Over the past two days myself, Chris Hutchinson, Stefano Ceccon and Kester Mollahan have represented the Sunday Times at the BBC’s newsHACK event. Our idea was selected as one of two winners, and we will now be working with Goldsmiths University & BBC News Labs to develop it over the summer. Here’s a run down of the problem we are trying to solve, and how we want to go about doing it.
The journalist toolbox
Giving journalists easy access to tools built for them
The problem
What might we create together, to improve the NEWS industry for UK & global publishers?
In just 48 hours, the seventeen teams at the BBC #newsHACK event have built a brilliant set of tools, half of which are to improve what journalists can create. But what happens to them all?
Everyone will go back to their respective offices, where some of these ideas will be developed and used internally. Some of them might even make it on to GitHub and be used externally.
But the vast majority of journalists will have no exposure to these great ideas, and this epitomises what we feel is a wider problem with the global news industry today:
How do we give journalists easy and clear access to tools built for them?
There is already an abundance of tools created to help journalists build things, from maps to charts, videos and images. But they are scattered around, hard to find and often complicated to use.
There is no clear way for journalists to utilise the tools developers have built for them.
The solution
So the Sunday Times team built the The Journalist Toolbox: a curated resource of the best ready-to-use tools for journalists from around the world.
Think Apple’s app store, but the Journalist Toolbox only collates tools aimed at journalists.
The Journalist Toolbox vastly improves collaboration between journalists and developers by giving them a platform from which to communicate. It also standardises the language developers use to describe their products and ensures it is easy for journalists to understand.
You might think ‘what’s wrong with GitHub?’, but GitHub actually epitomises the problem. It is a great website for developers, but a terrible one for journalists. The language used to describe tools varies massively and is often technical and confusing. There is no uniform set of questions that have to be answered, which means it is difficult to understand why one product might be more suitable for a journalists needs than another. But the main problem with GitHub is that it does not offer journalists a way of finding and trying tools in an easy-to-use interface.
How it works
There are two parts of the Journalist Toolbox:
- a search page for journalists with a specific problem they are trying to solve
- and an explore page for journalists to discover new ways to embellish their stories
So you might go to the site and search “maps”, at which point CartoDB, Google fusion tables and Mapbox would come up. Or you could search “charts”, and datawrapper, axis and high charts would show up.
You can also filter by language, see if a publisher has been ‘verified’ and whether a tool has a demo.
Each app or site would have one sentence summing it up and clearly visible up and down votes, allowing journalists to make informed decisions on the best tool for what they want to build.
Once that decision has been made, you can click through to a tools specific page, which has to feature screenshots or a demo, a description and answers to some key questions we think are really important:
- what devices and platforms is the tool compatible on?
- which news organisations are already using your tool?
Importantly, the Journalist Toolbox is self regulated: those uploading tools have to comply with a clear, uniform set of criteria — community agreed standards — before being able to add to the site, and then journalists and developers add reviews and up and down vote on a tools usability.
Even if somebody managed to upload a badly documented, difficult to use tool, the number of down votes would speak volumes. The higher the number of up votes your tool has the better its position on the results page.
Why it is important
There are four key reasons why we think Journalist Toolbox is a valuable addition to the newsroom
- Discovery the Journalist Toolbox provides a way for journalists to discover tools they don’t know exist in a visually pleasing way
- Bridge it builds a bridge between developers and journalists
- Exposure it gives developers an easy way to expose tools they have built for the newsroom
- Standards it is all presented with standardised language, documentation and interface
Journalists and developers are already collaborating more frequently and in increasingly innovative ways. All the Journalist Toolbox does is standardise this collaboration while bringing it all together under one roof.
The future
- Requests the ‘requests’ section will become a way for journalists to present newsroom problems to developers. Like a stackoverflow for journalists
- Free VS paid Much like Apple’s App Store, we would like to separate paid for and free tools. This would have the duel benefit of allowing journalists to work out what they wanted while also giving developers an insight into whether there is a gap in the market for a free tool
- Apps Make the Journalist Toolbox a downloadable app
Over time, The Journalist Toolbox will help foster a better quality of tool for the newsroom, help journalists to do their jobs better, and improve storytelling for publishers — from large newsrooms to independent journalists — around the world.
