Sabtu, 26 Mei 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

How a New York Times developer reverse engineered @Horse_ebooks –An Interesting

Posted: 25 May 2012 11:39 AM PDT

Horse with jaunty gallop

Jacob Harris, a senior software architect at The New York Times, shares my obsession with @Horse_ebooks, the wise and mysterious Twitter spambot. @Horse_ebooks tweets nonsensical phrases, apparently scraped at random from the web, and sometimes includes links to spam sites. The account has become a huge hit, with 74,000 followers.

The horse is often imitated but never duplicated, powered by the manual labor of human satirists. Like a good hacker, Harris took his obsession to the next level: He reverse-engineered the horse’s algorithm and created one for the New York Times. Behold, @nytimes_ebooks:

Like its precursor, tweets from @nytimes_ebooks are surprisingly compelling and accidentally hilarious. Harris describes in a blog post how he did it: A script crawls the New York Times RSS feed for recent stories, extracts quotes from the text (“better for ebookification,” he writes), and converts the text into a Markov chain.

Harris has no control over the text produced by his bot, which he finds “both comforting and alarming.” The source material includes the darkest moments of the human experience. He said the project is not unlike the artwork in the Times’ 8th Avenue building, a series of mounted screens that pluck phrases from stories and flash them without context.

Unlike its precursor, every @nytimes_ebooks tweet includes a short link back to the story. And it’s nearly impossible to resist clicking to find out what inspired the nonsense.

Bravo, Jacob Harris. You probably generated enough clicks per reader to hit the NYT paywall many times over.

“There is a mystery in the Markov model of how it writes its text,” Harris told me in an email. “Like Eliza or other textual experiments, there is this ambiguity where the machine sometimes writes something poetic and new and sometimes line noise. If this were a 3-D drawing of a person, we’d be staring right at the horror of the uncanny valley, but here it’s really compelling. Why?”

A father of two young children, these are the kinds of thoughts he discovered in the “loopy predawn hours.”

“Sometimes the text reminds me of a toddler learning to talk. We like to watch it because sometimes bots say the darndest things! And sometimes because it feels like we’re watching something being born.”

Harris laid out an example:

I’m not sure if @horse_ebooks uses this attention to get clicks. I’ve never clicked on a link in its feed when they appear. But I could see how you might want to just to see where the tweet came from. For instance, here are two tweets of the same story.

Which would you click? Of course, I did this for the lulz, not the clicks, but I’d be interested to see if it has a positive effect there, given that it’s not user-friendly at all! To give you some background, The New York Times sometimes creates two headlines for an article: a print version which can be opaque and artful and a more straightforward version of the headline for mobile readers and twitter. This makes sense, because print readers can see what the article is about from its context and layout on the page, but a headline like “A Very Fine Line” would be opaque and annoying on Twitter (where it ran as “A Brooklyn Artist Free-Associates on Her Walls”).

Harris stresses this is nowhere near an official project of the Times. But this being the Nieman Lab, we try to take away lessons for the news business. @nytimes_ebooks demonstrates the joy of finding content in unexpected places, places that previously appeared to have none. Who would have thought a robot that slipped through Twitter’s spam filters would have inspired so much creativity? Content with limited value in one context can have real value in another.

It’s a great example of the hacker mindset that journalists can embrace: What is a truly new and surprising way to tell stories? Experiment often, fail fast. Harris told me he spent a few days tinkering with Markov chains and two evenings coding it, but that’s it.

Are you confident that,

Must-see TV for the weekend: Three takes on how we create, spread, and take in information

Posted: 25 May 2012 09:23 AM PDT

In the United States, we’re about to start the three-day Memorial Day weekend, which means a little more sun, a few more hot dogs, and a bit more mental space. Don’t let it go to waste! Spend some part of it listening to smart people say smart things!

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society here at Harvard has hosted a spree of folks this month talking about the kinds of subjects we’re interested: how information gets made, how it gets shared, and how it gets consumed. First was James Gleick, talking about the ideas contained in his terrific book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Then came metaLAB’s Matthew Battles, who brought in his knowledge of the history of knowledge to talk about what it might mean to “go feral” on the Internet. And finally, earlier this week, Mike Ananny of Microsoft and Berkman spoke about the public’s right to hear and how APIs are changing media infrastructure and affecting free speech.

At some point, maybe after that second BBQ burger (extra mustard, please), take a stretch with your iPad or your laptop and have a listen to what these guys have to say. You’ll be smarter for it.

James Gleick / The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Harvard and the author of a half-dozen books on science, technology, and culture. His latest bestseller, translated into 20 languages, is The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, which the NY Times called “ambitious, illuminating, and sexily theoretical.” Whatever they meant by that. They also said “Don’t make the mistake of reading it quickly.”

Matthew Battles / Going Feral on the Net: the Qualities of Survival in a Wild, Wired World

How do we balance the empowering possibilities of the networked public sphere with the dark, unsettling, and even dangerous energies of cyberspace? Matthew Battles blends a deep-historical perspective on the internet with storytelling that reaches into its weird, uncanny depths. It’s a hybrid approach, reflecting the web’s way of landing us in a feral state—the predicament of a domestic creature forced to live by its imperfectly-rekindled instincts in a world where it is never entirely at home. The feral is a metaphor—and maybe more than just a metaphor—for thriving in cyberspace, a habitat that changes too rapidly for anyone truly to be native. This talk will weave critical and reflective discussion of online experience with a short story from Battles’ new collection, The Sovereignties of Invention.

Mike Ananny / A Public Right to Hear and Press Freedom in an Age of Networked Journalism

What does a public right to hear mean in networked environments and why does it matter? In this talk I’ll describe how a public right to hear has historically and implicitly underpinned the U.S. press’s claims to freedom and, more fundamentally, what we want democracy to be. I’ll trace how this right appears in contemporary news production, show how three networked press organizations have used Application Programming Interfaces to both depend upon and distance themselves from readers, and describe how my research program joins questions of free speech with media infrastructure design. I will argue that a contemporary public right to hear partly depends upon how the press’s technologies and practices mediate among networked actors who construct and contest what Bowker and Star (1999) call “boundary infrastructures.” It is by studying these technosocial, journalistic systems — powerful yet often invisible systems that I call “newsware” — that we might understand how a public right to hear emerges from networked, institutionally situated communication cultures like the online press.

This Week in Review: Facebook’s IPO gone bad, and New Orleans loses its daily newspaper

Posted: 25 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Facebook’s quick fall: A week ago, Facebook had just launched the largest, most buzzworthy initial public offering in years. And now, that IPO has already brought them a potentially massive lawsuit and a federal investigation. Aside from the whole “pocketing millions upon millions of dollars” thing, it’s been a brutal week for Facebook execs. Here’s what happened.

Facebook dominated the conversation online last week (GigaOM has a good roundup from last Friday’s IPO), and a lot of that wasn’t positive. As data from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism showed, much of the chatter online, particularly on Twitter, was about Facebook as an overhyped (and overvalued) stock. Those online observers may have been more right than they knew: As reports from Reuters, Business Insider (two posts), and The Wall Street Journal detailed, Facebook was allegedly telling top investors they had overestimated their projected financial figures, all while publicly talking up their earning potential and even expanding their stock offering to the rest of us. The result, so far, has been a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation and a (potentially class-action) lawsuit from investors.

There were a number of good analyses of what went wrong — at The Guardian, Heidi Moore laid out the list of sins involved and concluded, “Facebook didn’t know how to work its own privacy settings for investors. It couldn’t figure out, essentially, who should know what.” Reuters’ Felix Salmon was more specific with his list of incompetents, declaring that the only winners in this game were the ones who didn’t play at all. The Big Picture’s Barry Ritholtz also ripped apart the debacle.

The whole scandal still leaves open the question of what Facebook should, in fact, be valued at. At Technology Review, Michael Wolff was most provocative with his assessment, arguing that Facebook is just another business inextricably reliant on a fatally flawed online advertising model: “The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else,” he wrote. Harvard’s Doc Searls echoed Wolff’s thoughts about the brokenness of Facebook’s (and the web’s) ad model, and media consultant Terry Heaton countered that the broken industry isn’t the ad-supported web, but Madison Avenue’s insistence on the status quo on that web.

Others looked more closely at the future of Facebook’s services and of the social web more generally. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal wondered whether Facebook’s users would keep sharing and what would become of its native and mobile users, and ReadWriteWeb’s Dan Frommer examined the company’s four biggest risks (there’s mobile and advertising again!). There were other problems spotted: All Things D’s Peter Kafka looked at the continued decline of Facebook’s Social Reader apps, and The New York Times’ Nick Bilton contrasted Facebook and Twitter’s approaches to privacy. Tech blogger Dave Winer insisted that we can do better than Facebook, while Slate’s Farhad Manjoo contended that Facebook has improved Silicon Valley.

The end of an era for New Orleans news: The American newspaper industry absorbed another big blow this week when the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that it would drop back from daily publication to just three days a week, a change accompanied by the creation of a new corporate entity to run the paper and heavy layoffs — possibly a third of the newsroom. The change will leave New Orleans as the largest city in the U.S. without a daily newspaper.

The news was broken by The New York Times’ David Carr, and according to the New Orleans alt-weekly Gambit, Times-Picayune employees learned of the paper’s fate through his report. (They later got this memo from the paper’s publisher.) All this came despite the fact that, as Jim Romenesko reported, the paper remains profitable. For some of the background on the paper — which is owned by Advance Publications, a division of the Newhouse publishing empire — see this post at the Columbia Journalism Review. (Advance also announced they’d be doing the same thing with three of its Alabama papers, led by the Birmingham News.)

Media analyst Ken Doctor has an extremely useful analysis of what exactly Advance/Newhouse is trying to accomplish with this move, and what perils it faces. Doctor called the paper’s transition to digital a “forced march” because the paper simply isn’t ready for a digital transformation, particularly in terms of digital circulation. Others were similarly skeptical: The immediate comparison was to Advance’s 2009 transition of the daily Ann Arbor News to AnnArbor.com, and Forbes’ Micheline Maynard gave a bleak picture of what’s left of that news organization and the hole it’s left in the community.

Forbes’ John McQuaid, a former Times-Picayune reporter, described the way Advance’s web strategy has been “only lightly tethered to newsgathering,” and concluded that “with Advance, news has always been an adjunct to its vanilla branded sites, not something that is driving the internal business conversation, and it shows.” And former Wall Street Journal writer (and Times-Picayune intern) Jason Fry said he doesn’t see any reason for optimism that Advance will get the web right in this case.

Free Press’ Josh Stearns noted that while the future-of-news world has been optimistically focused on experiments to sustain quality journalism in certain hubs like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, they need to pay closer attention to mid-sized cities like New Orleans, where the infrastructure simply isn’t there to pick up the journalism being cut at major traditional news organizations.

What’s behind Buffett’s newspaper buy?: I briefly mentioned Warren Buffett’s purchase late last week of 63 newspapers from Media General in last week’s review, but some smart commentary has come out about the deal since then (along with a few other pieces I missed at the time), so it’s worth touching on again. Media analyst Ken Doctor did a sharp rundown of the deal, pointing out that the upside of Media General’s broadcast properties and the real estate involved with the newspapers Buffett’s buying should help buffer him from the inherent danger of buying a set of newspapers. Reuters’ Jack Shafer pointed out several of Buffett’s past bearish statements about newspapers, but said he’s most likely buying because he sees an undervalued asset, not for any sentimental reason.

The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters and The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple both explained why these papers might be surprisingly valuable for Buffett: While major metro dailies have taken a beating, smaller community newspapers in rural areas have weathered the digital storm fairly well so far, in part because of their monopoly on local news and the slower rates of broadband adoption there.

Former journalism professor Philip Meyer made a similar point, arguing that Buffett is the type of buyer who’s happy with the new normal of lower profit margins for newspapers: “It looks like he is betting that the slide in newspaper earning power has leveled out. The Internet has done all the damage it can, and papers still make money.” PaidContent’s Jeff John Roberts looked at the economic sense Buffett’s paywall plan makes, while media consultant Dan Conover said he should be open to other non-paywall-based models. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon, meanwhile, said we may be ignoring another big reason for news org purchases like Buffett’s — they’re a platform for personal philosophies of how journalism should be done. Buffett did tell his new papers’ publishers that he would be hands-off with them, and that he expected to buy more small and mid-sized papers.

A dubious bid to outlaw anonymous comments: This bill is almost too ridiculous to merit an item, but I’ll give it a quick mention here anyway. New York lawmakers have proposed state legislation that would make anonymous comments illegal — New York-based blogs and websites would have to add a name to posts or delete them. Wired’s David Kravets, who brought the bill to national attention this week, pointed out that there was no identification required of those requesting such post takedowns.

The bill, which was supposedly meant as a weapon against cyber-bullying and attacks against “local businesses and elected officials,” was predictably (and rightly) met with derision from scholars and those on the web. Columbia’s Tim Wu told The Guardian the bill was “an obvious first amendment violation,” and the bill was also ripped at sites like Techdirt and Animal. BetaBeat reported that some of the lawmakers involved with the bill were surprised by the blowback about it, while The Atlantic brought out a dissenting opinion, with a point/counterpoint on the value of anonymous online discourse.

Reading roundup: Plenty of other stuff going during this week of Facebook:

— The Wall Street Journal reported on some of the ongoing struggles with AOL’s hyperlocal journalism project, Patch, breaking the news that 20 Patch employees were being laid off and that one of AOL’s major investors is trying to get Patch killed, sold, or put into a joint venture. Jeff Bercovici of Forbes said it’s going to take a lot more cost-cutting or revenue-raising to get Patch to profitability by next year, and The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said hyperlocal journalism’s business model doesn’t have room for executives in suits.

— The New York Times’ public editor, Arthur Brisbane, will leave his position in September after two years, declining an optional third year. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, who broke the story, took the opportunity to criticize his most recent column, and Poynter’s Craig Silverman proposed five qualifications for the next public editor of the Times. Poynter also held a chat about the role of ombudsmen with Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton and Reuters’ Jack Shafer.

— This week in Murdoch was a relatively quiet one. News Corp. was reported to be considering spinning off its British newspapers — the Sun, the Times, and the Sunday Times — in order to preserve the rest of its media empire, something Murdoch denied but the Columbia Journalism Review’s Emily Bell saw as quite sensible. Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor examined what a trust for those papers might look like.

— A couple of interesting pieces of survey data discussed this week: The study that drew most of the headlines was one that looked at the political knowledge of audiences for various news outlets, finding NPR’s listeners to be the most informed and Fox News’ viewers to be the least informed. Another study found that about half of media professionals abandon websites when they hit a paywall.

— Finally, a couple of cool pieces on data journalism — Simon Rogers of The Guardian urged us to take on the punk “anyone can do it” mindset toward data journalism, and Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar talked with former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell about her efforts to put data journalism into action with students at Columbia University.

Photo of the Times-Picayune building by Alysha Jordan used under a Creative Commons license.
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