Nieman Journalism Lab |
- 3 new ideas on the future of news from MIT Media Lab students
- Dan Kennedy: How news executives can fend off the Wolff at their door
- Alan Rusbridger on The Guardian’s open journalism, paywalls, and why they’re pre-planning more of the newspaper
| 3 new ideas on the future of news from MIT Media Lab students Posted: 29 May 2012 10:50 AM PDT
Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Center for Civic Media taught a class this semester tailor-made for Nieman Lab readers: “News in the Age of Participatory Media.” The hook: What happens if you treat journalism as an engineering problem, bringing together the efforts of journalists and computer scientists? The course’s final class last week featured a lot of bright students presenting their final projects, which was supposed to be a new tool, technique, or technology for reporting the news. (They were in various stages of completion.) I’ll be breaking out a few of the good ideas in future posts, but here are some of the ones that stood out to me. Modernizing the hyperlinkThe Narula proposed the use of microformats and the little-known For example, a link to a citation (dictionary definition, Wikipedia article) would get
might lead to that link being presented not in the body copy, but at the bottom of the post, in the form of a tidy bibliography. She also proposes Perhaps most intriguing was Oh, and the biggest crowd pleaser was a feature you may love or hate: a button that toggles off all links in a document for distraction-free (or, er, context-free) reading. (Try it on this article!) Others have proposed approaches to adding metadata to links, from Searching for correlations in a haystackEugene Wu, a graduate student of computer science at MIT, demonstrated a suite of tools called DBTruck that makes data comparison a snap. Enter the URL of a CSV file, JSON data, or an HTML table and DBTruck will clean up the data and import it to a local database. Normally you might go to a web page like this, select and copy the table, paste it into an Excel spreadsheet, then spend 15 minutes trying to fix the misplaced cells and formatting issues. DBTruck is automated and fast. The program allows you to geocode any field that contains address information, whether that field is “Cambridge, MA” or “Cambridge, Mass.” or “1 Francis Ave, Cambridge.” Humans have come up with many ways to represent physical locations, but geographic coordinates are unambiguous instructions for computers to map a location. When you’re dealing with disorganized datasets, getting consistency is key. Wu’s tool then lets you plot arbitrary comparisons between datasets. To test the program he plugged in all kinds of datasets, just for fun. Is there a correlation between addresses of Massachusetts lottery winners and Taco Bell locations? (No.) Suicide rates and unemployment rates in New York state? (No.) Suddenly he stumbled upon a connection that made sense: Communities in New York state with high teen pregnancy rates correlated highly with low birth weights. There’s a potential story there that Wu might not have otherwise set out to write. Zuckerman advised Wu to team up with The Boston Globe to run more arbitrary comparisons and discover what local stories might be hidden in the numbers. (It also seems like a dandy add-on to the PANDA Project, which is building a platform for in-house newsroom databases.) How many Rhode Islands is that?Nieman Fellow Paul Salopek and Knight Science Journalism Fellow/Reuters correspondent Alister Doyle have covered large-scale calamities in far-off countries for domestic audiences sometimes too busy to care. Foreign correspondents have tricks, sometimes clichés, to get people to pay attention, comparing populations and land masses to familiar American things. Write Salopek and Doyle:
They propose something like a currency converter that turns impossibly big numbers into more qualitative terms. Great for a correspondent on a deadline.
The site would be user-maintained, like Wikipedia, and powered by real datasets. All statistics would require citations. It’s just an idea at this point, but a website like this is very buildable. (Anyone want to try it? Leave a comment below.) Salopek and Doyle offer a dizzying number of potential cross-discipline conversion units. How about Ayns, a unit of measure for how friendly a government is to corporations, named for Ayn Rand? Or the Obama Gap, a measure of the difference between a leader’s domestic and foreign approval ratings? Or Jolies, a unit of a country’s developmental aid as proportional to the amount of attention it has received from Angelina Jolie? (The Economist’s long-running Big Mac index is of similar spirit.) Along with the three projects mentioned above, a couple others caught my eye: Nathan Matias’s Data Forager, which slurps up all the Twitter handles mentioned on a webpage and builds a Twitter list that follows those people, and Arlene Ducao’s OpenIR, a much larger project that overlays multiple layers of satellite imagery on a map. To paraphrase Zuckerman, I hope these ideas earn at least 40 nanoKaradashians of your attention today. Photo by Solo used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Dan Kennedy: How news executives can fend off the Wolff at their door Posted: 29 May 2012 08:30 AM PDT
Facebook’s disappointing IPO may be indicative of a larger problem: the declining value of online advertising, an inexorable force that will eventually destroy not just Facebook, but the web itself. Sound nuts? Well, that’s the thesis put forth by media critic Michael Wolff in a piece he wrote for Technology Review headlined “The Facebook Fallacy.” Wolff has made his reputation as a provocateur, and his analyses often straddle a fine line between brilliant and crazy. Some might also consider him to be part of the problem facing news organizations, as his Newser.com site practices an unusually in-your-face form of aggregation. But if Wolff has overstated the case, he nevertheless may be on to something. Indeed, his Tech Review screed carries the endorsement of Doc Searls, a respected thinker about online media and advertising. I’ll get to what I think this means for journalism in a moment. First, though, a few words about Wolff’s argument. Essentially, Wolff is expanding on something that we already know: the value of web advertising is low and getting lower, even as it keeps expanding. He writes:
Wolff’s insight — again, not particularly original except for his eagerness to pick it up and run with it — is that Facebook is just another website. According to Wolff, Facebook’s current revenues are unlikely to grow all that much. And the situation is only getting worse as mobile becomes a bigger part of the mix, since Facebook has said it doesn’t know how to make money there. The only company making money from online advertising, Wolff argues, is Google, because it’s the middleman of last resort. Essentially Google is the company that finds itself in the enviable position of selling Levi’s and pickaxes to the hapless gold miners. People in the news business have been sweating out the reality Wolff describes for some time. How will we pay for the journalism we need? The answer to that is far from clear — and, of course, it’s also far from clear that the public is even willing to pay for what we’re selling, either directly or indirectly. But here are four partial answers that get us beyond the conundrum of relying on Internet advertising whose quantity keeps expanding but whose value keeps shrinking. Newspapers should keep printing.Print is doomed — if not in the short-term, then certainly in the medium- and long-term. But that doesn’t mean it’s going away entirely. It’s just too valuable, as online advertising is worth scarcely a fraction of its print counterpart. The most recent example of a newspaper company trying to adjust to that reality is the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which is cutting back its print edition to three days a week. The idea is to squeeze seven days’ worth of print advertising into three, saving money on printing and distribution costs while holding onto the most lucrative part of its revenue stream. As Nieman Lab columnist Ken Doctor notes, if the Times-Picayune move is successful, then the paper will keep some 80 percent of its print advertising revenues while saving a lot of money. By contrast, dumping print entirely would be disastrous. Move to the flat-fee ad model.With regard to online advertising, Wolff describes a never-ending spiral to the bottom, as prices for CPM advertising (that is, the cost of a thousand impressions) keeps dropping. News sites are getting killed by this model, which is based on the notion that advertisers should pay only for the number of times someone sees their ads, with a premium if someone clicks through. (Reality check: No one clicks on ads. No one. Not. Ever.) Some successful sites have moved away from this model, simply charging a flat fee — what might be called the sponsorship model. One of those is The Batavian, a for-profit community site in western New York. Publisher Howard Owens runs all of his 100-plus ads on the home page, rotating them from bottom to top throughout the week. As Lisa Williams, founder of Watertown’s late, lamented community blog H2otown, and now the head of a venture called Placeblogger, told me: “I think a lot of people will buy a sponsorship on a local blog for the same reason that they put their name on the back of Little League shirts.” Expand nonprofit journalism.Local foundations, community institutions, and wealthy philanthropists, not to mention readers, are contributing to nonprofit local news sites such as the New Haven Independent, Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, and the Texas Tribune just as they do to public television and radio stations. Unfortunately, the nonprofit news movement has failed to take off, in part because the IRS has held up applications for new nonprofits as the agency ponders whether journalism is an activity that deserves such status. That’s one reason the Chicago News Cooperative died earlier this year. Although there’s an argument to be made that IRS officials simply could (and should) change their minds, it’s possible that we need legislation explicitly recognizing journalism as an activity covered by the regulations governing nonprofits. Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin proposed such a bill several years ago, but it hasn’t gone anywhere. Experiment with flexible paywalls.There’s much that has been said and written about paywalls, so I won’t belabor the point. But smart, flexible systems such as those put in place by The New York Times and The Boston Globe, which allow for free sharing via blogs and social media, are worth exploring, even if they never amount to more than a minor revenue stream. Michael Wolff’s analysis of Facebook’s problems, and of any website depending on advertising, should be must reading for news executives. Perhaps they won’t learn anything they don’t already know. But it might give some of them the impetus to stop pursuing strategies that are bound to fail, and instead to seek new ways of paying for the news. Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a panelist on Beat the Press, a weekly media program on WGBH-TV Boston. His blog, Media Nation, is online at www.dankennedy.net. His book on The New Haven Independent and other community news sites, The Wired City, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Posted: 29 May 2012 06:41 AM PDT
The thing that connects the two ends of The Guardian’s franchise is a full embrace of new technology and the opportunities it provides for reaching readers and producing more impactful journalism. I had a chance to talk with Rusbridger during a recent trip to the U.S., when he came to Harvard to accept the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism at the Shorenstein Center. We spoke about open journalism and how it’s changing the newspaper’s report; Rusbridger also talked about how The Guardian is altering the production of its print paper to adjust to evening reading, and why he doesn’t see a paywall in the near future of his paper. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. Justin Ellis: What I want to talk about is the concept of open journalism, something you’ve obviously talked about a lot and something the Guardian has made a very big push for. Explain what the concept of open journalism means to you. Alan Rusbridger: The simplest way I explain it is to think of the theater critic. The Guardian’s got a wonderful theater critic whose been doing the job for 40 years, and no editor I can think of in his right mind would get rid of Michael Billington or not have a theater critic. If you asked the question, “What about the 900 other people in the audience next door to Michael?” — is it conceivable no one else in the audience has an interesting opinion that could add to your understanding? Editorially, it is generally better to try and harness multiple views. So then, if you accept that, then I think there are only two questions. One is how do you sort interesting people from uninteresting people, and how do you sort people of particular interests from other interests? And that’s something which is not unique to newspapers. Many, many people are trying to crack that nut in an age of overabundance of information. And then the question is: If that’s true for theater criticism, is that true for other areas a journalist can cover? Is it true of war reporting and reporting on science and fashion? Nearly always, and I would say always in our experience, the answer is yes it is true…Go back to the Billington example, the theater critic. Imagine you answered no to that question and said actually we are going to back our man against the rest of the web. Somebody else will do that if we don’t do that. So therefore you are allowing somebody else to come into your field. Commercially, it seems to me, that’s a very foolish step to take, as well as it is wrong. Then what you’re doing, particularly if you want to put a paywall around your theater critic, you’re inviting the public to choose between somebody who may well produce a very good account of that play over its entire run, versus the expert voice one night. So you have to be really, really confident your expert voice is worth a multiple of free voices, if what you want to do is create a model that’s actually a 19th-, 20th-century model, where you’re going to insist your content is worth paying for.
Ellis: What’s your take on the wave of paywalls being tried here in the U.S.? Do you think it’s a way to help shore up revenues? Do you think it limits access? Rusbridger: From the point of view of The Guardian, a wall that separated our content from the readers — the people who want to contribute and the people who want to have access to it — I think that would be a wrong turning for us. The New York Times model, I think, is more interesting because it’s so porous. So if you believe what I believe about being open, a paywall that succeeds in getting revenue as well as being open is a more interesting model, obviously. We charge — we charge for mobile, we charge for iPads. It’s not that we’re against payment altogether. But at the moment, when we’ve crunched the numbers, we don’t think that the revenues we would get from a paywall would justify making that the main focus of our efforts right now. I’m not a sort of anti-paywall fundamentalist — it just doesn’t seem the most interesting thing to be doing at the moment. Ellis: You guys made a big splash with the Three Little Pigs commercial. Why did you feel it necessary to make the case for open journalism directly to the public in that way? Rusbridger: First of all, the industry is changing so fast — my worry is that the reader is going to be left behind. I think what we’re trying to say with that advert is that The Guardian is moving beyond a newspaper. It’s something which is a different idea of journalism — it’s something which involves others and is responsive to others. It’s a sort of statement about journalism itself: We’ve moved from an era in which a reporter writes a story and goes home and that’s the story written. I think that we’re living in the world at the moment where the moment you press send on your story, the responses start coming in. And so I think journalists have to work out what to do about those responses: How do you incorporate those responses? And in this world, in which as a news reporter you’re going to — if you go along with open journalism — you’re going to be open to other sources, other than what can be created in your own newsroom, you’re going to incorporate those responses. The Three Little Pigs was an attempt at explaining the benefits of open journalism to the reader — that you get a more complete version of the truth — and to explain to them this idea of a newspaper company is changing very, very fast. Ellis: I remember in the announcement last year about going digital first one of the ideas was creating some sort of evening product — trying to follow the trend of people shifting reading time to evenings, when they’re reading on devices or maybe looking for something in print. Have you guys gone anywhere with that? Rusbridger: With 90 percent of stories, you have a vague familiarity with the paper, because you can’t avoid news now — it’s ambient, it’s everywhere. So why were we still feeding a product to people who might be reading in the evening, which was now 36 hours old? Wouldn’t they rather be helped to understand the context of it? So we’ve changed the paper and we had really interesting discussions with the Schibsted group in Norway, who’ve been pioneering this with their Swedish flagship paper. They went extremely radical: They have a daily paper which they now plan 50 percent of it 7 days in advance. When we first heard, we thought that’s ridiculous — how could you do a daily paper and have half of it planned? It comes back to how you think of news. The Scandinavians said, well, actually, most news is kind of predictable. There are profiles, pieces about the economy and the Middle East or what China’s doing in Africa. There are so many stories you could do at any point in time, and what newspapers tend to do — to be concise, the way we all grew up — was to leave everything till the last minute, and then between 4 o’clock and 10 o’clock in the evening, make a paper. So you have this huge down period at the beginning of the day and then this sort of crazy period for 6 hours. We haven’t done 50 percent — we’ve aiming for 30 percent of content pre-planned. It helps you even out production, it saves on costs — which we have to do — and it produces a paper which is more effective, more analytical, and helps you explain — because you then have to explain — to the readers that doesn’t mean we’re bailing out of news. On these devices is where you’ll find the news. So if it’s not in the paper, it doesn’t mean we’re not doing it. Ellis: What about the idea of journalists not taking it into their own hands to break stories on Twitter, or only linking to stories in your own publication — what do you think about that? It seems to touch on the idea of open journalism and sharing. Rusbridger: We don’t break everything on the web, and sometimes we hold things back in print. I think common sense tells you you don’t rush to break exclusive properties on the web without talking to your desk editor. But the notion of — you’re covering a sports event or trial which everyone is going to break, the window of exclusiveness may be a minute at the most. Writing down a policy that says you must file to The Guardian because The Guardian must be several seconds ahead? You know, I think Twitter is the place where those kind of stories are broken. If there are ten reporters in court or at a football match, the notion it has to come by The Guardian production system, somebody has to then edit it and then publish it on The Guardian, I can’t see what the value of that is over doing it on Twitter. In the eight minutes that it takes to do that, the story’s going to be out. As to linking to others, I think it’s a sort of good and generous thing to do. Years ago, we got over the hangup on The Guardian site — we wouldn’t link to others. If somebody’s done a good account of a story, and you can save the next three hours rewriting it, why not just point to it or link to it? I’ve got no problem with Guardian reporters saying “Interesting piece in the Telegraph today.” It makes them look like more rounded people, not simply as though they are extensions of the press office pushing out Guardian content. Ellis: It seems to me there’s two things at play for most news organizations when we talk about being open: one being having people onboard who believe in it as a philosophy and the other the tools you have available. How important is having a culture that buys into open journalism, and what role do tools play in being able to do it effectively? Rusbridger: It is obviously important to get buy-in. I think we’re there. Not everybody is there in any newsroom — you’re going to have skeptics, you’re going to have people who say “show me the money and then I’ll believe in it.” No one can get 100 percent. As I said, if you went around the paper you would find enough people who are saying this not because they hear me saying it — they’re saying it because they genuinely believe it’s better. That hasn’t happened overnight. It’s happened because the editorial and commercial leadership believe in it. It’s happened because we’ve been evangelists for getting people onto social media platforms. Very early on, I instructed my senior editors to sign up to Facebook at a time when other people were saying you mustn’t use Facebook in the office. I said no, you must use Facebook in the office. You know, there are sort of big things like the Facebook app we built recently, which says a very powerful thing: that we’re not hung up on all the content being on The Guardian site. It can sit on Facebook as easily as it can on The Guardian. We built an open API so that people who want to do things with our content will find it easier to do. We begin every day in a morning conference, which is open to everybody, with a little five-minute slot where people come in and talk about particular projects, talk about a particular thread, or they’ll talk about metrics or SEO. Or, to move onto the question of tools, they’ll talk about the tools they use. We haven’t got the best tools in the world, but we’ll use something like Storify or Audioboo, we’ll use other people’s tools if they can help us tell stories more effectively. We’ve spent time with Facebook recently. Google is extremely interested in working with us because we’re very easy to work with. The open API means they can take our content and they can play around with it. That seems to me a pretty desirable place to be in: You’ve got the most successful new media players actively wanting to talk with you and play with you. |
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