Indieweb for Journalism
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Indieweb for Journalism is the application of Indieweb principles to one's personal site with a particular emphasis on use cases for journalists, photographers, editors, related bloggers and platforms which are publishing their work.
While the general principles of Indieweb can apply to anyone's site, in an attempt to help foster the next generation of potential Indieweb adopters who may be focused on areas of news, journalism, or distribution, we're compiling some specific hints, tips, pointers, and examples which may be germane to these particular audiences to assist in their motivation and adoption.
In addition to the material below, be sure to see getting started, which is an excellent place to start for all people.
Projects
Naturally any project could be used for journalism and related purposes, but the following either are geared toward them, or are heavily used by them and have a relatively rich ecosystem of additional functionality or plugins to expand their use specifically toward these areas. New users, particularly those of generations 2+ who may not be programmers/developers by nature may be advised to take a look at one or more of these for their base functionality.
WordPress
WordPress is a commonly used CMS in general, but there is a large and engaged community of journalists, magazines, newspapers, and other outlets using it. There are also a variety of use-case specific plugins and functionality.
Plugins
The list below isn't specifically Indieweb related, but are plugins, some with an Indieweb flavor, which people interested in these areas may find useful.
- PressForward is free software for curating and sharing content from the web.
- Collect via a feed reader and a bookmarklet
- Discuss through collaborative editorial work
- Share with a workflow for republishing content
- Memento for WordPress
- Hypothesis Aggregator, see also 1
- Indie Cite
- Post Archival in the Internet Archive
- Academic Blogger's Toolkit
- Broken Link Checker
- Aesop Story Engine
- TinyMCE Annotate
- Storymaps by Knight Lab is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events.
- Timelines is an open-source tool that enables you to build visually-rich interactive timelines and is available in 40 languages.
- Pressbooks a plugin that transforms a WP multi-site install into a book production CMS.
Known
The Known CMS was built as an opensource Indieweb project from the ground up thus making it a convenient choice. See also: Getting Started with Known#Journalists
Indieweb Examples
A group of journalists and related people integrating Indieweb principles into their websites:
- Dan Gillmor
- Richard MacManus
- Bill Bennett
Chris Aldrich has both WordPress and Known installs- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Others
People working in the space and at least tangentially knowledgeable or aware of Indieweb or practicing some of the principles in the wild:
- Jeff Jarvis, professor and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism
- Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU 1
- Aram Zucker-Scharff
- Marina Gerner (example in the wild)
- Tim Harford (example in the wild, practicing PESOS)
- John Naughton, Technology columnist of the London Observer/the Guardian newspaper and researcher posts links, reads, quotes, commentary, and links to his columns written for other publications on his own website.
- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
People are heartily encouraged to look into the depth and breadth of other examples on the pages spanning the remainder of the wiki.
IndieWeb Outlet Examples
Below are a list of magazines, newspapers, and other journalistic outlets that are actively practicing various portions of IndieWeb tools:
ColoradoBoulevard.net
ColoradoBoulevard.net, a local newspaper for the Pasadena, CA and surrounding areas.
- As of 2018-05-08 Chris Aldrich added support for sending/recieving webmentions as well as backfeed from Facebook. Backfeed from Twitter and the ability to receive and display read posts was added on 2018-05-29. [1]
- Example of facepiling received webmentions including likes and reads
Others
- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Byline Examples
It's not always/often the case for outlets to provide links to authors' personal websites. Generally they're links within the company's CMS to a page that aggregates the author's work only for that publisher. Occasionally they will also include links to other social silos like Facebook or Twitter. In an ideal world, authors, even staff writers, should ask for and receive credit links to a website that they control.
Below are some examples of larger publications which are giving links from articles directly to the author's personal websites:
- Washington Post gives byline to Jonathan Greenberg
Syndicating Work on the Internet
Just as many people in the social media world syndicate or cross-post material from their own blogs to sites like Facebook and Twitter, there's no reason that journalists couldn't follow a similar model for their own work. Typically a writer will be able to reach far more people by publishing their work in the New York Times than on their own website, so in addition to earning money by giving it to the outlet, they should archive a copy on their own website for their personal portfolio as well as all the usual social media sites in addition.
POSSE
POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your site.
Indieweb Examples
Dan Gillmor wrote a post on his own site and syndicated it (presumably manually) to Slate on August 25, 2014. While there wasn't backfeed from the Slate article to the original article, the original article did have backfeed from social silos to it.
- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Examples in the Wild
- Quanta Magazine
- Some publishers expand their reach by syndicating articles written specifically for their own outlet to other outlets rather than simply syndicating to their own social media properties. Quanta has syndication partners that include Wired, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Nautilus, Spektrum, and Scribd.
- This article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/dark-matter-recipe-calls-for-one-part-superfluid-20170613/ was syndicated to Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/this-dark-matter-theory-could-solve-a-celestial-conundrum/
- Sometimes the titles of the articles will change from one publication to another although the bulk of the article remains the same. notes
- ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom, in addition to publishing content on their own website also "syndicates" a copy of the article to the publishing partner with whom they often worked or collaborated on the particular article. This type of syndication dramatically increases the circulation of the original story.
- Typically in these "syndication" examples, both the original and the copy both have a rel="canonical" link to themselves on their respective pages instead of a rel="alternate" on one or the other. These stories don't always have the same headline either.
- Example: original | copy on Bloomberg (without a syndication link) | copy on MSN a few days later (without a synidcation link, but with a rel="canonical" link to the original on ProPublica)
- Example: original | copy on NPR (note different titles)
- The News Co/Lab has syndicated some of their material from their primary site to other sites
- Example: 6 newsroom-library partnerships to check out was syndicated to the International Journalists' Network at https://ijnet.org/en/story/6-examples-newsroom-library-collaborations
- MIT Technology Review ran an opinion piece by David Byrne that originally appeared on his own website and they credited it as such, though they gave a link to his homepage rather than the original.
PESOS
PESOS is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It's a Syndication Model where publishing flow starts with posting to 3rd party services, then using some infrastructure (e.g. feeds, pingbacks, webhooks) to create an archive copy under your domain.
Indieweb Examples
- Chris Aldrich published an article on AltPlatform.org and PESOSed it to his own site using PressForward so that anyone visiting his URL would automatically be redirected to the canonical version on AltPlatform. He also then further syndicated copies of the post on his personal site to other social silos with the ability to allow backfeed to his post. Compare the following:
- 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) to
- http://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). note
- Wudan Yan presumably published the article I was owed about $5,000 from late-paying publications. I tried to hold them all accountable. Here’s what happened. on Medium first (archived copy), and then when the post was presumably removed for violating Medium's Terms Of Service for "Posting copies of private communications between private individuals without the explicit consent of all parties to the communication" she republished the original on her own website at http://www.wudanyan.com/late-fee and replaced the post on Medium to read:
This PESOS example helped to keep the article available and online despite the fact that Yan, a journalist, responsibly redacted the names of the offending parties in the article, and was thereby complying with the spirit of the Medium Terms of Service. Note that the copy on Medium has a large number of comments while the original doesn't allow any. While the article points out the precarious position of working as a freelance journalist, it also explicitly serves as a great example for why one should post their content on their own site first and syndicate to social silos.To comply with Medium’s policies, I have re-published the story on my professional page. Permalink to the story here: http://www.wudanyan.com/late-fee
- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
PASTA
PASTA is an acronym/abbreviation for 'Publish Anywhere, Save To (private) Archive and may be a workflow that many journalists would execute to maintain a personal portfolio of all of their work.
Indieweb Examples
- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Examples in the Wild
- Savemy.news is a service that uses Twitter in combination with the Internet Archive and webcitation.org to help journalists create public archives of all their work. The tool allows users to download a .csv copy of all of the links to their articles. [2]
Annotations
Interesting use of annotation (notably using open-source hypothes.is instead of a proprietary product) in journalism. https://t.co/yAWEWXfJLN
— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 23, 2017
- I Annotate conference 2018 is expected to have a talk on how annotation can streamline newsroom workflow with Jon Udell and
Archiving
Many journalists may be using their site as a portfolio and as part of that having an additional archive (aka Archival copy) can be crucial if their outlet should fold or disappear from the internet.
Dodging the Memory Hole conferences via the Reynolds Journalism Institute has some interesting resources and lists of researchers, librarians, archivists, and technologists working on archiving "born digital" news.
Beyond news: understanding the role of archives in journalism businesses is a blog post about a survey of news organisations' archiving practices, carried out by The Tow Centre for Digital Journalism. Conclusion: most are not doing a very good job of it, while those that are can see benefits.
Related Conferences/Organizations
- Hacks/Hackers join the media revolution: rebooting journalism
- Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News part of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute
- Campfire Festival 2017 on September 06-09, 2017 in Dortmund. Sebastian Lasse noted that "We get a sponsored tent at http://campfirefestival.org together with Code for Germany, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Techschool, CCC."
- Dodging the Memory Hole 2017: Saving Online News part of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute on Nov. 15-16, 2017 at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco (YouTube archived versions of talks)
Articles relating to Indieweb and Journalism
- 2013-09 : Publishing with GitHub pages (archived)
- 2014-04-25 : Why the Indie Web movement is so important (archived)
- 2015-07 : Installing a Known blog on a private server (archived)
- 2016-04 : Hypothes.is as a Public Research Notebook (archived)
- 2016-09 : A journey through API programming ― Part 4: Posting to Medium (archived)
- 2016-09 : Getting data out of Medium (archived)
- 2016-12-31 Chris Aldrich: PressForward as an IndieWeb WordPress-based RSS Feed Reader & Pocket/Instapaper Replacement (archived)
- 2017-01-03 Chris Aldrich: The Indieweb and Journalism: Some thoughts about how journalists could improve their online presences with Indieweb principles along with a mini-case study of a site that is employing some of these ideas. (archived)
- 2017-02-10 Chris Aldrich: Tweetstorms, Journalism, and Noter Live: A Modest Proposal (archived)
- 2017-03-29 : The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley reengineered journalism (archived)
- 2017-04-10
Jeremy Cherfas: The Undercover Indiewebber - 2017-05-19 : Facebook blocks Pulitzer-winning reporter over Malta government exposé: Temporary censorship of Matthew Caruana Galizia – who worked on the Panama Papers – raises concern over Facebook’s power to shape the news (archived)
- 2017-06-12 : Being on Medium was, is, and will always be, bad for publishers. End of Story. (archived)
- 2017-07-07 : A few ideas about new ways of working as a journalist that overlap with the Indieweb movement (archived)
- 2017-07-12 : Creating an archive of my online writing, from 2002-2017 (archived)
- 2017-09-07 Jeremy Cherfas: So, farewell then Lucky Peach: Why journalists need their own domain
- 2017-11-20 : After watching Gothamist and DNAinfo disappear, this journalist built a tool to help others save their own archives (archived)
- 2018-12 : The Year We Step Back from the Platform (Nieman Lab for Journalism) (archived)
- 2018-12
Ben Werdmüller: The Platform Tide is Turning (archived) - 2018-12 : Publishers Build a Common Tech Platform Together (archived)
- :
- PressPatron crowdfunding for journalists
- ...
See Also
- marginalia
- highlights
- commonplace book
- CV and resumé
- portfolio
- embargo
- archival copy
- getting started
- backfeed#Science_Communications
- Indieweb for Education
- backfeed for journalism
- PASTA
- Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom
- The Year You Actually Start to Like your CMS an IndieWeb-esque article in Nieman Lab collection of Predictions about Journalism in 2019
- https://www.clippings.me/ a silo service that offers a portfolio-like clipping profile; pro version starts at ~$10 per month for additional features.
- MuckRack a portfolio silo for Journalists - may have some interesting UI set up
- timeline.js
- https://authory.com/, a tool targeted at journalists that appears to be a silo-based app for backing up/archiving articles on the web as well as providing analytics, newsletter/email functionalities, and other options.
- The Markup used rel-me to allow for verification of their site on Mastodon https://themarkup.org/levelup/2022/12/22/how-we-verified-ourselves-on-mastodon-and-how-you-can-too