Selasa, 28 Februari 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

New Knight News Challenge puts emphasis on pragmatists and builders

Posted: 27 Feb 2012 02:09 PM PST

Now that the first new round of the Knight News Challenge is up and running there are a couple of things that seem to stand out, the biggest being the emphasis on speed and simplicity.

The speed part is not a surprise, given the fact that the $5 million innovation contest now takes place three times a year, with a gestation period of a little more than three months. (The application period runs from now till St. Patrick’s day. Winners are announced in June.) No, the interesting thing in today’s announcement was the dead simplicity of it all: A finished application will round out to about 450 words. And you can send it via Tumblr. (And, as you can see above, they’re also back with MOAR Michael Maness on the Internets. Also, a bewildered chihuahua.)

It seems like less of a start-up pitch session and more like a call for bids for a general contractor. And that may not be a bad thing.

As we’ve written before, Knight has a clear interest in improving the funding process for these projects. It has as much to do with their desire to get a social — or monetary — return in the investments they are making, as well as their mission to help transform journalism. What Knight is doing now is trying to shake out the best way to do that, and concise and complimentary are the guide words. Here’s John Bracken on the Knight blog:

We’re looking for ideas that build on the rise of these existing network events and tools — that deliver news and information and extend our understanding of the phenomenon. Anyone — businesses, nonprofits, individuals — can apply.

That’s why I come back to the contractor idea (that, or too much HGTV). What Knight is saying, especially with the networks theme, is don’t design us a house, just make a better kitchen. We don’t need architects and entrepreneurs, we want plumbers and engineers. I may be reading too much into the word “build,” but the application seem to emphasize clarity, skill and a focused knowledge, rather than a grand vision for saving journalism.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with entrepreneurs or visionaries, and by no stretch will the eventual winners not be big thinkers. But in streamlining their funding process, diversifying the funding mechanisms (grants, loans or investment capital are now on the table), and hanging the first challenge on the concept of networks, Knight is saying journalism needs people whose creative vision is critical and tempered with pragmatism. There’s no shortage of dreamers and thinkers wanting to tackle the big problems in journalism — and there probably never will be — but Knight appears to be designing a contest that can get builders working on the basics today.

Clock’s ticking. Make sure to read more about the application process before the March 17 deadline.

Disclaimer: The Knight Foundation is a funder of the Nieman Journalism Lab

Hacker Monthly: It’s the best of the Internet, printed out, and it’s turning a profit

Posted: 27 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST

Hacker Monthly covers

Lim Cheng Soon’s story defies convention. It’s a story about the value of curation, the value of community, and, for some, the lasting value of print.

Lim is addicted to Hacker News, the popular social news site, and he wanted to solve his own problem of information overload — “to be able to go offline [entirely] and not to miss out,” he says. So he decided to start gathering up some of the most popular posts from the site and printing them in a magazine he called Hacker Monthly.

It’s gone from scratching Lim’s own itch to being a real business — one able to attract subscribers, advertisers, and money.

Twenty-one issues later, the magazine has about 4,700 subscribers worldwide, Lim said. Annual subscriptions cost $88 for the print edition or $29 for the digital .mobi/.epub/.pdf bundle. Only five percent of subscribers get the print version, he said, but that’s still a tidy sum of about $20,000 on top of an estimated $130,000 in subscriptions per year. He also sells full-page ads.

Lim quit his freelance and consulting work a few months after launching in 2010 to focus on the magazine full-time. “But the reason I quit wasn’t ‘making enough money’. More like ‘I don’t have time for anything else’,” he told me in a text chat from Kuala Lumpur. It was 5 a.m. and he didn’t want to wake his non-nocturnal wife. “Now it’s making a modest income to support myself and my family.” A niche, printed magazine, compiled from free content and buoyed by a digital edition, is turning a profit.

Lim Cheng SoonWe’ve written before about the money to be made from repurposing existing content into ebooks and other forms, even when aimed at a highly digital audience. Ars Technica generated $15,000 overnight by selling John Siracusa’s OS X Lion review as a $5 ebook. Foreign Policy, ProPublica, The Huffington Post, the L.A. Times, even the small Fargo-Moorhead Forum are doing it, too.

Lim calls himself curator of Hacker Monthly; he also pays a graphic illustrator, Jaime G. Wong, who started as a volunteer, and two copy editors, Emily Griffin and Sigmarie Soto, whom he hired through the freelancer network oDesk. Every article is hand-selected, lightly copy edited, and dressed up for the page. The only criteria for inclusion in the magazine is that a story (a) has more than 100 votes on Hacker News and (b) satisfies the Hacker News ethos: “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.”

Hacker News, for the unfamiliar, is a lightweight social network for people in the tech and startup world to share stories they like. Paul Graham of Y Combinator created the site to try to recreate the feel-good early days of Reddit. Users upvote (but can’t downvote) articles they like and get karma points for sharing interesting stories. Civility is strongly enforced in comment threads, which are often better than the links themselves.

Lim has emailed hundreds of authors over 21 issues to get permission for each reprint.

Much of Hacker Monthly’s February 2012 issue is not for the programming-squeamish. There are pieces on the optimal length of strings in Ruby, how best to remotely work in Unix, troublesome corners of Python, and something called a fountain code. The previous issue had Matt Might’s “Translating Math into Code”, which goes deep into discrete mathematics, and stories about slopegraphs, the Haskell programming language, asynchronous user interfaces, and hiring “startup-minded” people.

Lim said he has emailed hundreds of authors to get permission for each reprint. The hardest part is figuring out how to reach them. He described the process on the Hacker Monthly blog:

A lot of people just doesn’t have a contact form/email address listed on their website. I have my own bag of tricks when it come to searching email address (worthy of a separate post), but when all methods fail, I will just leave a blog comment or message their Twitter account. After obtaining their email addresses, I email each of the authors personally to obtain their permission, biography and mailing address (if you didn’t know already, every contributing author receives a print copy + 1 year digital subscription). This takes another week.

Lim said only one author has refused permission, since he wanted to be paid; a few did not respond, and two or three had their own reasons for opting out. This tortuous workflow inspired a Hacker News user to make the case for more flexible open-content licenses such as Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License.

Lim told me he doesn’t mind emailing authors. It’s an excuse for him to introduce himself to people he admires. “I’ve even met up [in person] with some of the authors, from those emails. Some became my mentors too,” he said.

Lim said he enjoys a lot of support from the Hacker News community. Most subscribers are HN regulars. He did a “Christmas giveaway” late last year, and the traffic from Hacker News crushed his server within one hour — a high honor.

To see for yourself, you can download free copies of the first two issues and the November 2010 special issue.

Wadah Khanfar: A look inside Al Jazeera and the Arab media

Posted: 27 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST

As we mentioned last week, we were very excited to see Wadah Khanfar, former leader of Al Jazeera, come to MIT to give a talk on Friday. He spoke about both the wave of revolutions in the Arab world and the role of his network — now a global player — in the events of the Arab Spring. The video’s above; after his remarks, he has a discussion on stage with MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman and Joi Ito along with Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera English, followed by Q&A.

Nieman Fellow David Skok Storified the event, and a group of smart MITers kept a live transcript of the evening. A few of the highlights (noting that these are from a quick audience transcript, not word-for-word quotes:

It’s impossible for a network that has 3-4 correspondents to cover [the Arab Spring]. We started, but were overwhelmed by social networks who were feeding thousands of video clips, pictures, through the system. Now, you’re an experienced professional journalist with strong credentials: suddenly you’re beaten by people without experience or prestige, who are more free than you, just feeding immediate news through social networks. You’re no longer breaking news to anyone. So this was the challenge: to inject within the newsrooms, this newcomer, the youth, and consider whether this might introduce innacuracy to the newsroom. We had a big debate in the newsroom over what to do.

Now, Mubarak chose to kick out Jazeera, kick out correspondants, shut down newsroom, turn off cameras. So the decision was made for us: we had no choice but to carry information from social networks. So we took this on, and it turned out not to be a chllange or threat, but one of the most beautiful moments in the history of journalism: a moment when a new ecosystem had emerged. Prior to that, every meeting that I took part in with editors was about the threat of social networks. After that, the paradigm shifted.

When a network like Al Jazeera carries a story from social networks, it gains visibility and credibility. When people with no internet access see the story on Jazeera, they take it seriously and go down and join the youth in their protests. [...]

There’s a model of social networks: flat, creative, dynamic; and then there’s a model that has priorities, delivery in a certain format. Each is necessary in certain circumstances. How can we take the spirit of networks, and the spirit of the organization, planning, and priorities, that can serve democracy? This is not a challenge for Arab countries: it’s a challenge for the world! In a moment when everyone wants to know how the economy can serve our interests, everyone is trying to answer this.

He also addresses criticism that Jazeera’s coverage is sometimes warped in favor of its Qatari ownership. It’s a compelling talk — give it a listen.
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