.

When Bill visited our New York office last week, we talked about how the project was going and, more specifically, the utility of original reporting. The lesson from last week’s blog post was that attending meetings isn’t really critical for Structured Stories. At one point, Bill asked, “Could we operate Structured Stories NYC from a warehouse in Durham?”

Our quick reply — probably so.

As we mulled it over, we all agreed. We could have done this anywhere.

Because so many resources are available online, from court documents to live videos of committee hearings, remote reporting is both feasible and efficient.

Traditional reporters still need the immediate access to sources, the details of a scene and the off-hand remarks that can only be caught in person. But for us, the situation is different.

While most news organizations focus more on breaking news, we have preferred in-depth, historical research that provides background and context to recent events. And the archived news articles, historical records and statistics that we need to describe those events and stories can all be found online.

Granted, if we weren’t in New York, Ishan might not have developed his relationships with WNYC reporters, Natalie wouldn’t have talked to Josh Mohrer and Rachel wouldn’t have met police brutality protesters in Union Square.

At the end of the day, however, we all would’ve been able to create the same number of events whether in New York or in a warehouse in Durham. Remote reporting is uniquely feasible in this Structured Stories project.

But being disconnected from the stories we’re covering has been something of a downside to the project.

For three budding journalists who enjoy getting out and talking to people, Structured Stories NYC has not been quite what we expected. Inputting events has at times felt tedious, and we’re largely cloistered in our office all day. While some people might find this work rewarding, we doubt traditional journalists would if they had to do it full-time.

But we think there might be a good balance in this scenario: a beat reporter who spends most of the day covering the news in a traditional way and concludes with an hour or two structuring stories.

That would give the reporter a more well-rounded job experience and provide Structured Stories with the expertise of a skilled journalist.

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No cold pizza: Notes from a structured journalism planning session

Structured journalists meet in Cambridge to plan more events and promotion in the next year.

By Bill Adair – February 23, 2015 | Print this article

We held Friday’s meeting in a windowless conference room because that’s where we go when we discuss structured journalism. This year, our meeting was at Google’s office in Cambridge, Mass., and our host David Smydra upheld the tradition.

It’s not that we fear sunlight. It’s just a quirk of scheduling. You may recall that last year’s meeting, our first, was in a windowless room at Reuters where we munched on cold pizza. This year, we got to enjoy Google’s amazing lunch buffet.

Around the table: David, Reg Chua of Reuters, Laura and Chris Amico, the creators of Homicide Watch, and me.

The goal for our second annual structured journalism strategy session was to assess how we did in our first year and set goals for the next 12 months.

A professorial Android greeted us at Google's Cambridge office.
A professorial Android greeted us at Google’s Cambridge office.

We discussed our successes. We held well-attended panels at the International Journalism Festival in Italy and the Online News Association meeting in Chicago and we started this mailing list. We also wrote blog posts and articles, although we each felt we could have done more.

We discussed our new structured projects: Laura did a demo of a cool one she’s leading at the Boston Globe, which should be published in the next couple of weeks; Chris did a demo of two structured sites he’s built for Frontline, Ballot Watch, which follows the changes in state voting laws, and Ebola Outbreak: How the Virus Spread.

I showed two mock-ups of websites I’m building with Duke students, one to track and rate medical studies (a project now on hold because we concluded it’s too complex a subject) and one that follows cases of athletes charged with crimes. We’re calling it Rule 46, after the NHL rule on fighting.

David did demos of some Google products that can help structured journalism: Google Consumer Surveys, which can generate revenue, and Google Newsstand, which publishes free and premium articles from various sources and can display structured content in an attractive and readable form.

Reg Chua, David Smydra, Bill Adair, Laura Amico and Chris Amico.
Reg Chua, David Smydra, Bill Adair, Laura Amico and Chris Amico.

A common theme in our discussions: the need for narrative and context in structured journalism. Questions and suggestions from the group made me realize that our sports crime project needed an additional feature — articles — to help readers better understand the structured content. Readers are interested in stories, David said, and we shouldn’t “outsource how the narrative gets built” to the user.

We discussed business goals and agreed that the long-tail potential and new, innovative content formats of structured journalism projects provide different kinds of opportunities to earn revenue. It’s important for both editorial and business-side leaders to plan for revenue opportunities from the start.

We agreed to keep speaking and writing about structured journalism. We’re holding a panel titled Why Structure is the Future of Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in April and we hope to hold another one at ONA15 in Los Angeles. We’ve also started collecting a list of structured journalism projects that I’ll be publishing on the website of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. And we’d like to get this listserv more involved in developing the ideas of structured journalism and spreading the word — perhaps a larger group meeting later this year would be useful, too. (Let us know if you would be interested in that!)

We’ll be holding another planning session next year, probably at Duke. I’ll find us a windowless room.

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