Reporting for New Media in Six Easy Steps!

The Six Steps
Do Your Work
Show Your Work
Talk to Your Readers
Practice ‘Sustainable Journalism’
Storyboard Your Content
Prepare for Breaking News

Step 1: Do Your Work. The Internet doesn’t make it easier on reporters. It makes it tougher. Because everyone can do it poorly. It is going to take more to be a pro .

MoJo = NoGo

Step 2: Show Your Work.
Multimedia
Documents

Step 2: Show Your Work.
TIP: Start asking for all your documents in digital format and start recording audio of all your interviews.

Step 3: Talk to Your Readers.
Ask them what you don’t know.
Ask them what they don’t know.

Levels of Interactivity
Engage with your reader on their turf
Help your readers talk amongst themselves
Host discussion with a newsmaker
Let your readers ask you
Ask your readers

Tip: Write 10 trivia questions about your beat. And ask your readers to suggest a question.
Bonus Tip: Write a story. OK, now replace all the quotes with links.

Step 4: Sustainable Development.
Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle your background material in to standing resources that you can use as links in your story and that your readers can search to find when they want it.

Step 4: Sustainable Development.
TIP: Look for the most frequent words in your stories – especially proper nouns – and write three quick facts about each.
BONUS TIP: Make a list of all the objects on your beat. Then identify the sources of where you can obtain information about their attributes and their values.

Step 5: Storyboarding
Sub Step A: Make a list of your “assets”
Sub Step B: Make a list of descriptions of the types of people who will be interested in your story.
Sub Step C: Keeping audiences in mind, draw paths between assets that show the paths that would work best for each reader.

Step 5: Storyboarding
TIP: Take a story from another newspaper and “reverse engineer” it back to a set of notes.

Step 6: Prepare for Breaking News
Blog. But don’t forget to recap.
Work in Takes: Fast First. Rich Second.
Be ready to take information from audience.
Tell your readers what you don’t yet know.

Step 6: Prepare for Breaking News
TIP: Write yourself an emergency preparedness plan, with tasks and content workflow.

The Six Steps
Do Your Work
Show Your Work
Talk to Your Readers
Practice ‘Sustainable Journalism’
Storyboard Your Content
Prepare for Breaking News

… and learn the tools.
www.lynda.com
www.newsu.org
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/
http://www.kcnn.org/modules/
http://www.j-learning.org/

Additional Resources
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/reporting/
http://www.kcnn.org/tools/crowdsourcing
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/reporting/starttofinish/storyboarding/

http://mediablog.hvg.hu	543
http://www.ryanthornburg.com	77
http://www.ryanthornburg.org	53
http://blog.cosmeanu.ro	7
http://karlynwilliams.wordpress.com	6
http://www.ryanthornburg.net	3
http://www.slideshare.net	3
http://static.slideshare.net	1
http://www.marketingblog.hu	1
http://www.netvibes.com	1

Reporting for New Media in Six Easy Steps!

by Ryan Thornburg on Feb 02, 2009

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Reporting for New Media in Six Easy Steps! — Webinar Transcript