Yesterday, Washington Post Social Media Producer Katie Rogers talked to Kiplinger Fellows about Intersect, a tool that lets you chart stories at the intersection of time and place.
The Post teamed up with Intersect to collect reports from the Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert rallies on Oct. 30, 2010.
Now, the Post is using it again, this time for Recession Road, a project by Post photographer Michael S. Williamson to show the effects of the recession across America. The post is asking readers across America to submit their photos to a map using Intersect and #RecessionRoad.
Katie said The Post recently launched the project and will begin promoting it shortly. “Visually, it’s a really amazing tool.”
We just finished up Day 5 at the Kiplinger Program. Today, Lauren Keane, digital innovations editor for investigative and data projects at The Washington Post talked about DocumentCloud, a web-based service that allows documents to be uploaded, edited and displayed on a website via an embeddable widget. I can think of at least three reasons why this is good for the web.
1) using DocumentCloud adds more context to a story DocumentCloud allows the author to make comments throughout the document(s). In other words, you’re not just linking to a bunch of documents, leaving the reader to find nuggets of useful information. Instead, you’re highlighting portions of the documents that contain useful information and pointing them out to the reader.
2) It’s embeddable You’re not giving a reason for a reader to leave your site.
3) Mobile Put a QR code in the paper that links to a DocumentCloud (Note: I’ve never seen this in action, but it could be cool experiment.)
What do you think about DocumentCloud?
Here are some examples of news organizations that have used DocumentCloud
USA Today: When standardized test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real?
BY: Jack Gillum and Marisol Bello
The Los Angeles Times’ Data Desk
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis): Ernest Withers Exposed
BY: Marc Perrusquia
Grant Smith, data reporter
It’s Day 4 of the Kiplinger Fellowship and we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about social networks, particularly Twitter and Facebook. But aside from just using them for crowdsourcing, finding sources and story tips, we’re being told to use them as a conversation tool. We hear over and over again that social networks shouldn’t be a used as a broadcast tool or a glorified RSS feed. So true. There are also ways you can use it to help increase transparency.
A couple weeks ago the @seattletimes received a few tweets from followers asking why we cover University of Washington sports more than Washington State University. I’ve seen similar criticism before on Twitter and Facebook. I showed the tweets to our sports editor and asked him to respond. He wrote a great response, which I posted on the Seattle Times Sports Facebook page. I @ replied the three folks who tweeted us just a couple da
ys before. And I tweeted it on the @SeaTimesSports account.
One of our goals is to create conversation and engagement around our content. This is one way to get that conversation going. I hope to come up with new ways to respond to reader criticism and talk to our readers, especially those who make an effort to reach out to us on the social web. This might not be the perfect way, but it’s a step, I think.
How are other news organizations trying to increase transparency?
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