Pulling a post from Paton
If you haven’t seen John Paton’s latest blog post, we’re going to be having some fun in the next 30 days.
Here’s a quick excerpt if you haven’t given it a full read:
The Ben Franklin Project: A Bold New Experiment … In the next 30 days, we are going to attempt to produce one single edition of one of our newspapers using only tools available for free on the web. Using social media and other digital tools available to us we will crowd source the news assignments, creation, editing and publishing of content. And we will do all of this in real-time with constant updates to that newspaper’s website … We’re looking for volunteers. Will it be your newsroom?
Aside from looking for volunteers to participate in the “BFP” … we’re also looking for tools.
What tools should we added to the tool shed?
Digital Discussions 
Without mentioning the obvious (FB, Twitter, flips, cojones):
* Crimereports.com, if your community is in it.
* SeeClickFix.com, otherwise (the ones that can be published).
* http://twitpic.com/, for live photo-reporting with smartphones.
* Coveritlive.com for live chats (transcript can be published later, and Twitter feeds can be imported to integrate them with Twitpic.
* UStream.com for live video coverage. You’d need a laptop with a camera or an iPhone. I haven’t been able to find one for the Blackberry 😡
What am I missing?
Ivan Lajara
April 12, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Try GoMyTown.com, chances are your town has a discussion board there.
Also, local bloggers as well as political blogs; in PA we have pawatercooler as well as a few others that are state wide.
Stan Huskey
April 12, 2010 at 4:35 pm
I’d say del.icio.us or else a Wiki so that the “emerging” story can have a space that contributors can see that accumulated and/or aggregated assets as well as getting updates which is what Twitter and facebook are good for.
Matt Terenzio
April 12, 2010 at 5:48 pm
In our area (Montgomery County) we have the county WebCAD system, a live text feed of all emergency calls (fire, ambulance, traffic incidents). I have it hooked to an RSS reader so we have an archive (especially handy on weekends).
There is also live police / fire scanner broadcasts available:
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/
for counties across the country, which includes text reports from this site:
http://www.incidentpage.net/
also localized down to the county level.
chris stanley
April 12, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Integrating tools!
We’re about to introduce a good number of outside bloggers to our site in Kingston, N.Y. I’ve suggested to them to voluntarily have a live chat using Coveritlive.com to introduce their blogs to our readership.
Those who don’t know how to use it will be helped (telecommuting media labs!) to set up shop.
Will it work? Only one way to find out, right?
Ivan Lajara
April 13, 2010 at 12:33 am
We should start this project with a direct survey of our audience. Google Docs has a handy form that would work well for our purposes. We can send it out as an email link as well as embedding it on a site page. After a week or two run, we can collate our results into numerical and text data sets.
Throughout this period we should also be using social to promote a UGC “blitz” for the week we publish the experimental edition. This could include everything from general appeals to distribution of assignments (ex. We need a perfect image of the new courthouse. Who can help?)
We may also want to start basic blogs or forums where readers can rant for or against us. Our worst customer is our best friend. We could simply call it “feedback.”
Some good free tools:
Google maps — we’ve all used them but that doesn’t lessen their greatness
http://www.jaycut.com — free online video editor (just got out of beta…again)
http://www.swivel.com — free graphics and spreadsheets
http://www.aardvark.com — shows promise for crowd-sourcing
http://www.photopeach.com — free audio slideshows; very similar to Soundslides
http://www.flickr.com — photo galleries with social functionality; journalists tend to shy away because of ownership limitation, but it’s still a valid tool. Great example: http://www.flickr.com/groups/consumerist
Mark Lewis
April 13, 2010 at 1:13 am
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