A Report From Boston (from Bill Adair)

As I mentioned last week, I took leave of my senses and headed to Boston on Thursday to catch up with Bill Adair, Laura and Chris Amico, and David Smydra and discuss what we wanted to achieve in structured journalism this year.

Here’s Bill’s note to the Google Group that Chris set up last year (and please sign up for the group, if you haven’t already):

Fans of structured journalism!

Here’s a report from a planning session we had last week:

We held Friday’s meeting in a windowless conference room because that’s where we go when we discuss structured journalism. This year, our meeting was at Google’s office in Cambridge, Mass., and our host David Smydra upheld the tradition.

It’s not that we fear sunlight. It’s just a quirk of scheduling. You may recall that last year’s meeting, our first, was in a windowless room at Reuters where we munched on cold pizza. This year, we got to enjoy Google’s amazing lunch buffet.

Around the table: David, Reg Chua of Reuters, Laura and Chris Amico, the creators of Homicide Watch, and me.

The goal for our second annual structured journalism strategy session was to assess how we did in our first year and set goals for the next 12 months.

We discussed our successes. We held well-attended panels at the International Journalism Festival in Italy and the Online News Association meeting in Chicago and we started this mailing list. We also wrote blog posts and articles, although we each felt we could have done more.

We discussed our new structured projects: Laura did a demo of a cool one she’s leading at the Boston Globe, which should be published in the next couple of weeks; Chris did a demo of two structured sites he’s built for Frontline, Ballot Watch, which follows the changes in state voting laws, and Ebola Outbreak: How the Virus Spread.

I showed two mock-ups of websites I’m building with Duke students, one to track and rate medical studies (a project now on hold because we concluded it’s too complex a subject) and one that follows cases of athletes charged with crimes. We’re calling it Rule 46, after the NHL rule on fighting.

David did demos of some Google products that can help structured journalism: Google Consumer Surveys, which can generate revenue, and Google Newsstand, which publishes free and premium articles from various sources and can display structured content in an attractive and readable form.

A common theme in our discussions: the need for narrative and context in structured journalism. Questions and suggestions from the group made me realize that our sports crime project needed an additional feature — articles — to help readers better understand the structured content. Readers are interested in stories, David said, and we shouldn’t “outsource how the narrative gets built” to the user.

We discussed business goals and agreed that the long-tail potential and new, innovative content formats of structured journalism projects provide different kinds of opportunities to earn revenue. It’s important for both editorial and business-side leaders to plan for revenue opportunities from the start.

We agreed to keep speaking and writing about structured journalism. We’re holding a panel titled Why Structure is the Future of Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in April and we hope to hold another one at ONA15 in Los Angeles. We’ve also started collecting a list of structured journalism projects that I’ll be publishing on the website of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. And we’d like to get this listserv more involved in developing the ideas of structured journalism and spreading the word — perhaps a larger group meeting later this year would be useful, too. (Let us know if you would be interested in that!)

We’ll be holding another planning session next year, probably at Duke. I’ll find us a windowless room.