/handbook

A handbook of best practices and case studies for modern collaborative journalism

MIT LicenseMIT

(at some point I'll separate this document into a proper spreadsheet, rather than just a bunch of lists of links)

The Collaborative Journalism Handbook

A guide of best practices and case studies for modern collaborative and crowdsourced journalism.

The impetus for writing the Collaborative Journalism Handbook comes from the need to document the variety of scaleable, transparent, and wide-ranging journalism and best practices made possible by the Internet and collaborative software, similar to how the Data Journalism Handbook is the go-to reference for learning about the practice and people of data journalism.

Like the DJH, the Collaborative Journalism Handbook will be open-source and published online. Are you a collaborating journalist? Then fork this repo and add all the interesting content that's in my head.

Proposed topics tentatively

  • Introduction: history of news org competition and collaboration

  • Trust, financial, cultural, and other institutional factors etc.

  • The costs and downsides of collaboration

  • How to initiate a collaboration or crowdsourced campaign.

  • Hello spreadsheets

  • Using spreadsheets as a collaborative interface for organizing the data and reporting

  • Data entry: everyone's doin it!

  • The joy of plaintext and structured text

  • Divide and conquer

  • Best practices for team collaboration

  • Best practices for inter-organization collaboration

  • Security practices

  • Crowdsourcing and MEchanical Turk

  • Newsrooms and open-source development

  • The fear of losing the scoop

  • How to encourage and learn from citizen journalism

  • Case studies

    • Election Land
    • Trump White House Records
    • Lost Mothers
    • Dollars for Docs
    • Fatal Encounters / Fatal Force
    • Homicide Watch
    • Panama Papers
    • Luxombourg Leaks

  • Software tools and services overview

    • Google Drive
    • Dropbox
    • Dropbox Paper/Etherpad
    • Slack
    • Github

Random examples

Examples

Resources