Time To Go Online
As part of the Mpumalanga Civic Media Initiative (MCMI), each participating newsroom will receive a WordPress website to extend their publications to an online platform. Developed by Open Data Durban (ODD), these websites will catapult the online presence of the newsrooms. Two of the three participating grassroots newsrooms are print-only media distributing between 3000 to 5000 newspapers every second week. With a well-established readership, these newsrooms are surely ready to expand to online media.
Many of the journalists have never heard of WordPress before and therefore needed to be trained on how to post an article prior to receiving their own website. To make this easier, ODD’s tech team customised the WordPress backend by eliminating most of the dashboard’s menu options and only included the most relevant options one needs to post an article. This minimal approach was used so that there aren’t too many confusing options for the journalists since this is an entirely new platform for most of them.
Customised Dashboard (left) compared to Default Dashboard (right)
Each journalist received login details to a generic template to practice posting articles and getting familiar with the system. I created a tutorial for the journalists introducing WordPress and instructions to post an article. This tutorial consisted of various sections with instructional videos or images explaining each aspect of posting an article using WordPress. These sections include:
- Section 1: Personal Details
- Section 2: What is WordPress
- A brief introduction to WordPress
- Section 3: WordPress Login
- Login to account set up.
- Change the password to something you can remember
- Section 4: Creating a WordPress Post
- Add in only the text of your article
- Section 5: Formatting WordPress Posts
- Format the text of article accordingly i.e. make headings bold, change colours
- Section 6: Adding Links in WordPress
- Add in the relevant links in article
- Section 7: Adding Images
- Add in the images for article
- Section 8: Adding Embed Links
- Add in the Wazimap graphics into your article
- Section 9: Scheduling WordPress Posts
- Set a date and time for your article to be posted automatically
- Section 10: Categories and Tags
- Choose/create an appropriate category and tag
This tutorial has sufficient instructional videos for the journalists to post articles on WordPress. I decided to use this training approach to:
- Identify how journalists take to self-learning.
- Change up the teaching/learning method by letting them watch videos as opposed to reading how to guides.
- To show them that WordPress is an internationally popular platform and there are thousands of tutorials and content available online whenever they need it.
- Gauge how they respond to instructional videos as ODD is creating instructional videos for the data tools they are working with. (how is this different from 1?)
Unfortunately, this tutorial was a major failure. A document explaining how to complete the tutorial was emailed and at the end was a link to start the tutorial. At first, journalists did not respond to the tutorial, The Write News Agency (TWNA) suggested setting a deadline for them to complete the tutorial as journalists work best with deadlines. After setting the deadline, some journalists did not even watch the videos while some journalists watched some of the videos but didn’t follow the instructions and attempted to post a full article. No complete article was posted. After many emails, and no responses, TWNA suggested to set up an online session as done with previous tools to get the journalists through posting an article from scratch.
Finally, after a month from initially setting up the tutorial, I had an online training session with the journalists on posting articles on WordPress. The session was conducted over Google Hangouts, which made it easy for the journalists to share their screens with me so I could see if they were posting an article correctly. During this session, I played each instructional video for them and asked them to complete the task explained in the video such as adding images to the post. Many of the journalists were very excited as they watched their very own articles go live on the internet. After the session, I asked them to each post an article to practice their new found skill.
I created a process checklist on Google Forms for the journalists so they can check off each task as they go along to ensure nothing has been missed out. This checklist can always be used to ensure all necessary steps have been completed and the article is ready for posting. I also created an interactive tutorial on posting articles on WordPress. The user can simply view all steps or try out the steps by clicking or typing. VIEW visualises all the steps in a list required to post an article using WordPress. TRY takes the user to the perform steps, the user needs to follow the instructions and can only move to next step once the task is completed (either click or type).
Click here to learn the step by step process for posting an article to Word Press.
I hope that the journalists will use this tool many times (like the ODD team has) and once they are on WordPress, the process will be easier for them. This is a fun and interactive way to create a sequential tutorial and we will definitely be using this tool in the future.
As part of the MCMI project, journalists were required to embed Wazimap graphics in their articles. The journalists found it quite difficult to embed these graphics in their WordPress article. Special attention was paid to this task and even a video was created, showing how to copy the embed code from Wazimap and paste it into WordPress.
- Tricia
Tricia is an OpenGov Fellow with Open Data Durban and she loves to bake.
Originally published at Open Data Durban.
