We need to standardise tools for journalists— and here’s how
Over the past two days, myself and two colleagues from The Times and Sunday Times have been competing in #newsHACK, a journalism-focused event to encourage multi-discipline collaboration to solve problems.
We built The Journalist Toolbox, a site to “give journalists easy and clear access to tools built for them.” We’ll be writing more about our idea in the coming days, but one of the major components of our project was to help foster better quality tools for journalists. We propose a series of community agreed standards which all newsroom tools should try to adhere to. Our initial thoughts on those are as follows:
- Documentation should be written in at least one language, even better with more
- How-to guides, videos and tutorials should be provided, and the language used should be aimed at journalists of all abilities
- Projects should be open source, so developers can expand and extend them
- Tools should offer demo versions, allowing journalists to experience the them without a lengthy sign-up or deployment process
- We’re really interested to hear thoughts from the community on these, and will be looking to flesh them out over the coming weeks and months
Why create standards?
At The Times and Sunday Times, we’ve been developing our own suite of newsroom tools over the past twelve months. Most of those are available on our GitHub page, and we’ve written about many of them on our Medium publication. Equally, in newsrooms around the world, brilliant and innovative tools are being built by teams like ours every day to help journalists do their jobs.
For journalists, they don’t always know about most of these tools, and most of them — ours included — don’t do nearly as much as they should to make them easy to use. Hosting code and developer documentation on GitHub is a brilliant mechanism for sharing code and collaborating on ideas. However, GitHub is terrible for journalists. It’s code heavy, the language is often complex, and many projects don’t include live demos.
We think that by introducing standards for tools built for journalists, we can work together to create better tools that are easier to use across different newsrooms, and by publishers small and large around the world. Combined with a beautiful exploration and discovery tool — The Journalist Toolbox — we think we can improve newsroom tools for journalists around the world.
How do we do it?
In the coming weeks, we hope to launch a simple website to gain some interest around the idea, and start a discussion around the standards we should work towards as an industry.
If you’re interested in contributing, or being involved in the process, you can register your email address on our website, http://toolbox.timesdev.tools/#/interested.
Keep your eyes peeled on here, and I’ll tweet more about it @chrishutchinson.
