The building blocks of structured journalism

“Structured journalism” is a phrase that’s been circulating in the news and journalism sphere for a while now. The gist of structured journalism is that it works to adjust the way content is created in an effort to make the re-use of that content easier in the future. It’s a way of increasing the shelf-life of written content, making it scale well and increasing the overall value of the work.

To achieve this, a content editor needs to be designed so it can manage the smaller blocks that build a story. Information pre-structured this way established databases of multimedia available for re-use in future news stories. In addition to these tech updates, journalists and management at large need to broaden the way they think about news. This means viewing stories as interconnected parts of a whole rather than isolated in both their content and their use.

Building blocks of a story

The Superdesk team is building a new content editor with this goal in mind. The editor will be available in our first beta release on April 25th. The new editor will not only allow for the simple creation of media-rich stories, but it is structured to enable the automatic generation of semantic chunks from story elements. It also indexes stories and attaches metadata to content items for tracking a later use.

A structured journalism approach to content creation and handling is important because it enables legacy news organisations to step away from the paradigm of providing “single-use” stories. Digital news publishers born during the digital age (think VOX, Buzzfeed) have already built custom CMSs that store their data in a way that supports simple content re-use. These systems are effective, but also proprietary and costly. They are therefore currently acting as a competitive advantage to these organisations.

From story to database

It is widely agreed that news creation is labour intensive. With support from paywalls and ad revenue not poised to bear the increasing costs many newsrooms are facing, why would a news organisation forgo the opportunity to make more use of the content they create? “Structured Journalism is about rethinking how we write things and how to extract more value — and provide more value — from what we do daily, and in the process, hopefully build a business model that helps sustain journalism as well,” said Reg Chua, from Data and Innovation at Thomson Reuters.

The new Superdesk editor takes the traditional method of story creation and turns it 180 degrees. According to C.W Anderson, assistant professor at CUNY (@chanders) “[data journalism] uses data to tell stories. Structured journalism flips that on its head. What structured journalism does in the most simple form is it takes narrative, and out of those narratives turns them into structured data.” The Superdesk editor enables exactly this. Anderson continued, “In data journalism you go database to story, with structured journalism you go story to database.”

Superdesk’s new editor: a UI for NewsML

The concept of structured journalism as a whole is still in its early stages, but the underlying format and data structure from a technological perspective exists in Superdesk. Superdesk follows the NewsML-G2 specification which designates the treatment of every single piece of news as an item and encourages building content knowledge-bases where you can store (beyond news) concepts such as personas and entities.

“The NewsML-G2-based architecture already built in the server allows for supporting structured journalism,” said Sourcefabric CTO, Holman Romero. “What we were lacking were UI tools to allow newsrooms to take advantage of that architecture. The new editor is the first of these tools with more to come soon.”

The new Superdesk content editor provides writers with the ability to build stories rich with images, social media, text, native videos and graphics in one spot, while also storing all multimedia content for future use and searchability.

Imagine that you are creating a story. You write a bit of text, add some beautiful photos, include an engaging video and some social media content. In the text you decide to include a quote by a notable public figure to support your story. With this new editor in Superdesk, all of that information is stored as blocks of reusable content.

This means that someone could then conduct a search in Superdesk to retrieve, for example:

• All quotes by that same notable public figure used in any story
• All stories where a particular location has been mentioned
• All the photos from this story and related stories

Not all of the above capabilities will be available with the first version of the editor, but our recent release of the beta version provides a lot of new possibilities. It is designed with the capacity to include these capabilities very soon.

Right now in the editor, you can add content inline with text by creating independent content blocks that are easy to move around and will eventually receive their own individual metadata to be properly indexed in the system. On a larger scale, this new editor also allows you to include detailed per-story master metadata for easy search within the system.

Learn more at www.superdesk.org