Episodic news storytelling. Editor’s Lab hackathon in Warsaw

Editor’s Lab by Global Editors Network is a series of hackathons organised across the planet with the aim of cultivating the innovation culture within newsrooms. For the third time, the event was held in Poland — this time with the partnership with TVN24. Outriders partnered with Polish AszDziennik.pl and formed a team which took part in this 48 hour event. The team members included: Rafał Madajczak (AszDziennik), Piotr Mikołajczak ( Outriders’ guest from Sourcefabric) and myself.

To make it short — WE WON!

Task
But let’s start with the beginning. Organisers gave a “simple” challenge to the participants — find new ways to build trust within media’s audiences.

Trust is the main issue which media face these days and also the buzzword of most of events. But once you start to think beyond the obvious and try to tackle the issue to come up with technology solution, you realise it is not that easy.

Looking for solution
Firstly, we started to think how people lose trust and we focused on one particular aspect of it:

• Stories that matter get lost in the information chaos,
• It’s hard for readers to follow up,
• It’s hard for editors to find a reason to follow up as they don’t know exactly how many people is willing to do so

The tool — FollowON
Finally, we decided to build a tool that will enable readers not to lose crucial developments of major news stories and never lose sight of the background of these news. We could achieve this by combining push notifications mechanism with a timeline feature to show previous developments and background of a story.

Designed pages:

And the final presentation:

What’s next
End of June we will travel to Vienna to take part in the final hackathon to compete among other winners or national and regional hackathons. As for the tool — parts of will be implemented into the upcoming Outriders’ website.

Originally published at outride.rs on March 20, 2017.