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July 12, 2010 | 2:01 PM | By

Before you launch: the Argo checklist

Image courtesy of Flickr user mistersnappy.

Update: This checklist is now deprecated. Here’s the revised, canonical version.

We’re mere weeks away from launching the first set of Argo sites. Several of our bloggers are off and running, and others are just getting started. I expect a little construction debris will still be on the ground in many cases when the sites are live (by 7/26). But here’s the stuff that should be taken care of before the public christening.

☑ Nail down your Argo site branding.
We can give you legal and aesthetic advice, but the final choice is yours. Choose wisely!

☑ Finalize your tagline.
Be as economical and clear as possible about your site’s reason for being.

☑ Figure out the station site navigation that should appear at the very top of your Argo site.
Choose four or five main links in conjunction with your station site editor, but don’t labor over this, you can always configure it later. You can watch this screencast for instructions on how to add these to your Argo site.

☑ Determine the top four or five categories that compose primary navigation for the Argo site.
Consider correlating these categories to your distinct primary audiences or audience needs. Watch this screencast for instructions on adding these to your Argo site. See also: Developing categories.

☑ Subscribe to lots of feeds about your beat in Google Reader.
Set your filter low. Pull in everything you consider pertinent to your topic. You may end up pulling a few hundred feeds into your account, and that’s OK. Organize the best of these into folders sorted by priority, and consider organizing them by topic as well. See also: How we chose the topics – the market assessment.

☑ Get to know the online communities that are already established around your beat.
Become a regular presence in the main haunts around your topic. Respond to threads, engage with people on Twitter.

☑ List at least 30 – but not too many more than 100 – specific topics you intend to cover regularly.
Focus especially on people and organizations, although you can include other easily-defined subjects. For at least 20-30 of these, come up with a representative image and a quick overview paragraph explaining the topic. See also: How to choose your taxonomy terms.

☑ Start a Twitter account for the site, and begin cultivating a community there.
If you want to use your personal Twitter account, feel free. But it’s probably worth registering the site name on Twitter anyway. Aim to cultivate at least a few hundred followers by the time your site is live, and make sure your Twitter stream is a valuable read for you. See also: Five tips on getting started with Twitter.

☑ Create a page for yourself on Twitter Times.
TwitterTimes is the service we’ll use to pull together the most popular URLs spreading around your Twitter community to display on your Argo site. Once you’ve created your Twitter account, authorize TwitterTimes to synthesize the links in your Twitter stream.

☑ Set up a Delicious account, and begin bookmarking the best content you come across on your beat.
Once your topics have been set up within your Argo site instance, then start tagging the stories you find with keywords that match the list of topics you’ve created.

☑ Write some introductory text about the site topic and about yourself.
Write a short version of two-to-four sentences to appear on every page of the site, and a longer version to appear on the “About the site” page.

☑ Create a Facebook page for the site.
And reserve the appropriate Facebook shortcut.

☑ Upload your Gravatar.
Go to http://en.gravatar.com/ and upload a photo of yourself, connected to the email address you’re using on the site.

☑ Create a Flickr account for the site.
This may just be a placeholder, but it’s also good to store your best photos there (or even all of them).

☑ Conduct a photowalk for your beat.
Try to capture images of things you’ll be posting about frequently.

☑ Figure out who the best Creative Commons photographers are for your beat.
Reach out to them, let them know you’ll be writing about the topic, and ask how they like to be credited if you use their images.

☑ Developing a marketing plan for the launch.
Whether or not you have a marketing budget, you still need a marketing plan. When will you formally roll out the red carpet for the public? How will the station site point to the Argo site? What on-air promos will air in conjunction with the launch? How will you communicate the launch to local media?

☑ Start developing strong content to make a splash at launch.
Report and write four or five viral-worthy, enterprise posts that you can publish – and do dogged follow-up posting about – in the days after you go public.

☑ Start posting daily updates before the site goes live.
Save your best insights and enterprise work for the launch, but begin populating the site with updates on relevant news that’s transpiring daily. These posts will flow to topic pages and make your site feel somewhat robust at launch, and you’ll start to get a feel for the system.

(Updated to add to-dos for taglines and Gravatars. I reserve the right to update a couple more times this afternoon. [Hours later.] Updated again to add TwitterTimes and to stipulate that you shouldn’t start tagging things in Delicious until your topics are set up on your Argo site. [Next day.] Updated yet again to add links to screencasts. This is no longer the canonical version of the checklist: use this starter guide instead.)

FILED UNDER: About, Practice, first 30 days
May 28, 2010 | 3:29 PM | By

The blogger’s first month

Flickr photo courtesy of user Joe Lanman.

It’s rare that a beat reporter for a daily news operation gets the luxury of having weeks before the first story has to be filed for the public. But that’s the lucky circumstance our Argo-bloggers will find themselves in. It’s our responsibility to help them use that time as productively as they can.

Over the next week, I’ll be writing more about the things I hope to see the blogger tackle in that time, but for now, let me summarize those tasks in four broad and overlapping buckets:

1. Content planning

This is probably the most important thing the blogger will do during the pre-launch period. We’ll need to nail down the key audiences we hope to reach (much of which will have been determined beforehand) and plan content accordingly. An important element of the content plan will be the long-term planning – developing the long-running stories that we’ll be returning to all throughout the first year of the blog. We’ll also want to engineer content at the ground level – reporting and producing some feature-length posts that we expect will be viral hooks for various audiences at launch. For a good chunk of the pre-launch period, the blogger should be producing a flow of regular daily content to populate the site, a sort of dress rehearsal for the live performance. And I hope every blogger takes the time during this stretch to conduct a photowalk of the beat, generating a solid repository of free-and-clear imagery that will be useful over time.

2. Network building

From the get-go, the blogger will want to begin pulling together the social media network that will be essential to story-finding and story promotion. This will mean finding the places and people on the Web to pull into the RSS reader, to promote content to, and to participate in conversations with. This network will be represented on the site in a number of ways, which leads me to the next component …

3. System setup

All the work the blogger does to plan content and build a network will be reflected somehow on the final site. An essential piece of the first 30 days of the blogger’s workflow will be using the platform we’ve built to populate the site. Content planning will play into the creation of topic pages through an admin interface that we’re developing. The network of sites and Twitter users the blogger finds relevant will be crawled for links that will be aggregated on our topic pages and elsewhere on the Argo site. Throughout this process, the blogger will be using the Argo platform, hopefully identifying any rough spots or workflow kinks that we can smooth out before showtime.

4. Orientation

It’s important that the bloggers get to know not only their beats, but also their stations. We want to empower them to take advantage of their station infrastructure, so we’ll have to give them a chance to get familiar with it. They should sit in on pertinent meetings, embed with reporters and producers, and procure access to any relevant internal mailing lists and collaboration sites. Before the bloggers are on board, the Argo editors should spend time thinking about the best ways to ensure that work being done for the site is taking advantage of work being done elsewhere at the station, and vice-versa.

I’ll write in more detail about all of these elements in the days to come. In the meantime, enjoy your Memorial Day weekends!

FILED UNDER: About, Theory, community, content management, content planning, first 30 days, hiring, marketing, taxonomy, Topics
May 17, 2010 | 4:45 PM | By

How to choose your taxonomy terms

I’ve written before about the reasons for being thoughtful about classification on our sites. The Argo editors have taken a couple of stabs at sketching out what their site taxonomies might look like, and now we’re asking for a starter list of real terms – at least 30 – that we’ll use to create the initial set of topic pages for each site. I thought I’d write up some thoughts on how to develop that list.

Each term should reflect an audience interest.

In the Argo universe, every term we apply to content will generate a topic page. So as a baseline filter for what constitutes a good term, ask yourself whether you think your users would value seeing a page of posts about this subject.

I stress this point because we sometimes start out by structuring our sites around the subject rather than the audience. If we approached global health or the cruise industry from a subject-oriented perspective, for example, we might create topic pages for “Diseases and conditions,” or “Types of cruises.” But an audience-oriented approach might cause us to question that decision. Is there a genuine audience interest in reading content about “Diseases and conditions” or “Types of cruises”? We can imagine audiences would want to read about specific diseases or cruise types, so a page with posts about malaria or senior cruises would make a lot of sense. But “Types of cruises” makes more sense as a collection of topic pages rather than as a collection of posts.

That said, it will be useful to capture concepts such as “Types of cruises” that describe a class of topic pages. We might create a page or module like this, for example, to serve as navigation to different topic pages. Or we might use that information to surface related topics: if you’re reading about malaria, perhaps you’d be interested in reading more about TB.

Start with the low-hanging fruit.

The easiest thing to wrap our minds around in the taxonomy universe is topic pages. And the easiest topic pages to build are pages for entities – individuals and organizations – specific, proper nouns that an algorithm could search for and bring back relevant results. So I’d start with those. Who will you probably cover most frequently? The Gates Foundation will undoubtedly loom large on a site covering global health in Seattle. A site about the changing face of DC will probably feature many items about the city’s polarizing chancellor of public schools, Michelle Rhee. Generate a list of names like these that are central to the topic at hand.

Think about your various audiences.

With many of our topics, we want our community to include a few distinct types of audiences for the topic. In several cases, there’s:

  • an audience of industry insiders whose livelihoods are directly tied to the topic,
  • a governmental, activist or legal audience around the topic steeped in the relevant legislative issues,
  • a coterie of scientists and researchers who’ve studied various dimensions of the topic,
  • and a broad universe of people potentially affected by the topic, many of whom might not regularly seek out related subject matter, even though it concerns them.

Thinking about the topic this way might help generate ideas for categories – broader types of content bundles that require human judgment to define. For global health, these audiences might suggest categories such as “The business of global health,” “Law and politics,” “Science and research,” and “The impact of global health.” All the Argo editors have developed sets of personas typifying the different users who might arrive at the site. Feel free to revisit these personas as you develop your list of topics.

Consider your content plan.

Another set of terms might relate to how you program the blog. Tara Parker-Pope’s Well blog, for example, has several series of posts on topics like diet and nutrition (“Eat Well”), running (“Run Well”) and pets (“Well Pets”). These posts are collected into topic pages. Make sure to include these types of regular features in your list of terms.

Aim for relevance, not breadth.

We need to start off with these terms before the bloggers are hired, because they’ll help us determine how to build a topic infrastructure that can accommodate different types of terms. But we expect that these lists will change and develop a lot when your blogger comes on board. Your goal right now is not to capture every term that might touch on your topic’s universe, however tangentially. Right now, limit yourself to topics you expect will be most relevant to your coverage from day one. Keep 30 terms in mind as a minimum number of terms, but if you find yourself straining beyond that, don’t fret.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: About, Theory, classification, taxonomy, Topics
May 14, 2010 | 12:14 PM | By

Dark secrets of the blogging superstars: My ArgoCamp preso

Thanks again to everyone who came to Chicago this week. I can’t wait to get our bloggers on board and start putting your ideas into practice.

As promised, I wanted to post my preso on blogging, along with some quick wrap-ups of the main points. Feel free to steal, adapt, re-distribute, etc. (Note: This is an embedded PDF version of the preso. For the full PowerPoint, check the files section of the Argo Basecamp site.)

Dark arts preso

To practice what I preach, I’m going to lay out each of my points in 10 separate posts, then re-package them. (Don’t worry, I’ll update this one when they’re all up.)

FILED UNDER: About, Theory, dark secrets
May 3, 2010 | 3:17 PM | By

How we chose the topics: the market assessment

Among the most influential factors in our choice of a topic for each Argo site was the market assessment for the topic. When we asked the Argo stations to submit their initial proposals, we asked a number of questions about the opportunity they saw: Who does the subject affect? What are they reading today for coverage of related issues? How well-positioned is the station to develop the authoritative site on the topic?

The goals laid out for this project include filling gaps in the local journalism infrastructure, building significant online audience reach and engagement, and establishing each station as the authoritative source on an issue of local concern. As we worked with the stations to select and refine the final topic, we pursued a variety of methods to test each subject’s potential to meet these goals. Given the range of topics we considered, no two assessments were exactly the same. But here are five steps that were common to all of them.

1. Capturing the hunches.

In almost every case, each station identified potential topics using the sort of ambient awareness that any local institution develops over time. Some topics surfaced after a related story or series drew a strong response from the site’s community. Some had been popular beats at local news organizations until staff reductions snuffed them out. Others were just omnipresent (or soon-to-be-omnipresent) local stories that weren’t being authoritatively covered by any news source.

2. Quantifying the potential market.

The task of imagining how many people you could potentially reach with a topic is way more art than science. But it was one of the first things we asked several Argo stations to do as we explored ideas for topics.

If the topic concerns an industry, for example, there’s a good chance the site might interest folks who work in that industry. So our contacts at the stations dove into Census data, Federal labor statistics, trade publications and other materials to try to get a sense of how many people that included. Some subjects – such as health care spending – affect everybody. In those cases, we tried to determine who the primary seekers of information on the subject would be, and roughly how many of them there were.

Whenever I heard a numeric estimate of the size of a potential market, I’d pare it back in my head by 90 percent. If our site could attract 10 percent of the folks in that group every month, would that constitute a meaningful addition to the station’s reach? If not, could we adjust the focus of the topic to be relevant to a larger part of the station’s community?

In many cases, the number of people a topic touched wasn’t too narrow, but suspiciously broad. I was wary of topics that could “potentially appeal to everyone.” Our goal isn’t just to draw a crowd, but to establish the station’s mastery of a subject. Which led to the next part of the assessment…

3. Surveying the landscape.

Once we’d established a topic’s importance to a community, we needed to figure out how well it was covered. We scoured the output of local and national news orgs, industry groups and trade publications, and impassioned individuals online. We ran relevant keywords about the topic through Google – including its News Search and Blog Search engines – to find regular sources of information off the beaten path. We sifted through blogs on Technorati and groups on Facebook, and combed Twitter to find related hashtags, and individuals and organizations tweeting about related subjects.

Whenever we found a source, we looked for references to other sources. Blogrolls on blogs were invaluable pointers to good sites, for example, although the best sources are often linked to frequently in the blog itself. Twitter lists created by subject experts helped flesh out a network of important individuals to follow.

Several key questions animated our pursuit:

  • How much is this topic getting covered today? We didn’t have any sort of threshold for what volume of coverage constituted saturation on a topic. But if every big development on a topic was independently covered by multiple sources, that gave us an indication that the landscape was pretty crowded.
  • Where does coverage and conversation on this topic coalesce today? We were on the lookout for robust hubs that could be considered authoritative on the subject. When we found a site working to pull together information around a topic, we’d look for signs of life – timely content, comments and other community activity, enough traffic to appear on Quantcast’s radar. (See also: 10 free sites to estimate a blog’s popularity.) Sometimes we hit pay dirt, which prompted more questions about our focus. Would our site be different from existing ones in focus or ambition? Do we have the resources to do a better job?
  • Does this niche have online niches of its own? Most of our topics encompassed a few different storylines – industries evolving, scientists exploring, politicians jousting, and in all cases, families and individuals adjusting. We scoured the Web for evidence that people in all these domains were leading intimate online conversations that we could tap into.

4. Examining the station’s reach.

Once we were satisfied that we’d hit on a worthy topic, we tried to figure out how well the station was situated to reach those the topic affects. Was it an extension of an existing beat or desk in the station’s newsroom, or would it represent a foray into brand new territory? Demographically, how much did the target community for the site overlap with the existing audience for the station?

What we found helped us sharpen our strategy further. If we were treading into uncharted territory for the station, our challenge was approaching the topic in a way that built on the station’s existing strengths. If, on the other hand, the station had already established some relevant authority, we needed to figure out how to expand the community the station had built.

5. Evaluating the network opportunity.

A final consideration for us was the topic’s place in the Argo universe. We wanted to cover a healthy range of issues, while maximizing the potential network effects wherever the topics overlapped. This meant we shied away from subjects that might be too parochial. Each of the sites would be pushing and pulling information to and from the NPR API, so we knew we’d be able to share information among the sites, NPR.org, and several of the station sites, at a minimum. So we were looking for topics with a strong local focus, but a rich national resonance. It was a good sign if we could imagine the blog sending the occasional story to NPR.org.

FILED UNDER: About, Practice, community, marketing, Research, Topics
March 31, 2010 | 7:20 PM | By

OPB and API Ingest

Congratulations to Argo member Oregon Public Broadcasting for successful participation in the pilot around ingest of their content into the NPR API. This may be a fairly geeky topic… but we get quite enthused about stuff like this. Colin Fogarty of Northwest News Network wrote about participating in the pilot on the Inside NPR.org blog.

API ingest is a critical piece of Project Argo which will allow the stations to share content with one another and with others throughout the system.

So, congrats again to OPB and NPR’s Director of Application Development Daniel Jacobson for a successful launch. I know a few of the Argo stations will be a part of the API ingest pilot soon and we’ll make sure the all of the Argo sites will get there in time for launch this summer.

FILED UNDER: About, API, Ecotrope, NPR
March 17, 2010 | 1:15 PM | By

While others invade Austin, ARGO works

So just what have we been doing for the last 6 weeks? Good question. While the rest of our colleagues, from NPR Music, from ARGO and from the industry in general) party, errrrr work at SXSW, here is what the ARGO team is up to at the moment.

We are in midst of the research phase of the project, which will continue roughly through the end of the month.

We are in deep exploration across the disciplines.

1.) Editorial – We are working with editorial contacts at the stations to focus the Website ‘elevator pitch’ and to create a sample content plan to reinforce what type of content readers might find on an average week. This helps us envision the content in this format and also begin to ensure we are coming to a common understanding on the site’s soul.

Here are the current ARGO station sites
(*disclaimer… still subject to change… do not remove under penalty of law… void where prohibited).

  • KPLU (Seattle) – Global Health
  • WGBH (Boston) – Living on the frontlines of Global  Warming
  • OPB (Portland) – Nexus between the Environment and  Public Policy
  • WBUR (Boston) – Economic Impact of Health Care
  • KQED (San Francisco) – Green Technology
  • WNYC (New York) – Finance {Topic still in play}
  • KALW (San Francisco) – Cops and the communities
  • WXPN (Philadelphia) – Local Music
  • KPCC  (Los Angeles) – Emerging Immigrant  Communities in SoCal
  • WAMU (Washington, D.C.) – Changing face of D.C.  (Race/culture collisions)
  • KPBS (San Diego) – The Homefront — Military  Families
  • MPR (Minnesota) – Higher  Education

2.) Personas/User Experience – We have asked stations to think about the different audiences for their sites and try to think about their motivations for coming to it. That will help us design and build functionality, tools and – under this tight deadline – allow us to prioritize the order in which we build.

3.) Technical – We have asked a number of stations about their technical capabilities (Operating systems, hosting environment, Content Management Systems) to help inform platform decisions and identify potential integration points.

As you can imagine… there is a great depth of detail behind each of these areas. We will continue to discuss, with each station individually and as a group, their hopes, desires, dreams and expectations in these categories.

FILED UNDER: About, Personas, Research, SXSW