The Uncharted Backwaters of the Unfashionable

Breaking down all the silos in one hour or less

Last Wednesday, ten staffers from the Republic got up and talked for five minutes in front of about 250-300 colleagues about everything.

I talked about better allocating resources through covering events by collecting facts alone, rather than trying to mush them into a narrative. Andrew Long talked about how to be innovative. Other people talked about cutting edge concepts for advertisements, creative new ways to drum up advertisers and how exactly the paper gets to every doorstep by 6 a.m.

It’s a sad truth that at the vast majority of news organizations: The walls we painstakingly built over decades of “professionalization” are so thick that we have no idea what anyone else is doing. I sit in the newsroom and wonder why those guys in advertising aren’t doing anything innovative. Marketing people see me and wonder what the hell I do all day. IT people operate under the assumption that the newsroom doesn’t even know what the Internets are.

Little of the suspicion and distrust is based on actual interaction.Most of it is utterly false.

We wanted to stop that. So a few months back Andrew cooked up the idea of having an Ignite of our own, modeled after the popular format used at O’Reilly events around the country. We took all of our cues from the Phoenix model. We had a submission period, during which we received 30+ ideas for short presentations. We had a batch of impartial judges pick out submissions that represented a variety of topics. We took on the job of getting the room set up, marketing, and so on.

And then it just happened. For an hour last Wednesday, 250 crowded into our standing-room only auditorium to hear people they knew and didn’t know talk abotu whatever it was they wanted to talk about.

The feedback has been explosively positive. People spotted parallel projects and have identified new ways to get involved in good things. Our publisher has said he wants to shepherd a few of the ideas on to the next level.

Even some of the ideas that weren’t selected have led to good things. I submitted two ideas. One was about databasing news events, which is the submission that was selected. The other was some general stuff on Django and how it’s neat. Someone in advertising, who needed a way to set up a database quickly where users could log in , add and edit things (sound familiar?), saw my submission and asked if Django could help. Now we’re solving his problem together.

The best part of the Ignite model is that it’s relatively easy to do with proper guidance. Any news organization can make it work, and I promise any that do will see immediate benefits.

I’d be remiss not to mention some people here. The aforementioned Mr. Long, for cooking up a great idea, which I guess is par for the cource for that guy. Chris George and Allisence Chang for running tight ship. The inimatable (thank god) Jeff Moriarty, for graciously offering us his guidance throughout.

If you want to get this going in your shop, shoot me an e-mail, Twitter, whatever. I can’t get behind this idea enough.

EDIT: Just got the final count. In total, 319 attended or watched remotely. Simply amazing.

State voting records open up!

In California. Crap.

To be fair, The Az legislature has a great reputation for opening up data. When asked. It has provided attendance records, lobbyist disclosures (crappy though they may be), and dozens of reports at various parties’ request.

But California has made the logical leap from mere openness to transparency. And all signs point to it being legitimate (moreso than, say, data.gov). The “Official California Legislative Information” website now trumpets a downloadable database that appears to be updated daily, allowing citizens a reliable way to answer the question, “How is my representative reflecting my beliefs?”

Bravo to Maplight and the California First Amendment Coalition for fighting the fight. And kudos to California for admitting it’s mistakes and trying to move past them.