Newsroom in a cloud

In a way, I was trained for this.

As a twenty-something, hyper-connected journalism student, I often find myself lumped in to whatever social stereotype classifies “our generation” these days. We’re the Youtube generation. We’re the Twitter, Facebook generation. We’re also the “me,” generation. Maybe we’re the Meme generation.

And yet, the biggest challenge we faced at strikesituation.com wasn’t talent or dedication, funds or manpower. It was communication.

When you’re building a newsroom in a cloud, you start to miss the connectivity of face-to-face news hounding.

I’ve worked in several newsrooms over the past four years, most of them physical, albeit antiquated, spaces.

As a freelancer, you do work mostly in the cloud, receiving assignments by e-mail, doing research and filing stories from the comforts of your own home. But on the other end there’s still a physical newsroom.

Putting the newsroom entirely in cyberspace is a different beast.

When we started Strike Situation, we did so without a physical space in mind. But it sometimes made organizing complicated. Scott and I spent a lot of time drinking coffee in various locations across campus, texting and e-mailing. At times it was disjointed, but that has mostly become the nature of communication amongst our age group. Other members of the team would occasionally meet us, when schedules permitted, usually one-on-one.

We only had two group meetings, one with partial attendance. The latter was on what would become launch day and the second a full gathering (all six of us) for a post-mort wrap-up after all strikes were averted.

Luckily, the cloud is full of options for communication. We set up a Google document with story assignments, a to-do list and roster of team members. Without e-mailing or texting, one of us could check to see what had been updated or accomplished that day.

Blackberries were also an asset. At risk of sounding like the latest Torch commercial, we started a messenger group between the four of us who had Blackberry Messenger to send breaking news and updates in one scrolling conversation. However, it did often leave the two people without BBM out of the loop.

The third essential tool was TweetDeck. If you’ve never used this handy application you should check it out. With everyone tweeting and updating Facebook from personal accounts and Scott and I manning the Strike Situation accounts, having TweetDeck to micromanage mentions, retweets and replies was key to organizing and promotion.

The software proved its worth during live coverage of the information picket. Four of us were covering from the ground, most tweeting updates as they happened, while Scott managed the information from a hub (aka his house). He retweeted relevant information to Strike Situation followers, replied to questions and sent updates and follower questions to our phones to keep us all on track.

TweetDeck did have its shortcomings, though, and we started to envision how a news-specific software would look. A program that could managing multiple accounts and social advertising could be a game changer for online news. But more on that later.

Ultimately, while there were some hiccups in getting information out to all team members at once, operating a breaking news site in a cloud proved entirely possible with the right tools — most of which are completely free.

In all we used the following software/hardware to operate the site:

• Godaddy.com domain registration and WordPress hosting ($150)
• Modified Newsworthy WordPress theme by Theme Lab
• TweetDeck
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Docs
• Blackberry Messenger (on team members’ phones)
• ÜberTwitter for Blackberry/ Twitter for Blackberry
• Personal camera with HD video capability, microphone
• Various school and personal computers with existing editing software

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