Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Lessons in blogging (and tweeting) from Samuel Pepys
- The Wall Street Journal “cannot generate enough video streams” to meet advertising demand
- New York Times turns readers into beta testers with Test Drive
- This Week in Review: Facebook’s IPO aftermath, and New Orleans’ cuts stoke the paywall debate
| Lessons in blogging (and tweeting) from Samuel Pepys Posted: 01 Jun 2012 11:20 AM PDT
And thanks to Phil Gyford we have it in blog form. Also, tweet form. Turns out Pepys would have made for a pretty good blogger and a good follow on Twitter (though he does often report on his meals). In 2002, Gyford set out to recreate the Pepys experience by posting the diary daily on Pepysdiary.com, mirroring the writing pattern of Sam himself. And as of yesterday, when the diary had run its course, Pepys signed off for the last time, again. Gyford’s project wasn’t parody (@Pepys_ebooks!) or an update (Pepys loves Pinterest!). It was a faithful, contextual example of how blogs and tools like Twitter can help us experience history in unthought of ways — a model that’s been repeated numerous times by others in the years since. As several news outlets have tried their hand at re-telling stories from our past through blogs and social media, Gyford provides a good example on how to relive history on the web. He’s also a portrait of endurance: Who among us not named Robert Caro can say we’ve worked on a single writing project for 10 straight years? I had an online chat with Gyford (who news nerds may know better from his remarkable reformatting of The Guardian), lightly edited below, about Pepys the blogger, Pepys the tweeter, and what he learned over the years. Justin Ellis: Well first off, congratulations on completing the diary. Is it a relief to be over? Phil Gyford: Definitely. Ellis: What was your daily routine like for posting the diary for a decade? Gyford: No daily routine…I usually prepared a week’s worth of entries at a time. At first it was maybe a couple of hours a week. But more recently, it took between a half and one day a week, so I’d spend most of either Friday or Saturday on it. Ellis: What do you mean by prepared? Was it just finding the right passage for the right day? Gyford: No…well, there’s the diary on the website. For that I had to add all the links into the text, and create any new Encyclopedia pages for them to link to. That sometimes involved working out exactly who someone was, or where a place was on a map. And then for Twitter I picked out a few bits and lightly edited them for length so they’d fit. Ellis: I liked all the context (the Encyclopedia of topics and places, Also On This Day, even weather records from the time) you provide on the website. This may be a stupid question, but why did you want to include that? Gyford: Because so much of the text either makes no sense without more context, or just loses a lot. Knowing something about the people involved, aside from what Pepys says about them, helps bring it to life and give you another view on what kind of person they were — what they achieved, how they looked (from which we probably make many snap judgements about what kind of person they were…) Ellis: You probably get asked this all the time, but why did you start the diary? Gyford: I do :) Ellis: Sorry! Gyford: Because I was interested in reading it — because I live in London and was aware of him, but knew little about him. But I knew that I’d never actually read through all the volumes in book form. Too long and daunting. I was reading a lot of blogs at the time, 2002, and it seemed like his diary would be perfect in blog form. I assumed someone must have done it already. Unfortunately they hadn’t, so I felt I should, especially when I found there was a copyright-free version of the text on Project Gutenberg. Ellis: And then you made the jump to Twitter. Does Pepys translate well into tweets? Gyford: Yes, I think so. Actually, at first I was thinking I’d just use Twitter to post a link to that day’s diary entry, because a lot of people seem to use Twitter for sharing links. Then I thought I should add a little quote with the link and then I realised I should just make it completely “in character” and be nothing but quotes from the diary as if it was Pepys tweeting. I think it works very well. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d have stuck through all of the diary-as-blog as a reader — I just wouldn’t be interested enough to cope with the length, when there’s so much else to read online. But I like the tweets a lot, how they slip into your daily routine, and give an impression of someone going about their daily business at the same time as everyone you know.
Ellis: So the tweets might fit better with a reader’s attention span? Gyford: Some readers. I’m not 100 percent, sure but I doubt there’s much crossover between tweet and blog readers when it comes to Pepys. Other readers love the detail of the blog — it’s part of their daily routine of something to read over breakfast or whatever. Ellis: Twitter does seem to fit the spirit of what he did. In the same way I might tweet about watching a basketball game, Pepys tweets about going out to dinner. Gyford: Yes. While there’s a certain conceit to it — if Pepys was tweeting he wouldn’t have tweeted all those private events, just as he wouldn’t have posted them on a public blog…but I tried to keep the quotes I used for Twitter to be very in keeping with the medium, so that they weren’t too jarring when part of the flow of normal tweets. Also, he never broke character as much as someone on Twitter can — he was entirely in the 17th century. He never replied to anyone, posted a link, or anything except post text from the diary. Ellis: No Foursquare check-in from Pepys. Gyford: Yes, I think that would have been a bit too odd. Too apart from the text. Ellis: Was Twitter more difficult in a way? Picking out the right quotes that fit into 140 characters? Also, did you use something to schedule the tweets? Gyford: The bulk of the work was preparing the diary entries for the website. Preparing the tweets wasn’t that difficult really, and just meant some careful editing to make them fit. I wrote a script that posts the tweets automatically. Also, my hosting provider limits me to only running scripts once per hour. That felt like a hassle at first, but I think it was mainly good for Pepys — it meant I wasn’t tempted to post too many at once, which could become annoying. He just drips in occasionally. Ellis: Pepys spams your Twitter feed. How did the number of people following the blog and Twitter feed change over time? Gyford: There was a lot of interest at first — interest bloomed in a few days and I did a few bits of press, so it was a lot more popular more quickly than I expected. But since then, aside from very occasional articles here and there, there’s been little coverage and I think interest has dropped off a bit. It’s been fairly steady for quite a while, but the start was its peak. The number of Twitter followers has been growing steadily since @samuelpepys launched. Ellis: I’m wondering what your thoughts are about using the Internet to give a better understanding of history. We’ve seen other efforts like this, people doing live blogs or Twitter feeds for things like the U.S. civil war.
Gyford: One aspect is that as we’ve become increasingly used to having the net as a continuous part of our lives — it’s given us new ways to experience the past. Years ago, we might have used the Internet quite a bit, but it was either only at our desks or only on a laptop. These days we (a) have the ability to be online all the time if we want, and we (b) have more online environments that we use more continuously — Twitter, Facebook, etc. are more ongoing experiences, unlike most websites that are a bit more sporadic. (I guess websites like forums are a bit of an exception to that.) So we’re now able to experience these historical events in a way that we couldn’t before, by using time. Experiencing World War II one tweet at a time might seem quite superficial at first, because there’s so little textual content there, and that’s true. But over time, we experience WWII at the same pace as people who lived it. Obviously, it’s nothing like the same, but it’s also different to just reading a history of the war in a book over the course of a couple of weeks. The passing of time gives those little drips of events added weight. Ellis: You spent a lot of time with Pepys’ work now. What do you think about him as a writer or just as a person? Gyford: As a writer, I don’t know…hard to judge. It’s a diary, rather than something written for publication, and I know nothing about other contemporary writing so can’t judge it in comparison. As a person…very tricky. On the professional level he seems to have been good, competent…he reformed the navy and put in place things that lasted for a long time. As I understand it. On a personal level…he gets a lot of flak for his philandering. The worst of his philandering justifies the disapproving words — going round kissing and touching up many other women isn’t good husbandly behaviour however you spin it! But I don’t know how much that can be (very partially) explained by changing times — it’s still not okay, but I really have no idea how his contemporaries would judge him. But still, not good, and he knew himself that he was wrong. One thing I find interesting though is that because of this obviously wrong behaviour any other times he mentions in his diary an attractive woman, then people on Twitter are very disapproving…when even today the world is full of people much more openly “admiring” people of their favoured gender. It’s what we do. And so it’s a shame that him doing it, and then writing about it in his personal diary, is looked on by some as bad behaviour. Ellis: That’s fascinating. People almost forgetting this is in a personal diary, and that the fact that it’s his diary is the only reason we get that insight. Fooling around with the help is timeless, I guess. Gyford: Yes, if we see his diary as simply him writing down his thoughts — I wonder how many of his readers’ thoughts are entirely free of these kinds of musings! (Aside from the actual things he did, which are wrong, of course.) Ellis: Now that you’ve spent all this time writing about Pepys, do you think it gives you a feel for what it was like for him writing back then? I mean, 10 years is a long, long time to be writing one thing. Gyford: I don’t think so. They’ve been very different activities, physically and mentally. I write my own diary myself, although it’s much more sporadic. I think making yourself write a diary for every day would be the best way to get a feeling for what he felt. The self-analysis, working out what’s important to say, etc. Ellis: So what do you do now? What’s next? Gyford: No idea. It’s great! Photo of Phil Gyford courtesy of Matt Locke. Image of Samuel Pepys from Wikimedia Commons. |
| The Wall Street Journal “cannot generate enough video streams” to meet advertising demand Posted: 01 Jun 2012 08:51 AM PDT
The Wall Street Journal announced this morning the launch of a new early-morning show, Asia Today, which will broadcast weekdays at 6:30 a.m. (Eastern), with a focus on business, finance, and breaking news in the region. It’s the second Asia-based initiative that the newspaper has announced this week; Tuesday, the Journal made public plans for a dedicated Indonesia news site. But aside from a continued push overseas, Asia Today also represents the Journal’s continuing push into video as part of its “WSJ Everywhere” mission. A couple of weeks ago, Raju Narisetti, managing editor for The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network, told me that despite the newspaper’s big jump into video — more than four hours of live video per day, some 1,500 videos per month, accessible across 18 digital platforms like iPads, iPhones, desktops, YouTube, Apple TV, etc. — there’s still a hunger for more. “From a business point of view, we cannot generate enough video streams,” he said. “We are sold out. There is no shortage of demand to generate more video views.” The Journal’s release on Asia Today noted that the video push has created “an 85% growth in video streams since the start of the calendar year for the Wall Street Journal Digital Network and has attracted a range of innovative advertisers across categories.” Advertisers’ interest in video comes as Americans are spending more time with screens, and increasingly taking those screens with them. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that nearly one-third of Americans are getting news on mobile devices, and increasingly across different platforms. For the Journal, that shift represents an opportunity for pervasiveness in a media-saturated world — and video is one of the paths to get there. Narisetti calls portability “the big issue” that the newspaper faces. But the other big issue will be to make sure that a portable advertising experience complements the content that consumers are seeking. “You have to create your content in such a way that it will travel,” Narisetti said. “But the real challenge is not content — it’s an advertising challenge. That’s where the challenge would be, from an execution standpoint. Conceptually, no matter where you want the Journal, I want to be there. But the question is how do we do it without messing up the ad experience?” |
| New York Times turns readers into beta testers with Test Drive Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:40 AM PDT
Congratulations, New York Times readers: You can now think of yourself as beta testers. The Times has released a new browser tool that will let readers test experimental features on NYTimes.com in real time. With Test Drive — available as a Chrome extension, a Firefox add-on, or as a simple bookmarklet — readers can test experimental web features the Times doesn’t think are yet ready for the big show. The experimental features currently in Test Drive include NYT Accessible, which optimizes the site for visually-impaired readers, and TimesInstant, an article search that produces results while you type. Once Test Drive is installed, you can toggle the experimental features on or off at will. These projects were created by the Times beta620 group and have already been available for testing on their site; Test Drive puts these ideas into on wrapper and lets the Times take them out of a static lab state and into a real world environment. The goal of beta620 is for developers, designers, and others to tinker with ideas that have the potential to enhance the Times online or through apps. (Times HQ is at 620 Eighth Avenue.) “We love beta620 — it’s been a great experience and a great way to get our innovations in front of the public before they’re fully baked,” Marc Frons, the Times chief information officer told me. “The downside of it was that it was a separate website.” David Erwin, a software engineer with beta620, said the point of their work was to see how these experiments would play on NYTimes.com. By keeping them on the beta620 site they couldn’t really test that. “The key moment for me was, why not have a framework to actually bring the projects designed for the live site into that everyday experience so they can be used where they belong?” he said. The web has pushed journalists to be more willing to expose the workings of their reporting — blogging stories in progress, tweeting updates from a scene before filing. But the beta mentality of letting users play with new features before they’re ready to ship has a long history in the technology world. Of course, the kinds of people who discover and install browser extensions are not a random sample of Times readers as a whole. Frons says they’re okay with that. ‘It’s not like a traditional A/B test where you’re actually just throwing something else up on unsuspecting readers and measuring your clicks,” he said. “I think the quantitative data will be less important here than the qualitative, where people’s comments and our own understanding of how we’re using these tools and experience will be more important than measuring clickthroughs or that sort of thing.” The Times’ innovation staffers have created several features that have “graduated” into wider usage on NYTimes.com, including the article recommendation engine, Times Skimmer, and the up next box that slides into view at the end of a story. (Some of those were internal Times innovation projects started before beta620 was officially christened last summer.) It wouldn’t be hard to imagine TimesInstant and NYT Accessible joining that group. TimesInstant was inspired by Google Instant and is seen as a means of making searching the Times easier, particularly if you’re not entirely sure of a proper name, place or event. While it doesn’t give you predictive text as Google does, it provides results as you type.
Erwin said NYT Accessible is aimed at making the site more friendly to vision-impaired readers, stripping away some of the elements of a Times story page that can confuse screen-reader technology. So instead of a page with an array of links, the recommendation box or ads, a user would get just the headline, byline, and text of the story along with enlarged photos. (It’s also a vision of a stripped-down, minimalist version of the Times that some designers with perfectly fine vision have clamored for.)
On a broader level, Test Drive is a way for the Times to let readers make a personalized experience on NYTimes.com. As new modules are added, readers will have a customized layer they can turn on and off at will. “At some future date, you may see what looks like an entirely new website on Test Drive and then be able to switch that off and go back to NYTimes Classic, or whatever we’re gonna call it,” Frons said. (For example, check out beta620′s Late Edition, which imagines a NYTimes.com front page that trades link density for scrollability.)
Image by Chris Devers used under a Creative Commons license. |
| This Week in Review: Facebook’s IPO aftermath, and New Orleans’ cuts stoke the paywall debate Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:00 AM PDT
David Strom of ReadWriteWeb did point out, though, that stock prices soon after tech IPOs haven’t been a very reliable indicator of companies’ prospects for long-term success. The New York Times’ Joe Nocera made a similar point, arguing that Facebook’s IPO flop was fueled by get-rich-quick investors and that long-term investors should be undeterred. At PandoDaily, Farhad Manjoo made the case that Facebook’s IPO was a valuable corrective to a dangerously overhyped tech market: “Facebook's IPO proves that there isn't an endless supply of bigger suckers. And because bigger suckers are the primary ingredients in bubbles, it now seems likely that the new tech bubble—if there ever was one—is dead, dead, dead.” And The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal made a pretty thorough defense of Facebook’s value as a company, reminding us that it has a still-growing near-monopoly and tremendous potential for making money from its millions of users. There was still plenty of criticism of Facebook floating around this week, though. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat saw Facebook as a sign of the lack of financial progress brought by the Internet economy, and Facebook’s advertising shortcomings continued to be a point of discussion. Ad Age reported that GM pulled its advertising from Facebook in part because Facebook balked at its proposal to run full-page ads, which, according to media consultant Terry Heaton, illustrated the difference between Madison Avenue’s philosophy of bending the masses to their will and Facebook’s gentler approach. The Huffington Post’s Bianca Bosker also looked at the tension Facebook is facing between its advertisers and users. Here at the Lab, Dan Kennedy extended the ad problem to journalists, proposing a few ideas for adapting to an online world in which the value of ads continues to shrink. Also on the news front, Buzzfeed’s John Herrman wrote about how coverage on Twitter of the Facebook IPO indicates that Twitter is well ahead of Facebook in covering and developing breaking stories. Another major note on Facebook to keep an eye on: The New York Times reported that the company is trying again to build a smartphone to release later this year. It’s had several false starts in this area before, but is moving “deeper into the process” this time. Facebook was also reported this week to be buying the facial recognition company Face.com.
The impact of New Orleans’ move away from print: As we moved into the second week of discussion of the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s cutback from daily newspaper production, the conversation began to shift from New Orleans in particular to the future of the newspaper industry as a whole. Poynter’s Steve Myers looked at a couple of the immediate issues — concerns over whether Advance Publications’ other papers (such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer) might make similar cuts, and whether New Orleans readers are likely to follow their paper online. The New York Times’ David Carr, who broke the story, wrote a kind of elegy for the paper, concluding that while the cutback may make some financial sense, it’s a great loss for a historically corrupt city. “The constancy of a paper,” he wrote, “is a reminder to a city that someone is out there watching.” At the Huffington Post, Harry Shearer thought Carr wasn’t harsh enough in his assessment of Advance’s plans, arguing that breaking readers’ daily newspaper habits is foolish, not economical. Shearer, Myers, and Iowa journalist Dave Schwartz all pointed out that New Orleans has particularly low Internet penetration rates (not to mention high newspaper penetration rates), with Schwartz calling those without web access “casualties in a revolution.” Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis, on the other hand, both argued that we need to get past our fixation with print journalism, using it when it’s profitable but feeling free to drop it when it’s not. “We have to make print beside the point,” Jarvis wrote. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, meanwhile, proposed some ideas at Poynter for resolving the journalism crisis in New Orleans, focusing on philanthropic efforts to improve Internet access, hyperlocal journalism, and accountability journalism. Al Jazeera discussed the future of the newspaper industry in light of New Orleans’ move away from daily with a few luminaries as well.
Cuts, layoffs, and the viability of paywalls: The Times-Picayune isn’t the only paper making these kinds of changes — Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain, announced this week it would cut the Sunday edition at three of Canada’s largest newspapers, lay off dozens of employees, and consolidate some of its editing operations, and also hinted at cutting back print days for its largest paper, the National Post. Postmedia was also reported to be moving ahead with paywalls at several of its papers. While Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey complained in an interview with the Globe & Mail that its ad revenue was being stolen by foreign digital companies (read: Google, AOL, etc.), GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said the problems for Postmedia and other newspapers run much deeper than cuts and paywalls. Crain’s Chicago Business also reported that the Chicago Tribune is considering a paywall potentially focusing on niche coverage, and Poynter’s Steve Myers pointed out that the major newspaper companies that aren’t charging for news are quickly becoming the outliers. The paywall debate got a shot in the arm this week in the aftermath of the Times-Picayune’s cuts, when The Wire creator and former newspaper reporter David Simon asserted at the Columbia Journalism Review that “the whole industry will continue to collapse until everyone swallows hard and goes behind a paywall.” The short post spurred a feisty comment thread as well as several varying responses. A post at the news startup Circa made a distinction between charging for content (OK) and information (much more difficult to do), and Will Bunch made his aforementioned philanthropically driven proposals for New Orleans as a middle way between paywall advocates and detractors. In addition, former newspaper editor John L. Robinson argued that if young people won’t even pay much for Facebook, they sure won’t pay for a newspaper — and that should worry newspaper publishers. Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor added some practical approaches to the discussion, looking at the effectiveness of different newspapers’ plans to shift from advertiser revenue toward reader revenue. Breaking down the article: We got a reprise of the occasionally occurring discussion about better ways to do the news article this week, starting with NYU professor Jay Rosen’s complaint that a Reuters article on Facebook’s IPO was too dense for non-investors to understand. That triggered a lengthy Twitter conversation between Rosen, Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa and Felix Salmon, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis — Storified by De Rosa — about ways to better incorporate background information into news stories. Rosen has done plenty of thinking about this problem in the past, and this time, Jarvis expanded the Twitter discussion into a post of his own in which he reconceived the news article as a group of assets (data, background information, leads, etc.) that could be broken down, rearranged, or specialized in by various news organizations, with links as the core element tying them together. “The end result is still an inverted pyramid — a prioritized set of assets that one can stop going through when one feels sated with information. But everyone's pyramid can be different. And what fills those pyramids can come from various sources,” he wrote. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM echoed the idea, and meanwhile, Technically Philly’s Sean Blanda and blogger Dave Winer both wrote on rethinking the elements of an article — Blanda proposed thinking of the basic unit of journalism as the fact rather than the article, and Winer said we need to do better than Wikipedia when it comes to background information and explainers. Reading roundup: Lots of little stories and debates popping up at the intersection of news and tech this week. Here’s a few of them: — WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange lost his appeal to the British Supreme Court against extradition to Sweden on accusations of a pair of 2010 sexual abuse cases. He has two weeks to appeal one of the ruling’s points, but it looks as though he’s headed to Sweden to stand trial. Here’s The Guardian’s and The New York Times’ coverage, and Micah Sifry’s examination of the state of online whistleblowing as WikiLeaks struggles. — A couple of ebook notes: Amazon settled its dispute with a publisher that pulled its books from the site earlier this year, and meanwhile, two other publishers filed responses to the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit on ebook pricing, and Apple filed its response to a parallel class-action suit. — Web designer Oliver Reichenstein ripped the ubiquitous “Share” buttons all over news and other sites, while the Lab’s Joshua Benton provided some initial data showing they may be quite helpful for news orgs to prompt sharing of their content on Twitter. — Cornell prof Tarleton Gillespie wrote an interesting post exploring whether we can trust Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithm, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said it’s not necessarily Twitter’s job to broaden our worldview, but instead our own responsibility. — Some additional commentary on Warren Buffett’s purchase of dozens of small Media General papers two weeks ago: NYU prof Clay Shirky thinks it’s a bad idea, and Mathew Ingram agrees with him. — Finally, it’s not shameless self-promotion if it’s actually really good: The Lab ran several fascinating pieces this week that are worth a look — Justin Ellis’ talk with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, some cool ideas for improving news from MIT Media Lab students courtesy of Andrew Phelps, and the Jonathan Stray’s smart column on broadening our concept of what journalists do. Enjoy. Flipped Facebook thumb by Johannes Fuchs, 1979 Picayune shot by Josh Sanders, and Canadian paywall (har har) by John Fink all used under a Creative Commons license. |
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