notonthewires
Not on the Wires, a new digital reporting social enterprise, is on the brink of launch, its co-founder Alex Wood told a group of journalists last night.

Speaking at the first official UK Future of News Group meet-up held at the London School of Economics, Wood, a former City University London student, explained how an online and mobile reporting project to cover the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall had now grown into a bigger experiment.

"You need a brand to put things together. We can't use the Berlin Project forever," Wood told Journalism.co.uk.

The new co-operative not-for-profit 'events-based reporting' project had grown out of the realisation that the team - Sheena Rossiter, Dominique van Heerden, Marco Woldt and Marcus Gilroy-Ware - could achieve more together than if they worked separately as freelancers, he said.
 
While the members have other work on the go - two are based at CNN for example - they will slot these projects alongside. The group is currently working with the BBC College of Journalism.


Wood is open to commercial, as well as journalistic, commissions, he told Journalism.co.uk. The Berlin Project, which was supported by Reuters from the beginning, had shown them "you had to act like a business," he said.

The Berlin Project followed an earlier G20 protest reporting experiment which had received over 75,000 hits on its site. Using skills developed then, the team concentrated on gathering video and audio material and communicating events in Germany that the traditional media neglected. They decided to "play with the way people enjoy their media," Wood said last night.

notwFor reporting Berlin, the group received tips via Twitter from members of the Reuters team in London, who acted like a 'mini-editor,' Wood said. The biggest success story, Wood added, was the length of time people spent on the site - probably due to the way it was designed, with related content easily accessible. In Germany, the average time spent on the site was 9.5 minutes. Globally, the average stay time was 5 minutes.

Innovations included building a plug-in for the site which allowed them to automatically publish Qik videos to blog posts. Another plug-in, due to be released publicly soon, allowed them to create related content thumbnail links on the site.

A free digital storytelling event, in conjunction with the UK Future of News group, is planned for March or April 2010. More details about Not on the Wires can be found by registering on the site, and the team can be found on Twitter here: @notonthewires.

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