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    ReportingOn 2.0 Launches Next Generation of Backchannel for Your Beat

    Knight 2008 News Challenge Winner

    ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers.

    It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network.

    For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

    RO2_launch_screenshot.png

    (You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts right here at IdeaLab.)

    The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on.

    That didn't happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years. So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we've rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions.

    There's no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network.

    You can "watch" users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from journalists, topics, and particular issues you're interested in.

    I think you'll like it.

    And, as the grant year for ReportingOn comes to a close, we're also making the source code for ReportingOn available here under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. You can use that to build your own backchannel question-and-answer tool for the journalists in your news organization, or even let your readers ask and answer questions.

    Where to go from here

    Here are four things that could happen next:
    1. ReportingOn.com itself is a stunning success, with thousands of journalists asking and answering great questions every day, finding peers and mentors, improving local news by adding context and insight gleaned from others working similar angles on stories in far-flung locales.
    2. A media company uses ReportingOn's open-sourced code base to build their own internal backchannel, probably on an intranet, or requiring authentication so they can limit it to members of their own organization.
    3. A single news organization uses ReportingOn to do the same thing -- build an internal backchannel.
    4. A single news organization uses ReportingOn's open-sourced code base to build a public tool that allows readers, sources, and reporters to ask and answer questions in a sort of open forum.

    What else could you do with ReportingOn? Give it a shot, and let us know.

    What's next for 2.01 and beyond? We'll let the dust settle over the next few days and figure out which additional features we want to build first, then we'll take a look at our budget and consider the options. Feel free to check out feedback.reportingon.com to get an idea of where we might go next, and add your own ideas, too!

    Thanks to everyone who helped get this launch out the door on time and on budget, especially the Lion Burger development and design team, all the friends and colleagues who gave me their input over the last year, those of you that answered my last-minute call for beta testers, and the Knight Foundation staff for supporting the first year of ReportingOn.

    So... Any questions?

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    Featured Comment

    I think newspapers, blogs, and magazines should all be doing audio versions. I grew up enjoying and listening to audiobooks and now I don't have the same option for the short form content that I prefer to consume.

    Will Mayo
    Do Touch That Dial: Turn Your Newspaper Into a Radio Station

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