November hasn’t even ended yet and the time for 2011 list season has begun! Today Facebook published a list of the 40 most shared articles on Facebook in 2011. Perhaps what’s most interesting about this list is not the headlines themselves but the fact that all of the stories are from...
Here is an excellent, crowd-sourced extensive list of the New York startup scene – including photo tours and founder interviews. View NYC Startups in a larger map
Business Insider’s IGNITION: Future Of Media conference this week in New York City has a great lineup of speakers, from Glenn Beck to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. If you’re interested in going, you can enter the code IGNITION30 to get a 30% discount. Here are all the details and...
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The conversation is worth a read in its entirety — Rashbass has good info and analysis to share about The Economist’s now-legendary reversal of the typical, horrible “newsweekly magazine” fortune — but I was particularly interested in Rashbass’s thoughts on The Economist’s success as a function of media culture overall. That success, Rashbass suggests, can be attributed to — and is, in its way, proof of — ”the mega-trend of mass intelligence”: an overall “smarting up” rather than “dumbing down” of people’s information consumption habits. While that may be an optimistic read on things (Kardashians, cats, etc., etc.), what’s even more interesting is his explanation of why that general intellectual upswing is occurring. As Greenslade puts it, summing up Rashbass’ point: “There are no longer elite media and mass media.” Instead of sharp categories, and instead of stratification, there’s a hodgepodge. People are, Rashbass notes, “going to art-house movies and Spiderman,” blending high and low, pop and niche, into personalized — and specialized — experiences. As a result, as Greenslade sums up: “People are no longer easily categorized.”
What Rashbass is hinting at is the disruption of personalization itself.
Not that they ever were. Still, though, there used to be a degree of fatalism when it came to branded news consumption: You subscribed to, maybe, a couple different newspapers and magazines, you watched or listened to maybe a couple different channels…and those consumption choices — choices made within a highly limited universe of options, relative to today — came, to some extent, to define you. George W. S. Trow, reflecting on his family’s news consumption habits in the 1950s, noted that, in the New York City of the time, there were Times people and there were Herald Tribune people. And the Trows were, for their part, “in our souls a Herald Tribune family.” In our souls. This is what we tend to forget when we talk about journalism’s evolution: The news brand, in the past — for all its exclusivity, for all its anonymity — was much more than a brand, with all the corporateness and cravenness that that term can imply. It was also an identity. It was a purchased proxy for a personal worldview. A subscription to the Times — even a newsstand purchase of the Times — meant something both public and, even more importantly, intimate. The news brand was, in its way, an externalized self, a reflection — often aspirational — of the way its consumers took part in the tumult of human events. What Rashbass is highlighting in the Guardian interview is not just the clichéd-because-true idea that the digital age is a golden age for personalized information consumption; what he’s also getting at, I think, is the disruption of personalization itself — from something that’s reliant on the news brand to something that lives beyond it. And from something that’s default private — you read the paper in the privacy of your own home — to something that’s effortlessly public. All of the sudden, with social media and other digital tools — with sharing both intentional and “frictionless” — we can define ourselves not just by what we read, but by how we read. We understand the world, and ourselves within it, through the amalgams of content we create for ourselves. What we share on Twitter, what we comment on on Facebook — that is new the proxy for identity.
To get the tablet experience, consumers first have to care enough about The Economist to download the app and subscribe to its content.
What The Economist has managed to capture — to recapture — is, I think, the sense of self and self-containment that defined media brands before those brands became social. It is not just clever content, cleverly packaged. It is also an outsourced worldview. In that, it is a decidedly singular worldview, to be sure: The Economist sells a self-image that’s high-class, high-culture, high-end. Depending on where you stand, it is either congratulatory or aspirational. But, even then, it’s inviting. As Paul Rossi, The Economist's managing director, told the Times’ Jeremy Peters last year: "One of the things people say is, ‘You go after an affluent audience.’ But we don't define our audience by their demographic. We define our audience based on what they think.” The magazine — or “newspaper,” as it calls itself — seeks psychographics as much as demographics. It cares about who its readers are as much as what they are. And that’s important, in particular, considering the strategy Rashbass shared in his interview with Greenslade: The Economist, based on user surveys that anticipate a decline in their readers’ preference for print, seems to be doubling down on the tablet. “Rashbass clearly expects the tablet platform to become the dominant form in future,” Greenslade notes. What that means is that The Economist has an interest in shaping itself as a kind of imagined community, a social space where fellow-thinkers are implied if not actually seen. The magazine famously eschews bylines in its print pages, based on “a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it.” During a time when journalism is increasingly focusing on individual voices and individual perspectives, The Economist’s approach — unapologetically institutional, purposely collective — may well mark a return to an older, time-tested concept of the media brand: one based on loyalty, one based on identity, one based on intimacy. The “lean-back, immersive, ritual pleasure” Rashbass believes consumers take from the tablet experience is predicated on an old-fashioned notion of brand identity. It requires that consumers know enough, and care enough, about The Economist to download the app and subscribe to its content in the first place. It requires that they be, on some level, “Economist people.” And that is a big requirement. A new slogan for the magazine, launched last year, is telling: “Get a world view. Read The Economist.” Image via Matt Price.
Okay, maybe it’s a minor point. And after Jeff Bezos rightfully taunted me on stage (an honor, really!) for something I wrote almost three years ago, I should probably shut up about the Kindle for a while. But Amazon has just put out another press release talking about how great Kindle sales are without including a single actual sales number. Four years after launching the Kindle, Amazon has still not released one concrete number regarding either how many actual Kindle devices they’ve sold or how many Kindle books they’ve sold. To be clear, I have no doubt the number in both cases is “a bunch.” But I keep thinking back to what Steve Jobs said two years ago: “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.” We know, for instance, that Apple sold 14.8 million iPads in the last nine months of 2010 (it launched in April of that year) and 23.6 million in the first nine months of 2011. Amazon has never gotten any more specific than some variation of “millions of Kindles have been sold,” a numerical region it first referred to in January 2010. An IDC study in March estimated that Amazon had sold about 6.1 million Kindles in 2010. Is that accurate? Who knows? Instead, Amazon loves making comparisons between unknown variables. Some of those comparisons are easily misinterpreted, such as when it announced in May that it was selling 105 Kindle ebooks for every 100 printed books — which led some people to write headlines like “About Time: Ebooks Outselling Printed Books.” (They’re not. Amazon has a 15-20 percent share of print book sales, whereas it’s the only vendor for Kindle ebooks. It’s like McDonald’s saying Shamrock Shake sales have passed Chicken McNugget sales — and extrapolating that out to mean that green Irish-themed shakes now outsell chicken in the United States.) Here are today’s new unknowable comparisons for the new Kindles introduced eight weeks ago:
“Even before the busy holiday shopping weekend, we'd already sold millions of the new Kindle family and Kindle Fire was the bestselling product across all of Amazon.com. Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family — customers purchased 4X as many Kindle devices as they did last Black Friday — and last year was a great year,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle.
I’m sure it was! And “millions” over a specific, defined time span is an improvement from “millions” over a multi-year period. But would it really kill Amazon to say, directly: “We had a great launch for these new Kindles! We sold [positive integer] of them!” Without hard data, it’s hard for content producers to know how much effort to expend building for the platform. This is a much bigger issue for news organizations and other periodical publishers than it is for book publishers. If you publish books, of course you need to invest time and energy into being on the Kindle. It’s the biggest game in town in a clear growth market. But the decision isn’t as clear cut for newspapers and magazines, which need to decide whether to put a slice of their development budgets into developing Kindle-specific editions of their publications. (I’m not talking about Android apps, which the Kindle Fire can run and which have the benefit of also working on Android smartphones and tablets. I’m talking about the Kindle-specific mags and papers that only work on the Kindle platform.) When a media company is deciding whether or not to build an iPhone app, an iPad app, or an Android app, they have real sales numbers — or, in Android’s case, activation numbers — to use when calculating whether it’s worth investing in the platform. On the Kindle, that’s harder. If sales numbers really are impressive, shout them from the rooftops!
The New York Times My Alerts: Yuli Akhmada November 28, 2011 1:19 AM -------------------------------------- Business Day / Global Business: Southeast Asian Nations Look at Nuclear Power By SONYA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP Despite the Fukishima accidnet, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam are considering it as an option. Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/global/28iht-RBOG-NUKE-SEA28.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
News coverage of a fatal single-car crash that occurred early on Thanksgiving Day in our home town of Framingham, MA spotlights the tradeoffs between traditional news reporting and the less constrained world of the real-time Internet. Look at the distinctions between them and tell us what you think.
The first report of the crash came from Framingham Patch, the one-person news bureau that covers the town for AOL’s Patch network. It reported Thursday morning that a vehicle had struck a utility pole and tree at about 3:30 a.m. and that an occupant may have been killed. The fatality wasn't confirmed, but was speculation based upon police scanner requests for a medical examiner and accident reconstruction team.
It was nearly a full day before Patch published a more complete account of the accident, republished here unedited and in its entirety. The latest version is here.
Junior Koga Killed in Franklin St. Crash; Wife Pregnant
Members of the Framingham Brazilian community were discussing the death of Junior Koga on WSRO radio in Portuguese, on Twitter and even on Framingham Patch Thanksgiving day.
Friends say Junior Koga is man who crashed into a pole and then slammed into a tree killing himself on Franklin Street, early Thanksgiving morning around 3:10 a.m.
Framingham Police and other authorities have not returned calls or emails about the fatal crash. No official identification of the driver has been released.
At the scene, Thanksgiving morning Framingham Police requested, on the scanner, for the Massachusetts State Police reconstruction team, the Middlesex District Attorney’s office and the medical examiner.
Friends say Koga’s wife is pregnant. Koga, according to friends is a Brazilian national from Santa Catarina, a state in South Brazil. One friend said his wife is due to give birth in a couple of weeks. Koga is employed as a mechanic and lives in Framingham, according to friends. He is in his 30s.
Thiago Prado commented on Framingham Patch Thursday “very very sad news – Junior we gonna miss you.”
Nayara Martins, who tweeted the Framingham Patch video of the accident, also tweeted “Hate to see once again another life cut short so quickly because of driving drunk. When are people going to learn?! <|3 #RIPJunior”
Friends tell Framingham Patch Koga “came back from a night club, was brought to his home and got into his own car to go out again.”
Friends said they suspect alcohol may have been involved.
Police are still investigating, and have not released any information on the fatal crash, including an identification.
The crash happened just after the Mt. Wayte Shopping Center at 384 Franklin St.
At the scene, Framingham Police blocked off the road. The Framingham Fire department placed a sheet over the car lodged into the tree and then added a second sheet to block the scene, while awaiting the State Police reconstruction team, which was coming from another Thanksgiving fatality in Freetown.
A neighbor near the crash, who didn’t wish to be identified, said the driver was partially ejected from the car. “It is a nasty scene,” he said.
Nearly 10 hours after the Framingham Patch report appeared, the local Metrowest Daily News reported its version of the story, again reprinted here in its entirety.
Framingham man dies in car crash
A 31-year-old Framingham man died early Thanksgiving morning after crashing into a telephone pole and then a tree on Franklin Street, police said today.
Ricardo Junior, of 67 Georgetown Drive, was the only person involved in the one-vehicle crash, which happened at about 3:10 a.m. yesterday, police said.
“It looks like he was killed on impact,” Deputy Police Chief Craig Davis said.
Davis said alcohol may have been a factor, as police found several Heineken beer bottles in the vehicle Junior was driving. Some of the bottles were full, and others were broken, he said.
“The initial indication is the cause is excessive speed,” Davis said. “There was an excessive amount of damage to the car.”
Junior crashed in the 300-block of Franklin Street, near Newton Place, Davis said.
We were struck by several contrasts between the coverage by these two outlets and the questions they raise about the conventional rules of sourcing in this tweet-saturated times. The spelling, formatting and grammatical mistakes aside, it's unlikely that the Patch story would have ever made it past the desk of an editor at a metro daily. Among the factual holes are:
The identity of the victim is unconfirmed and an age and address aren't supplied.
Most of the details about the crash and the victim are sourced to unidentified friends.
Details about the reported pregnancy of the victim's wife are sketchy and unconfirmed.
The police would neither confirm nor comment upon any of the facts in the story.
Perhaps most importantly, allegations that the driver was drunk are raised by unidentified "friends" but never confirmed.
In fact, the Patch story got an important fact wrong: the victim's real name was Ricardo Junior, not Junior Koga. Other than that, though, Patch provided more information and better context than the official account published by the local newspaper. And it did so nearly 10 hours earlier.
Among the unique details in the Patch story are a photo, news that the victim's wife is pregnant (unconfirmed, but likely, given the photo on Junior's Facebook page), the location of his home town in Brazil and comments by friends who knew him.
On the role of alcohol in the crash, Patch provides context about the incident that the official account lacks. The report that Junior was driven home from a night club by friends would indicate that he was probably seriously intoxicated when he got in his car. It also raises questions about his judgment and responsibility, given that his wife is due to deliver a child shortly. However, that information is sourced to unidentified “friends.”
Community Service or Slipshod Reporting?
Nevertheless, these details are unconfirmed and anonymously sourced, making the Patch account unacceptable under the traditional rules of news journalism. But should those rules apply any more?
The Metrowest Daily News' sole source in its coverage is the local police department, which is standard practice in these cases. Patch had no access to those official channels and so had to piece together its story from unidentified friends, talk radio accounts and Twitter chatter. Anonymous sourcing permitted Patch to beat the local daily by many hours and to add details that would never appear in the police log. In the hours since its account appeared, other people have confirmed the victim's identity and added a few details via comments.
Anonymous sourcing is dangerous, though. While the events would indicate that Junior was drunk (high-speed, single-vehicle crash in the early morning hours on the eve of a holiday), there was no official confirmation of that fact. Driver impairment is an important issue not only because of the victim’s reputation but also for legal reasons. What if Junior was sober and responding to a friend’s call for help when he hit a police cruiser parked with its lights off? The town could be liable for damages.
Standard journalistic practice is to confirm a story through official channels before publishing, but standard practice assumes archival permanency. Online, our mistakes are quickly corrected. For example, in the time since we began writing this entry, Patch has already corrected the victim’s name. The Patch editors sacrificed absolutely accuracy for speed and the interests of residents who wanted details as quickly as possible. In the process, it made one major mistake and an inference that could have legal ramifications.
Patch’s sourcing style is increasingly typical of online-only news operations. Is it making the proper tradeoffs or sacrificing accuracy for expediency? Comment below.
The New York Times My Alerts: Yuli Akhmada November 25, 2011 1:21 AM --------------------------------------
Technology: Voice Messaging Services Aimed at the Masses By SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP Social voice messaging, or voice microblogging via cellphones, is still in its infancy. Some companies see great potential, but many analysts remain skeptical.
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Arts / Music: Times Pop Music Critics Recommend Boxed Sets By JON PARELES Are collectors and music nerds now the only people buying albums? Apparently that's the judgment behind many of this year's gargantuan boxed sets.
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Yahoo News’ integration with Facebook — which automatically shares users’ Yahoo News activity in their Facebook feed once they’ve opted in — is a big success, according to Robert Scoble. “Their internal numbers prove people are using frictionless sharing on...
This clever new book is a parody of “Goodnight Moon” for the tech generation. Watch a narrated version of the story below, and click here to learn more about it or buy “Goodnight iPad: a Parody for the next generation”
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The New York Times My Alerts: Yuli Akhmada November 24, 2011 1:18 AM --------------------------------------
Business Day / Global Business: Economic Slump in the West Is Catching Up With Asia By BETTINA WASSENER Economies in the Asia-Pacific region appeared isolated from the turmoil in other parts of the world, but cracks are appearing, and a serious disruption in Europe could spill into Asia.
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There was a bit of a battle last week in the tech-writing world about specs — meaning specifications, or the concrete data points that can be used to describe any piece of tech. You know what I mean — as in, this Dell XPS 14z has an Intel Core i7-2640M processor running at 2.8 GHz, 8GB of dual channel DDR3 SDRAM running at 1333MHz, a GeForce GT 520M 1GB graphics card from Nvidia, an 8x CD/DVD burner, a 5x turbotoaster, 12 tripaflops of lobster thermidor, and so on.
Steve Jobs liked to call them “speeds and feeds,” and he never liked them much. Here he is talking in 1997, just after his return to Apple, about how the company’s marketing needed to change. (This was the introduction of the famous Think Different campaign.)
To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us…
The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It’s not to talk about MIPS and megahertz.
(Jobs’ disdain for speeds and feeds was arrived at honestly — although it didn’t hurt that for years Macs had fallen behind Windows PCs in many of those key numbers.)
The battle I’m talking about is a tension around the right way to review or evaluate a new piece of technology. If you’re comparing two products, the fact that one has a clock speed of 2.4 GHz and the other only 2.2 GHz — does that go in the “win” column for Gadget A over Gadget B? Is the fact that the iPhone 4S has 512 MB of RAM enough to make it worse than Android phones that have twice as much? Are products fairly evaluated or compared through ordered charts of numbers and data points, or is something more holistic better?
Obviously these are artificial extremes, and both the raw data and the subjective experience are important in evaluating a product — just as the feel of driving a well made sports car can’t be summed up in horsepower or foot-pounds of torque. But for those folks who are paid to tell us about technology, that tension is very real — just as it is for those who build technology, who are sometimes torn between focusing on user experience and focusing on completing a checklist of features. (“My checklist’s longer: I win!”)
I was reading Gizmodo’s review of the Kindle Fire — which leans more toward the user-experience end of the spectrum — and was surprised to see this comment: “I’m disappointed there isn’t more of a spec vs spec comparison at the bottom of this article…More spec comparisons.”
M.G. Siegler wrote about this last Monday at TechCrunch (“The Death Of The Spec”) and cited a tweet from Dustin Curtis that summed it up nicely: “The section headings for a Kindle Fire review should not be ‘battery, internals, screen;’ they should be ‘reading, surfing the web,’ etc.” Here’s M.G.:
We're starting to see backlash against reviews of products that just do spec-by-spec rundown. Because really, who cares how the device sounds on paper? It's how it feels that matters. Is the Kindle Fire smooth? Is the Nook Tablet fast? Is the iPad a joy to use?
The thing is, it’s easy to understand why specs are appealing. They’re objective, and as such they’re low risk. If you review a product and note the precise speed of its processor, you’re not going to be wrong. It’s right there on the press release! And specs are pleasingly defined: it’s a known fact how they compare to the competition, which has its own press releases, and they help lay down a journalistically useful, if not quite accurate, framework for comparison. (“This year’s model has twice the RAM” is an objective comparison. “This year’s model feels a little bit faster than I remember last year’s” is subjective and tied to the individual reviewer’s personal experience.)
The problems arise when there’s a disconnect between the specs and lived reality. Anyone still buying digital cameras hopefully knows about the megapixel myth by now — the fact that a camera with more megapixels could be substantially worse than one with fewer, because while higher numbers sound better in ads and reviews, they actually can reduce sensor sizes to the point that they worsen the quality of the image. Or that a device with a higher clockspeed might feel slower than one with a lower one because it has other chokepoints in the design. Or its software might be buggy. Or its interface might be terrible. That all comes out of something other than raw, chartable numbers.
The work of evaluating a subjective experience — the work of the critic — is stressful! I used to be a Professional Rock Critic, and let me tell you, that’s a job filled with the risk of humiliation. I praised albums that, in retrospect, I find embarrassing and slammed others that, a decade later, I now know were amazing. (I think I got more right than wrong, but on net I was a less than 100% trustworthy guide to indie rock in 1998.) Luckily, no one reviews records based on hard metrics like “songs per CD” or “minutes per track,” but I have no doubt some critics would flock to raw numbers if it were culturally acceptable to do so.
Jay Rosen may not realize he’s secretly been a technology-journalism critic all these years, but I think this preference for hard specs isn’t too distant from what he calls The View from Nowhere. Many journalists’ self-identities are bound up in not making a subjective call, Rosen argues — in leaving the he said, she said dialogue unresolved. Is “he” (e.g. Obama, Tea Partiers, whoever) wrong? Is “she” right? Addressing those questions requires leaving the comfortable role the journalist has carved out for himself as the neutral, above-it-all observer. When “CNN leaves it there,” they do so to remain outside the arena, which is the comfortable place to be. Just like it can be comfortable to rely on clean numbers like hardware specs and not dive into fuzzier areas like user experience, interface design, and responsiveness.
But this post isn’t about technology reporting, or Dell laptops, or Steve Jobs. It’s about Jim Romenesko.
What Romenesko was criticized for was sometimes taking phrases directly from the stories he was linking to and putting them into the brief story summaries he wrote, without surrounding them with quotation marks. So instead of:
The paper found that the kinds of records it wants from Emanuel are “routinely available — in many cases with a phone call or an email request — in Atlanta, Boston, Hartford, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Seattle.”
Romenesko skipped the quotes around “routinely…Seattle,” which come straight from the linked story. Poynter’s Julie Moos said: “If only for quotation marks, it would be exactly right. Without those quotation marks, it is incomplete and inconsistent with our publishing practices and standards on Poynter.org.”
Journalists erupted in his defense in part because they like Romenesko, who gives every indication of being a mensch and whose work had been a part of their web habits for about as long as they’d had web habits. We don’t care about quotation marks, they said. We knew what Jim was doing. Nobody complained. To which others responded: But they’re someone else’s words, and there weren’t quotation marks around them. That’s a rule.
In a sense, it’s the same tension between hard specs and user experience. The quotation marks are the spec: their presence or absence is hard data. It’s binary, 1 or 0; either they’re there or they’re not. The problem is, the hard data of that spec conflicted in many journalists’ minds with the feel of the situation, the user experience — which was that Romenesko was a fair-minded, generous-with-his-credit, positive contributor to the world of news. The point of getting attribution right is to avoid pretending someone else’s work is your own — and it’s hard to say that passages studded with “The paper reports…” and “Smith writes…,” with a big prominent link up top to the source, are pretending that someone else’s work is your own. Specs should be in service to the user experience, and in Romenesko’s case, the user experience was good.
This is the central problem around aggregation these days: the specs don’t line up with the user experience. You can follow the rules, as traditionally defined, and end up coming off as a jerk. Or you can flout the rules, as traditionally defined, and be seen as generous with your credit.
Here’s an example. Nouveau tech site The Verge does a lot of aggregation. But The Verge, like its spiritual predecessor Engadget, almost always avoids linking to the material it’s aggregating in the body of its one-paragraph summaries. Instead, the site pushes the crediting link to a small box at the bottom of the post, like so:
That sort of aggregation doesn’t send much traffic anyone’s way. When I complained about it in my otherwise highly laudatory post about The Verge, managing editor Nilay Patel defended it in the comments:
I will defend our decision to break out vias and sources, though — we think it’s incredibly important to consistently and canonically show people where our stories come from, where are primary sources are, and how they fit together. A reader who comes to a post on The Verge can immediately trace our steps and check our work against the primary source, since we put that information in the same place every time. It might not be the “standard” across the web, but we think it’s much cleaner and clearer for people.
To which I responded:
Re: source credits, I agree with you it’s a good idea to be consistent in how you show where you’re getting your stories from. My complaint would be that that admirable consistency is no reason to avoid also linking to the source story in the actual text of the post, which, let’s be honest, is much more valuable real estate than a 22px-high box the eye jumps right over.
I just pulled up your five most recent stories. Each of them is aggregated from another site, but none of them provide a link to the original story in the body copy. Meanwhile, they do find room to link to three other Verge stories and six Verge product pages. I just think it would be good sportsmanship if the obvious places for credit within the body copy (e.g., “GSMArena reports,” “Engadget has gotten a photo,” “according to CNET’s sources,” etc.) had links.
And, in response to a separate comment about Engadget, which does much the same thing:
As it is, just about the only time Engadget ever links to anything in the body copy of a post is when they can link to one of their own posts, so they can drive up pageviews and time on site. Just glancing at Engadget’s home page now, in the 15 full posts on it, all that body copy has a total of 46 links. And every single one of them is to another Engadget story or tag page. To me, for a site build heavily on aggregation, that just strikes me as rude.
Rude — not unethical, but rude. This isn’t a Verge problem or an Engadget problem — lots of sites do it. Talking Points Memo, a site I greatly admire in many ways, used to link out from its front page. Now the vast majority of those links go to its own staff-written summaries of the stories it used to link to directly. (Although it does link to the source from within the body copy of those summaries.)
I don’t begrudge anyone their pageviews. Aggregation performs a very real and very valuable service; summarizing other people’s work has been a part of journalism since Jonathan Swift. Just as newspapers used to have to run a lot of box scores, recipes, and fluffy features to support their investigative journalism, websites have to mix in pageview-drawing aggregation to support the original work they do.
And, to go one step further, I’m not sure I even buy the argument that the primary measure of good aggregation is its ability to pass along traffic to the story’s originators. If that’s true, traditional news outlets are far worse offenders than just about anyone online; newspaper stories are filled with other people’s work, whether in quotation marks or not, and there’s rarely a link to the originating source to be found. Links are valuable because they help the reader, not because they pass X number of pageviews down a level in the Great Traffic Pyramid.
But none of that changes the fact that some methods come off as more friendly-to-content-producers than others.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is just over three years old. In 2008 and 2009, a link from Romenesko was worth a minimum of 400-500 pageviews — more frequently, 700-1,000. That’s when headlines on Romenesko items linked directly to the source material.
Yesterday, Steve Myers was nice enough to write up the short piece I wrote about Google backtracking a hair on charging for its Maps API. Steve’s writeup was 116 words and summarized the key points I made. Now, I don’t have any problem with that at all — heck, my post was mostly summarizing a Google blog post! and I don’t have to sell ads! — but the end result was that barely anyone clicked through to my post. In all, Steve’s post generated 21 pageviews yesterday, Google Analytics tells me.
To look at it another way, here’s the total Nieman Lab traffic trend, from October 2008 to the present:
And here, over the same period of time, is the amount of traffic we’ve gotten from poynter.org. (Note the scales are different here — it’s the trend line that matters.)
Now, this is very noisy data — maybe we were just doing better work three years ago! And in the meantime, there’s been a huge change in social media that’s allowed people to put Twitter in the slot that Romenesko used to occupy in their media diet. But the result is that a link on Romenesko generated a lot less traffic to us in 2011 than it did in 2008.
Again, that’s fine. Playing Aggregation Police is incredibly tiresome, and from a reader’s point of view, saving clicks by providing fuller summaries is probably on net a good thing. But the point is that this sort of behavior can’t be simply declared good/ethical if there are quotation marks or bad/unethical if there aren’t. The totality of the user experience brings in issues of design, of code, of fair use, of promotion — it’s a lot more complicated than merely whether a box gets checked on a feature checklist.
Remember when the iPod came out, and a guy at Slashdot famously derided it because it didn’t have the specs he wanted? “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.”
Or remember when the iPhone came out and the big complaints were it didn’t have a removable battery and you couldn’t install an extra memory card?
What happened was that people actually used iPods and iPhones and found that they’re delightful little devices that are easy to understand, fun to use, and filled with pleasant little surprises. And the checklists fell away, and the human race collectively decided to buy a gajillion of them.
That’s why the journalism world blew up in defense of Romenesko. Because they knew what the Romensko user experience, at its best, was like, and once you know that, the checklist falls away.
The Huffington Post is, in the minds of some journalists, the web’s bad guy, a nemesis that subverts the norms of legacy media, soaking up other people’s work in the pursuit of money and the all-powerful pageview.
And maybe it is! But here’s one tiny tale where the content flows in the opposite direction. Readers of The Harlan Daily Enterprise, a small newspaper located in southeast Kentucky, found something strange on the front page a couple months ago — a Huffington Post byline. (There’s no evidence Huffington Post Rural Kentucky is the web giant’s next planned vertical.)
The one-off collaboration resulted in bylines for Jamieson and the Huffington Post over a two-day period as the paper ran the story in full. What’s remarkable about the partnership was the single-minded simplicity of it: One side gets a story valuable to readers, the other gets exposure for an enterprise piece and a little goodwill. No need to try to clone the story or wait for AP to do a take, as might have been SOP when it was one newspaper scooping in another’s turf: This was more like a neighbor borrowing a cup of sugar. One editor called another. “I don’t think anyone here would have had much hesitation about a print newspaper wanting to use a story like that,” Jamieson told me.
While writing about mine safety, Jamieson found one name kept appearing repeatedly in his research — Charles Scott Howard, a miner from Harlan County. Jamieson spent two full days with Howard in Kentucky, getting to know the man who’s spent as much time working in mines as he has fighting his bosses. Howard’s been an outspoken advocate for mine safety, often using the mines he’s worked in as examples, which never sits well with his bosses. Through those interviews and piles of court documents, Jamieson crafted a story that opened up the culture of mining and the costs of Howard’s crusade.
“Talking about mining safety is not a very sexy issue,” Jamieson said. “The stories come down to lots of statistics or figures or recent disasters. So thought writing about a miner would be a more interesting way into the issue.”
When the executive editor of the Daily Enterprise asked if it could run the story, they agreed, with the newspaper running only excerpts from the story online, linking to the original piece on Huffingtonpost.com. No money changed hands.
“We’re a site with really high traffic as its known. You write items here and tons of people like it on Facebook,” Jamieson said. “But I was weirdly excited to have a byline in the Harlan Daily Enterprise.”
On this, the day before Thanksgiving, let’s be thankful that despite all the tension inherent in the news business these days — despite all the wars of words between print and online, between producers and aggregators, between new and old — this little example of cooperation could happen.
Although it’s become a cultural mainstay now, I still remember when I first saw that thick book — the one with the wizard on the cover — about a school for magic where wonders are easily conjured by those who know the proper spells. Of course, I’m talking about the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There was that other book with the spells, but the “Wizard Book” sincerely claimed to teach magic.
For the past few years, I’ve been working as a software developer in the newsroom, where perceptions of my kind have changed from novelty to a necessity. Recognizing this, some journalism schools now even require programming courses to teach students practical skills with databases or web frameworks. It’s thrilling to contemplate a generation of web-hacking journalists — but I wish we could somehow squeeze a little magic into their course load.
Learning to program is an important skill; learning how to be a programmer requires a far different type of course. For that, I have to thank a truly impractical introduction — my first programming class at MIT, 6.001, taught in the very impractical language of Scheme.
Scheme is an academic dialect of Lisp (LISt Processing), an old-yet-advanced language designed for the theoretical work of artificial intelligence. To the beginner’s eye, Lisp looks like sentences turned inside out and nested in a truly maddening numbers of parentheses. Eventually, you learn to see it as the language of angels, because the language is not narrowly designed towards a specific purpose like matrix manipulations or building operating systems. Lisp is designed for representing symbols (and also included other important features lacking in other languages), which means it’s capable of representing anything. Because Scheme’s core syntax is remarkably impoverished, the student is constantly pulling herself up by her bootstraps, building more advanced structures off simpler constructs.
At the start of the semester, it was enough to learn how to learn about procedures; but the end, we were casually manipulating infinite streams of data and simulating the workings of a computer chip. The most radical lesson was in the middle of the term, where we learned the seemingly paradoxical exercise of writing the Scheme interpreter in Scheme itself. Appropriately, the metacircular evaluator introduction was not so much lecture as an dorkishly adorable induction into the MIT Scheme society, complete with costumes, flashpots, and each of us issued buttons emblazoned with the logo of Scheme to mark our initiation. By the end of the semester, I was entranced.
But I was no more skilled at the practical work of programming; learning theory was the point. Which is why such impractical introductions to programming is a hard sell at most universities. If students only take one programming course, professors want them to be able to build something when they’re done. Even MIT itself replaced the Lambda Mystery Cult in 2009 with a simplified course based on Python and robotics meant for students who might not be majoring in computer science. The reasoning was that programming itself had changed since the ’80s; developers no longer built whole systems from nothing; now they merely plugged together existing libraries to get something that worked. This is true for much of the programming work out there — but I am gloomily reminded of Prospero renouncing his magic.
And yet, I feel like 6.001 (and the rest of the gloriously impractical CS program at MIT) made me a better programmer. Its very impracticality forced me to understand the broader world of computer science instead of just focusing on a very narrow end-of-term goal, like building a website or learning SQL. This might be a mawkishly unconvincing argument, but at least I’m in good company; as usual, Paul Graham expresses this better than I ever could. I may not have used Scheme in years — in fact, I use the same practical tools as you. But I don’t just use a hammer: I know how its form was derived and how it could be adapted to new problems. I think this is what impractical computer science instruction gave me.
I won’t argue that journalism schools should squander those dearly-won computer-science credits on whimsical introductions to programming. But if you want to advance as a programmer, you need to take some impractical detours. If you don’t know how to program, it’s fine to pick something practical; there are fine introductions in languages like Python, Ruby, or Javascript. But then try learning a programming language that’s far different from the one you work in. Clojure is a pretty cool modern LISP. You could even take a Grand Tour through several languages at once. In the opposite direction, finally learn C, and read how your favorite language is implemented by reading its source. Read the source code of libraries and tools you admire and those you hate. Do some genealogy — learn about the languages your favorite programming language was derived from (e.g., Ruby borrowed from Smalltalk, Eiffel, Lisp, Perl, and a really key feature in CLU). Learn how to write a parser. Learn about algorithms. Learn how operating systems work. Start random projects; fork random repos. Always be coding. Ignore my suggestions and make your own. And have a blast doing it.
All that matters is that you strike out on journeys without clear destinations in lands you hardly know. Be impractical. Cast spells.
Although it’s become a cultural mainstay now, I still remember when I first saw that thick book — the one with the wizard on the cover — about a school for magic where wonders are easily conjured by those who know the proper spells. Of course, I’m talking about the 
But I was no more skilled at the practical work of programming; learning theory was the point. Which is why such impractical introductions to programming is a hard sell at most universities. If students only take one programming course, professors want them to be able to build something when they’re done. Even MIT itself 