I’ve been meaning to do it for quite a while, but I’ve finally started a stub in the Indieweb wiki for the topic Indieweb for Journalism.

There is a rapidly growing group of writers and journalists who have been joining the Indieweb movement, and it’s long overdue to create a list of resources specific to the topic to help out ourselves and others in the future.

I invite others like Dan Gillmor, Richard MacManus, Bill Bennett, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Aram Zucker-Scharff and others to feel free to add to, change, or modify the page to add resources they’re aware of as well. Not on the list? Feel free to add yourself too!

I’d also welcome everyone to join in the conversation online via webchat, IRC, Slack, or Matrix. Hopefully we can all make each others’ sites better and more useful for our daily writing work. (If anyone needs help logging into the wiki or getting set up, I’m happy to help.)

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

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  1. a post by I’ve a few ideas about new ways of working as a journalist that overlap with the Indieweb movement.
    The first is having a syndicated work portfolio. If you like, a single source, feed or river of everything I post elsewhere.
    This means linking back to my stories published on mainstream media sites. I want to do this even when those sites don’t reciprocate my links. At the moment I sometimes write a linking blog post on my site.
    Here’s one from last year: https://billbennett.co.nz/agility-knowledge-economy-key-for-auckland-as-an-emerging-global-city/
    My second idea is to somehow consolidate the comments that fill different buckets at places like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. There are also some on Disqus. There have been times when there are two or more conversations covering much the same aspects of a story. It would be better if the interested commenters could see what others have to say and interact.
    Indieweb central repository
    Then there’s my unrealised idea of moving to more of a stream-of-concious style of reporting. This is not so much Jack Kerouac style, but more like the daily live blogs you see on sites like The Guardian. I like the idea of writing a post then update it as the story evolves. This would be easier to manage with a central repository.
    Last and not least, there’s my need as a journalist to own my work outside of the big silos. I’m not a snob about FaceBook or Google, but I am aware their shareholders get the reward for my effort when my work appears there. It won’t happen overnight, but the Indieweb may hold the key to redressing the balance in the future.
    Related

    1. For the syndicated portfolio, you might want to take a peek at the PressForward plugin for WordPress [http://pressforward.org/%5D. While it is a stand-alone feed reader under the hood and could be used for creating an editorial flow, it will let you use a simple bookmarklet on your work published on another site to make a quick and complete copy of the post on your own site. Within the plugin settings you can set a “time to forward” (I use one second) such that people who visit that particular post will be automatically forwarded to the original (and canonical URL) on the commissioning outlet’s site.
      As an example, compare:http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/%F0%9F%94%96-feed-reader-revolution-its-time-to-embrace-open-disrupt-social-media/ (which is a bookmark with some commentary pointing to my post)
      tohttp://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/ (which is an exact copy of my post, which only I can see on my backend, that redirects the viewer to the original on AltPlatform).
      This is beneficial as you can syndicate (POSSE) the post with your own URL to Facebook, Twitter, et al. and folks who click to read will be sent to your site for a moment before being forwarded on to the original. Thus you get a ping and the original outlet also gets a ping (as well as the advertising revenue for it.) And if, for any reason, the original outlet goes out of business, gets sold, or disappears, you’ve got a word-for-word copy of your original and can simply un-forward it so that it can appear on your site as it was originally published. Naturally if you prefer and the outlet doesn’t stipulate otherwise, you could publish the original to your site and not forward it (or even forward it for an exclusivity window of time pre-agreed with the original publisher.)
      Additionally, if you’re using Brid.gy for backfeed, anyone who comments on your POSSE copies will have their commentary sent to your site. While others won’t necessarily be able to see the commentary (if you’re forwarding the URL to the publisher’s original), at least you’ll be aware of it and can reply to it and get your own replies in return. I suspect that in the future brid.gy may be able to scrape commentary based on the syndicated URL so that your personal version aggregates commentary from the publisher’s original as well as mentions of it on Facebook, Twitter, et al.
      There are still some missing pieces I’d like to see in such a workflow for journalists, but it’s slowly and surely getting somewhere.
      (I’ve written about other parts of PressForward before at http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/ as I also have an off-label use-case to replace read it later apps like Pocket and InstaPaper.)

  2. a postI’ve a few ideas about new ways of working as a journalist that overlap with the Indieweb movement.
    The first is having a syndicated work portfolio. If you like, a single source, feed or river of everything I post elsewhere.
    This means linking back to my stories published on mainstream media sites. I want to do this even when those sites don’t reciprocate my links. At the moment I sometimes write a linking blog post on my site.
    Here’s one from last year: https://billbennett.co.nz/agility-knowledge-economy-key-for-auckland-as-an-emerging-global-city/
    My second idea is to somehow consolidate the comments that fill different buckets at places like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. There are also some on Disqus. There have been times when there are two or more conversations covering much the same aspects of a story. It would be better if the interested commenters could see what others have to say and interact.
    Indieweb central repository
    Then there’s my unrealised idea of moving to more of a stream-of-concious style of reporting. This is not so much Jack Kerouac style, but more like the daily live blogs you see on sites like The Guardian. I like the idea of writing a post then update it as the story evolves. This would be easier to manage with a central repository.
    Last and not least, there’s my need as a journalist to own my work outside of the big silos. I’m not a snob about FaceBook or Google, but I am aware their shareholders get the reward for my effort when my work appears there. It won’t happen overnight, but the Indieweb may hold the key to redressing the balance in the future.
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