Selasa, 27 Maret 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

This American Life’s retraction of the Mike Daisey story set an online listening record

Posted: 26 Mar 2012 02:47 PM PDT

One common problem with journalistic errors is that it’s rare for a correction to get as much attention as the original mistake. The screwup goes viral; the mea culpa is a footnote.

But that wasn’t the case with the stunning, sometimes excruciating retraction of Mike Daisey’s partially fabricated This American Life story about working conditions in the Chinese factories that supply Apple products. The hour-long correction attracted more online listeners in its first week than any episode in the program’s history — including the original Daisey show back in January, which previously held the record.

This American Life logoSome 891,474 people have podcasted or streamed Episode 460, titled simply “Retraction,” according to production manager Seth Lind.

Daisey’s original story remains, for now at least, the most listened-to episode in the show’s online history, but it had about two months after its air date to keep gathering listeners. That episode was “the single most popular podcast in This American Life's history, with 888,000 downloads (typically the number is 750,000) and 206,000 [subsequent] streams to date,” according to a March 16 statement. (This American Life also has about 1.8 million radio listeners a week.)

The audio of the January story has since been removed from the TAL website. (You can still hear it here.) This American Life’s hourlong retraction is no longer available for download — downloads of all episodes are disabled after one week — but it is still available for streaming on the TAL website and in its mobile apps.

Daisey apologized again yesterday, saying he let down journalists, human-rights workers, and the theater community. “When I said onstage that I had personally experienced things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract I'd established with my audiences over many years and many shows,” Daisey wrote. “In doing so, I not only violated their trust, I also made worse art.”

Designing for the iPad, using analytics data, understanding attention, and creating delight: Great videos from Webstock

Posted: 26 Mar 2012 08:48 AM PDT

I first went to SXSW Interactive back in 2002, when it was a small add-on to the music and film conferences, with attendance measured in the hundreds. This year, 24,000-plus paying attendees choked downtown Austin, leading cranky old men like me to yearn for the days of something smaller and more intimate.

Maybe the best contemporary analog of early SXSW — with a heaping measure of TED mixed in — is Webstock, the annual festival in New Zealand that brings together many of the smartest minds in web publishing and the nerdier corners of media. The speaker list might not have the flash of a Jill Abramson keynote conversation, but folks like Tony Hsieh, Adam Lisagor, Rob Malda, Jared Spool, Biella Coleman, and Matt Haughey are themselves celebs within certain circles and make for an intellectually stimulating experience.

I’ve never been (feel free to invite me, Webstockers!), but I know that from seeing the videos of talks Webstock posts each year once the festival is over. This year’s are starting to trickle out (more coming to this URL), and I’ve picked out four that might be of particular interest to Lab readers.

(Want to dive a little deeper? Also check out Jeremy Keith on web permanence, Erin Kissane on scaling small projects, and Estelle Weyl on developing for mobile.)

Jennifer Brook on designing for the iPad

Jennifer Brook is currently a lead user experience designer at Method, but before that she was an interaction designer at The New York Times, working on web, mobile, and tablet. (You may remember her as the person who demoed the NYT’s proto-iPad app at Apple’s original iPad announcement in 2010.) Her talk: “Within Reach: Publishing for the iPad.”

Two years ago, the announcement and subsequent launch of the iPad catalyzed a strange mix of euphoria and panic in the boardrooms and newsrooms of the publishing industry. The hope for broadening their reach and appealing to new markets has been coupled with the challenge of shifting reader expectations and behavior as an onslaught of new products continue to redefine what’s possible. With a front seat view into the strategy and design of these new products and apps, Jennifer will reveal what went right, wrong, and what might be next.

Nick Mihailovski on how to use web analytics data

Nick Mihailovski is a senior developer programs engineer at Google and oversees developer relations for Google Analytics, a tool you’re probably using on your own website. Whether you’re a GA site, an Omniture site, or something else, there’s lots you can learn from the data your analytics program produces. His talk: “Acting on data.”

We have more data at our disposal than ever before. Learn 10 things you should do in 2012 to make the most of it.

danah boyd on the attention economy

Cambridge’s own danah boyd is a rock star in the social media and social network research worlds, particularly when it comes to how young people interact with these forms. She’s a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a research associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her talk: “Culture of Fear + Attention Economy = ?!?!”

We live in a culture of fear. Fear feeds on attention and attention is captured by fear. Social media has complicated our relationship with attention and the rise of the attention economy highlights the challenges of dealing with this scarce resource. But what does this mean for the culture of fear? How are the technologies that we design to bring the world together being used to create new divisions? In this talk, danah will explore what happens at the intersection of the culture of fear and the attention economy.

Dana Chisnell on creating delight in users

Dana Chisnell is an independent researcher working on usable security and research methods for social media usability. She has observed hundreds of study participants to learn about design issues in software, hardware, web sites, online services, games, and ballots, and helped organizations perform usability tests and user research to inform design decisions for products and services. Her talk: “Deconstructing Delight: Pleasure, Flow, and Meaning.”

There's a lot of talk going around right now about designing for delight and gameification. You know what? Giving you a badge for getting your expense report done on time probably isn't going to make you any happier or more likely to do it on time next time. And delight is temporary — people habituate pretty quickly.

There's a vast difference, though, between designing an experience that doesn't suck and one that drives engagement. We're good at eliminating frustration. It's easy to observe whether your customers are pissed off, and then just not do that. But that's really not enough anymore. Users' expectations are higher.

Some companies are doing it — they're creating great experiences. From the outside, it looks effortless. But you know it's not. The user part of you is like, wow, now this is really nice, I get it, in fact, I don't want to live without it. The designer part of you is going, holy crap, how'd they do that — it's really hard!

In this session, we'll look at a nifty framework for thinking about and talking about what I call three levels of happy design. The framework is based on research done over the last couple of years looking into behavioral economics, hedonics, positive psychology, the importance of adult play, emotion in design, and a whole bunch of other stuff better saved for the talk.

Mohamed Nanabhay on Al Jazeera’s online growth and the future of news distribution

Posted: 26 Mar 2012 07:10 AM PDT

Mohamed Nanabhay likes to talk about something he calls “distributed distribution,” which, aside from being delightfully alliterative, might be a kind of rallying cry for the future of media.

“What that meant was that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as having a single venue where our content should be viewed,” said Nanabhay, the head online for Al Jazeera English. “We shouldn’t force people to come to our website if they want to view our content — rather we should move onto the platforms where communities have already formed and there are already big audiences.”

That’s a strategy that has worked for Nanabhay and Al Jazeera English: the site’s videos on YouTube generate around 2.5 million views a month; they have almost 1 million Twitter followers and just as many likes on Facebook. Maybe more importantly, Al Jazeera has turned around and used those alternate channels to bolster their news gathering, particularly throughout the events of the Arab Spring.

Nanabhay is stepping down as the online chief for Al Jazeera English and is planning his next big venture. But it’s worth looking at his time at Al Jazeera because it’s likely the idea of “distributed distribution” will be one of his legacies as it played a role in transforming the website of the Middle Eastern broadcaster into a experimental online news operation in itself.

“Previously, you relied on your correspondents and your wires or other news organizations, and suddenly you’re relying on the Internet effectively”

“We’ve done some great work over the years, especially the last two years with our coverage of the Arab Spring, and we built the website up to a place where I’m quite proud of it and quite happy both with the journalism we do and the form that we do it in,” Nanabhay told me.

Nanabhay has been with Al Jazeera more than 7 years, starting as the head of new media, a kind of digital projects division that allowed Nanabhay and his team to experiment with many of the things that are common practice at Al Jazeera English today: using social media in reporting and distribution, cultivating video from citizens, exploring the use of mobile tools for news. One of the biggest accomplishments during his time was the decision to allow Al Jazeera footage to be licensed under Creative Commons. As he prepares to leave two months from now Al Jazeera English is poised for more growth, establishing a foothold here in the U.S.: at least 40 percent of the traffic to Aljazeera.com comes from America.

“The English channel has been on the air for 6 years now, so we’re quite young, we’re quite nimble,” he said. “And in terms of international news, especially with our English channel now, we are a global player. But we have to fight to be recognized as such.”

Balancing what the audience expects with what’s useful

While Al Jazeera English is celebrated for its website and digital journalism today, in the beginning it was no different from other broadcasters who had to reconcile the need to produce broadcast-quality news and the demands of a website. “There’s always this tension between the broadcast side of the business and the online side of the business,” Nanabhay said. “People who produce television are extremely good at what they do and they are steeped in the medium and they feel that’s what’s important, that’s what people want. I think it’s a matter of balancing what the audience expects online and what’s going to be useful for them.”

Nanabhay said those early tests using YouTube, both to distribute video produced from the newsroom and to capture events recorded by citizens, showed the value of working differently. Similarly, the entire staff went through social media training — not to make everyone an expert, but to raise their awareness of the tools available and competing channels for information, he said. It may not be necessary for editors to be fluent in social media and aggregation, but it’s valuable for them to be aware of it as a source. As Nanabhay said “So when things kicked off, they knew there was this Twitter thing and they knew they needed to use it.”

Into the Arab Spring

And then Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt happened. A sizable chunk of Al Jazeera’s coverage area in the Middle East was in upheaval. As the job of reporting in many of these countries became more difficult, either due to violence or state censorship, the reporting output switched to the web. Nanabhay said one thing that is overlooked when considering the role social media played in their coverage is the fact that Twitter and Facebook would not have been effective if Al Jazeera’s journalists weren’t familiar with the people, activists and other groups providing updates from the ground.

“What we saw in Egypt, and we see this with Occupy as well, is the ability of the Internet and people in general to be able to shape what’s newsworthy”

“The use of citizen media, both in terms of being able to find the information, verify the information and then produce it was obviously challenging, especially at the height of the Arab Spring when a lot of this material was based off citizen media,” Nanabhay said.

As ready as they may have been, it did require realigning Al Jazeera’s newsroom to focus attention on the flow of information online. Where tweeting and blog updates had once been a secondary concern, there were now dedicated staffers covering those jobs around the clock. “Previously, you relied on your correspondents and your wires or other news organizations, and suddenly you’re relying on the Internet effectively,” he said.

One thing Nanabhay is particularly proud of is the evolution of liveblogging on Aljazeera.com. The format made sense during the early days of the revolution in Egypt as well as the protests in Yemen, when news would come in through short bursts that would typically not be big enough to carry a full story. It wasn’t long before they saw a change in where eyeballs where going on the site. “After a couple of days of doing this we noticed that at certain points in the day our liveblog would have 10 times the amount of traffic on it than the lead story would have,” he said.

“What’s changed now is the context has moved from that particular video package into a stream of content”

As with most broadcasters, video remains a very big driver for Al Jazeera, and that was no different during the Arab Spring, where views of the network’s live feed jumped 2,500 percent during peak Egypt coverage. But Nanabhay said the attention to the liveblogs continued to increase as well, and they now have liveblogs with a constant stream of news for Bahrain, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria.

Changing news consumption

If there’s a reason liveblogs and live video do well, it’s because the audience now has an expectation of being to drill down into a topic, quickly. At the same time, the relative size of updates we receive on Twitter and Facebook are shorter than the average news story and have changed the atomic unit of news. How media organizations respond to that will determine their success online, Nanabhay said.

“We’ve historically produced a unit of content that contains the entire story, so it has all the context built in. We have the introduction, we have the meat, we have a conclusion and that’s a story or a video package. What’s changed now is the context has moved from that particular video package into a stream of content,” he said. “So each of those individual tweets and Facebook updates and YouTube videos themselves wouldn’t provide you with context. But if you look at a stream of data coming through you would see a bigger picture.”

One of the reasons Nanabhay is so bullish on liveblogs is because of the ability to thread all that information together to create cohesive stories. The value journalists can provide is as a curator of that information, but also delivering that news wherever readers are. That’s why alongside Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, Al Jazeera English also is active on Reddit. It’s also why they launched The Stream, a show deeply immersed in social media.

That’s “distributed distribution” in action, as a means for journalists to continue their work and build audiences. Al Jazeera English is a distributed network that reaches out to its audience wherever it is at any given moment. One of the reasons Nanabhay is so optimistic about a future where journalists and citizens collaborate in storytelling is because of the possibilities of technology. Thanks to smartphones, journalists and civilians alike are producing more media than ever before, which is something news outlets need to embrace and facilitate, Nanabhay said.

“What we saw in Egypt, and we see this with Occupy as well, is the ability of the Internet and people in general to be able to shape what’s newsworthy,” Nanabhay said. “I think that’s quite powerful. I think it’s not a matter of them taking journalists’ jobs — that’s just the way the Internet’s evolved and the way information now flows.”

Photo of Nanabhay from Joi Ito used under a Creative Commons license.
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