One of the critical tools that I keep thinking about is the editor. No matter what you have to write, you will need a tool for writing it. While there are many different editors available, it seems innovation in this field is all going in the same direction.
The one thing I always miss from my editors is proper integration with my research process. One of the critical projects of Prototyping Pulitzer will be to develop an editor that will change how we write and research.
Enabling Research
There is no way we will create the perfect editor today but let us have a first look at how it could look.
Research should enable your writing, but often it creates a barrier that considerably slows down the act of writing. That’s why I want to investigate automating areas of research while writing.
The idea is to have an automatic news lookup based on who you are writing about. On the left side, there is a text editor, and on the right side, research will appear as you type.
When the editor notices a person of interest, in this case, Donald Trump, it will call the News API for the last few days of articles mentioning him.
First Pass at a Prototype
First of all, I need a basic WYSIWYG editor. I have picked Froala since they provide a clean and fully featured editor that is open source and extensible.
Then I need to figure out the logic. For now, I settled on the following:
I will store a list of relevant people (politicians for now).
Whenever I type it will check in the background for any mentions of the relevant people
If someone is mentioned, it will fetch a list from News API in the background
Once delivered, it will insert it in the right side of the document.
It will then add the relevant person to a list of “already researched” people to avoid getting the same data again and again.
After 30 minutes of hacking, I got the final result. It works surprisingly well, and I think I might explore more integrations like this going forward.