Apply HN: Coporter – Secure and searchable contact management for journalists | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: Coporter – Secure and searchable contact management for journalists

6 pointskristoforlawson7 comments

Coporter is a contact and story management application that allows journalists and content makers to keep track of their sources, notes, and media securely in the cloud. Think of it like a CRM combined with Evernote, but designed around the needs of reporters and newsrooms.

In many newsrooms there is increasing pressure on journalists to cover more stories with less resources, but Coporter will make that burden easier. Journalists will be able to store details on sources, notes on conversations they've had, quotes from people they've talked with, links to previous stories they’ve featured in, and even upload photos or video. All of the story data will be searchable and available securely through web or mobile devices. When a journalist wants to find information on a person they spoke with a year or two ago they will have all the information available to them in an instant.

Coporter would be available as a free product, but with reduced features. Users will pay to unlock extra features (e.g more storage).

I'll target the product at individual users but I'd like to also create an enterprise version that can be sold to media companies and integrated into their publishing workflows. In this version, journalists will be able to work together with other reporters to collect and assemble stories, and share information securely with their co-workers.

Why build Coporter? - I'm a digital producer and journalist with experience working in newsrooms across Australia and I've noticed a need for a tool to help with the reporting process. Whilst there are some tools to help find stories on social media or to help you publish content - there aren't any useful tools to help with the day-to-day content gathering process.

Coporter is a tool that I desperately need to do my job, one that would make my work more efficient, and one that other reporters have told me they also need.

YCF would allow me to spend time building Coporter and making this a reality.

A couple of thoughts:

My concern is that a monetization strategy where the paid tier is for commodity services like "more storage" directs the project toward building a monolithic silo. From where I sit on the internet, this looks counter to the trends of business software in general and the direction of journalism in particular.

One successful strategy for free software companies might be applicable here. A basic product that does everything at small scale and then building paid enterprise features on top of it. For example dashboards that only make sense at scale.

I'm not pushing this as free software, but by analogy I see an opportunity to have a free tool that works for an individual reporter and paid tools that work and only make sense for a news room.

On the other hand, I think there might be merit in considering a free or open source model for the software because another trend I see in journalism is software eating the delivery. Big news institutions are tech companies [Yesterday I noticed The Guardian recruiting developers via browser debug screen] and independent journalists are often managing blog software.

The other trend I see in journalism is the rise of data analysis. Again this is tech and software and the winner is likely to be integration of open source tools rather than monolithic silos.

Anyway, very interesting. Good luck.

Thanks for your thoughts! It's a really interesting observation you make regarding the paid tier and rise of data analysis.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what would be the right way to go with monetisation and I'm still refining that aspect of the idea. In many ways I won't know the right strategy until I launch and iterate, but my initial thought was to limit the software by number of contacts someone would upload or security features. However after receiving some feedback from other reporters I decided to give all that functionality by default and just restrict based on storage space, or extra search functionality etc.

But I actually really like your idea of making the paid features the enterprise ones. This could very well be the direction I head in as it definitely makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of money in enterprise apps for newsrooms and it's probably easier to do this as a paid tier option rather than going B2B - that way it's more accessible to the people who make day-to-day decisions.

A couple of additional thoughts about storage.

1. This seems like a headache for both journalists centering around confidentiality and for a SaaS platform centering around being a target for attack and potentially breaching confidential information. In the journalism the adversaries can be state level actors and the level of expertise required to hold them off is expensive.

2. Holding data hostage isn't going to bring joy to users. Neither will security. It is always going to be taken for granted until something fails. And a company that stores a lot of data is a single point of failure.

4. Aesthetically or philosophically if you prefer, there's something to be said for a symmetry of openness to public scrutiny between the goals of journalism as the fourth estate and an open source software.

5. Maybe there is an analog in Git (store data where ever is convenient) and Github a business based on commercial service on top of a free technology.

6. The growth model of infiltrating at the level of individual choice eventually making management spend money is how Apple entered enterprise [journalism being an exception at least in the US where Apple was already common].

Anyway, having fun thinking about it. I really like the idea. There's a lot of space between Wikileaks and enterprise software.

Thanks! I really appreciate your questions and insight.

Definitely the biggest issue is security and confidentiality. Everything will need to be encrypted from day 1 - just in case it does become the target of an attack. I also need to include additional security measures to allow for anonymous or confidential contacts.

I also love your git analogy and is definitely giving me something to think about.

I'm worried about a disconnect with the actual workflows of journalists. In my very limited exposure to journalists, they take notes in a journal and probably make digital voice recordings. Is this still true? If so, how will you convince someone to input notes into your app?

I can see some value in organizing research, but how would you help me do this better than I can with say, evernote, or pinboard?

You're absolutely right and there's particular reasons journalists work like that. One reason being security, and the other being there's currently no better way to take notes or store story data. Also those notes aren't searchable if I need to access them at a moments notice.

I'm not saying that a reporter won't use a notebook - but reporters have to keep these notes for years and over the course of a career you might go through boxes and boxes of notepads. And what happens if your editor asks you to call someone you did a story on 4 or 10 years ago? Those notes could be stored in a box at home so may not be easy to access. They also are your security if someone sues you or your company and could be used as evidence so you have to store your notes somewhere. And if you're someone who takes voice recordings, where do you store these securely? And what do you do if you have a mixture of written notes and recordings on someone?

I've also spoken with many reporters who store their contacts on their iPhone... but then never back those contacts up. If they lose their phone they lose all that information. I worked in one newsroom where many people stored their contacts in a word document, and in another newsroom they were stored in this archaic television broadcast software not designed for the purpose. It's just a really inefficient and insecure way to work.

Evernote is great - I love it as a product. But it's not designed around the way reporters work or the type of information we collect. That's why I see the value in a new product.

The main thing I need to do is convince reporters of the value in having that information stored in Coporter, and if I can get digital staff using it then they will encourage other reporters to use it.

It seems like there are two separate interests: long term storage and quick retrieval. The first requires a very high standard of care in regard to reliability [I'd bet disks go bad and companies go out of business more frequently than reporters who care about such things lose a file box full of notepads]. It feels like hardware.

The second seems an expectation of technological progress problem. Maybe it is software over the hardware of the first problem.

Rather than convince people to switch from what mostly works to the unknown, make the mostly what works work a little more often. There's a regression test there.

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