Sabtu, 24 Maret 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Location, location, location: NPR customizes the news with local content

Posted: 23 Mar 2012 10:43 AM PDT

Screen shot of local headlines on NPR.org home page

NPR is trying another experiment with geotargeted news, partnering with 13 member stations to deliver local headlines on the NPR.org home page. Location-sensing technology detects whether a user is in one of the test markets and, if so, pipes in headlines straight from a station’s website.

“From earlier tests we already know that there is some appetite among NPR.org visitors for local news. And we know that NPR.org can drive traffic to member web sites,” said Bob Kempf, the general manager of NPR’s Digital Services division, in an email.

“We know less about the differences in users’ expectations between local and national sites. Our goal is to learn more about how those expectations align and in particular if we can drive sustained engagement with member station web sites.”

The experiment will run four weeks. In seven markets, the local headlines link directly to the station’s website; in the remaining six, the user is taken to a station-branded page on NPR.org.

Joining a Facebook experiment

Last month, we told you NPR’s experiment with geotargeting on Facebook: When NPR shared links to KPLU stories on its main Facebook page — only visible to people in the Seattle area, not all 2.3 million fans — the station's website got record traffic. More importantly, according to NPR’s Keith Hopper and Eric Athas, it drove more focused community conversations.

“For example, one KPLU story tackled a question Seattleites know well: Why don't people in Seattle use umbrellas?” they wrote. “Residents of New York, Boston, or D.C. wouldn't have much to contribute to a conversation around this question — or even understand why the question was being posed. But Seattle users — the only ones who saw this post on NPR's Facebook page — had a lot to say.”

Hopper and Athas since have proposed expanding the Facebook experiment in a Knight News Challenge application seeking $340,000. They would build a “GeoGraph,” a sort of software dashboard that would let stations pitch stories for Facebook sharing, streamline NPR’s process for picking links and sharing them, and capture metrics to share the results with other stations.

“When you do a localization post, only people in that region can see it and see how it’s performing,” Hopper told me, “which is obviously a problem if you’re trying to develop learning among your participants.”

NPR can provide a richer experience by tapping its powerful network — almost 1,000 member stations, hundreds of which produce original journalism — since the network’s own reporters can’t be in every corner of the United States. It’s what stations have done for decades on the radio: providing a tailored news experience, a blend of local and national content.

And it’s another way for NPR to throw a bone to stations, many of whom produce news on a shoestring and can’t compete with NPR’s shiny digital products and national brand power.

“The localization experiment is really part of a wider effort to identify ways in which we can deepen our digital partnership with stations,” Kempf said. “Assumed in that is the goal of deepening engagement and ultimately growing audience both locally and nationally.”

Hashtags are the new lawn signs: Why Twitter won’t predict political success in the 2012 cycle

Posted: 23 Mar 2012 09:33 AM PDT

Editor’s note: We thought this piece from Talking Points Memo’s Kyle Leighton and David Taintor was interesting. It looks at how political journalists, searching for external indicators of a candidate’s momentum, seem to have moved from counting lawn signs to counting tweets.

It’s worth a pre-weekend read. Thanks to TPM for letting us republish this piece; the original’s over here.

Ask any political operative tasked with managing “presence” and volunteers in past campaigns what their biggest frustration is, and it’s usually not a contest. Lawn signs.

Lawn signs, meet your digital replacement: Twitter.

“The old mantra is that lawn signs can’t vote,” Matt Canter, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told TPM. “The same applies to hashtags.”

Lawn signs are a metaphor for campaign frustration, whether it’s a race for city council or the presidency. They’re an easy tool that make people feel good about their candidate in a public display of affection, but many a staffer has been frustrated by supporters who think they are doing their part by putting one up — when they could be making phone calls and knocking on doors. Twitter, as a campaign tool, is much more valuable — Canter and other operatives point to its success as way to recruit volunteers and get supporters excited about the campaign.

Rating the intensity of one candidate's supporters means nothing if a rival's supporters cast more votes.

What’s probably less valuable is where the social networking tool overlaps with the news media. Journalists sometimes use Twitter to help make sense of where voters stand and why — the ultimate goal of political coverage. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

Widgets like The Washington Post’s Mention Machine and Time magazine’s Campaign Buzz Meter track mentions on Twitter and other social media to determine who’s up and who’s down on any given day of the campaign. As of Thursday afternoon, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney were jockeying for the top spot on Time’s Campaign Buzz Meter. But Paul has yet to win a GOP primary contest, and Romney has far and away secured the most delegates.

When the Post’s “Mention Machine” appeared ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Cory Haik, Amanda Zamora, and Natalie Jennings, three members of the paper’s social media team, wrote about its inception:

@MentionMachine is a new Washington Post news app that monitors Twitter and media across the Web for political candidate mentions, revealing trends and spikes that show where the conversation is and why. It launched Jan. 3, the day of the Iowa caucuses, and will run through the presidential election in November.

There are a few ways Twitter variables, or mentions, can be measured or extrapolated to examine trends in campaigns. Growth in number of legitimate followers or a high recurrence of retweets are both indicative of growing grass-roots support. A spike in the number of times a candidate is mentioned on Twitter might signal an event that could alter a campaign. There are many engagement presentations across The Washington Post site that will display @MentionMachine counts to show these variables.

Michael Dimock, an associate director at the Pew Research Center, told TPM that it may be too soon to tell whether social media tracking tools are a useful way of reporting on political campaigns.

The data don’t show what voters are “feeling,” Dimock said, also saying that it doesn’t make the display uninteresting. “It gives me some information about how engaging [a particular] storyline is,” he added, “whether that story is resonating with people.”

But “to think of this as an indicator of that broader public is not a safe connection to draw yet,” Dimock said. A recent Pew study on primary news consumption illustrates Dimock’s point. Only 2 percent of the study’s respondents learn about the presidential race from Twitter. Dimock said Twitter ranks low because it was built for personal and social interaction, not necessarily a channel through which to deliver news. “We’re still in the very early stage of seeing how much will these be news sources for people,” he said.

Social media are more effective at gauging the intensity of an electoral base than measuring political preference, Dimock added. Which is exactly what political professionals use it for — to rally their supporters and disseminate information to reporters.

Cory Haik, The Washington Post’s executive producer of news innovations, said the Mention Machine is just one way of monitoring the political conversation. But to be most effective, she said, it needs context. “Twitter is not necessarily going to tell you who’s going to win the election,” Haik told TPM.

But when the Post’s Mention Machine declares who’s up and who’s down, the paper is suggesting that when a candidate surges on Twitter, he or she could be surging at the polls. Claims that legitimate followers and retweets are “indicative of growing grass-roots support,” are likely too close for comfort, in the same way that lawn signs are no indicator of a winner. After all, rating the intensity of one candidate’s supporters means nothing if a rival’s supporters cast more votes. It should be mentioned that the Post’s Mention Machine also uses traditional media mentions — not just Twitter and social media — when ranking candidates.

The Post cited a chart in an article last month that graphed the results of their Twitter tracking and the results of different states along the GOP presidential primary process. It turns out, when a candidate wins a state, people tweet about them. If another candidate wins a state, people tweet about them. So the whole idea of Twitter’s possible predictive value of the state of the race was essentially done in by their own data — the information gleaned from the chart shows users reacting to events, not helping to shape them.

Santorum campaign manager Mike Biundo agreed that using social media is a piece of a larger campaign strategy. Tweeting and posting on Facebook is a great way to quickly get a message out, but you “can’t rely on social media as the only way you’re communicating with voters,” he told TPM. “It’s a part of your holistic approach,” including traditional campaigning, direct mail, get-out-the-vote efforts, and so on.

That’s where all sides seem to intersect. Twitter is a great organizing tool. But its function is better served rallying actual people to speak directly with other people, rather than persuading across media platforms. And attempts to make sense of the crosstalk between camps is no different than saying reporting on the number of lawn signs Candidate X has up, and how that will ensure Candidate Y’s defeat on election day.

Photo by Scorpions and Centaurs used under a Creative Commons license.

New FCC rules offer a “historic opportunity” for low-power community FM radio

Posted: 23 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT

For more than a decade, community radio advocates have been fighting to get more low power radio stations on the FM dial. The Federal Communications Commission took a step in that direction this week by adopting new rules that clear the way for a substantial increase in a class of low-power radio stations.

From a technological standpoint, terrestrial FM radio signals that barely extend two miles might seem old-school. But it represents an enormous chance for underserved communities to organize, communicate, and collaborate. The FCC expects to be able to begin accepting applications for new low-power — or LPFM — stations by early 2013.

“This is the first opportunity to apply for low power anywhere in the country in 12 years, and the first time there’s been an opportunity for urban radio in decades,” said Brandy Doyle, policy director for the nonprofit LPFM advocate Prometheus Radio Project. “It’s going to be the first opportunity in a long time and also the last opportunity of its kind. After this, there won’t be any spectrum left. The FM dial is going to be pretty much full, so this is a historic opportunity.”

“They flipped for a profit, essentially speculating on the public airwaves.”

The new rules set out to accomplish a number of goals. In addition to making available more frequencies for community radio, they also aim to curb speculation in the translator market by putting a 50-translator cap on the number of new licenses one group can acquire nationwide. In any given market, applicants are limited to one license.

“The FCC did not originally put a lot of restrictions [on applicants], so you had these giant translator networks that have hundreds or thousands of these translators all over the country,” Doyle said. “They’re largely noncommercial religious networks…The license is free to apply for but, unlike a low-power, you’re allowed to sell your [translator] license to someone else. The biggest filers applied for thousands and then when they got them they flipped for a profit, essentially speculating on the public airwaves, and they didn’t actually break any rules.”

Now, the FCC is getting ready to process a backlog of thousands of translator applications, as well as substantially expand LPFM licensing opportunities in medium and large markets. A cluster of communities in urban Minnesota have been closely tracking the FCC’s action on the issue, including the LPFM victory that came with President Barack Obama’s 2011 signing of the Local Community Radio Act. That law removes the ban on having low-power stations within three “clicks” on the dial of a full-power station, a requirement based on worries about interference.

Community organizer Danielle Mkali is working to get two licenses for low power radio stations in the Twin Cities. Mkali, who focuses on media justice for the nonprofit Main Street Project, says the dense and diverse urban areas in the region are vastly underserved by existing media.

“What were hoping to do is probably not unlike a lot of other communities that are looking for ways to build power and get their voices heard,” Mkali said. “We know that, for one thing, we don’t often see ourselves reflected in the media in ways that are accurate or positive. People of color, immigrants, low-income people in general — to be able to see our cultural strengths or traditions reflected in a positive light, we’re not necessarily hearing on the radio right now.”

The other major piece of the equation is news.

The Twin Cities is home to a diverse population of non-English speakers, including substantial Spanish-speaking, Hmong-speaking, and African-language-speaking groups. “There’s a huge population of Somali and East African immigrants,” Mkali said. “What makes Phillips [a diverse Minneapolis neighborhood] really unique is it has the largest concentration of urban Native Americans in the country. In St. Paul, the neighborhood that we’re focusing on, Frogtown, has the largest population of Hmong immigrants in the country.”

The addition of low-power radio, produced and run by members of these communities, could connect them to the larger region — including decisions lawmakers are already making with their tax dollars on their behalf — in a way that’s not possible now.

“Being able to understand what’s happening in the neighborhood, heard in their own language and being able to create some influence around community changes and policy is really important to us,” Mkali said. “There’s been studies done in Phillips, and not a lot of people in that neighborhood have broadband access. Being able to get information to people through the Internet is not necessarily working in these neighborhoods, and we know that radio is really affordable, and it’s also something that you can engage with at home while you’re doing other things. You can be with your kids and have a lot going on and still listen to the radio and feel like you are a part of your community.”

Photo by William Li used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Mike Daisey and truth in journalism, and the tech giants’ news grab

Posted: 23 Mar 2012 06:50 AM PDT

The agony and the ecstasy of Mike Daisey: The story that dominated this week broke last Friday, when This American Life announced it would retract a January story about abuses in Apple’s factories in China. The piece, adapted from a monologue performance by Mike Daisey, turned out to be littered with falsehoods, which were discovered by a reporter for Marketplace and subsequently admitted by Daisey. (As it turned out, Gawker’s Adrian Chen had already been partway down this road, too.) TAL devoted a full episode to the retraction, and the resulting outrage led Daisey to change his show…but not that much.

Daisey’s response was far more defensive than contrite. His initial statement contended that his only regret was to let a theatrical monologue air on a journalistic program. A follow-up lamented that people were using this controversy as an excuse to deny the reality of where their gadgets come from. You can also hear his prologue from one of last weekend’s shows, as well as a much longer defense of his story (helpfully transcribed here).

Daisey’s response — not to mention his lying in the first place — wasn’t received well. NYU professor Jay Rosen called it the response of a “master manipulator,” and several others objected to his contention that he wasn’t bound to a strict definition of truth because he’s in theater, not journalism. CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis said truth is the norm for everyone, and Grist’s Scott Rosenberg argued that Daisey drew a bright line between journalism and theater (and journalism and activism) that doesn’t exist. Blogger Rachel Joy Larris contended that Daisey was aping the practice of journalism to give his stories a veneer of credibility.

Several commentators delved into the possible reasons for Daisey’s fabrications: Reuters’ Felix Salmon said that it stemmed from a desire to turn a complicated reality into a simple narrative with clear good guys and bad guys; The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos posited that Daisey believed that China was too faraway and exotic to be fact-checked. Two other bloggers, Matthew Baldwin and Aaron Bady, said Daisey’s main problem was his narcissistic need to put himself at the center of his stories, and Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D refuted Daisey’s assertion that he was the only one shining a light on these abuses. An Economist blogger highlighted the role that Daisey’s misguided effort to blame the media for its supposed oversight played in his falsehoods and his defense.

Daisey did have a few defenders—entrepreneur Kevin Slavin, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and columnist Michael Wolff, who argued that journalists’ preoccupation with factual diligence neglects the fact that good writing is what audiences value. Additionally, others, included these professors writing at CNN, were worried that Daisey’s lies would distract from the larger truth of problems in Apple’s factories in China.

Time’s James Poniewozik offered a similar ”larger truth” point, but pinned the blame solely on Daisey — because of his lying, other well-reported accounts of abuses will be tarred by the “larger truth” of Daisey’s exposure. Others had different problems with the “larger truth” argument by Daisey and his defenders: Slate’s Daniel Engber said Daisey’s story wasn’t even substantially true, and Gawker’s John Cook described the “larger truth” argument as an artful attempt to get around the simple fact that “those things didn’t actually happen.” And Slate’s Jason Zinoman said the “larger truth” has already been reported by numerous outlets; the only thing Daisey added to those stories were precisely the things he made up.

So what about This American Life’s role in all this? The New York Times’ David Carr was relatively sympathetic, contending that no matter what mechanisms are employed, some fabulists will always slip through journalism’s cracks. But at the Columbia Journalism Review, Lawrence Pintak pointed out plenty of problems in TAL’s fact-checking process, and Poynter’s Craig Silverman said it wasn’t fact-checking at all. Jay Rosen wondered whether that fact-checking failure was because TAL has fallen too deeply in love with stories, and Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark offered a similar indictment: “Ira Glass wanted the story to be true. He let down his guard — and his audience, who also wanted the story to be true.”

Also at Poynter, Steve Myers and Craig Silverman presented some lingering questions about TAL’s standards and fact-checking processes, and here at the Lab, Ken Doctor suggested that the solution isn’t to try to erecting higher walls between journalism and everything else, but to acknowledge and disclose the blurring boundaries that come with digital media convergence.

Ceding ground in news to the tech Goliaths: Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the Media report this week, and its overview lays out the themes pretty well: Mobile media consumption has come of age, a handful of tech giants are taking the lion’s share of the economic benefits as they fight to gain jurisdiction over more of our online lives, and the decline of traditional media continues to take its toll, financially and civically. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter also has a good summary of some of the other findings, especially as media consumption is concerned.

One area that got some attention was on Facebook and Twitter use for news, which found that only 9 percent of American adults get their news often from Facebook and Twitter recommendations. Peter Kafka of All Things D interpreted the findings to mean that even though social media is much further along as a news source than it was just a few years ago, it’s still on the early-adopter curve.

PaidContent’s Staci Kramer pointed out a few other social media findings that make sense — Twitter users are more likely to follow links from news sources and news recommendations from non-news sources, and they’re more likely not to know where a news recommendation comes from. And GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram saw a larger trend of personalized curation and aggregation, in which platforms like Facebook are becoming major players — and “frenemies” of news orgs.

The Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance focused on who’s getting the money in this scramble for mobile and digital news dominance, and landed on the tech giants, pointing out that five tech companies (not including Apple and Amazon) received 68 percent of all digital ad revenue last year. She talked to the project’s Amy Mitchell about the prospect that one of those companies could swoop in to take over a struggling news org and the idea that “technology leaders might identify news production as a path to omnipresence in consumers' lives.” Poynter’s Rick Edmonds looked at the way this is hitting newspapers, warning that they’re close the edge of losing a critical mass of advertising revenue.

The Times’ pay plan tightens up: It’s been a year now since the New York Times launched its paid-content plan, and Joe Pompeo of Capital New York detailed its inception and its success: More subscribers than the paper anticipated and the same overall web audience, though slightly lower traffic. He also touched on the Times’ plans for the paywall going forward, including its attempts to grow internationally and to convert more casual readers to subscribers, partly through tablets.

The Times unveiled the next step in its paywall development the next morning, announcing that it would drop the number of free articles per month before the wall kicks in from 20 to 10. (You can still get Times articles after you hit the wall by finding them through blogs, social media and, to a lesser extent, search.) Peter Kafka of All Things D wondered whether the Times was making the change simply because it could or because it had to.

The Times also announced a total of 454,000 digital subscribers, which, as Pompeo reported, is well on its way to the 600,000 to 1 million it may ultimately need to be a success. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum was impressed by the number of subscriptions, but he suggested that the Times might be able to rope in a few more younger readers by tightening the loopholes to its system.

Reading roundup: There wasn’t a whole lot being discussed in the journalism/tech world this week outside of the Daisey debacle, but there were still a few miscellaneous pieces worth reading:

— Fortune was the latest media outlet to cover Pinterest’s meteoric rise, but some real warts are emerging: More attention is being drawn to its copyright problems from people like artist Glendon Mellow and the photographers’ group Artists’ Bill of Rights. Pinterest has assured that it’s addressing copyright issues. MediaShift, meanwhile, showed how j-school profs are using Pinterest in their classes.

— On one side of media utopian/dystopian divide, Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker offered a fine rebuttal to the argument that Twitter inhibits deep thought and serious argument.

— On the other, cultural critic Evgeny Morozov lamented the possible dangers to privacy in automated forms of journalism in a piece at Slate, decrying “our refusal to investigate the social and political consequences of living in a world where reading anonymously becomes a near impossibility.”

— Finally, the Lab’s Andrew Phelps put together a smart analysis of Gawker’s new editorial strategy of alternating “traffic-whoring” with more substantive posts.
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