How to review source tagging progress

A review of your newsroom's source audit can help you determine if the Source Matters strategy you’ve devised is working as intended, and, if not, to spark conversations about what support is needed to complete the audit.

As your newsroom conducts its source audit, Source Matters allows you to see how well your newsroom is progressing in terms of tagging your sources.

An occasional review of this progress can help you determine if the strategy you’ve devised is working as you hoped, and, if not, to spark some newsroom conversations about what additional support is needed.

Source tagging tip: Create a script for reporters and editors to use when explaining to sources why you’re collecting this information, for example: how it fits into broader work within the newsroom to improve your coverage of your community. This can help both reporters, and sources, have these important conversations. Ask us for examples!

But first, how to find that progress chart. 

When you open Source Matters, click on the person icon to the right of your newsroom name, and on the drop-down menus, click “settings”.

This will open a page where you’ll find ways to update and adjust a variety of settings. You want to look for the box titled “Source Auditing,” which should be on the lower left-hand side of your screen. In that box click the “Review source tagging completion” link. (see image below)

That will open a new window where you will see two charts. One is “Tagging completion by collection period” which aggregates how many sources have been collected and tagged in each of your source auditing periods. If you only have one, ongoing collection period, then it will be just one line in the collection.

The next chart—”Tagging completion by user”—provides a snapshot of how far along each user is in completing their source tagging. There is a little bar that includes a percentage of completion and the bar is color-coded green, yellow, and red to correspond with how well things are going. Green means that the user has completed a majority of the source audit, a yellow indicates that they’re making good progress, but still has room for improvement. A red bar indicates that a user may be struggling to get the time to complete the source audit. Or, depending on the source audit period may have not yet started.

Low completion scores should give editors and reporters a chance to review the source development and tagging process from start to finish to be sure that reporters have the necessary time, support and tools to tag sources. (Side note: A source’s tagging is not considered complete unless all categories are filled out.)

Source tagging tips: If completion scores are low, take time to ask your team what challenges they’re having. Maybe you need to update your script (see above). Maybe you need to build time into the workweek so a reporting team or desk takes time together to update their sources as a group, or paired up with a “buddy.” Or, maybe build in more time during story development, when possible, to give adequate time for thoughtful source development and building relationships with new sources.

Building time into the story development and post-publication process to identify and then tag sources is essential to creating robust and accurate data for your source audit - and to learn from what you collect.

What the progress markers mean on Tag Sources page:

There is a space to the left of each source on this page that displays one of the following based on the source’s status.