Nieman Journalism Lab |
Posted: 23 Dec 2011 08:30 AM PST   Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.Here’s Lab columnist and Newsonomics author Ken Doctor, weighing in on what 2011 developments will become 2012 trends. (Just don’t look for these fanciful products in stores any time soon — we couldn’t find any of them listed in Amazon or the App Store, for some reason.) Rubik’s Cube Home Design Set: The tablet, when vertical looks like a magazine. When horizontal, it looks like a magazine. It’s neither, of course, and both, and it’s a newspaper, a book, a radio, and a CD player. So it’s lots of fun to see how designers are playing with their fingers, swiping for fun and profit, creating conveyor belts and doing flips. The latest New York Times tablet app is something of a Rubik’s Cube. Go up, go down, go sideways, as if we’re playing with a set of content and refiguring how to fit it into some kind of intuitive order that makes sense to us. Perhaps the perfect last-minute present for that special designer on your Christmas list. The Infinity Stopper: The Internet has just gotten too big for its britches. It is spilling over into our bedrooms, through tablets and smartphones. It assaults us in elevators. It even threatens the passivity of our living-room TV experience, a particular hazard to our culture as Americans lead the world (save Serbia and Macedonia) in couch potatohood. The Infinity Stopper, though, handily offers to put a plug in some of that content, boundaries you know that any media psychologist will tell you are the must-have for 2012. Somehow, The Economist (“Yet Another Reason the Economist is Trouncing Competitors“) got one of the beta Infinity Stoppers and has been going to town with it, extending its limited print franchise into a limited (and quite successful) digital franchise. The simple secret of the Infinity Stopper: a beginning, a middle — and ta-da — an end to the stream of content. As infinity-loving tablet aggregator products now profliferate (Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand joining Flipboard, Pulse and Zite), both The Daily and AOL’s Editions test out their own versions of the Infinity Stopper, offering a daily snapshot for infinity sufferers. Expect the sale of Infinity Stoppers to mushroom, as publishers just say “no.” The Socializer: Let’s face it, most journalists fall off the I spectrum on the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. So the idea of fully participating in the social swim gives them hives. Yet, now the social world is introducing new and younger audiences to traditional news. The Socializer, a patented pharmaceutical developed in the wilds of the Humboldt coast, allows editors and reports to become familiar with Facebook and try out Twitter. While it’s rumored that LinkedIn is a known gateway drug here, no empirical proof has yet been published. Billionaire Bingo App (iOS only, HTML5 in development): Finally, we’ve found a new use for the .0001%. They’re the 412 U.S. billionaires. They can buy up incredibly cheap U.S. newspapers. With prices falling below Filene’s Basement and perhaps copying its business model (“… every article is marked with a tag showing the price and the date the article was first put on sale. Twelve days later, if it has not been sold, it is reduced by 25 percent. Six selling days later, it is cut by 50 percent and after an additional six days, it is offered at 75 percent off the original price. After six more days — or a total of 30 — if it is not sold, it is given to charity,” New York Times, 1982 via Wikipedia), newspapers are beginning to sell to an assortment of new buyers. Warren Buffett buys the Omaha paper for $200 million, Michael Ferro and John Canning snatch the Chicago Sun-Times for $20 million or so, and Doug Manchester buys the San Diego daily for about $130 million. Billionaire Phillip Anschutz swaps out the San Francisco Examiner for the Oklahoman. Whether your interests are community service, political pulpits, and plain-old profit-seeking, the Billionaire Bingo App offers you fast-moving bingo matching of money, interests, and newspapers. Bonus: Got a billionaire buddy who has the app? Play and swap in real time! Kred Kurrency: In a world that measures Klout, why can’t real news companies that do real reporting, which gets mentioned throughout the web and fills the vats of aggregator coffers, get some new currency, even virtual currency? Maybe they could exchange the Kred Kurrency for even better SEO rankings, or buy fake bricks to build digital paywalls. MP11 Remover: Forget MP3s and 4s. The secret chemical compound, concocted by Friends of Murdoch in an Asian country with loose manufacturing standards, is the perfect antidote of choice for bothersome Parliamentarians. The British Parliament’s 11-member Special Committee on Culture, Media and Sport — and who couldn’t love Tom Watson — may be vanished overnight, launched Skyward. And what would those pinkos at the Guardian have to livecast then? I Ching Hourglass: This melding of two technologies may be first tested by Boston Globe publisher Chris Mayer. What will the sudden departure of New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson and the divestment of the flagship Times’ other non-Times newspaper holdings, its regional newspaper group, mean to the Globe? Only the contemporary blending of ancient Chinese hexagrams and the old standby hourglass (it’s reversible and non-digital!) tell the future. Tebowing the Tablet: In recent years, with no great new business model in sight and the old one fading ever faster, publishers searched for the “Hail Mary.” Now, the modern publisher can Tebow the tablet. The power of the tablet — with the power to both save the news industry or destroy it more quickly — may only be harnessed by Tim Tebow-like injunctions of the Almighty. iPad 2 sold separately. The Missing Paper Finder: For the confused newspaper subscriber, especially in Michigan or northern California, who has trouble finding the daily newspaper that only arrives sporadically these days. The Missing Paper Finder app redirects calls self-doubting seniors make to their family physicians to the new centralized customer service centers (Bangalore or Bangor), where they can be upsold into new all-access subscriptions. Crystal ball photo by Melanie Cook used under a Creative Commons license. |
Posted: 23 Dec 2011 07:30 AM PST  Rethinking political fact-checking: PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times, named its Lie of the Year this week, and the choice wasn’t a popular one: The Democratic claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare was widely denounced among liberal observers (and some conservative ones) as not actually being a lie. As Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen noted, the Medicare claim only finished third in PolitiFact’s reader voting behind two Republican lies, leading to the belief, as Benen and The New York Times’ Paul Krugman expressed, that PolitiFact chose a Democratic claim this year to create an appearance of balance and placate its conservative critics who believe it’s biased against them. This sort of liberal/conservative bias sniping goes on all the time in political media, but this issue got a bit more interesting from a future-of-news perspective when it became an entree into a discussion of the purpose of the burgeoning genre of fact-checking itself. At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer argued that the reason fact-checking sites exist in the first place is as a correction to the modern sense of news objectivity as a false sense of balance, as opposed to determining the truth — something he said even the fact-checking sites are now succumbing to. Several others decried fact-checking operations as being, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald put it, a “scam of neutral expertise.” Forbes’ John McQuaid said PolitiFact “is trying to referee a fight that, frankly, doesn’t really need a referee.” Gawker’s Jim Newell was more sweeping: “why does anyone care what this gimmicky website has to say, ever?” He argued that fact-checking sites’ designations like “pants on fire” and “Pinocchios” are easily digestible gimmicks that lend them a false air of authority, obscuring their flaws in judgment. And The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein called the fact-checking model “unsustainable,” because it relies on maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of both sides of a hopelessly fractured public. At The New Republic, Alec MacGillis made the point that fact-checking “invests far too much weight and significance in a handful of arbiters who, every once in a while, will really blow a big call.” Instead, he said, fact-checking should be the job of every reporter, not just a specialized few. Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” responded by saying operations like his aren’t intended to be referees or replace reporting, but to complement it. PolitiFact’s Bill Adair stood by the organization’s choice and said fact-checking “is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth.”  An abrupt change at the Times: New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson surprised Times staffers late last week with the sudden announcement of her retirement, and some details have trickled out since then: Reuters reported that she’ll get a $15 million exit package and that she and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. clashed at times, and the Wall Street Journal reported that much of the dissatisfaction with Robinson was over her digital strategy. The Atlantic’s Adam Clark Estes summed up the reporting and speculation on Robinson’s forced departure by saying that she didn’t get along with her bosses, and the Times felt it needed a technologist. With no successor in sight, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram gave the blueprint of what he would do with the paper: Scale back the paywall, and go deeper into apps, events, and ebooks. CUNY j-prof Jeff Jarvis proposed a “reverse meter” for the Times — pay up front, then get credit for reading and interacting that delays your next bill. He acknowledged that it wouldn’t work in practice, but said it illustrates the idea that paywalls should reward loyal customers, not punish them. Ingram picked up on the idea and threw out a few more possibilities. In reality, the Times is in the process of making quite a different set of moves: It’s talking about selling off its 16 regional newspapers, not including The Boston Globe. Media analyst Ken Doctor broke down the development, explaining that the Times Co. is slimming down its peripheral ventures to focus on the Times itself, particularly its digital operation. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds said the possible deal marks a thaw in the newspaper transaction market. Looking back and forward for news: We’re getting into the year-in-review season, and Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has started it off by releasing its annual analysis of the year’s media coverage. They found that this year, just like 2010, was dominated by coverage of the economy, though the Occupy movement emerged as a strong subtheme, and foreign news was a major area of coverage, thanks in large part to the Arab Spring movements. They also examined media coverage in comparison with public interest, finding that journalists moved on from big stories more quickly than the public. The Lab went big with its year-end feature, publishing more than a dozen predictions for the news world in 2012 from a variety of news and tech luminaries. You can check out that link for the whole list, but here are a few of the trends across the predictions: — Apps. Nicholas Carr predicted that “appification” would be the dominant force influencing media and news media next year, opening new arenas for paid content, particularly through “versioning.” Tim Carmody said e-readers will take a big leap at the same time, led by Amazon’s Kindle. Amy Webb predicted the rise of several sophisticated types of apps, and Gina Masullo Chen envisioned our apps leading us into a more personalized news consumption environment. — Big institutions make a stand. It may be in a continued state of decline, as Martin Langeveld predicted, but Dan Kennedy saw the beginnings of a semi-revival for the newspaper business, accompanied by more paywalls and an feistier defense of their value. On a more ominous front, Dan Gillmor warned of tightening content controls by an oligopoly of copyright holders, government forces, search engines, and others. — Collaboration and curation. Emily Bell saw an increasing realization by news organizations of the importance of networks as part of the reporting process, Burt Herman described the continued emergence of a real-time, collaborative news network, and Paul Bradshaw and Carrie Brown Smith also saw collaboration as central next year. Vadim Lavrusik saw an increasingly sophisticated curation as part of that news environment. Reading roundup: This is the last review of the year, so here are the bits and pieces to keep up with during the holidays over the next two weeks: — Congress’ hearings on the Internet censorship bill SOPA adjourned last Friday, with the vote delayed until next year. Cable news finally began acknowledging the story, and the document company Scribd staging an online protest. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick continued to write about the bill’s dangers, looking at the ability it gives private companies to shut down any website and the way it sets up the legal framework for broader censorship. — The Wall Street Journal reported on the continued high prices of ebooks, a trend that drew criticism from GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram and paidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen. Elsewhere, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo and Wired’s Tim Carmody engaged in an interesting discussion about Amazon and independent bookstores — Manjoo praised Amazon for putting independent bookstores into decline, Carmody argued that Amazon has its eyes on a bigger prize, and Manjoo talked about how independent bookstores can fight back. — A big development in the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning cases: Wired reported that U.S. government officials found chat logs with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on the laptop of Manning, the Army private charged with leaking information to WikiLeaks. This could be critical in the U.S.’ possible prosecution of Assange if the logs show that he induced Manning to leak the documents. — The Journal Register Co.’s Steve Buttry wrote a series of posts on the practical details of the company’s Digital First approach, looking at its journalistic workflow, values, editor’s roles, and ways to think like a digital journalist. Meanwhile, Mashable’s Lauren Indvik looked at The Atlantic’s transformation into a Digital First publication. — Some great discussion about solution-oriented journalism this week: David Bornstein made a case for solution journalism at The New York Times, and Free Press’ Josh Stearns put together a fantastic set of readings on solution journalism. NYU grad student Blair Hickman also shared a syllabus for a solution journalism unit. Crystal ball photo by Melanie Cook used under a Creative Commons license. |