Questions for Modern Reporters/Publishers to Consider

  • What is the story about/communicating & who is the core audience?
  • Will it really ‘wow’ our users and keep them coming back to see what we’re up to?
  • Is it entertaining or something that you’d forward to a friend, post to Digg or show to your mom? (Those are all very different types of projects.)
  • Will it teach us a new technical skill we can use in the future?
  • Is this an experience/technical/logistical issue/idea that *really needs* to be told with multimedia? (Like how cold fusion works.)
  • Will the project or pieces of it be a reusable template or reworkable for future projects?
  • Is it a story or issue that people really want to talk about? (Are there other social media aspects we could use to enhance it?)
  • Is it toasted ravioli? (A unique experience or important to our specific local audience?)
  • Does this project have a decent shelf-life or ‘evergreen’ content?
  • Does this story demand it be blown out/told with multimedia because of the journalistic/social/legal importance to our society? (Free to flee kinda had this going for it)
  • Does it already have a substantial, passionate audience that would love this kind of feature? (For instance, a photo gallery of the Midnight Ride was crazy popular.)
  • Will it generate substantial page views?  (What’s “substantial” though?)
  • Uh… Is it advertising friendly?
  • What is the degree of difficulty/time it would take to execute the appropriate and how does that relate to our best guess on a)shelf life, b)interest for our audience (which can be measured in various ways) or b) importance to our society  pr community.