Updated: 3/23/2005; 11:58:16 PM.
Berlind's Media Transparency Channel
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This blog is now a part of my experiment in media transparency. The premise is that if the media can broadcast polished edited content through one channel like ZDNet, then why can't it also broadcast a parallel channel that's full of the raw materials (thus, this "channel"). For a much more detailed explanation, be sure to check out the following:In case you're interested, maintaining a simplistic transparency channel like this one has so far involved a significant amount of heavy lifting. The core technology may exist, but it's my opinion that a decent UI for publishing a transparency channel does not. So, one outgrowth of this experiment might be a complete specification for such a system -- Something I call JOTS.
        

Friday, February 04, 2005

Objective:  Provide a way to keep the raw materials going into an unpublished story from public viewing until after the story is published.

Abstract: As I said in my entry regarding the need for an RSS feed on a per editorial project basis, one reason RSS feeds would be great for media organizations is that they would allow editorial managers to track the projects that their editors and writers are working on. But, editorial organizations -- especially ones that do any investigative reporting -- probably don't want editorial projects-in-progress to be available for viewing by the public until after the story is published. After all, you don't want to show your hand to competing journalists and media organizations. So, on per category basis, you need a way to toggle the editorial project as public or private. This of course raises the issue of security which I'll try to address more in depth in another post. But, suffice to say that JOTS has to have the sort of security baked into it that gives an administrator control over users and what authority those users have. For example, who has the authority to switch an editorial project from private to public?

10:36:28 PM    comment [] RadioEdit

Objective: Break a transparency channel down into sub-channels and allow people who want access to the raw materials to subscribe to the complete channel, or individual editorial projects.

Abstract:  This is a pretty straightfoward part of the spec and it's why the underlying infrastructure of a blogging system may be ideal to serve as a transparency channel's infrastructure. I've already broken this transparency channel down into multiple categories, many of which are focused on a single editorial project.   The idea is that if someone wants to narrow their view down to the raw materials for one particular project, the system should make it really easy to do this.  Most blog infrastructures such as the one I'm using to prototype this channel, will automatically generate RSS feeds for each category.  With categories, the RSS feeds and the Web site provide a plethora of entry points to those interested in the raw materials.  For media organizations, RSS feeds at the editorial project level would also provide editorial managers with a great way to keep track of the stories that their staffs are working on.

10:27:00 PM    comment [] RadioEdit


As with my first test, I've completed another test where the editorial points to the raw material. In the first case, the editorial provided time codes that could be used to advance to certain quotes in an audio file. In this case, the raw material is an e-mail instead of an MP3 file and the editorial mentions that the full text of the e-mail is available here, in the transparency channel. In response to concerns from the PR community regarding the automatic publication of their e-mails into my transparency channel, I adjusted my methodology and checked with the source (Kelly Larabee of Skype) to make sure she was OK with it. You can see in the thread where I asked:

Would you mind, if for transparency's sake, I published this contents of this thread between you and me on my transparency channel?.....Your email address will be removed as will any phone numbers (including my conference line numbers).

and she responded:

That would be great, no problem at all ~

So, in summary, I felt pretty good about the way this worked out. By asking Larabee if she was OK with it and assuring her that her contact information would be redacted (a laborious task, by the way), her expectations were not only properly set, she was agreeable to the idea.
6:33:44 PM    comment [] RadioEdit

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 3/23/2005; 11:21:16 PM.


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