Bill W:
Chad G:
#19 of 21 in a series: Building SOAPSzone
Story Idea #111 – Setting Up the Virtual Backroom: How SOAPSzone Evolved Its Google Drive Workflow
A newsroom with hundreds of ideas can become useless very quickly if nobody can find anything.
SOAPSzone’s virtual backroom is therefore becoming almost as important as the public website.
Google Drive began as a place to store files. It has evolved into a working editorial system: Stories for background documents, Research for deeper source collections, Photos for story images, Articles for public drafts, plus folders for the app, publication material, cartoons, music and other parts of the project.
The Story Ideas worksheet became the spine. Each idea receives a permanent ID that stays with it as the title changes or the story develops. That ID can connect the worksheet row to photographs, Info Documents and eventual articles.
Then another problem appeared: source documents often contain useful development history mixed with private details or backstage conversation. The solution was to preserve the originals while creating separate public-facing scrubbed copies. The worksheet records which stories have been scrubbed and which source documents belong to them.
The workflow has already changed several times as the project grew. That is exactly what this article will document. Organization should serve the work rather than becoming a hobby that prevents the work.
There is a useful tension here. A system needs enough structure that 100-plus stories remain auditable, but not so much structure that every new idea requires filling out a small government application.
The virtual backroom is where that balance gets tested.
Readers normally see the finished newsroom product. This series will show some of the filing cabinets too—except ours happen to be in the cloud and occasionally need their own investigation.
