Thursday, January 31, 2008

Socially Networked NewsRooms

2 comments :
Here is an interesting experiment to create an Election News Network . Publish2 is a free online editorial platform for journalists, editors, and newsrooms. Scott Karp is the co-founder, President & CEO and he is also main author of Publishing 2.0 a blog that i am a fan of. I love Karp's attitude on whether the Elections News Network will work:
"Will it work? I dunno. It’s an experiment. We’re in beta. I could have called a committee meeting to commission a study into whether it will work. Instead we decided to JUST DO IT."

Over the years i have work with many media clients, many who unfortunately have had to do major cuts within their libraries and research centers that journalists relied on heavily for research on articles they were writing- many of these researchers served as 'networkers' potentially hooking up journalists that were working on similar stories. Over the last few years i have always brought up the idea that journalists would benefit for tools like social bookmarking, wiki like publishing, social networking (between journalists in big organizations for example) etc.

Publish2 seems to be a platform that enables this. From their site (i have not tried the service):

Publish2’s mission is to bring all of the world’s journalists onto one common web platform and community, one that empowers journalists to discover, organize, and rank the most important news — to benefit your own reporting, your newsroom, and all news consumers on the web. Publish2 is optimized for you as a journalist, combining online bookmarking, news aggregation, and social networking.

This post by Jack Lail 'Read What we Found' explains how Knoxnews.com plans on implementing it going beyond just their own journalists by picking top community bloggers to also make selections- i see this type of implementation like a controlled de.li.cious tag that only certain people are allowed to use on a domain and the more journalists bookmark a story, the higher it rises in the ranking on the site that publishes the 'widget'. Not sure if they can also leave comments on the bookmark but that would also be useful.

Will have to check back during and after the elections to see how this experiment goes.

Image attribution: cheesebikini.

2 comments :

Anonymous said...

Thanks for noticing. Scott Karp has come up with an interesting "live test" of the tools he's developing in the currently private beta Publish2.com. Best of luck to him in that.

And a key for me was involving some bloggers across Tennessee who are known for doing smart political commentary.

I hope you and others do follow how this works out.

daniela barbosa said...

Thanks Jack- i will check back later this week. Good Luck!