MediaShift Idea Lab

MediaBugs Aims to Fix Errors, Rebuild Public Trust in Media

Scott Rosenberg — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:32:18 -0500

As a student journalist working for my high school and college newspapers, I learned basic reporting from a strict rulebook. I can still recall my truculent resentment at one particular rule: why did we have to include the middle initial whenever we mentioned somebody's name? What a pain to have to ask for it each time! What an invitation to introduce a trivial error!

On one level, of course, the middle-initial rule was, even then, a pretentious holdover from a bygone era of compulsivity, and today those lonesome capital letters are less and less commonly seen in print and on the web. But there was a sensible rationale for the practice -- one that's worth remembering today, at a moment when the public's faith in journalists' ability to get simple facts right has tested new lows.

When I'd complain about the bothersome middle-initial requirement, this is, roughly, the lecture I'd hear from my editors:

"If you have to ask your sources for their middle initials, you'll also end up double-checking the spelling of their names. That's good. And when readers see that you've taken the trouble to put that little detail in, and get it right, they'll figure that you've been equally conscientious about all the other facts in your story. That's even better."

In other words: the middle initial didn't matter much in itself; it was a pledge to the world that you were willing to sweat the small stuff -- and therefore that you could be trusted.

Little Faith in Media

I was thinking about those middle initials as I read the dismal findings of the most recent Pew Research Center survey of Americans' attitudes toward the news media. It seems that our collective faith in the simple competence of news professionals is at its lowest level since the Pew folks began tracking these numbers 25 years ago.

"Just 29 percent of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight," Pew finds, "while 63 percent say that news stories are often inaccurate." And only 21 percent of respondents said they think news organizations are "willing to admit their mistakes."

Michael Kinsley has maintained that public dissatisfaction with the media stems more from ideological fervor than from discontent with "trivial" errors of fact. But I think Kinsley is too quick to discount the cumulative impact of the vast number of small mistakes that go uncorrected every day in the media. The correct spelling of any particular name, or the inclusion of an accurate middle initial, may be a "trivial" matter -- but what if it's your name or initial?

Journalists ought to stop making excuses and pay attention to what the public is actually saying, rather than what they want to hear. This isn't about red state/blue state partisanship or the imperiled newspaper revenue model, or any other excuse that journalists might try to summon in their own defense. It's about the very survival of the news profession.

At a time when the traditional business of media is embattled and the Internet is upending old patterns of creation and distribution, journalists have staked their future on a promise of professionalism and reliability. "We're more trustworthy than any random person with a cell phone or a blog," they're saying. Meanwhile, though, the public is saying to the newsroom, "Sorry, we don't buy that. We don't trust you to get things right."

That's quite a disconnect. And I don't think it will be fixed by more rhetoric and debate. If journalists are to win back the public's trust, we need something a little humbler: a more open and effective process for correcting mistakes, however trivial -- one in which journalists can expect to hear about their goofs in a civil fashion, and the public can expect to see results once they point out a problem.

That's what we have in mind as we begin the work of building MediaBugs, an experimental public forum for the reporting and repairing of errors in news coverage. There's still a ton for us to learn, and I'll be writing here, as well as at the MediaBugs blog, about our findings.

While we won't ask participants to use their middle initials, we will, I hope, share some of the passion for detail and accuracy that drove that venerable custom.

Spot.Us Expands to L.A. with USC Annenberg

David Cohn — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:10:10 -0500

First: The big news.

Spot.Us is expanding to Los Angeles and we are doing so with USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Needless to say, we are very excited about the opportunities and possibilities. The main Spot.Us homepage will aggregate pitches from both the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles regions. You can go to Subdomains to find pitches specific to those regions: la.spot.us and sfbay.spot.us.

As many know, I grew up in Los Angeles (Hamilton High School anyone?) so this is a bit of a home coming for me. I will remain up north running the Bay Area Spot.Us - but will be working closely with folks in Los Angeles building up our SoCal presence.

What Does This Mean?

We will continue to move forward. If the Los Angeles launch goes smooth there is no reason we couldn't expand to another city soon. This can be done in partnership with another organization (media company, university, etc) or just by Spot.Us itself.

It has been 10-months since Spot.Us officially launched with support from the Knight Foundation (who remain fantastic supporters). There have been a few highlights in the Spot.Us world.

I first announced that I was working on Spot.Us (winning a Knight News Challenge my advice on that here) . The site launched five months later.
Six month "state of the spot" after our official launch - including a list of some thing's we'd been up to
Spot.Us starts to build a strategic business plan (as a community). - We will have another one of these open brainstorm meetings soon!

We have been observing and learning along the way. Without a doubt the concept holds. In fact, we've been joined now by other community funded reporting sites (Global For Me, PayyAttention, KickStarter, ReelChanges and others). But only Spot.Us focuses on local, long form reporting. To my knowledge we are also the only one that is situated to work with multiple news organizations at a time to collaborate publicly with citizens or each other.

As such - that is what you can expect more of from Spot.Us: Focusing on our strengths, providing services to news organizations that want to participate, creating a new marketplace for freelancers to sell their work to the public or organizations and for community members to take control and set the news agenda themselves.

Agile and Iterative Development Begins Again

Long time Spot.Us community members will know I am a big believer in agile and iterative development.

Unfortunately - we've strayed from this mission for the last 4-6 months. But it isn't for lack of want - more like lack of funds ;)

I am happy to announce that we have new developers at Spot.Us who will be working closely with me to take the site to its full 2.0 vision. I want to thank Hashrocket for the development on the site so far. They are, hands down, a FANTASTIC shop to work with. I would recommend them to anyone looking for Ruby on Rails work in a heartbeat and I hope to work with them again soon. I consider them not just colleagues but friends.

But for the immediate future I am excited to be working with two developers (they'll be introduced soon) who will work on the day-to-day of the site, getting it in a position for what we need to do.

What We Need To Do

SO MUCH!

There is a list of site development needs (feel free to add, please don't delete). This includes some redesign and some needed features.
There are incredibly ambitious projects to support - pick your favorite. Donating just $10 can make a HUGE difference.
Define what Spot.Us is and what Spot.Us isn't: a higher level conversation that we will be having with advisors and the community.
Figuring out the three sided market: Community members, reporters and news organizations. We are a service organization for all three. But three sided markets are tough to pin down. I am convinced it can be done.

Personal Thought and Rant

Along with the press release I get to write this blog post and it would be a missed opportunity not to reflect on the last 1.5 years of my life and the last 10 months since Spot.Us officially launched. I am more dedicated than ever towards the concept of "community funded reporting" and Spot.Us as a tool to accomplish that. I do believe it will be a part of journalism's future no matter what name we call it.

But I have also come to realize that there is no silver bullet. Journalism needs multiple revenue streams. That is also why I believe "content is King, collaboration is Queen." It isn't an either/or scenario with citizen journalism and I've spent hours upon hours thinking about what these terms all mean. In the attempt to zen out on all this I've learned from many people. I want to thank them all and I want to thank everyone that has been a positive influence on me and Spot.Us so far. In truth Spot.Us belongs to everyone that participates in it. So if you think we are doing okay - give yourself a pat on the back. You are making it happen, I'm just a conduit.

For News Organizations, Transparency is the New Objectivity

David Cohn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:40:04 -0500

Back in the spring, I made an analogy about journalism being a game of chess. On the chess board of journalism, content is King (the most important piece) but collaboration is Queen (the most powerful piece).

To extend the analogy further: transparency is the board itself.

Unfortunately, freelancing is a horribly antiquated system. It works behind closed doors. Independent freelancers are left out in the cold and have to build personal relationships with editors to get any paid work.

These relationships are always one-to-one. This make it an outdated model. It made perfect sense 30 years ago, but now it needs to be re-thought. That will only happen when the process of journalism, including the business processes of news organizations comes out from under its cloak.

It was in conversations with Steve Katz that I realized one of the breakthroughs of Spot.Us is that we help make the process of journalism transparent.

Traditionally, news organizations are transparent with their finished work. "Extra, extra, read all about it."

That is necessary but in my opinion it is no longer sufficient.

If transparency is the new objectivity -- more than our finished product must be revealed.

In a discussion with another editor last week I realized another transparency boundary Spot.Us is pushing on organizations that collaborate with us: We force them to be transparent about where they spend their money with freelancers.

Freelancing is outdated

Thirty years ago, I would probably snail mail my pitches to editors with a self-addressed envelope inside so editors could write me back. Today the Internet allows freelancers to email pitches. But that seems to be the ONLY evolution in the process. Our communication in the process of procuring work, writing stories and editing stories is faster, but fundamentally happens in one-to-one relationships. The public never sees this. Nor do they see the pain of waiting -- which was the topic of one of my earliest blog posts from 2005 -- for responses, edits, or checks.

Here's what I wrote last week to the editor: "To work with Spot.Us you have to be transparent about where you would spend your freelance budget. Every organization that works with Spot.Us is transparent about where they are putting their dollars or at least where they are putting their editorial efforts."

The editor responded that it would be scary to make an editor's freelance budget so public.

That's exactly the point!

We are supposed to shine a light on other industries, public and private. How can we be expected to be a public beacon if we ourselves hide behind a veil of secrecy?

Some valid counterpoints

As always, I want to push boundaries but recognize that some aren't going to go anywhere. A few reasons why.

The process of journalism (editing, re-writing, etc.) is boring. We can make it transparent for the nerds who are interested, but let's not scare our audience off. Also: If you are investigating the mafia you don't need to title that in your Spot.Us pitch (I'm not THAT young and naive).
It takes energy to be transparent. Just because an organization isn't transparent doesn't mean they are nefarious -- it simply means there's 2,134,241 other things that they're focused on instead of this issue.
You tell me!

I recognize I come at this from one extreme. I believe transparency is the new objectivity and that news organizations are hurting in part because as large institutions they are ill-equipped to be transparent. Here's how they are ill-equipped:

They are ill-equipped to be transparent in their personalities: It's okay to have a voice. Personally, I'm sick of the traditional news voice. But it's the only one they have.
They are ill-equipped to be transparent in their editorial processes. Distributed reporting is an emerging art and large news organizations have yet to master it. (For some good examples of distributed reporting, see NewAssignment.Net, OffTheBus.Net, ProPublica's efforts and this Nieman Journalism article.)
They are ill-equipped to be transparent in their business processes. Distributed funding is also an emerging field. (See Spot.Us, ReelChanges.org, Global For Me.)
They are ill-equipped to be transparent in their day-to-day operations: It's a dream of mine -- a newsroom cafe.

As always: I say this not to be an "anti-old media" person. That's not what I'm about. I bring it up in an effort to point to areas where I see room (and need) for improvement.

Look Beyond Data When Considering New Models for News

Chris O’Brien — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:11:34 -0500

My post last month -- Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content -- generated some thoughtful discussion and comments. But there was one thread that I want to highlight in order to elaborate on an important concept for news innovators.

Before I dive into the details of the conversation, let me summarize my overall point. When it comes to understanding behavior, there are two general strategies. The first is to gather as much data as possible. And in this Google-driven, engineering-led era of product thinking, this tends to be the dominant approach.

The Anecdotal And Observational Approach

But numbers and data can often obscure the important lessons of the way people behave. And that's why I advocate for the second approach, which is anecdotal and observational. It tends to be overlooked or even dismissed. In the work I've done over the past two years, I've found this approach to be far more helpful in thinking about the opportunities for reinventing news and information.

My thinking on this topic has grown in part out of a conversation that started on Twitter between myself, Steve Buttry, the C3 Coach at Gazette Communications, and Tim O'Brien, the editor of the New York Times Sunday business section. Steve cited my post to support an argument and Tim replied that my post didn't prove anything because my analysis was too subjective. He wanted data to support it.

That's an oversimplification, of course. The series of tweets led to Steve blogging a response here. In the comments, Tim felt his point was misrepresented and explained himself further:

But to extrapolate from Fine's data to say, as Chris does, and as InfoWeek does, that it shows that newspapers didn't understand what their readers were paying for is ridiculous. I asked for any empirical data, reader surveys, etc., that outline why readers buy certain papers so we could look at that issue in a less subjective way, not one driven by Chris or InfoWeek's assumptions. And once we have more of that, then maybe I'll be proven wrong.

My response is in the comments here. But, again, my message to people designing new services is that there's another way to think about the problems that need solved.

So, with that in mind, below are some key excerpts from what I wrote. I look forward to continuing this conversation.

Why Data Alone Can't Solve Our Problems

In trying to think differently about how to deal with the ongoing news business crisis, over the past two years I've taken an approach that is intentionally anecdotal and subjective. I simply don't believe that any amount of data is going to solve this industry's problems. As I've worked on various newsroom reinvention and research projects over the past two years, I've come around to believe that the quantitative approach -- putting our trust in massive reader surveys, polling data, whatever -- has failed us.

Instead, I'm convinced that we need to take a qualitative approach to understanding the behavior, patterns and needs of our communities when it comes to news and information...

Why? Without listing every single study undertaken and tallying all the money spent, I think I can safely assert that over the past two decades, the news industry has spent millions of dollars accumulating data about readers and what they supposedly want. And our industry has responded by altering its products and newsrooms to produce the things that they thought the data told them that readers really wanted. Today, metro newspapers write shorter stories, with faster ledes, and publish more pictures about fluffier stuff. Our leaders have steadily used this data to make decisions that have made newspapers worse every year. Somehow, no one has stopped to consider that no industry has ever solved its problems by making its main product worse. Instead, management points to the data from readers' survey to insist they're doing what people say they want. The result is that we're worse off than ever.

If a data-driven approach was going to solve our problems, wouldn't it have done so by now? What exactly is the piece of data we're lacking to begin to address the business crisis the news industry is facing?

I don't believe there's a magic data set waiting to be assembled that will lead us to the big "Ah-ha!" I don't think we're one reader survey away from figuring it all out. We live in an era where people turn to data as a crutch, leaning on it to give themselves a false sense of certainty. The facts don't lie, right? Except we know that they do. A lot of such data is formed by the biases and frames through which the questions are formulated, asked, and then interpreted. The newspaper business has failed to recognize its own flawed frames. To this day, no matter what you hear from a newspaper executive, they still believe their primary purpose is to get people to read them in print. It's why newspapers still spend so much money propping up circulation by subsidizing a large number of people through persistent telemarketing.

My intention, in the original post, was to point out that within the newsroom, these questions have been asked, and continue to be interpreted, through an incorrect frame: The belief that the primary product customers paid for was journalism. It's not. I do think that in the newsroom, and in the management suites, many in our industry have failed to grasp the need to reinvent the business side. And even among the most experienced new executives, I think there is truly a failure to understand the dynamics of our business and our relationship to the community. While the functions in the newsroom have evolved (not as much as critics say they should, but still....), on the business side, there's been little attempt to do anything wildly different than what's been done before.

My perspective on the quantitative versus the qualitative approach to product design began to shift two years ago when I became a member of a task force for a project called "Rethinking The Mercury News." In the summer of 2007, our executive editor at the San Jose Mercury News charged us with zero-basing the newsroom and re-imagining all of our products and newsroom staffing as if we were just creating the company today. Rather than hunting down piles of research data, or commissioning yet another survey of readers, we decided to conduct the research phase using the "design thinking" process. Design thinking seeks to create empathy with the user of a product by using observation and interviewing to allow you to see the world through their eyes, not your own. The goal is to "re-frame" the issues or problems in the hope of pointing toward different opportunities or solutions.

For me, it's the anecdotes that provide better insight than the numbers...

The problem with a lot of data we've gathered is that you can't always be sure the people themselves know why they do what they do, or what they really want. Or whether you're even asking the right questions. During one of my Rethinking interview sessions, my team talked to a woman in her early 40s who spoke at length about how un-interested she was in technology and how she didn't feel like technology played a role in her life. As she was speaking, she kept taking out her BlackBerry and checking her email. Now, if I'd called her on the phone, and asked her about her interests, I would have checked her off as a woman not interested in technology. But in observing her, I could see that she was. Was she lying to me or was she ignorant? No and no. But she clearly thinks about that topic differently.

To take another example, let's look at young people and printed newspapers. If there is one piece of data that everyone seems to agree upon, it's that young people don't read printed newspapers, right? Its turns out that's totally false. Over the past two years, as part of the work I've been doing for the Knight Foundation (The Next Newsroom Project), I've been spending a lot of time visiting college newsrooms, which are far more conservative in their journalism culture and behind the new media curve than professional newsrooms. That was confounding to me for a long time. So what's going on? The response I heard from college media advisers and college newspapers editors has been fairly consistent: The staffs at college newspapers look around and see all their classmates reading the printed version of the college paper every day. When they get up in the morning, the newspaper bins are empty. If everyone is still reading the print version, why should they worry much about the Internet and all this new media stuff?

As I've considered what that means, I've tried this experiment a few times myself: Go into the student union and leave a few copies of the newspaper like the New York Times or the Mercury News on a table. They get scooped up pretty quick.

In fact, the generation that doesn't read print does read a lot of print. What the surveys have really been telling us is that this demographic won't pay to have the morning paper delivered every day. But when they encounter a printed product that's free, is compact, and fits the way they consume news and information, and yes, usually has the crossword and comics, then they'll consume it in large numbers. Do I think print is the future? It's a part of it, much bigger than most folks believe, I think. How does this square with all those surveys about the news habits of young adults? Those surveys are being commissioned by news executives who are really just trying to figure out how to get young people to pay for the newspaper. They thought they could do this by altering the content. But what they really needed to do was reinvent the product form (compact, free) to fit into these people's lives (lots of downtime on a pedestrian campus), and that's a step that's too radical to be considered by most newsrooms.

These are insights that I've gained not through studying the data, but through the subjective, anecdotal approach...In my view, the subjective approach is the strength, not the weakness of my analysis.

The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate

Ryan Sholin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:40:08 -0500

A few weeks ago, I spotted a link to something called deathpanels.org getting passed around Twitter, and quickly traced its origin to Matt Thompson, Knight Foundation interim online community manager and general champion of contextual journalism. (Note: deathpanels.org is an independent project of Matt's, and not affiliated with the Knight Foundation.)

Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time.

A few minutes after I looked at the site for the first time, I called up Matt to talk about the idea.

Listen to our conversation

The full transcript of our conversation

Ryan Sholin: This is Ryan Sholin and I'm here with Matt Thompson. Matt do you want to introduce yourself?

Matt Thompson: Sure, once again, Matt Thompson, I'm an online journalist, and the interim online community manager for the Knight Foundation.

RS: Cool, so I, within the last 10 minutes, saw a tweet about something called deathpanels.org, and it looked scary. But Matt and Howard Weaver were talking about it, and I know what both of them are interested in, so I clicked through and I was not disappointed. And I discovered, before I even got to the "about this site" link that explains that Matt was behind it, I fired up Terminal, did a quick whois, and I knew that it was Matt, but I could have just kept clicking and I would have found out. Matt, do you want to explain what deathpanels.org is and why you just put it up and what it's for?

MT: Sure, so deathpanels.org is an expose behind the disturbing details that underpin the current health reform process. And in truth, it's about the disturbing details of the U.S. healthcare system that make health reform necessary.

RS: So, when I open up this site, I get a big scary red thing with like a gothic tattoo sort of Death Panels and a skull behind it. This seems kind of sensational almost, like you're just trying to get me to click through to read the disturbing details.

MT: Right, well, it's targeted, when you come to the site, the whole kind of tongue-in-cheek goal is that you won't know that this is by someone who is very sympathetic to the cause of healthcare reform. But it is playing up the total, I mean the whole "death panels" element of it, the ludicrous "I will not have my grandmother paraded before a death panel" nature of the debate around healthcare right now. I want to play on that element of fear and panic and paranoia to get people to what I hope is actually a fairly sober and, well, friendly, accessible overview of the problems in the current system, what Congress is doing about them, and what are some other good resources to look at for finding our more information about health reform.

RS: So you mentioned more resources. As soon as I click on the disturbing details, and you kind of give it away in the URL because it's "/the-problem" so you're presenting an issue. And the first thing that I see is that there's a lot of links. Can you talk a little bit about why you did that and what that's for?

MT: Yes. Basically my whole goal in creating a site like this is to bring some context to the issue of healthcare reform.

It's difficult -- you'd be surprised that there are just not that many places on the Web that sum up the basic, "these are what the problems are," "these are what some of the proposals for fixing those problems"; that information, [is] sort of buried in a lot of different places around the Web. That said, there are a lot of places around the Web that are doing a great job of tackling tiny pieces of that larger question: what are the problems and how are we trying to fix them?

And so,when you come to this site, after you click on the disturbing details about health care reform, the first thing that you see is a page that sort of summarizes the three overarching basic problems of the U.S. healthcare system, with links to different sources. And these are sources that are in most cases as non-partisan as I can find -- think tanks, non-partisan institutions and what-have-you, that look at different aspects of the U.S. healthcare system and why it's so lame.

RS: And then the next page we get to is the proposals, right, this is how we're going to fix the problem, and it's flagged as "what Congress wants to do" about health care.

MT: Yes. This was a page, actually, when I started creating this Web site on Tuesday night [August 11, 2009], I thought that a lot of this, that I'd be able to find all this in a pretty digestible form, or maybe in a few different links, or I'd just be able to say, "here's the picture, go nuts." But I didn't find anything that sort of summed up the common proposals in a sort of human-accessible fashion. And so I ended up just doing that to the best of my ability: taking the main components of all the different pieces of health care legislation that are winding their way through Congress and summarizing them, with, again, supporting links to different sources, to the best sources that I could find, explaining what each proposal is, why it could help, and what some of the pros and cons might be.

RS: And you've got, especially, these three criteria: "Does it improve effectiveness, does it control cost, and does it increase access" and then some checkboxes below that. And it certainly makes it clear that there seems to be one choice out there that does all three of those things.

MT: Right, and this is sort of an info design thing that might be a little misleading in fact. These different proposals, even if one gets at all three goals of health reform -- improving effectiveness, bringing costs under control, bringing coverage to more Americans -- it may not even be the most important piece of the puzzle. Each of them is important, and each of those three aspects is important, and some of them that just focus on one aspect are as important as the others, but you'll notice that those three things, the three elements -- effectiveness, cost control, more access -- are the same things that I identify in the "problems" page as being the overarching problems with the system. It's ineffective, it's leaving America bankrupt, and it leaves many Americans out altogether.

RS: So in a lot of ways here, you're using the "Death Panels" meme, if you will, to kind of turn it around on the people that are saying a lot of things without any information, and you're providing the information to back up what you think is the right frame for the discussion that we should be having in the media.

MT: Right.

RS: People are going to ask, is it activism or is it journalism?

MT: Yeah, absolutely, and I come out, one of the first things I say on the About page, is I'm a journalist. I identify myself as an online journalist, but I definitely have a perspective on this, which is that I am in favor of health reform, broadly.

RS: And I'm right there with you. So from a theoretical point, I'm sort of interested in [the question]: Does identifying ourselves as journalists, first, does that make it easier for the average person who comes across this site to then say "Oh, OK. I believe what he says, he's got a point of view, but I can tell this is journalistic."

MT: Yeah, it's really hard to say. And this is an area, especially, health reform, where it's difficult to draw that line, partially because the balance of evidence is weighted so heavily in one direction. It is really difficult to say that the U.S. has a good healthcare system, or the best healthcare system, among industrialized nations and provide any evidence to back up that claim.

So, you will notice, the Frontline producer, T.R. Reid, who's behind one of the big media efforts to grapple with the problems of the healthcare system, which is called "Sick Around the World" -- it's a Frontline documentary. T.R. Reid is actually a strong proponent of health reform, and his new book looks at healthcare systems in other countries and comes away with the conclusion that the U.S. should emulate these. So in a way, T.R. Reid, who's definitely a prominent, well-recognized journalist on the issue, is also an activist for this particular type of reform.

It is a tricky line, and I think, especially on a subject like this, [that] saying a lot of things that have a lot of evidence behind them and that you can say are sort of objectively true still sounds like you're stumping for a particular perspective.

RS: Right and it's not necessarily as clear-cut as "the earth is round; the earth is flat," but I'd like to believe for a majority of Americans [that] it's clearly something right, and so as journalists, the question is how do we maintain our skepticism? I'm not going to use the O word but [how do we] maintain our skepticism and yet come up with the right evidence to back up our claims? And I think that you've done that here, and stylishly. So thank you for taking a quick time-out to talk to me. I'm sure that you're refreshing Google Analytics a couple times. Obviously, I think this is a really fascinating piece of journalism, and I hope we'll be able to talk more about it soon.

MT: Hey, thanks for the interview Ryan, and to everyone who's listening. Check out deathpanels.org and spread the word.

How Citizen Journalists Can Learn from Work of 'Citizen Scientists'

Dan Schultz — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:43:08 -0500

Last week I visited Carnegie Mellon University's website for the first time as an alumnus. The front page, often dedicated to highlighting faculty work, had a picture of an iPhone screen displaying brightly colored data visualizations. I didn't have to look past the first two words of the title -- "Citizen Scientists" -- before I knew that it would be worth my time to keep reading.

The article described how Eric Paulos, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is equipping "everyday mobile devices" with sensors used to collect reliable scientific data. The point of all this effort is to create "a new generation of 'citizen scientists,' connected both to the environment and each other." Just in case that quote isn't clear enough: the study might as well have been funded by The Knight Foundation.

What's interesting about this project is that members of the scientific community, a professional group that arguably maintains higher standards for verification than journalism, are trying to harness the crowd in the same way that we are. In fact, they are actually going out of their way to do it. This demands an explanation!

But First, Outer Space

At the end of July, an amateur astronomer found a giant hole on Jupiter. Some people were surprised that the ocean-sized crater was discovered by a hobbyist instead of a professional. I, however, wasn't shocked. My reaction could be the result of a personal perception that astronomy is relatively accessible to "the common man." Or maybe it's because looking to the sky is such a primal thing to do. Either way, the subsequent media dialogue exposed me to several new spins on the "amateur vs. professional" debate.

A few days later, I saw a follow-up story on Digg about another amateur observation. This time someone found a bright spot on Venus. It was admittedly less interesting than the news from earlier in the week. I scanned the comments anyway and saw a highly rated one that asked, "Why is everything first discovered by amateur astronomers? What the heck are we paying the professional astronomers for?"

Using my recently gained knowledge of the issue, I replied and pointed out that professionals have bigger and better things to do; it doesn't make sense for a PhD to use a million-dollar telescope to look at something that a hobbyist could view using a thousand-dollar one, especially when there is so much of the universe left to unlock.

Once again, there seems to be a lesson here for journalism.

The Three Classes of Scientists

It's important to know where amateur and citizen scientists fit in relation to professional ones. Here's how I define these three broad classes of scientist:

Professional Scientists - These people make a living from science. They have the expertise, the patience, and the resources to handle the big stuff.

Amateur Scientists - Folks who tackle science as a hobby. They enjoy participating and have varied levels of knowledge. They also have the capacity to make direct contributions to the scientific community because they're exploring the same reality as everyone else (regardless of what quantum physicists and philosophers might say).

Citizen Scientists - These individuals are equipped to contribute to science when they are empowered by tools and networks. They aren't out conducting experiments or learning methods, but they are generally willing, with the help of professionals, to provide crowd power and reap the benefits of the resulting information.

Here's the interesting part: between the story of the amateur astronomers and the vision of Eric Paulos, all three types of scientist have beautifully compatible relationships.

Professionals can safely focus on daunting tasks, knowing that amateurs are ready and willing to take on the smaller stuff (like keeping tabs on Jupiter). The community standards are clear and ultimately bound by cold hard observable fact, so amateurs can make meaningful contributions without diluting the knowledge base. Meanwhile, citizens are being empowered by professionals to help the scientific cause in a way that informs individuals and improves their lives.

Takeaways for Journalism

Now it's time to take the leap back into the land of journalism. If you buy my claim that scientists and journalists all care about informational integrity and the quest for truth, then several things can be extrapolated:

If professional journalists take the lead by clearly defining expectations, explaining best practices, and implementing an accessible infrastructure, then amateurs can contribute without disrupting the industry.
If amateur journalists do a good job of covering a smaller scope of topics or areas (e.g. the hyperlocal), then professionals can focus on the deeper, otherwise inaccessible issues.
Professional journalists are responsible for creating and maintaining the citizen network if they want it to meet their standards.
Citizen networks need more than a host. In order to reach full potential, they need to be explicitly empowered through tools and guidance.
A symbiotic relationship between the professional, the amateur, and the crowd is not just possible, it's socially optimal.

And there we have it: If the journalism industry can create an infrastructure that allows amateurs to contribute reliable information, then professionals will be able to dedicate more resources to epic reporting. If local papers can find the capacity to set up and empower meaningful citizen networks, they will establish a major foothold in the evolving domains of community and information. Man, science is useful.

Now we just need to define the standards (and explain how to meet them), create that infrastructure, and set up those networks.

iPhone image via Carnegie Mellon University.

EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

Amanda Hickman — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:34:13 -0500

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question

Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service?

We at Gotham Gazette had been wondering just about the same thing, albeit for different reasons. We're working on our final Knight-funded game and the programmer we're working with thinks the GPL is too restrictive which got us wondering what it would look like to release source code according to the terms of our agreement with Knight but also allow our programmer (who's hardly getting rich off of this development project) to use the code under a different, less viral license.

And, James Vasile at Hacker Visions has an answer. It is a complex answer, and worth a read. Loosely? The holder of the copyright is not necessarily bound by the license a project was released under.

Two Recent J-Education Conferences Show Resistance to Change

Guy Berger — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:48:49 -0500

There's no intrinsic reason why organized journalism education shouldn't lead -- rather than merely reflect -- what's happening in the world of communications. Yet this passive "mirror" status cries out for transformation.

Of course, not everyone sees J-schools as reflective entities. For years, editors worldwide have complained that the schools don't in fact reflect the mainstream media enough. J-teachers are blamed for a shoddy supply of new cogs to the newsroom machines.

The industry's assumption has been that it knows exactly what's needed; that it's the J-schools that need changing. Educational institutions, in this view, should be service providers to the status quo, generating graduates who can do "the job."

In a nutshell, this perspective condemns J-schools as generally lagging behind; as falling short of what they are "supposed" to be doing. It's a model of J-education "manqué."

The other side of the coin is avant-garde J-teachers who regard the industry as endemically conservative, and whose innovative work qualifies graduates with a mindset that's out of synch with restrictive newsroom practice.

For industry, this is a model of J-teachers as irritants rather than disappointments. From the J-educator side, however, it's the industry that's the problem and in need of change.

These two polarized perspectives -- J-schools behind, or J-educators too far ahead -- do reflect some realities. But their appeal can conceal the systemic situation. This is that J-education has generally correlated, more-or-less, industry patterns in regard to a manifesting both a predominant conservatism and fragmentary pockets of innovation.

Two Education Conferences

So it was that two recent conventions about university-based programs exhibited this "mirror" status -- of mimicking the trends in broader society. In Boston, the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) consisted of those teachers resisting change (most delegates) and those embracing it (a minority). A sizeable constituency felt that "journalism is in major upheaval and journalism educators don't know exactly what to do about that."

In Accra, the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE) revived itself after ten years of inaction to draw its constituency into an academic conference. Here the mix was between the bulk of delegates interested in development communications, and a fringe focused on mass media and journalism.

Only a handful of AEJMC participants blogged and twittered their conference, and packed out appropriate sessions that generally squeezed into small venues. Yet, the predominant refrain at the event seemed to be one of J-teachers clinging to vanishing models and urging "back to basics." This despite the prize-winning entry to a conference competition by Jane Singer about the need for new kinds of graduates.

For example, titters of approval arose in response to one speaker criticizing the shortness of Twitter (140 characters). A lone voice (backed online by a few Twitter fans using the tag #aejmc) had to point out that the truncated format is an advantage for skimming, and that posts often include links to content of greater depth.

Impressionistically, the overall balance of views at AEJMC seemed to be widespread reluctance regarding change -- thereby echoing what seems to be the situation in the media industry. There was much nostalgia for the old certainties, and a display of defensive fears of the unknown future.

Alfred Hermida had the same sense, following the conference via the limited blogging. My own experience was that excitement at change was in short supply.

Former Washington Post multimedia editor Tom Kennedy earnestly urged AEJMC teachers to become change agents, but his appeal seemed puny against the inertia of two similarly cumbersome institutions: big media, and university academia. For now, the revolutionaries appear to be pretty marginal.

Barely Touching on New Media

In Accra, the ACCE barely touched on new media. Although there were a few research papers on Information and Communication Technologies, these mainly focused on the significance of these for health care and development purposes, rather than for journalism.

The dominant thrust at ACCE was that communications in Africa is much wider than journalism and the mass media, and that priority goes to word-of-mouth communications, culture and community radio. Only a minority of research papers dealt with mass media, journalism and democracy.

The bulk of participants also seemed to have little inkling about how cell phones are game changers for so much social life in Africa -- not least media and journalism. In all this, the ACCE event also seemed to duplicate much of the communications and media environment in Africa.

In summary, two conferences -- despite being continents apart -- both seemed to miss making a mark in terms of changing journalism education. That may not be very surprising, but it also doesn't have to be this way.

Fortunately, at both events, some attention was given to the forthcoming 2nd World Congress on Journalism Education (WJEC-2), scheduled for South Africa, 5-7 July, 2010. The theme of that gathering, based on a suggestion by this writer, is: "Journalism education in an age of radical change."

The character of this occasion will be a chance to focus energies on going beyond the nature of J-schools as we know them.

Experience of difference is a great stimulus for change -- in part, because looking at others helps you to see yourself in different ways. So, by mashing up a myriad of international experiences at WJEC-2, there's a prospect for imaginations to really break free, en masse.

Anyone out there agree that journalism education needs re-booting?

Postscript: Suzanne Yada (below) directed me to her blog and some good links too:

Her post: "Throwing social media in J-school curriculum isn't enough"

* Mark Hamilton's "Remaking Journalism Education: Some Thoughts"

* Vin Crosbie's "Anatomy of a 21st Century Media Executive" (Plus Joey Baker's Publish2 links.)

* Greg Lynch's posts on "Wanted: Resident Butt-Kicker (Thoughts on journalism education)" and "Rich Beckman discusses how to reshape journalism education"

The Leadership Vacuum in Journalism

David Cohn — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:00:21 -0500

Ideas are cheap; execution is everything. There are several factors that come into play to make the difference between a successful and a failed execution. One of those factors is leadership.

There are different kinds of leaders. Some lead from the front. (William Wallace comes to mind.) But, in war at least, we haven't had a general lead from the front since Alexander the Great. It simply drains a person too much to lead from the front, especially on a modern battlefield where too much is happening all at once.

Some lead like ants, working hard and getting others to follow in line. Others lead like owls, giving sage advice in a calm and zen-like manner. Still others lead like puppies, bringing an unparalleled enthusiasm to galvanize others into action.

So the question is: What types of leadership does journalism need now?

A generation ago, we needed people who could take small newspapers and turn them into thriving businesses, people who could lead because of their stature, cut-throat competitiveness, and business savvy. The journalism industry has different goals and needs now. Today, we need flexibility, innovation, community, collaboration and tech-savvy, to name a few things.

Which begs the question: Do we need new leaders? This isn't a question relating to specific people, but characteristic traits.

I have often used the chessboard as an analogy for the state of journalism: "Content is king, collaboration is queen, the board itself is transparency." But the game of chess needs a leader, somebody who can step back, look at the board and make decisions.

Just as a William Wallace-type general would be ineffective on a modern battlefield, could a William Randolph Hearst make it in today's journalism environment? What new characteristics would Hearst need to nurture? What would be outright foolish in today's culture? More importantly, is journalism suffering a brain drain? What new leaders are we losing to other industries?

I went to my Tweeple for some thoughts.

What do you think? Share your thoughts on the leadership needed in journalism in the comments below or by replying on Twitter to my tweet (which will then show up above).

How Fear, Brand Addiction and Paranoia Block Innovation

Dan Pacheco — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:50:23 -0500

I've been thinking a lot lately about organizational behavior and innovation, and how the former can hinder the latter. It comes to mind not because I like to dwell on the negative, but rather out of hope that understanding the root cause of problems can help us all avoid the mistakes of the past.

This is an important exercise because, as many of us were reminded in the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica" series, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." Or if you prefer the non-geeky version: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," as George Satayana said. If we can learn from what didn't work so well yesterday, perhaps we can collectively use that knowledge to help make things better tomorrow.

This is all the more important in the current economic climate, as even the smallest vulnerabilities of businesses are magnified -- sometimes fatally so. And just to be clear, while I work in newspapers now, I'm not talking only about them. This is true of many, many industries, most notably even relative newcomers with highly technical, highly intelligent employees. As just one example, when I worked at AOL, I saw many of the same group behaviors that I see in newspapers today.

The other night I started to explore this on Twitter with the question. "Why is it so hard for old companies with existing customers to change quickly?" People replied to me with additional ideas, and together we built the list below. But don't let it stop there. If you can think of other ideas please post them in a comment below. (Note: One thing we discovered in the Twitter conversation is that it's easy for this to turn into a gripe session about specific situations or industries, and the symptoms they show. There's no end of blog posts about that and they're not that helpful. Here, let's try to get to the root causes that apply to any mature business.)

With that, here's our short list...

Innovation Killers

1. FEAR: Too much money can be the enemy of progress.

This is perhaps the biggest irony of all, so I list it first. How can too much money keep you from innovating? It's because of a phenomenon that someone named Siddhartha Gautama -- otherwise known as Buddha -- explained a long time ago. It's because you're attached to it. That kills innovation because you're focused on keeping what you have rather than serving your customers' changing needs.

In general, successful companies are either too afraid to stop making money the old way or they're not allowed to. This is true even when a pool of money is decreasing. On the flip side, I have noticed that once revenue drops past a magical percentage, it triggers a panic which can result in a flurry of last-minute innovation -- but that's not a plan for success.

It's even worse for publicly traded companies. The shareholders they really work for, whom they have almost no control over, are often even more afraid. Or worse, they can't agree on a course of action -- with half of the shareholders punishing a stock when it makes drastic changes and the other half punishing it for not changing fast enough.

But this is also true for privately owned companies. If an inspired leader sees a storm coming that will likely result in a 30% drop in long-term revenues and tells the board of directors that it needs to proactively cut current profits 20% while it focuses on emerging business opportunities, what happens? That leader is most likely fired and nobody wins. A few years later, the company is still down 30% or more, but in this case without any game plan whatsoever.

I once, probably foolishly, told one of the leaders of a company I worked for that she would one day have to eat her own children to compete with free advertising. She looked at me like I was crazy, but this is basically what I was talking about. Sometimes you have to kill a large portion of your current business to preserve your future. Very few newspapers -- let alone many established companies -- have done that, and now they're paying the price of inaction.

2. BRAND ADDICTION: Companies are addicted to their current products and brands.

I'm surprised at how many businesses act as if their job is to protect a current brand from change, as if the brand itself is the customer as opposed to the audience. This blinds them to their customers, who are usually the ones driving the rapid change.

The good news is that we're finally seeing some movement with newspapers. More and more are creating new brands that go after audiences that didn't read the newspaper anyway, or extending their brands to audiences like Facebook and Twitter. But think of how much further along they'd be if they had started four years ago? (Side note: At the Bakersfield Californian, where I currently work, new brands have increased our audience by 100,000 individuals in a city of only 330,000. This can work, but it takes time.)

The bad news is that many still think that creating separate brands means they're killing or competing with existing brands. I'm reminded of this every time I see a niche brand that is "Brought to you by" a newspaper. This mindset only makes sense if your goal is to better serve an existing audience, but it's usually a bad idea if you're trying to grow your audience. It's the vestige of protectionism, and you can only hope that the new audience isn't turned off by the marketing tag.

Just to be clear, I'm not opposed to building and growing existing brands, but in today's fragmented world I think that "one size fits all" brands have limited appeal. My advice to mature information companies is to think of their brands as "wrappers" for capabilities and expertise. They deliver solutions to customers. But every audience prefers different packaging, so if you use the same brand for everything you end up polluting their potential.

3. PARANOIA: Companies assume everyone is their competitor, as opposed to potential partners or members.

This is something that affects business people of all types, including sole proprietors. The other day I was talking to a friend who was starting a technology consulting business in a tourist town. I gave her the name of someone else I know there who could help her out. A cloud passed over her face, and she told me, "Oh -- I don't want to talk to someone who's in the same business because they may compete with me."

If you multiply that mindset by a few hundred or thousand, you can see how paranoia can be ubiquitous in many large companies. But in my opinion, the entire premise of this argument is disproven by the open source movement, which shows that sharing leads to more opportunities and lower costs for everyone.

A corollary to this is that information businesses in particular never talk openly about their problems. This makes absolutely no sense because, in my experience, everyone will eventually find out if your traditional business model isn't working. Your current customers are also most likely to want you to succeed, and they may even be able to help you out if you're more honest about challenges up front.

4. BUSINESS BLINDNESS: Most innovation is on the consumer side, but not with the business model.

Finally, the biggest hindrance of all is that core business models don't fundamentally change until it's too late -- and that's a huge problem. You can innovate your ears out on the consumer side, but if you can't eventually grow revenue to pay for that it doesn't matter.

I was reminded of this three years ago when former Knight-Ridder exec Brian Monroe addressed winners of the Knight-Batten Awards. I wrote about his chilling words then, but I'll repeat them here for emphasis.

He told us about how the Knight Ridder newspaper chain -- which has since been sold -- was a pioneer in using digital technology to better inform citizens, "but that wasn't enough. In the end, our shareholders didn't believe in our ability to be relevant in the future. They placed more value in our assets when sold than they did in our future potential."

He said that everyone needed to innovate even more quickly or history would repeat itself and more newspapers and news providers would go out of business. He was right. Lots of innovation has happened, but it hasn't been enough. As a result, people in places like Ann Arbor, Mich., have no daily newspaper.

Power of Fear and Attachment

How is it possible that this could happen when there was so much warning? I think the answer is clear in #1 above: the paralyzing power of fear and attachment. But it also comes down to how businesspeople are motivated and compensated. If you feed your children based on a percentage of sales, are you going to do anything to upset the department store that makes up 20% of your salary? Probably not -- until it's too late and two department stores merge or one goes out of business.

To summarize, innovation is hampered by fear, brand addiction, paranoia, and insufficient focus on the business. What else? Post your ideas here. If we can make a good list, maybe some people who can make a difference will read it and help break the cycle of mediocrity.

The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name

Ryan Sholin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:45:10 -0500

I'm not one for semantic arguments. There's little-to-no practical value in deciding the names of things. ("User-generated content," anyone?)

But if you spend your days and side projects talking to journalists about interacting with their readers, you tend to look for the right words to get your message across. Or at least I do. Because they're not really "readers" anymore, are they? The people formerly known as the audience? Accurate, but wordy -- and maybe a little too professorial for my usual purposes.

So what do we call the human beings who both consume the journalism we produce and participate in its creation? Are they members in a geographical or topical community of interest? Does that qualify them as a community?

I asked a similar question on Twitter and in a blog post a few weeks ago, and most of the answers were negative: No, our readers aren't necessarily a community. No, you can't slap the label of "community" on a group of people; they have to do that for themselves, or otherwise prove that they're a communal gathering. No, most of our readers are still a static audience, one-way receivers of information.

Geekdad Examples

And then I spotted something in one of the not-about-journalism blogs that I read. Specifically, Wired.com's Geekdad. Here's what Geekdad blogger Jonathan Liu wrote, trying to explain to a friend why he and his colleagues referred to themselves as "geeks" so often in their blog posts. Are they like Diggers or BoingBoingers or Treehuggers? Maybe...

But the other answer I came up with is this: We are a blog in which the writers, the readers, and the subject matter are all the same: it's about the intersection of parenting and geekiness. Our readers are geekdads and moms, and our writers are geekdads and moms. And, in fact, all the new writers (myself included) were readers first who wanted to geek out about their own obsessions. We write about our passions, for people who share something in common with us.

Because I'm a geek/dad, if not necessarily a full-blown Geekdad yet, it makes perfect sense. These are people like me writing about experiences that are either familiar to me, or talking about ideas that I'm profoundly interested in as a member of the community of people who self-identify as geekdads.

So maybe readers have a common topic of interest (baseball, city government, gardening), but a community is the topic of interest itself (baseball players, city council members and local activists, serious gardeners).

Defining Community

I'll take that a little further into the realm of definitions: A community is not defined by its participation in your media product, but by their own experiences which you happen to also be describing, or engaged in yourself.

For a local news organization of any sort, I expect the next question to be whether a geographic location alone is enough to define a community. I don't think so. I do think there's a subset of residents of a place that can form a community, but it might be time to get used to the idea that the people interested in highly detailed process stories coming out of city council meetings are a niche community, and not the broader population.

What do you think? How do you define a community, and is that what you'd call the people participating in acts of storytelling, activism, and/or journalism in your town or topic of interest?

News Ecosystem Demands Collaboration, Not Us vs. Them Mentality

Chris O’Brien — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:57:19 -0500

One of the great tragedies that I see in the current debate about the future of journalism is the way the discussion continues to be framed around a series of binary choices. Newspapers or blogs. Print or online. Journalists or algorithms.

In each case, there seems to be a simple-minded belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other. I consider this tragic because the result is a lot of dead-end debates that devolve into spitball fights about whether one will replace the other. My belief is that the better conversation is about how these things should complement each other and extend and enrich our journalism. That is the great opportunity of this moment.

False Trade-Offs

I got to thinking about these false trade-offs last weekend when I saw the The New York Times headline: Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle. The piece, by reporter Steve Lohr, discusses a recent study released by Cornell researchers called Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle. The three researchers built an algorithm to track the way news moves across the web to better understand the dynamics of the evolving news cycle.

Now, I'm not qualified to assess the way they designed the algorithm. But what caught my attention was the decision to essentially place all sites into two categories: mainstream news or blogs. While the study has some interesting findings, this construction strikes me as perpetuating that binary choice. Us vs. Them. The Future vs. The Past. Choose A or B.

What I've been arguing through my Knight Foundation project, and others have also, is that news is now an ecosystem. And going forward, news organizations of all shapes and sizes, from the blogger at Starbucks on up to whatever remains of the major metro newsroom, need to focus on how they fit into the ecosystem. And more importantly, how and when they collaborate with the other parts. Continuing to make artificial distinctions short-circuits that thinking. It emphasizes divisions and competition, rather than collaboration.

The paper, co-authored by Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstron and Jon Kleinberg, does make a nod to this notion when they write:

"For example, one could imagine the news cycle as a kind of species interaction within an ecosystem..."

Yes, one could indeed imagine such a thing. But the false construction of the study (mainstream media or blogs) essentially ignores it.

There are any number of holes that could be punched in the study. And Scott Rosenberg does a nice job of mapping out many of those red flags here.

Blurring of the Lines

But on a fundamental level, it's still the "blogs or mainstream news" construction that bothers me. Most problematic, of course is simply tackling the problem of which site goes in which bucket. The lines were never really all that clear to begin with. But they're become increasingly blurred in an era where newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times run enormous blogging networks.

In this fast-changing era, identity and labels are hard to sort out. Just to use myself as one example, I've been a professional journalist for 17 years now. Currently, I write a column twice each week for the San Jose Mercury News. But beyond that, I've been blogging about my family here for three years; blogging about my Knight research here; blogging at Idea Lab for two years; and, oh yes, blogging for my employer here. On any given week, I produce more words for blogs than the newspaper. So what am I?

Answer: It doesn't matter.

What does matter is that I'm constantly trying to see how all those different pieces fit together and complement each other. I see blogs not as competition, but vital parts that help expand the conversation around news and information. I worry less about who is winning the battle of breaking news first, whether it's mainstream sources, blogs, or Twitter.

Seeing these other pieces as competition leads down the poisonous road where people complain about bloggers stealing content. Or, it takes you down the equally poisonous path where people argue that blogs (or now Twitter) have rendered the mainstream newsroom obsolete.

I don't want to choose option A or B. I want "All of the Above." That is the mindset we must choose to fully realize the enormous potential of this digital era of journalism.

Ideas for Professional Journalists to Prove Their Value

Dan Schultz — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:40:40 -0500

If you were a professional journalist and I asked you, "what does mainstream media provide that the crowd can't?" I have some guesses about what I might hear in your answer: It's more credible, more comprehensive, fact-checked, less biased, professionally composed, more knowledgeable, presented in the larger context, and more reliable, to name a few.

But wait! It's a trick question, and not just because there are countless examples of all classes of reporting from both mainstream and creek media. The trick is epistemological: The existence or non-existence of these qualities on either side is practically meaningless if nobody can prove they exist to the audience.

What makes this trick important is that a person who doesn't believe in the benefits of mainstream media probably won't do much to support it, and I worry that too many people don't. That's the bad news. The good news is that technology can help newspapers, and all other deserving entities, earn trust among a generation that includes skeptics with access to a world of information.

Some Non-Representative Opinions

During the conference at MIT last month I decided to ask some back-at-home friends how much they value professional journalism. The results aren't exactly uplifting, but obviously they don't mean much -- I doubt Gallup would back my informal "methodology." I'm also betting a lot of the people I asked were thinking of network news when voting (one person commented "I voted for 5, but would vote for 1 if Wolf Blitzer [were] not included in that category.")

The reason I mention this private poll is because it reflects a small-but-still-too-large sentiment of mistrust toward the mainstream media that I've noticed among peers and Internet brethren. I'm not old enough to know if this is new or if it's been around since the dawn of time, although I assume the latter. The truth is, I also find myself finishing articles only to wonder what wasn't said; and why shouldn't I?

Fox News shows how easy it is for a media source to shape people's understanding of reality on a massive scale. Goodness knows I don't want to become one of those sheeple things I hear so much about.

The main issue is that most mainstream media is lumped together with political pundits, polarized reporting, editorial echo chambers, and infotainment-driven news cycles. Is it fair? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's something that must be considered: In the eyes of some, The Watchdog has become The Man.

Defend Your Credibility

Clearly a business model or distribution channel that prevents free riders would be nice, and providing so much value that everyone starts subscribing again is also a great plan, but what about all the people out there who would vote for option #4 in that poll? It seems to me that since professional journalists are doing what the industry says they do anyway, it's time to use technology to leverage that effort and eliminate any room for doubt.

Here are some thought stubs about ways to show the audience why they can trust a specific news source. I may explore them in more detail in future posts.

Make your source documents public - I was so excited when the Obama Administration made it easy to read all the official documents on whitehouse.gov, until I realized I didn't have 5 hours a day to read them. What I want is the ability to read a reporter's analysis and have the means to check their work and form opinions of my own. (Word on the street is that somebody awarded a grant to develop a technology that could help with this effort...)

Provide Timelines and Notes - How much time was spent on this article? When did the research begin? What contextual factors influenced its development? Did anything get cut out that might still be worth showing in a footnote? The more information you can provide about the creation process for the audience the better.

Share Author and Editor Information - I know that disclaimers are provided when appropriate, but the more information about the people who shaped the analysis, the better. What else has this author written? For who? Where does the editor fall on political issues? Maybe some of this is none of my business, but then again, maybe it is.

Reference the Past - If you know the context of a new story, chances are you documented the context in the past, and maybe you even have some archived reports about it. Link to it. Even better, make a technology that allows for line item comments on old articles so that people can understand how it fits in. There is a lot of potential here.

Track your News Trends - What if I could see a visual summary of the topics covered by a news organization over time? Then I could know for sure how much was spent on crime, entertainment, world news, politics, etc. Ideally this would also show me what the specific trend was about - did CNN spend more time on Michael Jackson than Iran? I don't really know for sure, but I'd like to.

Now that I look at it again, this might be the sort of added value that actually matters anyway. It differentiates those with time and resources from those without it while bettering the quality of the product. Sounds like a 2-birds-for-1-stone situation!

Reflections on a Facebook Birthday

Dori J. Maynard — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:38:04 -0500

This year for my birthday I got three calls. Two people sent cards. And I don't think I ever received so much attention in my life.

I have to say, it was fabulous turning 51 years old on Facebook.

The well wishes started pouring in on the night before my birthday and they kept coming the day after, too. Friends from junior high, high school, college, past jobs, former neighbors, fellow travelers all weighed in on my Facebook wall.

According to a January study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, adults between 45 and 54 make up 19 percent of the population on social networks. However, an earlier Pew tracking survey found the number of adults joining social networks is growing quickly, from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent by December 2008.

Believe me, I know. At times, it seems as if every week brings a new friend request from someone I haven't seen in more years than I care to admit. After a few Facebook missteps, I've learned it's best to friend lest I offend. And it's often best to act quickly.

"X is devastated you won't friend them," one of my Facebook connections chided me about an unanswered invitation from someone I hadn't seen in decades.

Friend Now, Remember Later

In that case, I had been swamped by work. But sometimes, sometimes, I just can't quite place the person. Take the time I got a friend request where the only thing I could see that we had in common was where we lived. No message. No mutual friends. No nothing. Something in the name must have struck a chord because instead of hitting the ignore button I just let it sit. About a year later, I was flipping through my college alumni magazine. It all came back to me. As a result, I've adopted something of a "friend now, remember later" policy.

I mark these mistakes down to being a digital immigrant traveling in a very foreign land.

Facebook, after all, was created by a Harvard University student in 2004 for a generation used to online life, as NYU professor Clay Shirky explained in a 2007 New York Times interview:

"To some extent, a generation gap is already apparent in the Facebook population," said Shirky. "Younger people will use it more naturally and differently than older folks."

Don't I know that. Sometimes when I'm talking to my younger brothers, both digital natives, I feel like my grandmother might have felt the first time we handed her the remote for a VCR.

"Eh, now, how do I write on somebody's wall?" I've asked. And I still can't figure out what the heck I'm supposed to do so that my Twitter and Facebook feeds mirror each other.

My younger brothers have kindly walked me through the process, tweaking my profile and installing privacy settings. I didn't even know there was a privacy option.

It's not surprising they would prize privacy. According to an earlier Pew study, younger people are more concerned with online privacy. Maybe it has something to do with those stories we hear about pictures of people partying popping up in their professional lives with less than optimal results.

I don't so much worry about that at this age. But there have been some unexpected meet-ups between the older respected professional I've become and the "free spirit" I once was.

Nestled in between two sedate "Happy Birthday" greetings from colleagues was this message from a junior high school friend:

Happy Birthday, Dori! It was close to this time of year a million years ago when we ran away from home together just for the adventure ;)

A million years, many lifetimes ago and a time and place I may have forgotten were it not for Facebook.

Unintended Uses

I once read that one of the underappreciated aspects of diversity is that when we create something for one group it often benefits many others. For example, curb cuts for people in wheel chairs have also been a great boon to people pushing baby strollers or pulling luggage.

(I would link to the citation but I read it either before Delicious.com was invented or before I knew how to use it.)

I thought about that on my birthday. I doubt anyone initially involved with setting up Facebook to help college students meet envisioned sharing it with people their parent's age. But here we are, searching for each other, surprising each other and supporting each other.

For all the people who took the time to wish me a happy birthday -- thank you. Each one of you helped make it the best birthday ever.

What Are The New Obligations Of Readers?

Chris O’Brien — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:58:08 -0500

A few weeks ago, I was reading an interesting story about the state of the Columbia Journalism School that appeared on the New York Magazine website. In short, the story tried to examine concerns about how well Columbia was making the transition to the digital journalism era.

After reading the story, I dutifully tweeted a link to it to those following me through my Next Newsroom account:

Columbia J-School struggles to adapt to the digital age: http://is.gd/mY0s "F--- new media," says one prof.

A short time later, I received this reply from ajsundby:

@nextnewsroom That @nymag post has many reporting holes in it. If you bothered to look at the comments, you'd know that. You've had a week.

That phrase gnawed at me for quite awhile: "bothered to look at the comments." I believe that at the time I tweeted the link, there were several dozen comments. When I checked today, it was up to 71.

But am I really obliged to read the comments? Says who?

Of course not. The story was long enough on its own. And I didn't feel compelled to wade through the ensuing conversation.

But clearly a conversation had emerged around it, challenging some of the facts and assumptions. And in that case, if I didn't read the comments, did I in fact actually read the story? Is the "story" now the original article plus the comments? And if I didn't consume the whole enchilada, should I refrain from recommending it, tweeting it, posting it on Facebook?

No Hard and Fast Rules

I don't think there can be any hard and fast rules on this. But since commenting on articles continues to cause such heated discussions, I have a few thoughts on this from the perspective of a reader.

First, I just don't want the pressure of feeling like I'm required to read all the comments. It's just not realistic. I don't have the time, except in the rare cases when I'm feeling particularly passionate about a topic and I want to really dive in.

Second, I recognize that comments are important. But if you really want to overcome my reluctance to engage, then consider this yet another in a long line of pleas to improve commenting systems. Ideally, reporters or someone at the news organization would identify the best comments and highlight them by incorporating them into updates to the original article.

In the case of the New York Magazine article, at some point someone added an editor's note acknowledging some of the feedback in the comments. (Though I wouldn't have seen the note if I hadn't gone back to re-read the story to write this post.)

I'm sympathetic that this might not always be possible given time and resources. So, third, embrace a commenting system that allows readers to help rate and boost the best, most insightful dialogue. The folks at SFGate.com have a pretty good system. Not perfect, but helpful when there are hundreds of comments on a story. I can click on the "recommended" tab and get the ones that garnered the most votes.

You might do all this. And I still might ignore the comments. And when I do, I'm going to try not to feel guilty.