IDR bootcamp
Project management
Tips and tricks for new grantees
Amsterdam, NL, 11 December 2016
Jacopo Ottaviani – @JacopoOttaviani
Quick résumé
-
Data journalism for 5 years
- Mostly in Europe and Africa
-
I coordinated 3 projects with Journalism Grants
- Land grabbing (very first round!)
- E-waste Republic: http://aljazeera.net/ewasterepublic
- Lungs of the earth: http://bit.ly/lungs-earth
- Contributed in few other IDR projects (e.g. Dark Side of the Italian Tomato)
- Co-authored cross-borders data projects such as #MigrantsFiles and #GenerationE
- Now ICFJ Knight fellow, data editor @ Code4Africa
How to manage your project
- Team
- Tasks
- Time
- Budget
- Content & format
- Publication strategy
- Tools
Manage your team
Appoint a project manager or coordinator (you?), in order to:
- Define roles of all participants (a.k.a. areas of responsibility)
- Minimise complexity (BTW, agile teams work better)
- Dictate the pace and keep an eye on the project as a whole
- Take complex decisions and negotiate with partners
Manage your team, 2
- Typical roles in these kind of projects
- Journalist
- Film-maker / photographer
- Data expert / researcher
- Designer / Illustrator
- Video editor
- Developer
- Translator
- Project manager
- Media diplomat
Manage your team, 3
- Usually some members cover more than one role
- Journalist
- Film-maker / photographer
- Data wrangler
- Researcher
- Designer / Illustrator
- Video editor
- Developer
- Translator
- Project manager
- Media diplomat
JACOPO
ISACCO
EXTERNAL
Manage your tasks
- Some tasks can be ran on parallel
- Every task should have:
- task ↔ deadline
- task ↔ person in charge
- task ↔ budget line
- The coordinator should constantly keep a bird's eye view on the project
Manage your time
- You all have a deadline. Set more!
- Share a calendar within your team
- Set flexible time-slots (try not to have tight timetables)
- Count always at least 2 or 3 weeks of «buffer zone» from "zip delivered to the media" to "publication up and running"
Co-publication strategy
- Four options:
- One-off simultaneous publication
- Different stories published on different days
- Hybrid approach (e.g., simultaneous online + radio on a different day)
- Modular media campaign (long and complex, but more impactful)
PROs
- Maximise impact on social networks & presence on search engines
- Possibility to run it on a special day (e.g. "World Health Day")
- Wider resonance
- Summed prestige
CONs
- Complex coordination of media partners
- High pressure right before the co-publication day
- Fixed format for all publications (requires: design compatibility)
One off co-publication
PROs
- Easier coordination and time management
- Design-independent
- Keep the project in the hype for longer (however within different audiences)
CONs
- Less impact on social networks
- More complex to leverage on the media coalition
- Watch out for audiences overlaps
Publication on different days
PROs
- Relax rigidity of previous approaches
- Re-ignite the attention around core
- You can publish more than once in the same country (different content!)
CONs
- Complex project management
- Different outputs for different media in multiple languages
- May lead to disperse your energy
Hybrid: core co-publication + satellite publications
PROs
- Mosaic-like storytelling project (e.g. series of story + final publication with all stories)
- Tension around the core topic within the same audiences for longer periods
- Optimised use of content
CONs
- Needs to be well planned beforehand
- Time-consuming
- Budget-consuming
- Requires strong trust between media outlet(s) and collaborator(s)
Modular publications
Lungs of the earth
- 4 short stories (text + videos)
- Long form project (4 videos above + extra content and dataviz)
- Some satellite-publications (a photo story)
- One brand #LungsOfTheEarth (to expand the project in the future, publish extra content...)
- All content distributed on multiple media in different languages
Explore it: http://bit.ly/lungs-earth
http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/shorts/india-menstruation-man/
Media diplomacy
- Involve staff and make them feel part of the project / coalition
- Tell media partners from the beginning about your coalition
- Make their life easy (give them a zip-file, vectorial files, subtitles transcriptions, etc.)
- Do not give your stories away (collect multiple fees)
- Build a network of partners (e.g. for European partners talk to EJC, for African partners talk to Code4Africa, for Indian/Pakistani and Latin-american partners > ICFJ fellows)
Going cross-platform
- Map the audiences you want to target
- Your content can be repackaged, recycled, translated and adapted to your audiences
- Different audiences use different platforms (e.g., radio is still fundamental in some areas in Africa)
- Videos can be re-used to some degree online & on TV
- Audio can be extracted from videos and re-used for radios or podcasts
Go mobile.
Useful tools
- Use Google Drive for co-editing and file sharing
- WeTransfer to transfer heavy files
- Trello or Slack for project management (especially when you have big teams)
- Invision to share and comment design previews (especially when you work with a designer)
Trello.com
Slack.com
Final tips
- Use a hashtag to identify your project (ask media outlets to tweet using that hashtag)
- Negotiate with media outlets a number of tweets/shares (not just one)
- Remember to monitor the stats of your project (put an Analytics code or make sure they monitor stats)
- These projects take long: do not forget that things could change very quickly (keep asking your sources about updates before publication)
LIVE THE POETRY
Thanks.
Questions?
@JacopoOttaviani
Brainstorm!
5 minutes to list all useful tools to manage:
- your team
- your data
- your files, videos, cuts, translations
- your budget
Project management, tips and tricks for new grantees
By jottaviani
Project management, tips and tricks for new grantees
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