Moby Dick Project

Moby Dick Project

The Idea

We've gone down a few roads while prototyping, ranging from what a “Salesforce for journalists” might look like to the idea of a semantic ontology for news. Our core idea is that bloggers and journalists on deadline need more expedient access to a high-quality global knowledge base.

...which we're sticking with, but the precise users we're going after now are professional bloggers (perhaps freelance) who write several columns/posts per day, use inline hyperlinks excessively, and are read widely enough to garner a significant amount of comment/Twitter/Facebook chatter.

We've been expanding on the Back-Story and Data-Check + API ideas from the summer d.school session (and are considering how reader observations might be made to work harder for journalists). We think that over-worked journalists on deadline need more expedient access to a high-quality global knowledge base (an idea that we're discussing with journalists), and we're exploring the following:

How can comments (which are largely forgotten about at the end of current stories) better point to what's working with a story and where more information is needed? Would a journalist-only tool for marking comments and tweets for future exploration be helpful to journalists? Could this create a pipeline for related stories? How do trusted commenters' contributions bubble up? What role does sentiment analysis play?

CURRENT GOAL: Designing a better fact-checking workflow for fast-paced news bloggers, which we could elaborate on with implementation-specific aspects like "wordpress plugin", "browser extension", "collaboration platform", etc., and/or functional aspects like "publicly visible writer/editor/fact-checker interactions", "reader-contributions", "inline semantic links", "margin notes", etc.