June 2010
Since we launched DocumentCloud’s beta, one of the most common requests has been: “How can I share documents with reporters from other organizations?”
Now you can share a project with any other DocumentCloud user — in any newsroom.
How does it work?
Let’s say I have a project with documents relating to the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and I want to share them with Scott. To open the project for editing, I click on its edit icon.
Inside of the project, I click on the “Add a collaborator to this project” link, and I type in Scott’s email address — the one that he uses to log in to DocumentCloud.
After clicking the “Add” button, Scott now appears as a collaborator on this project.
The next time Scott logs in to DocumentCloud, “The Madoff Files” will show up as one of the projects in his sidebar. He can now view, edit and annotate all of the documents inside of it. He can add documents of his own to the project and I’ll be able to see and edit those as well.
Project collaborators can do anything with the documents in a project that you can do: they can edit public notes, change settings like the document’s title or source, add “related article links.” Collaborators can also add or remove additional people to the project. You can only collaborate with fellow DocumentCloud users, though: if you’re collaborating with a newsroom that isn’t yet part of DocumentCloud, send them our way and we’ll get them set up.
We’d love it if you would give it a spin and let us know what you think: write to support@documentcloud.org or suggest improvements where fellow users can weigh in as well: in our support forum.
Cross posted from PBS Idealab.
I recently attended the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2010 conference and ended up talking with Astrid Gynnild, a post doctoral research associate in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway. She’s researching collaborations in investigative journalism.
I showed her some of my favorites: The Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, ABC News and Washington Post working together on Disposable Army was one of them. Frontline, ProPublica and the Times-Picayune’s coverage of police shootings that were never investigated after Hurricane Katrina is also great reporting, but she’s looking for more. Are you collaborating internationally? On an enterprise reporting team? Do you work closely with one or two other reporters in your own newsroom? She’s curious to hear about it. I am, too. What makes collaboration work when you’re an investigative reporter?
Share your thoughts and experiences in comments. Or, if you don’t want to comment here, you can write to her directly. She’s astrid.gynnild@infomedia.uib.no
Discuss Gathering Examples of Collaboration in Investigative Reporting on PBS’s IdeaLab.
Over the past few months, you might have noticed a handful of news organizations using embedded documents to complement their reporting.
This morning, we’re opening up the ability to embed documents to all of the newsrooms participating in DocumentCloud. When you log into your workspace, you’ll notice a new menu: “Publish”.
From here, you can grab an embed code (a short snippet of HTML) that can be dropped onto a web page to create a document viewer. You may be familiar with such snippets from embedding YouTube videos: this works in a similar fashion. For guidelines on setting up a template and other help, check out our documentation.
If you still have questions about the process, we’re listening at support@documentcloud.org.
Note: we know you’re eager to host documents yourself, and you can do that now, but we recommend that you stick with embedded documents so that you can take advantage of bug fixes and other improvements to the viewer. We don’t know yet whether we plan to offer embedding as a long term service. Keep in mind, as well, that this is still a beta. As described in our terms, our capacity to commit to uninterrupted service is limited, as is our liability if service is interrupted in some way.
For those news organizations that want to host documents on their own servers, we’re now offering that as an alternative too. Click on “Download Document Viewer” to get a zipped up folder with all the code, text, and images bundled together as a web page. Drop the folder into any web server (no special software required), and voila, it’s online.
Search of the document’s text is provided by DocumentCloud as a service, but everything else in the package is completely static — just HTML, images, JavaScript and CSS. If you choose to use this alternative, there is a caveat: If you edit your annotations, or want to make any changes to the document, you’ll have to download it again.
Here at DocumentCloud, we’re looking forward to seeing the great reporting you do with embedded documents — don’t forget to use the workspace to add a “Related Article” link.
