Nieman Journalism Lab |
- OC Register assigns 70 reporters to cover one baseball game
- Wait — so how many newspapers have paywalls?
- A new framework for innovation in journalism: How a computer scientist would do it
| OC Register assigns 70 reporters to cover one baseball game Posted: 05 Apr 2012 12:30 PM PDT
Usually, when the majority of reporters in a newsroom rallies around coverage of a single story or event — floods the zone, you might say — something really big is breaking. Maybe a mass shooting, a tsunami, or a terrorist attack. Or, if you happen to work for the Orange County Register, it’s opening day for the Los Angeles Angels — April 6, 2012 — and you’re part of the newspaper’s first official “news mob.” Ever since the Angels signed star first baseman Albert Pujols and pitcher C.J. Wilson, fans had been going nuts with anticipation for the 2012 season. The growing excitement gave the paper’s Angels editor, Keith Sharon, what he called a “crazy idea.” “They’ve never been so excited,” Sharon told me. “Given that atmosphere, I wanted to match the intensity and the enthusiasm of the fans somehow. I like flash mobs, I like cash mobs, and what I’ve been telling people is this is an overwhelming choreographed allocation of news resources. I want everybody who sees our website, our print product, our iPad product, our mobile device product to think: ‘They thought of everything. I mean everything.’” So what exactly does an Angels news mob cover? A real estate reporter is doing a story about how property values around Angel Stadium have gone up. A business reporter talked to the manufacturer of Angels bobbleheads. A technology reporter interviewed the person who picks the songs and video clips that run during the game. The person who usually covers celebrity gossip filed a story about the 1870s-era baseball cards that are in a Library of Congress collection. One reporter is writing a story about an Angels fan who plans to propose to his girlfriend at the opening-night game. “We’ll have a photographer lurking around this guy,” Sharon said. “He’s going to unveil a shirt that says ‘she said yes.’ She better say yes!” Sharon says there’s at least one “controversial” story in the mix. It’s about people who “don’t necessarily like the Angels,” and the staffer who wrote it is (gasp) a Dodgers fan. Reporters are being encouraged to find stories that aren’t regularly on their beats, to take stylistic risks that normally wouldn’t fly, and generally to get outside of their comfort zones. The message Sharon says he emphasized most: “Break out of what you normally do, and it’s okay to try something that you didn’t think you could before.” There will be stadium food reviews, photos from the best sports bars, and an analysis of the song that plays during the seventh-inning stretch: As of Thursday morning, Sharon already had 48 Angels-related stories on his desk. “Once people heard that we were doing this news mob thing, people came out of the woodwork to help,” Sharon said. That includes the fans. Sharon says they newspaper is amassing a huge database of photos and stories from citizens sharing their memories about the Angels. These photos will be online and scrolled across the bottom of every page of the print newspaper. Of the newspaper’s 100 or so reporters, Sharon says about 70 are involved in the news mob. Their assignment on opening day: omnipresence. “We’ve got someone in the parking lot, reporters in the sports bar, reporters at a memorabilia show where former Angels will be signing autographs, a reporter in the stands, a reporter in the pressbox, a reporter in the radio station, we’ve got a reporter with the guy who’s gonna propose, we’ve got a reporter [standing next to the person] holding the flag in center field,” Sharon said. “We want everyone to see that we are everywhere. Everywhere you look, we’ll be.” No, they won’t be wearing OC Register T-shirts — branding opportunity missed! — so you’ll have to look for press passes around their necks instead. And if you’re thinking it’s the perfect day to send out that embarrassing press release in Orange County, not so fast. Sharon says there are reporters in place to cover “anything that happens” on beats like crime, city government, courts, and so on. Fine — but all those resources for opening day? Something that happens, er, every year around this time? Game 1 of 162? Sharon says the editorial process that led to a baseball-obsessed news mob could be translated to coverage of other events down the road. “We thought about that, and we discussed it many times,” Sharon said. “Just like how the space program gave us Tang, we hope there are these residual benefits. A news mob for the first day of school. We might be able to use the same approach for covering the Oscars next year, or election day next year. Can we translate this kind of reporting to other big events? We think the answer will be yes.” And in an era where one of metro dailies’ top remaining assets is the sheer size of their newsrooms — shrunken from their peaks, but still larger than the local competition — it might make sense to flex that muscle now and again. Track the news mob’s action on opening day via the OC Register website, and Sharon’s Twitter account. Photo of Los Angeles Angels pitcher Hisanori Takahashi by Keith Allison used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Wait — so how many newspapers have paywalls? Posted: 05 Apr 2012 10:00 AM PDT
It can be hard to measure something that keeps growing. Just over two weeks ago, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that there are roughly 150 dailies in the United States that now have some form of digital subscription service. “Dozens more papers are likely to follow in 2012,” the study’s authors wrote. Fast forward to Wednesday, and here’s the headline attached to an AP story in the Washington Post: “Nearly 300 US newspapers now charging for access on websites, smartphones and tablets.” I had heard about the Lansing State Journal (Go Green!) announcing its paywall the other day — but did the number of dailies with paywalls really double in a matter of weeks? It depends on who you ask and how you count. Most of the papers AP is counting are clients of Press+, which announced in a press release that 323 publications now use its services to “launch paid models.” But those aren’t all newspapers, or in the United States. “Press+ also does college publications, magazines, trade pubs, things like that,” said Chuck Moozakis, editor-in-chief at News & Tech, which produced the numbers Pew cited. Press+ also works with non-daily newspapers. Press+ spokeswoman Cindy Rosenthal says that, if you take out the weeklies, magazines, international newspapers, and others, the right number for their platform is around 250 — that’s U.S. dailies who use the company’s platform for digital subscriptions. She couldn’t give an exact figure, and Press+ keeps confidential its list of clients, which makes comparing their count to others’ difficult. But she noted the number continues to grow. By Moozakis’ count — he updated it just a few days ago — the number of U.S. dailies with digital subscription services is hovering around 160. And the Newspaper Association of America‘s most recent data (from mid-February) finds about 110 daily newspapers in the U.S. have paywalls. One thing seems clear: The number of newspapers that are putting up paywalls is on the rise. Between newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises Inc., and Gannett, Moozakis estimates about 110 new paywalls in the nearish future. “Other publishers like McClatchy, which at this point only has one paper with a paywall, you gotta figure they’re going to be jumping on this,” he said. Tribune is the “wild card.” Even the company’s home page has dueling perspectives under the subheads “Old Media is Dead” and “Long Live Old Media.” Turns out the lesson here is one we keep learning again and again: The news business is changing, and it’s changing fast. |
| A new framework for innovation in journalism: How a computer scientist would do it Posted: 05 Apr 2012 09:00 AM PDT
What if journalism were invented today? How would a computer scientist go about building it, improving it, iterating it? He might start by mapping out some fundamental questions: What are the project’s values and goals? What consumer needs would it satisfy? How much should be automated, how much human-powered? How could it be designed to be as efficient as possible? Computer science Ph.D. Nick Diakopoulos has attempted to create a new framework for innovation in journalism. His new white paper, commissioned by CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, does not provide answers so much as a different way to come up with questions.
Diakopolous identified 27 computing concepts that could apply to journalism — think natural language processing, machine learning, game engines, virtual reality, information visualization — and pored over thousands of research papers to determine which topics get the most (and least) attention. (There are untapped opportunities in robotics, augmented reality, and motion capture, it turns out.) He thinks computer science and journalism have a lot in common, actually. They are both fundamentally concerned with information. Acquiring it, storing it, modifying it, presenting it. “The goal is really about making innovation in journalism more technologically literate and aware,” Diakopolous told me. The obstacles to progress in news organizations are probably cultural — “not having come from a user-centered design culture,” he said, “where design thinking is important or…you really think about people’s needs or values.” Diakopolous deconstructs the newsgathering process to help identify which parts can be better handled by computers than humans. (Rest assured, humans: “It's unlikely in the near-term that automated systems will fully replace people,” he concludes, “but there are many opportunities for using technology to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes.”) The most practicable takeaway is Diakopolous’ final exercise, a real-life series of brainstorms he conducted with CUNY students and practitioners. He created a card-based game to encourage rapid and frictionless ideation. In three five-minute rounds, five groups generated 54 ideas. About a quarter of them were not half bad, he said. (Some are listed at the bottom of this post.)
The Tow-Knight Center will distribute this game — free — to j-schools and media companies, said Jeff Jarvis, who runs the center. (You have to request one here.) Diakopolous has proposed bringing the game to this year’s Online News Association conference, and they’re asking for votes. “I believe that news organizations still think too incrementally,” Jarvis wrote today. “They aren't being disruptive — even revolutionary — enough. They need to break the form of news — the article as their atomic unit — because they can. They need to imagine and experiment with new ways to serve their publics. They need to ask what business they are really in.” News executives should be hiring scientists, Diakopolous said. They should be conducting all-staff brainstorms. They should be testing the limits of what’s practical and dreaming a little. “An often-cited statistic from health care research is that it takes 17 years to take a research paper in medicine and have the results of that paper be translated into clinical practice,” Diakopolous told me. “Now I don’t know what the exact number is for computer science. It’s probably less than 17 years, but it might not be that much less. It still takes a long time for the cutting-edge, bleeding-edge ideas that are being published in research to make their way into practice.” Part of his motivation for doing the research is to bring those two ends of the spectrum closer, to help journalists meet technologists halfway “and maybe bring down that period of transfer.” The paper is high-concept but short, and everyone who wants to reinvent journalism should read it. (You might have to read it twice. Here’s a PDF version.) Breaking down the problems makes solutions a lot more attainable. If you’re curious, Diakopolous provided me some of the ideas generated by CUNY students in his brainstorming sessions:
Photo of old and new media by Gregory Gruber used under a Creative Commons license. |
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