Rabu, 14 Maret 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Village Soup’s hot pursuit of a hyperlocal model goes cold

Posted: 13 Mar 2012 12:30 PM PDT

It wasn’t that long ago that Maine’s Village Soup was being lauded as a model for what a print/online hybrid strategy for local journalism could look like. That optimism took a big hit late Friday with the abrupt closure of Village NetMedia’s newspapers and their related websites.

Fifty-six Village Soup staffers got word on Friday evening, via email, that the Bar Harbor Times, Capital Weekly, Village Soup Gazette, Village Soup Journal and the Scene would immediately cease operations. The papers’ websites had been taken down and replaced with a message from Village Soup owner Richard M. Anderson about how “profound changes in the newspaper publishing business, a weak economy and our investment in new products created severe financial challenges” that made survival impossible. Employees were told that a deal that could have saved the papers — some of which were launched in the 1820s — had unraveled.

“[Anderson] got the word at the close of banking hours on Friday that this negotiation was not going to proceed, and I imagine he probably spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how to tell us,” Shlomit Auciello, a former reporter and photographer for Village Soup Gazette, told me. “We are a little bit of a petri dish here right now.”

Anderson didn’t respond to my attempts at an interview. (His blog, Sustainable Journalism, was last updated in September.) But yesterday the Bangor Daily News found Anderson and quoted him saying he felt awful about the closure, adding, “Nobody did anything wrong.”

In the latter part of the last decade, he was a frequent speaker at future-of-news conferences, promoting the Village Soup model, which relied on getting local advertisers to pay for the right to post press releases and other messages alongside news content, along with a heavy focus on aggregating citizen content. Village Soup’s peak moment probably came in 2007, when it received a $885,000 Knight News Challenge grant to create an open source version of Village Soup’s underlying software.

Online origins

Anderson began his experiment in local news in the late 1990s, when he launched a website that would eventually become VillageSoup.com. The idea was to facilitate online interaction between members of the community, including giving advertisers a way to interact directly with potential customers. Here’s how Anderson explained it in a 2007 piece for Nieman Reports:

If we didn’t get their buy-in and support, we knew we wouldn’t have a sustainable way to share news and information for people who live in these places. So we created browser-based tools to help the business people answer simple, frequently asked questions, such as: What are your specials today? What waterfront property is on the market? What are your business hours? Are you available?

Gary Kebbel, now journalism dean at the University of Nebraska, was Knight’s journalism program director at the time of its grant. He says Anderson was way ahead of his time even in 2007. “In terms of the development of online community and social media, 2007 is like 1990. It was just so long ago,” Kebbel said. “The grant was made based on the fact that Village Soup had a business model that we hadn’t seen anybody else have.”

It was a time when “hyperlocal was sort of the ‘in’ word,” he said. “They were very local and close to their community, so we thought they would also have particular expertise in advertising. That’s still the Holy Grail that has not been found: How do online news sites get community advertisers?”

Anderson’s model also involved taking advantage of print. First, that meant creating two print newspapers to republish some of the material produced by Village Soup websites in Maine. Then, in 2008, he purchased six struggling weekly newspapers in the region to put more of the ad market under one roof. As he told CJR in 2010: “Print plays a very important role. It does something for advertisers that online will never do. And print does something for readers that is going to be hard for online to ever do.” Whatever the motive, the timing was terrible, buying flailing weeklies on the eve of the recession. But at least one Maine journalist, Down East magazine’s Al Diamon, has doubts there was ever much of a business there: “In retrospect, Anderson's ever-changing vision of what he wanted to accomplish never coalesced into a viable business plan. Managing by mercurial changes rarely results in progress, no matter what the economy looks like.”

Kebbel says he’s not sure whether anyone actually used the open source software that Village Soup produced with the grant money. (It was last updated in 2009; the most recent release has been downloaded less than 200 times.) But Kebbel praised the company for finding an additional revenue stream by also offering a premium iteration of the platform. A Village Soup website lists nine sites that use the premium service. The publisher of one such site, Delaware’s Cape Gazette, says the “folks at Village Soup” had assured him that the service would continue, even with the closure of the Maine newspapers. “My understanding is that it’s not going to affect the outlets that are using the Village Soup platform,” Dennis Forney said. “They tell me that I shouldn’t worry about our platform, and so far I’m taking it at face value.”

Filling the news hole

In the statement he posted online, Anderson says he’s “confident that others will step forward” to fill that void that Village Soup leaves behind in Maine. And it appears that’s already started to happen.

Nathan Greenleaf, the owner of a Maine-based commercial refrigeration company, launched a website called Pen Bay Today on Sunday as a way to help the community “move forward” post-Soup. He says the site has had more than 14,000 hits since it went live (and is quoting Shakespeare to rally support). Greenleaf told me he’s willing to invest about $35,000 in the project, but that his understanding of journalism comes primarily from “noir books and movies.” He’s hoping to find reporters who will “work for nothing” at first.

And it appears the president of another Midcoast Maine weekly newspaper will purchase Village NetMedia’s assets and revive most of them. Reade Brower, founder and president of The Free Press, has signed a letter of intent and tells the Bangor Daily News he plans to revive two of the newspapers as soon as next week, closing the others.

Virginia Decoded is the prettiest state code you’ve ever seen

Posted: 13 Mar 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Screen shot of Virginia Decoded

Developer Waldo Jaquith has launched a public beta of Virginia Decoded, an astonishingly user-friendly presentation of his home state’s code. It’s the first iteration of Jaquith’s open-government platform, The State Decoded, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner.

Because Virginia makes its code available as structured data — which puts it ahead of most states, Jaquith says — he can build a website that looks better than the official one. Compare Virginia’s entry for § 24.2-956, which regulates campaign ads in print media, to Jaquith’s implementation. The former offers no design and little context. Jaquith’s page provides understandable history information, a list of attempted amendments, cross-references to other provisions, and inline definitions that pop up for key terms.

“Think of a code as a social network,” Jaquith told me. “Every law is like a person. Every law is connected to every other law via court decisions, legislation, shared definitions, cross-citations, and a dozen other ways.”

When you start thinking about laws that way, the user experience changes dramatically. Jaquith said every official state code website in the United States is, without exception, “wretched,” in effect making public data inaccessible to the public. Jaquith plans to post his source code on GitHub and help implement the State Decoded platform in other states.

Jaquith explained four key features of the website to me in an email:

The first, and best (IMHO), is the built-in glossary. The software scrapes the text of the code to find definitions, which it extracts, figures out the scope of it, and then stores to apply in the relevant sections of the code. (For instance, “person” has 118 separate definitions in the Code of Virginia. The most relevant one must be applied each time that it is used.) The reason why this is so important is that definitions are wildly important in understanding a law. A law might say “No playing loud music on weeknights downtown,” but unless you know the definition of “loud,” “music,” “weeknights,” and “downtown,” it’s of no value whatsoever. The definitions of those four words might be scattered widely, throughout the code. The State Decoded puts them all in one place. You can see an example of definitions in this section of the code about the state’s FOIA law. The defined words have a subtle, dotted underline, designed to make it easy to ignore for people who have no interest in them, but noticeable by folks to whom they’re very important.

The second is the connection back to legislation. In the sidebar of another section of the FOIA law, § 2.2-3711, you can see “Amendment Attempts.” That’s being pulled via a JSON request to Richmond Sunlight (another website of mine), which is listing every bill that cites § 2.2-3711. That allows people to see how laws have built up over time, and what sort of interest that there is, at least among legislators, in amending it.

The third is the connection to other parts of the code. Keeping open § 2.2-3711, you’ll see “Cross References” farther down in the sidebar. That’s a listing of every other part of the code that cites § 2.2-3711. Sometimes there are connected parts of a code that are far, far apart—in different titles, hundreds of pages away (on paper). This is a first step towards integrating them, breaking down the sometimes artificial barrier of topical divisions and regrouping laws more meaningfully.

And the fourth and final feature that you won’t want to miss is the connection to case law. For any section of the code for which there have been state court decisions that cite that section, those decisions will appear in the sidebar, under “Court Decisions.” (See, for instance, § 18.2-33.)

From pipe to platform: The US CIO on the future of open data

Posted: 13 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Steven VanRoekel is the government’s top IT guy, but in a way he’s also its chief content officer. VanRoekel was named chief information officer for the U.S. last fall, a job that oversees the everyday tech needs in federal offices while also looking at big picture issues, like increasing the government’s computing efficiency and web policy. It also involves managing, at least on a grand scale, the government’s push to releasing vast amounts of data on the web.

Journalists swoon at the thought of mountains of data to pore over, information rich with story possibilities. And yet in releasing raw data or structured APIs to the public, the government has shifted farther in the direction of publisher, a role journalists often like to keep to themselves.

VanRoekel was in Cambridge last week for events at Harvard, including a seminar at Harvard Law School where he spoke about advancing government transparency through data and technology. The centerpiece of the government’s tech transparency push has been Data.gov, the growing repository of federal datasets from departments within the executive branch. While VanRoekel is proud of the site, he said it needs to transform into a true open data platform, not just a spout people use to access government information.

“Not only can’t you see the needle in the haystack — you don’t see the haystack.”

“We have to get out of the data business and into the platform business,” he said.

What VanRoekel wants is for the government to be more than just a dumb pipe. Instead he envisions a system where the government provides a service for citizens and developers to experience data, either through widgets and apps, or through what they create on their own. The government would be the jumping-off point. VanRoekel sees it as moving away from a kind of distributed presentation of data to a more centralized distribution. That distinction is important, he said, because the sheer volume of datasets across various agencies can be daunting.

“Not only can’t you see the needle in the haystack — you don’t see the haystack,” he said. Another component would be the ability to track the usage and impact of the data, even using normal web analytics. That’s important, VanRoekel said, because effectiveness is just as important as openness.

VanRoekel is vocal in his support of open data and the use of APIs; during his time as managing director of the FCC, he once said “Everything should be an API.” So instead of offering up raw files for things like meat and poultry inspection records from the Department of Agriculture or Army suicide rates from the Department of Defense, the government would make it possible to find — and more importantly use — that data in more functional ways.

One result of the the new open initiatives on the federal level is that news outlets as well as independent developers have been taking advantage of that data either in reporting or consumer facing apps. In a post on the recent NICAR conference, Alex Howard summed up the work being done: “The parallels to what civic hackers are doing and what this community of data journalists [is] working on [are] unescapable. They’re focused on putting data to work for the public good, whether it’s in the public interest, for profit, in the service of civic utility or, in the biggest crossover, government accountability.”

Journalism, at least in this scenario, is as much about deciphering the unknown as it is about assembling a narrative from strings of bits and bytes. How does this dynamic change when the government wants to become a content platform? Governments and individual politicians have a long history of taking their message directly to the public, and that’s only increased thanks to the power of the web. VanRokel’s goal is an optimistic one that shares commonalities with journalism: The desire to use information to help people make sense of things. As bullish as he is on making Data.gov a true platform, the country’s CIO doesn’t think it will supplant or replace the builders who are providing content based on federal data. The things journalists and coders provide is a way of finding relationships in data that make it more applicable to the average person. That’s something the government isn’t good at yet, VanRoekel said. “Information never gets interesting unless you layer it on top of something,” VanRoekel said.

Still, there are many things on VanRoekel’s plate, and the open data question is just one. While he’s responsible for thinking about big picture ideas like open data, he also is the guy who oversees the government’s collection of printers, laptops, and BlackBerrys. That’s no small task. The government spends about $80 billion a year on technology, something VanRoekel likes to joke about: “I’ve got stuff sitting on the president’s desk and the International Space Station that comes out of that spending,” he said.
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