Selasa, 22 Mei 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

From cold calls to community building: ProPublica tries to make crowdsourcing more meaningful

Posted: 21 May 2012 12:40 PM PDT

When reporters use social media for crowdsourcing, they’re often just cold calling in the form of a passing tweet — Did you lose your house to foreclosure? Were you the victim of discrimination in the workplace? Have you ever donated your eggs? Contact me for a story I’m working on!

ProPublica takes a warmer approach with its recently formed Patient Harm Community Facebook group. Here’s the question that ProPublica poses to the group: “Were you or a loved one harmed in a hospital? Have you seen this happen to someone else? This is a place to learn, share resources and connect with others.”

The reporters who created the Facebook group described their goals in a post to the website Monday afternoon:

With Facebook, we want to build a community of people — patients as well as doctors, nurses, regulators and health-care executives and others — who are interested in discussing patient harm, its causes and solutions…Please join us. Share your story, ask questions and provide your perspective with other members. Your contribution may help shape our reporting.

ProPublica’s hosts encourage civil, respectful discussion. “Behave in this community as if you were at a dinner party with 10 of your closest friends and family members,” they wrote in a post connected to the group. ProPublica also published explanations for why they started the group in the first place, as well as resources for those patients who have been harmed.

Reporters Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce are moderating the discussion, which Allen says will likely be a vehicle for his reporting on issues related to patient harm. He’s already reached out to some of the 175 people participating in the group, but he emphasizes that the group is its own stand-alone project. By creating a group that exists away from ProPublica, the news organization is facilitating a discussion that its reporters can tap into, but also one that participants can make their own.

“Social media creates a new layer of vulnerability for a reporter compared with what we do traditionally, which is less personal.”

Allen calls it a form of service journalism, “not so much by putting them in touch with us, but more by putting them in touch with one another.” That’s particularly important given the sensitivity of the subject matter, which Allen knows well. In his introduction to the group, he writes that he has interviewed more than 100 patients harmed in medical facilities — and often their family members because the patient is dead.

“When I talk to them, they all feel very alone,” Allen said. “It’s a very isolating experience. They often don’t know where to complain, or what they can do to protect other people…Another value for us is to listen.”

And he hopes other journalists will listen, too, saying they are welcomed to join the group and reach out to participants for their own stories. Maybe the greatest value would be the participation of lawmakers, or hospital CEOs, people who have the power to make changes that will improve patient care. But the key to this project is seeing the Facebook group as complete in and of itself. If it takes on a life of its own, that’s okay by ProPublica.

“It doesn’t need to be something else,” Allen said. “Our intent doesn’t have to be to mine it for sources.”

There’s also a potential benefit in using a third-party site as the platform. While the discussion may be hosted by reporters, Facebook is somewhat neutral territory, and participants are as prominent as hosts in discussion on the group’s wall.

“Social media creates a new layer of vulnerability for a reporter compared with what we do traditionally, which is less personal,” Allen said. “Even for people in the health care community, they can come here and they can see who I am, and see what kind of perspective we’re putting forward on these different types of issues.”

Mainly, Allen says he sees the group as an experiment that people will respond to because it’s framed openly and transparently. And that jibes with ProPublica’s larger social media strategy. At its core is the idea that journalists are not the only ones who can deliver important information, and traditional articles aren’t always the best distribution channel.

“A lot of times the readers are the ones who can deliver that information,” the site’s social media editor, Daniel Victor, told me. “Trust is a huge issue, especially when you think about [it] on a sourcing level. A lot of people aren’t going to trust a reporter they don’t know or a publication they don’t know. To me, I think people are much more willing to trust each other. But we can make the incentive: Meet people like you, discuss this with people like you.”

NPR snags Brian Boyer to launch a news apps team (and they’re hiring)

Posted: 21 May 2012 12:00 PM PDT

NPR has hired Brian Boyer, head of the Chicago Tribune’s news apps team, to lead a new, similar team of data grinders and designers focused full-time on interactive storytelling. That makes NPR the latest major outlet — like The New York Times and The Boston Globe — to devote newsroom resources to news apps.

Brian Boyer

“Apps,” in this context, means interactive, data-driven visualizations of the news on any platform. The network was already creating these — Poisoned Places, The Fracking Boom — but with resources scattered across departments.

The new team is seven people, including Boyer, Matt Stiles, who has done database reporting for NPR’s StateImpact project and who was the founding data apps editor for the Texas Tribune, three staff designers, and two yet-to-be-filled positions. (They’re hiring, which means more great Brian Boyer job postings.)

It hardly seems strange anymore that NPR dropped “radio” from its name.

“For a long time text was a multimedia challenge for a news organiation like NPR,” said Mark Stencel, the managing editor for digital news and Boyer’s new boss. “What we’ve been able to add over the past several years is this visual storytelling…whether that’s amazing photography or video or now really robust data-driven interactive graphics and document presentations.”

News apps are the next logical step. In an interview, Boyer described the last 10 years of multimedia journalism as an “expensive conceit,” a way for news organizations to put sounds and pictures on a screen and say they’re doing something new. He feels strongly — and says so at many a conference — that multimedia journalism should be useful, not just pretty.

“I like pretty things, don’t get me wrong,” Boyer said. “I always like to make the point that I like art but I like craft more.”

Take the Chicago Tribune’s recent story about high-rise buildings that fail fire codes. “I could have made a map. And we could have made a timeline. And those would have been interesting and explanatory in some way,” Boyer said.

“I want to give people a place people can look at to see if their house is safe,” he said.

Boyer’s challenge will be in scaling up these experiences to reach a national audience. That includes working with member stations to build customized, localized versions of news apps.

“I’m a project manager masquerading as a programmer masquerading as a journalist,” Boyer said, summing up the life of anyone building news apps. He wants to create “a really rigorous process that involves user testing, that involves being ready to change things if they stink, if they don’t work, that involves failing fast and iterating toward something.” To put it in journo-friendly terms: “You could call it inverted-pyramid style of development. If you run out of time, you cut off the bottom.”

Boyer will also help NPR move into responsive web design, something Boyer has been doing at the Tribune. For example, open the Tribune’s recent story on flame retardants and resize your browser window. The elements adapt gracefully to any screen size. “The challenge that everybody in the news apps business is facing right now,” Stencel said, “is figuring out how to make these experiences work beyond Web classic, how to get them into the handheld and tablet space, which is where our future is.”

For those of you following Boyer’s PANDA Project, it continues operating as an IRE initiative (independent of Tribune), and Boyer will remain involved part-time. (The project’s 2011 Knight News Challenge grant expires in four months.)

Boyer starts work May 28 July 9. We should see job postings in the next few weeks.

MinnPost tracks new (and stalled) laws with Bill Explorer

Posted: 21 May 2012 10:30 AM PDT

Politics often gets framed in sports metaphors. For journalists, maybe that means it’s worth thinking about the merits of a good scoreboard — or, in newspaper terms, maybe the agate page from the sports section, a single place to check up on the progress of all your favorite players and games.

MinnPost’s new Bill Explorer tool accomplishes this with some data visualization and geolocation thrown in for good measure. The Bill Explorer is a spin on bill-tracker applications that a number of news organizations, watchdog groups — not to mention state legislatures and Congress — have developed to give people a sense of what their elected officials are up to. The Bill Explorer is something of a Frankenstein project, combining data from numerous sources: some directly from Minnesota Legislature bill index, some from the Minnesota governor’s office, and some scraped from state government websites.

I emailed Kaeti Hinck, MinnPost’s director of News Technology, and she said the Bill Explorer needed to work both for policy wonks and for average readers. “Our primary audience is civic-minded people who care about state politics in Minnesota. A majority of our readers come to MinnPost for our politics and policy coverage — it’s our bread and butter,” she said.

The Bill Explorer gives the duration of days it took a bill to be vetoed or become law, as well as vote totals and the names of sponsors. Individual senators and representatives get a rundown of votes on specific bills. Since the language around state house bills can sometimes be dense, MinnPost created broad categories to help readers zero in on what they’re looking for. To give a sense of what took up the most attention, the categories (business and economy, education, and so on) are in bubbles sized accordingly to the number of bills in the session. They also threw in a big red “controversial” category for things like recently passed bill approving public funding for a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings (SKOL! It’s a Vikings thing, trust me).

Hinck said the project took two and a half weeks from start to finish, working while many bills were still in limbo during the session. They anticipated having less time to work with, but votes got dragged on, allowing for additional time. Still, they would have launched the app earlier had the session ended on time. “With apps like this, we take an iterative approach: We’ll do as much as possible in the time frame, and launch the project on deadline even if it doesn’t have every feature we were hoping to build,” she said.

One of the biggest obstacles was the fact that the data collection. There’s no API for the Minnesota Legislature, so they had to piece together what they wanted through various sources, including the Sunlight Foundation’s Open States API. They also had to use ScraperWiki grab information like roll call votes from the legislature’s website and vetoes from the governor’s site. (For a more detailed account of how they built the app — which included some Python and a lot of JavaScript — read their write-up.) Hinck said the Bill Explorer builds on their experience from other data projects, like the “partisan lean” map they developed after legislative redistricting took place. With a project with this much information and moving parts, Hinck said it’s important to have a clear plan in mind. “You need to start by asking, ‘Who is our audience?’ and ‘What are we trying to solve here?’ Sometimes it involves analysis and investigation, and other times it’s simply making the data accessible and searchable,” she said.

Hinck said MinnPost’s tech team has spent time this year trying to better align the editorial and interactive process so projects can be produced more efficiently. They made the code available on Github for others to play with. Hinck said that’s standard practice for most of their projects.

“In my mind, it’s just part and parcel of being in the data journalism community. We’ve learned so much from the great work that others are doing — Chicago Tribune, ProPublica, and WNYC, to name a few — that we want to contribute what we can, as well,” she said.

Buzz Bissinger: Newspaper editors are “very cautious — too cautious”

Posted: 21 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Reporter, author, and former Nieman Fellow Buzz Bissinger stopped by the Nieman Foundation last week and shared his thoughts about how journalism has changed since his early days, and where it’s going, among other topics.

Bissinger is probably best known for his books, which he says he was inspired to write after his year as a Nieman Fellow. He wrote best sellers like Friday Night Lights and A Prayer for the City, and is out with a memoir this summer. (In certain corners of the Internet, he’s best known for his 2008 televised blowup with Deadspin’s Will Leitch on the merits of blogging and new media, for which he later apologized, or for his invective-laden Twitter account.)

First and foremost, he’s a reporter — he hated his stint as an editor, he says — and earlier this year he wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell for leading a group of investors interested in buying Philadelphia’s two largest newspapers. (Ultimately, Rendell backed out of the investment group, which finalized the purchase last month.)

Here’s a partial transcript from Bissinger’s visit.

On the sale of the Philadelphia Inquirer

I knew Rendell, and I knew the team he had put together, and I thought it would be a blithering disaster far beyond what other papers have had to do. I mean, I understand developers have bought papers, and Warren Buffett bought a paper…[With Rendell] you have a former governor, mayor, arguably the most powerful person in the state — and I’m not saying this to be facetious, probably was [the most important person] since Joe Paterno had died — running a paper, making editorial policy.

And not only that. It wasn’t simply a matter of what Ed decided to do, it would be the thousands of people who would call Ed, every f—king day, because they would hear a rumor — and I know Ed, he would be very susceptible, sometimes out of kindness sometimes out of whatever, protecting someone, and I just felt the influence he would have had over the paper…it would be a disaster. This was the worst-case scenario of a paper being taken over. It would be local leadership, but you could not have a former governor or mayor running a paper.

So I wrote [the op-ed], so reaction was predictable. Journalists loved it. I understood that…I actually think it did have something to do with it because increasingly there was increasing criticism and Rendell actually dropped out. I think he realized that this was just going to be a can of worms that he did not want to get involved in. Every day, someone would be saying the coverage had been be slanted one way or the other by Rendell’s influence.

The consortium that bought it does include George Norcross, who’s a very powerful politician, and [former New Jersey Nets owner] Lewis Katz, who I’ve never really trusted. Norcross did do something that I actually did admire. He wrote a sort of public letter and signed it, and said I will not in any way influence coverage of the paper whether it involves me, any of my companies, or any of my family. And if he sticks to that, you know, I think that’s good.

So right now you can’t really tell. They brought back Bill Marimow as the editor. Bill is a wonderful editor. Whether or not Bill is right — because Bill is very old-fashioned and papers are changing, papers need to change — and whether that type of old-fashioned editor is good for the paper, I don’t know.

On entering journalism in the 1970s

What was great about journalism when I entered it — it was literally, really, right after Watergate, it was 1976 — papers were hot. Papers were making money. But beyond that, they all wanted investigative reporting. They all wanted long-form reporting. So when I was at the Norfolk Ledger Star, I was doing 125-inch stories as a kid reporter. Even there, I began to learn narrative, how to tell a story. When I went to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I wrote 35,000-word stories. You know, seven full pages in the paper.

So even before [working at the Philadelphia] Inquirer, the tools of interviewing, the tools of developing character, the tools of telling a story, the tools of drawing the reader in were things that, you know, I had already learned. They were certainly honed at the Inquirer, which gave a tremendous amount of time to stories. And also by the stimulation, which for me was good and bad, of being around other reporters, who really were superb. [Former Philadelphia Inquirer Editor] Gene Roberts is a complex man, and he was great at the Inquirer. He wasn’t so great at The New York Times. He did [say], and it’s a nice aphorism but I think it’s true, which is the key to reporting is to zig while everyone else zags.

On the turmoil of the printed word

I was never an expert but I don’t follow newspapers as closely. I think, and this is a generalization, I think the writing is not very good a lot of the times. A lot of it is fewer copy editors, fewer editors, the 24-hour cycle which I never had to deal with. You’re writing for the web, you’re writing for this, you’re writing for that, you’re updating here, you’re updating there. So I think the writing has really gone down, and that was one thing that was really coveted at the Inquirer.

Are papers — some papers — still doing good investigative reporting? I think that’s the case. But they just, papers don’t have the same relevance. Of course neither do books. Neither do magazines. I don’t really know where we are headed. The book businesses — every portion of the printed word is in turmoil. News holes are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. But you know what, a lot of good things are still being done. And I think it all depends still on the editor.

On what gets lost in the editing process

Newspaper editors are very cautious — too cautious. One of the things that I don’t miss about papers is the constant — as it goes up the food chain, one editor after another, after another, after another, and what happens is it loses its voice. Everyone takes a shot at it. It’s like making a bad movie. I think it’s better if you just stick with one editor. But none of us know what the future is going to be.

I still think papers can be great places to work at. They’re different beasts now but you know what, you’re in good company or bad company. So are magazines. I write for Vanity Fair which doesn’t have nearly the buzz that it once had. You almost never hear anything about it anymore…These are scary times. I can’t predict.

On why newspapers need to innovate

Papers have to think out of the box. It’s hard for journalists to think out of the box. One of the reasons I left print journalism was because I got a little bit bored of being reined in. But they have to — and they still may fail — but they have to. What I worry about the most is — because there’s been so much negative that’s been written — that readers have just said, ‘Well, f—k it. They’re dead.’ And I’ll tell you, if they die, our world will be a hell of a lot different. A hell of a lot different. We’ll have no news. You know, we’ll have these little websites, but we’ll have no news, and we’ll have no vigilance, and we’ll have no reporting of any kind, and it will be f—king chaos. That’s just more than a tragedy. That’s a social disaster.
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