Craig Silverman is part of a team, headed by Wilf Dinnick, that is creating the transparent, multimedia, open-sourced news website OpenFile. The first part of this interview can be found here. -Travis Boisvenue
People talk about how social media, or new media, might replace traditional forms. It seems more that social media acts as a supplementary medium to communicate niche information and aggregate information between forms of old media.
I certainly think so. I mean, just the simple basic premise that we will link out and connect the dots on certain topics, and we are pretty aggressive in terms of our use of social media. We launched on Twitter and Facebook before we launched our beta website. And the reason for that is, you know, I basically have my Twitter client open 24/7 as my own personal newsfeed. And you’re right in the sense that people are using it to share the things they are interested in, to broadcast information about themselves, their work, other things like that, and you see people are tweeting links to traditional sources. But what Facebook, and Twitter in particular, have shown us, is the importance of our personal network and the importance of recommendations from friends and from trusted peers in our network. What it has enabled is this mass way to collect your friends and peers in certain ways and to view and recommend things to each other.
That’s a pretty powerful thing, and sometimes you’re going to be recommending traditional media, and sometimes you’re going to be recommending something you created, you blogged, somebody else blogged. And so they are really creating sort of a conduit for all of these different types of information. And naturally, news and journalistic information is a part of that. but it’s not the only part of that. It’s important to realize that you can’t just approach Twitter and Facebook and say, “these are places we are going to broadcast out links to our latest reporting and send people to our site.” if you approach it in that way, then you are just using them as tools, you’re not actually trying to create some value for people beyond just occasionally tweeting a link they might be interested in. Our approach is about process, and we’re trying to make Twitter and Facebook part of the process.
I think that nobody knows what the future of news looks like, but I think that one of the failings of traditional press has been a lack of transparency, a lack of openness.
We’re trying to address that. I think one of the failures of trying to bring traditional print media online is to try and use that format of the traditional story and just throw that up online when, in fact, you’re looking at an interactive environment. And so, over time we’ve added layers–now you can comment, now you can add [a story] on Facebook, you can do different things with this story. But the idea that it’s still this single static article doesn’t make a lot of sense. So we’re trying to adjust to that and create a living story, a living file that never dies. Those are some of the core elements.
Another one that I recently blogged about on our site, is that we’re seeing a shift away from building up gigantic newsrooms where you’ve got everybody on a different beat, and you’ve got tons of spare bodies lying around in case you need to throw them at a breaking news events. What we’re seeing is the rise of self-employed people in general in the world, and we’re seeing more and more people who are freelancing. Partly sometimes out of a choice that they want to be freelance for quality of life and other things, and partly because of the trouble that traditional media have experienced, in that they are having to lay off and buy out people. So one of the things we are trying to do is adapt to the new world of work, adapt to the new world of media, and say, “we can’t really see ourselves supporting a newsroom of 20 people right now”.
There are tons of great freelancers out there and there are more and more freelancers, so why wouldn’t we build ourselves to work with freelancers? We could find the right person and match them with the right story.
The concepts that OpenFile is built on all seem cohesive as a whole.
I think that the jury is still out, obviously. The site is up, it’s working, we’ve got good feedback about it. A lot of times people put a product out and they put the beta tag on it just in case it ends up crashing or whatever, so they can say, “well it’s a beta”. Well, in our case we really think of it as a pure beta, in the sense that we need to see what people like and don’t like about it. And we already have a laundry list of new product requirements that we’re going to be rolling out over the summer.
The starting point for Wilf Dinnick, who really brought the team together to build OpenFile, the starting point was that the older media organizations were having trouble adapting online–there is an opportunity there. The old story formats and the way they go about reporting aren’t necessarily adapted to the Internet. [Dinnick] looked at it and he said, “one of the things that is really suffering is local news, and thats something people are really passionate about”. So he started putting those elements together first, I think. And from there it started evolving as other people came into it. I can tell you that over the next two weeks, we’re having some big big meetings where we’re going to bring forward ideas and thrash them out, and figure out what the product roadmap looks like going forward over the next few months.
What are those changes?
I don’t know that we’ve got anything that was really shocking at this point. I think we need to find better ways of welcoming people into the process onto the site. We have a sort of call-to-action on the top, and some explanatory files on the site about how people do it, but I think we probably need to take that up to the next level. One of the things that we’re trying to do to help people understand how to get involved is a blog post I wrote about how a tip sent in turned into a story within about 24 hours. I think we’ve got to do a better job of guiding people. And also, frankly, if we find that we’re not getting the kind of engagement and participation that they want, it’s not necessarily people not understanding it, we have to look at ourselves and say, “You know what? maybe we built a part of it wrong.”
We haven’t gotten to that point yet, but we’re certainly open to being drastically wrong at any given time.
What other ways are you going to engage the community?
One of the things we did before the launch was reach out to community organizations in Toronto. Start introducing ourselves, start telling them what we want to do, and start making them hopefully see that when there is an issue that isn’t being covered–when there is an important topic that needs to be looked at and isn’t–there is a vehicle here for them that they can use to draw attention to something. So that was one of the community outreach initiatives.
We’ve got something we’re working for in the fall, as we sort of evolve the site over the summer, we have a plan that–I don’t mean to be a tease about it–but that we’re going to roll out in the fall. That i think will be quite novel, and will really be about finding ways to engage citizens in their homes, in their neighbourhoods rather than trying to just put a call out there and hope people respond. We’re excited about that, I think it’s one area where there is a lot of work to be done, and part of welcoming people into it and making them want to participate is just showing them that we’re for real and that we are following up on what people send us.
Do you plan on expanding into other communities?
We do plan to expand to other communities.That will happen once we’re satisfied with where we’re at in Toronto, so there isn’t a timeline I can offer for expansion.
What has the reception been like since the launch?
So far I think it’s fair to say people are cautiously optimistic about what we’re trying to do. They’re happy to see a new news source emerge in their city, and others hope we’ll launch in their area. Freelancers are happy that we pay and have a fair contract. That’s all great to see. Other people have questioned how viable the model will be, which is of course valid and expected. No surprises so far, but we’re only a week or so into our beta launch. The only certainty is that there are lots of surprises to come.
