Scott Klein is Editor of News Applications at ProPublica, the New York-based non-profit organization dedicated to investigative journalism. He tells WAN-IFRA how 'a whole new ocean of investigation has become possible' now new technology is available to journalists.

Klein heads a team of programmers and journalists who create new software that allows users not just to read stories, but to interact with them and find out how national trends are relevant to their daily lives. Projects range from The Opportunity Gap, a database where users can compare how well states provide richer and poorer schools with the same access to advanced classes, to Dollars for Docs, a programme that readers can use to find whether their own doctor has been paid money by drug companies.

Klein will be speaking at the 18th World Editors Forum, from 12th - 15th October in Vienna, about how news organizations can look beyond traditional forms to create more interactive methods of story-telling.

WAN-IFRA: What are the most important things to bear in mind when designing a news application?

Last week, the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released a set of data documenting student access to advanced classes and special programs in public high schools. ProPublica used that data for some traditional news analysis but also went beyond that. Nieman Journalism Lab reported on the non-profit news outlet's data journalism project, which incorporates and encourages sharing the data in social media.

"The Opportunity Gap," ProPublica's online story package, is based on OCR data that covers 85,000 schools and about 75 percent of public high school students in the US. In other words, the amount of data is enormous, but ProPublica's app makes it easy for users to access and cross-compare data from different schools. Its news app team designed the app to encourage public participation by including tools for sharing data on Facebook. It even made it possible to generate individual URLs, making sharing and linking to the data even easier.

ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism source, has launched a new tool allowing users to share good investigative stories online.

The feature, #MuckReads, is on ProPublica's website and its content is generated by recommendations on Twitter. The feature takes advantage of Twitter's capacity to share links quickly and accompany tweets with a hashtag to allow other users to track the topic.

#MuckReads is dependent on user participation, and ProPublica eventually hopes to turn users' aggregation of stories into an ongoing newsroom resource. The heavy reliance on Twitter is part of a larger trend of editorial work being opened to the public using social media. LongReads, a site that links readers to long articles, also relies on an aggregation of user content. The homepage features two lists: "our picks", articles chosen by the editorial staff, and "community picks", consisted of articles tweeted by users. Users can see how many times their story was retweeted.

Nonprofit news organisations seem to be gaining traction in the news industry. For anyone interested in the nonprofit model, The Texas Tribune, launched at the end of 2009, is one of the most interesting outlets to follow. Evan Smith, the editor-in-chief of the site, spoke recently to Business Insider about the organisation and its experience with the not-for-profit news model.

The site has seen a healthy flow of visitors since its inception - it exceeded its expectations in six months - and last Wednesday it set a daily record of 60,000 unique visitors. But traffic is one thing; sustainability is a harder nut to crack. The Texas Tribune has raised over $9 million and has also other revenue streams. This gave reason for Smith to believe that the nonprofit model could provide a sustainable future: "I'm ever more confident every single day."

It seems that steady funding is, at least partly, a consequence of quality content: The Texas Tribune has already won journalism awards and has a content partnership with the New York Times.