content management

The Argo approach to software development

This post for MediaShift considers the development philosophies behind Argo:

Part of the mission behind NPR’s Project Argo is to construct a software platform that can maximize the output of a one- or two-person team of reporters. Project Argo is a collaboration between NPR and member stations to strengthen public media’s role in local journalism. As the project has progressed, we’ve realized that we evolved a set of design and development principles that have guided our work throughout.

This is how software invention looks in the era of the framework: Ten years ago, armed with an unstoppable designer/developer combo like Argo’s tech architect, Marc Lavallee, and our designer/front-end developer, Wes Lindamood, we would have built a system from scratch. But almost from the moment our planning for Argo began in early 2010, two things were clear to us: (1) Software such as WordPress, Drupal and Django gave us a great start toward what we wanted to accomplish. (2) No one piece of software would meet all the needs of our bloggers. The bloggers were certain to use tools like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Delicious in addition to whatever we used to publish their site. So we set about building a content management ecosystem, integrating a variety of systems into a coherent whole.

Read the rest at MediaShift.

FILED UNDER: About, Theory, content management, design

June 7, 2010 | 6:55 PM | By Matt

The blogger’s repertoire

A blogger has a great many tools to choose from. Photo courtesy of Flickr user tashland

Next time you’re scrolling through Andrew Sullivan’s blog, take a moment to notice how much Sullivan and his merry band of link-droids vary up the pace. The blog alternates long posts with minute ones, highly visual posts with snippets of pure text, stacks of links and blockquotes with flowing columns of original thought.

This is among the most freeing elements of the blogging format: with no news hole to fill, you can adapt every post to the length and format it deserves. We’ve been dreaming up ways that our design can accommodate the blogger’s creativity in designing different types of posts for different occasions. Here’s a smattering of the types of posts we’ve come across:

The just-a-link: Thrifty as can be.

The link roundup: A way to signal that you’ve read everything relevant to your topic and selected only the highlights, so your reader doesn’t have to.

The list: Remember, numbering is narrative. If you want to make a variety of disparate points without wasting time on transitions, there’s no better choice.

The single quote: Dramatic, arresting, concise.

The quote roundup: For displaying a wealth of perspectives.

The Q&A: Got an interview with a string of compelling tidbits? Edit it lightly (and transparently) and post it all. You’ve got the space, your wonkier readers will love it, and you can always highlight snippets and provide analysis in follow-up posts.

The liveblog: I think every reporter should have the experience of liveblogging an event on their beat. Unlike the typical event, where you often have to walk in looking for a story angle to take away, the liveblog demands your full engagement with every minute of the proceedings. You have to pay attention and capture what’s going on, rather than trying to impose patterns on the event from the get-go. If users chime in during the liveblog, the mix of voices and perspectives can make for a more rollicking, informative experience than you could ever create on your own. When you wrap up your live coverage, you’ll have the best notes from the event, hands-down – perfect raw material for a good analysis post afterwards.

The call-to-action: One of the many benefits of taking the time to create a great community is that you can turn around and ask your crowd to produce some stellar content.

The single photo: What’s that they say about the worth of a picture?

The slideshow: If people love one photo, how much will they love a dozen?

FILED UNDER: Practice, Andrew Sullivan, content management, content planning, design, link roundup, pace

May 28, 2010 | 3:29 PM | By Matt

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 24, 2010 | 7:09 PM | By Matt

Questions for candidates: How comfortable are you with CMSes?

Image courtesy of Flickr user kk+.

This question is not particularly brilliant, but I’m not sure there’s a good way to ask it, and it needs to be asked. Our ideal bloggers are going to push the limits of the system we create for them a little bit. To do that, they’ll need to not be afraid of their content management system, at a minimum.

We’ll be starting out with the friendliest interface we could find – WordPress – which at this point is arguably cleaner, prettier and more configurable than Microsoft Word, has some mobile publishing options, and auto-saves your content, to boot. Even Web publishing n00bz tend to grok WordPress pretty quickly. And if there’s any sign that they’re scared of WordPress, well, that scares me a little. Can a candidate who can’t handle WordPress build a successful Web community? Not sure.

At this point, given the mainstreaming of Web publishing and link embedding and sharing on sites like Facebook and Twitter, I don’t expect these ideas to intimidate too many people. But beyond the not-being-scared criterion, our ideal bloggers exhibit some fearlessness about CMSes, within reason. They’d understand that it’s going to be fairly difficult to break the system, and if they do, we’ll restore it. They’d embed weird objects into their posts, do unholy things with Google Forms, and develop all sorts of zany workarounds to have their way with their sites. We want to learn from our bloggers’ workflow, so we can take the more productive mutations of the format and fold them into the system. If all the bloggers operate perfectly within the constraints they’ve been given, well that’s just no fun.

Related questions: How comfortable are you with HTML markup? Did you just cringe when you heard the term “HTML”? Do you know how to link to something / pull a photo off Flickr / embed a video? What CMSes have you worked with in the past? What does the term “WordPress” mean to you?

What to watch for: If the candidate breaks out in a cold sweat at the mention of the words “WordPress,” “CMS,” “HTML markup,” or “link to something,” that might just be a disqualifier. A sense of fearlessness – a dismissive shrug of the shoulders, even (“I can handle anything you’d throw at me!”) – would be delightful. I’d accept a candidate who said, “Well, I haven’t really used much beyond [Wordpress/my news org CMS/Flickr], but I don’t think I’d have too much trouble learning the basics.”