Collaborative Reporting

via Strange Attractor

I read Highs and Lows of “Post Mortem” Collaboration Between Frontline, ProPublica, NPR, by Carrie Lozano over on Mediashift with interest, not least because collaboration has been a specialty of mine for many years now. Ever since I first started working with social media over seven years ago I have focused on collaboration, so a project that marries collaboration and journalism is of course going to pique my interest.

This piece, first in a series by Lozano, sets the scene, but doesn’t go into any detail about how journalists from Frontline, ProPublica and NPR actually got down to the day-to-day nitty gritty. That’s what I’m really interested in, because the collaboration tools available today make working together really easy, if – and only if – people are willing to learn and adjust the way that they communicate.
There are basically two types of collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration:

• The actions of the collaborators are spread out over time 
• Materials are gathered or created and made available to the other team members who access them whenever they wish to
• Collaborators can be spread out over different time zones
• Conversations can occur slowly as there can be a delay before each participant is able to reply
• Tools include: wikis, blogs, microconversation tools (i.e. Twitter-like tools), Google Documents, file sharing services like Dropbox

Synchronous (or nearly synchronous) collaboration:

• The actions of the collaborators are taken in concert
• Materials are created together, in real time, either by simultaneous editing or by taking turns in a timely fashion
• Collaborators are usually in overlapping timezones, even if they are not physically in the same location 
• Conversations happen smoothly as collaborators can response almost instantly
• Tools include: instant messenger, chat, Google Documents, microconversation tools

The trick is in knowing what kind of collaboration you need and how to swap seamlessly between modes as required. A lot of people who don’t understand collaboration wind up using email as their primary tool, despite email being very badly suited for the work. If you’re going to collaborate with other reporters, you must set up your collaboration systems and ensure that everyone is familiar about what to use, when and how, before your project truly kicks off.