A hub for journalists to find industry-specific tools, created for them.
Built during the London #NewsHACK in June 2015
The challenge: What might we create together, to improve the NEWS industry for UK & global publishers?
Every day, in newsrooms around the world, brilliant tools are being created to improve the work of journalists. But what happens to them all?
Many of them will make it to GitHub, or be developed for internal use. They'll have lacklustre documentation, and will often be built with close ties to the newsroom developing them.
But the vast majority of journalists will have no idea, and this epitomises what we feel is a wider problem with the global industry today. Giving journalists easy and clear access to tools built for them.
There is already an abundance of tools that have been created – and are being created – to help journalists. But they are hard to find and often complicated to use.
Scattered around on lots of sites or only used internally, there is no clear way for journalists to utilise tools we have built for them.
We have built The Journalist Toolbox as a solution to this, with some added benefits:
- Provides a way for journalists to discover tools they don’t no exist in a visually pleasing way
- A bridge between developers and journalists
- A way for developers to expose tools they have built for the newsroom
- All presented in standardised language, documentation and interface
The Toolbox vastly improves collaboration between journalists and developers by giving them a platform from which to communicate. It also standardises the language developers use to describe their products and ensures it easy for journalists to understand.
Importantly this is already happening - journalists and developers are collaborating more frequently and in increasingly innovative ways. What the toolbox does is standardise this collaboration while bringing it all together under one roof.
You might think ‘what’s wrong with GitHub?’, but GitHub actually epitomises the problem. It is a great website for developers, but a terrible one for journalists. The language used to describe tools varies massively and is often technical and confusing. There is no uniform set of questions that have to be answered, which means it is difficult to understand why one product might be more suitable for your needs than another.
One of the most important components of The Journalist Toolbox is that apps and tools within it should follow community agreed guideline for tools created in the newsroom. Our thoughts on these are:
- Projects should be open sources, so developers can extend them
- Documentation should be written in at least one language, even better if more
- How-to guides, videos and tutorials should be provided, and aimed at journalists
- Tools should offer demo versions, allowing journalists to experience the tool without a lengthy sign-up process
- We're really interested to hear thoughts from the community on these, and will be looking to flesh them out over the coming weeks and months