SEAMUSCONDRON

Don't you love it when a favorite movie gets the royal treatment on DVD? From director commentary to the earliest production art, many of us are suckers for that bonus material that accompanies the cinematic art we love. The most popular perhaps is "the making of" content. I can't tell you how many times I've watched "the making of" everything from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (yes I'm an vintage Spielberg junkie).

I got to thinking. Do we have "the making of" feature in journalism? As many try to figure out the future of the news model, some more productively than others, I find myself asking: Why can't journalism be more like the special edition DVD?

Today, Evernote, a service I don't use nearly enough, despite singing its praises to everyone I know, rolled out a new feature. If you're unfamiliar with Evernote, here's a quick summary: the service lets you to capture information (image, text, audio, & video notes, web clippings, and more) into "notebooks." You can perform these capturing tasks through a web interface, a Mac or PC app, or the immensely popular iPhone app. Captured information syncs across all platforms to the "notebook" of your choosing. Evernote likes referring to their service as your "second brain." For journalists, it can be a godsend, especially if you're one of those types who has a million post-it notes and cocktail napkins with relevant story information strewn across your desk. Whatever your mental spillage, Evernote can handle it all beautifully.

As of today, you can now share your Evernote notebooks with individuals, or with everyone. If you have a premium subscription to Evernote ($45 per year), you can also add collaborators to your notebook. And that's where magic can happen. Future of journalism type magic.

What do I mean, exactly?

Recently, it was suggested that if the technologies powering the crowdsourcing and citizen media surrounding the Iran election had been available in the 70s, Watergate would have been busted wide open not by Woodward and Bernstein, but by the "the crowd." While that may seem implausible to some, consider this: what if the Washington Post's dynamic duo could have shared every scribbled hypothesis, audio conversation, and hunch in a central online hub as their investigation progressed? What if the public was continually updated with information about everything relating to Watergate via this central "notebook"? The end result would have been the same (so long tricky Dick), but the path leading there would have been dramatically different. The Watergate scandal is a dramatic example, but as community continues to immerses itself in the principles of digital journalism, and as the search for a viable business model continues, context, collaboration, and back story will become just as important as the inches after the headline. And they're elements that, if meaningful, will compel an audience to open their wallets.

I use Evernote as an example because it's a platform that has tremendous possibilities for collaborative journalism, and for helping to usher in a new level of transparency in reporting. While I don't think Steve Brill or anyone can make us all do a 180 and pay for "aged news," I do think people will pay for the bonus material. And just like on a special edition DVD, people love to know how a great story comes together.

Services such as Evernote have the potential to become the storyboards of journalism. A possible future Evernote feature that could make that happen would be the ability to turn a notebook into a more produced piece of content, such as a slideshow. I think of the New York Times' LENS blog, a wonderful example of multimedia journalism, and I think how that same model can be applied to the materials that give birth to a journalist's killer feature. Because I believe that in journalism's digital future, context will be a killer app.

Journalist Challenge: The next feature you write, use Evernote to capture all your notes, whether they be in written, audio, video, or image form. Make your notebook available to your readers an accompaniment to your story.

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