Sabtu, 14 Juli 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Radio Ambulante wants to drive narrative journalism in Latin American radio, via the web

Posted: 13 Jul 2012 09:30 AM PDT

Latin America has a long tradition of telling stories — and it used to have one of listening to them on the radio, too. For decades, “radionovelas” (radio soap operas) were a huge success across the region, but the rise of TV supplanted radio for broadcast storytelling. Radio is still big in many Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s dominated by music and live talk shows.

Radio Ambulante wants to bring those days back, but with a twist. The project’s goal is to catch the people’s ear with narrative journalism, not fiction. “It is a project to tell stories from all Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, where people listen to radio every day,” Daniel Alarcón, one of its founders and a renowned writer himself, told me.

In other words, it’s trying to create a product that sounds like This American Life and Radiolab, a format rarely found on radio programming in Latin America.

To change that landscape, Radio Ambulante is betting on the web. It raised some of its initial funds via Kickstarter — $46,000, beating its goal by $6,000 — and it’s crowdsourcing reporters and stories.

“Without the Internet and without all the digital tools available now, Radio Ambulante wouldn’t exist,” Alarcón told me. The web, he explained, allows production to take place across multiple countries while maintaining low costs. “On the distribution side, it is very important also,” he said.

However, the web is not the only channel Radio Ambulante wants to be on. Alarcón’s ultimate ambition is to broadcast its content on radio stations across Latin America. The idea is to build sort of a syndication network of narrative radio journalism. “Latin America is a continent of narrators and storytellers, and for us it was obvious to put such oral tradition together with radio, and adding journalistic rigor to the mix,” he said.

The first episode of Radio Ambulante, which became available May 15, reflects that intention. The 50-minute-long program is dedicated to stories about moving:

  • A man relives the 26-day trip he made from Perú to New York, hidden in a ship, in 1959.
  • A woman tells the story of a friend returning to Perú, her home country, after years of living in Barcelona, Spain.
  • Reza revisits his first day as an immigrant in a North Carolina high school and remembers how saying a forbidden word let him blend in with the crowds.
  • Manuel Zelaya, former president of Honduras, describes intimate details of the day in 2009 he was ousted by the army and what happend during his two-year exile.

“Mudanzas” is the first of four shows Radio Ambulante plans to produce this year, one every two months. For now, the content is available at the project’s site or in iTunes.

When it comes to its audience, Radio Ambulante wants one that is “transnational and greographically diverse.” Alarcón emphasized that they are not only aiming at Latinos living in the U.S. “We are going to build an audience along the way. With digital platforms, we don’t need just one big market — we can have small niches in different cities,” he explained. As part of those efforts, Radio Ambulante is exploring distribution in the U.S. and alliances with radio stations in Latin America, Alarcón said. “Not everyone has an iPhone or a phone that allows to download audio. That’s why radio stations are very important for us.”

There’s nothing concrete yet, but Alarcón hopes the second season will be aired in different radio stations throughout Latin America, in 2013. “This year, the priority is focusing on producing high-quality content.”

To ensure the quality desired, Radio Ambulante is making use of a network of contributors, especially with experience in radio. Journalists and producers like NPR correspondent Manadalit del Barco and This American Life contributor Annie Correal advise the editorial team on various things from technical issues to creating the show’s sound aesthetic.

Helping me helping you

Collaboration plays a key role in a small operation like Radio Ambulante, which is based in Oakland, California, and wants to cover all Latin America on a budget. Producers invite story pitches on their site, including those related to upcoming episode themes. (The next episode is about names, so they’re asking for good tales behind aliases or surnames.) A Soundcloud dropbox lets you submit finished audio if you’d like.

Another form of collaboration is working with Latin American magazines specialized in narrative journalism, like Etiqueta Negra (from Perú) and Anfibia (from Argentina). When a reporter needs to travel for a story and there’s not enough budget, Radio Ambulante share expenses with the publication and they run the story adapted to its particular platform. Some stories originally produced for Radio Ambulante will end up having a magazine version, too, and vice versa.

The last but certainly not the least form of collaboration is donations. However, Alarcón is aware that won’t keep the project alive. For 2013, Radio Ambulante plans to produce 10 episodes, which requires an estimated budget of $450,000.

Alarcón knows that the audience has to grow in order to lure investors and commercial partners. Since the project was launched with a pilot in February, the site has had 20,000 visitors. “It’s not our goal,” he acknowledged, “but is it a good start. We want to have thousands of downloads.”

The biggest challenge so far, though, has been to learn and to teach a new way of storytelling. “We are based on long tradition of narrative journalism in Latin America — the small detail is that we are doing it on radio,” Alarcón told me. “We’re driving a new tradition.”

Radio Ambulante usa la web para impulsar el periodismo narrativo en la radio latinoamericana

Posted: 13 Jul 2012 09:29 AM PDT

Latinoamérica tiene una larga tradición de contar historias y durante mucho tiempo tuvo una de escucharlas por la radio. Durante décadas, las radionovelas fueron un éxito a lo largo de la región, pero su vigencia desapareció con la aparición de la televisión, que suplantó a la radio como medio para contar historias. La radio, sin embargo, sigue siendo muy importante en muchos países de habla hispana, pero su programación está dominada por programas en vivo y música.

Radio Ambulante quiere revivir los viejos tiempos, aunque dándoles un giro. El objetivo del proyecto es captar la atención de la gente con periodismo narrativo, no con ficción. “Es un proyecto para contar historias de todos los países que hablan español en América Latina, donde la gente escucha radio todos los días,” me contó Daniel Alarcón, uno de los fundadores y un reconocido escritor en América Latina y Estados Unidos.

En otras palabras, lo que trata es de crear un producto que suene parecido a This American Life y Radiolab, dos programas muy populares en Estados Unidos y con un estilo difícil de encontrar en la programación radial latinoamericana.

Para cambiar ese panorama, Radio Ambulante está apostando por la web. Parte de su inversión inicial se recaudó a través de Kirkstarter -$46.000, superando su meta por $6.000- y está reclutando reporteros e historias a través de una convocatoria abierta a todo público (lo que se conoce en inglés como crowdsourcing).

“Sin Internet y sin todas las herramientas digitales que hay disponibles ahora, Radio Ambulante no existiría,” reconoció Alarcón. La web, me explicó, permite producir desde diferentes países a bajo costo. “Para la distribución, es muy importante también,” dijo.

Eso sí, la web no es el único canal en que quiere transmitir Radio Ambulante. Alarcón sueña con que los programas se escuchen en radioemisoras de toda América Latina. La idea es construir una especie de cadena distribuidora de periodismo narrativo radiofónico. “Latinoamérica es un continente de narradores y cronistas, y para nosotros resulta obvio unir esa tradición oral con la radio, y agregar el rigor periodístico a la mezcla,” aseguró.

El primer episodio de Radio Ambulante, disponible desde el 15 de mayo, refleja esa intención. El programa, que tiene una duración de 50 minutos, está dedicado a historias sobre “mudanzas.”

  • Un hombre revive los 26 días que pasó escondido en un barco que lo llevó desde Perú hasta Nueva York, en 1959.
  • Una mujer cuenta la historia de una amiga que regresa a Perú, su país natal, después de años de vivir en Barcelona, España.
  • Reza reconstruye su primer día como inmigrante en una secundaria de Carolina del Norte y narra cómo decir una palabra prohibida le facilitó pertenecer al “grupo.”
  • Manuel Zelaya, expresidente de Honduras, revela detalles íntimos de aquel día en 2009 cuando fue derrocado por el ejército y describe qué pasó durante esos dos años de exilio.

“Mudanzas” es el primero de cuatro programas que Radio Ambulante planea producir este año, uno cada dos meses. Por ahora, el contenido está disponible en el sitio web del proyecto y en iTunes.

Cuando se trata de su audiencia, Radio Ambulante quiere una que sea “transnacional y geográficamente diversa.” Alarcón fue enfático al decir que no están interesados sólo en los Latinos que viven en Estados Unidos. “Vamos a ir construyendo una audiencia. Con las plataformas digitales no necesitamos un solo gran mercado, sino que podemos tener pequeños nichos en diferentes ciudades,” explicó. Como parte de esos esfuerzos, Radio Ambulante está explorando posibilidades de distribución en Estados Unidos, y alianzas con radioemisoras en América Latina, me dijo Alarcón. “No todo el mundo tiene un iPhone o un teléfono celular que permite descargar audio. Por es que las estaciones de radio son muy importantes para nosotros.”

No hay nada concreto todavía, pero Alarcón espera que la segunda temporada se transmita en diferentes estaciones a lo largo y ancho de América Latina, en 2013. “Este año, la prioridad es concentrarnos en generar contenido de alta calidad.”

Para asegurarse la calidad deseada, Radio Ambulante echa mano de una red de colaboradores, especialmente con experiencia en radio. Periodistas y productores como la corresponsal de NPR, Mandalit del Barco, y la colaboradora de This American Life, Annie Correal, asesoran al equipo editorial en diversos temas, desde aspectos técnicos hasta cómo crear la estética del programa.

Ayudame que te ayudo

“Colaboración” es una palabra clave en una operación pequeña como Radio Ambulante, que desde Oakland, California, pretende cubrir toda América Latina con bajo presupuesto. A través de su website, los productores piden a la gente que envíe ideas de historias, incluídas aquellas que se relacionan con los temas de episodios por producir. (El próximo capítulo, por ejemplo, es acerca de “nombres,” así que están pidiendo buenas historias detrás de apodos y apellidos). Un buzón de Soundcloud permite enviar la historia en audio si ustedes quieren.

Otra forma de colaboración es trabajar con revistas latinoamericanas especializadas en periodismo narrativo, como Etiqueta Negra (de Perú) y Anfibia (de Argentina). Cuando un reportero necesita viajar a reportear una historia y no hay suficiente presupuesto, Radio Ambulante comparte los gastos con la publicación y cada una produce la historia en su respectiva plataforma. Algunas historias originalmente producidas para Radio Ambulante terminarán teniendo una versión en revista, también, y viceversa.

La última y claramente no menos importante forma de colaboración son las donaciones. Sin embargo, Alarcón está conciente de que ese dinero no es suficiente para mantener el proyecto vivo. Para 2013, Radio Ambulante planea producir 10 episodios, que requieren un presupuesto estimado en $450.000.

Alarcón sabe que la audiencia debe crecer para lograr atraer inversionistas y socios comerciales. Desde que la iniciativa se lanzó con un piloto en Febrero, el sitio ha registrado 20.000 visitantes. “No es nuestra meta,” reconoce Alarcón, “pero es un buen comienzo. Queremos lograr miles de descargas.”

El mayor reto hasta ahora, sin embargo, ha sido aprender y enseñar una nueva manera de contar historias. “Nosotros nos basamos en una larga tradición de periodismo narrativo en América Latina, el pequeño detalle es que lo estamos haciendo en radio,” me dijo Alarcón. “Estamos impulsando una nueva tradicion.”

Banyan Project planning its first community-owned news co-op

Posted: 13 Jul 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Ownership matters.

It matters in New Orleans, where Advance Publications is cutting The Times-Picayune's print edition from seven days a week to three — and gutting the staff — despite earning a profit and paying bonuses in 2010 and 2011.

It matters in Chicago, where Tribune Company — which may soon emerge from bankruptcy — got rid of its hyperlocal reporters at the Chicago Tribune and replaced them with Journatic, which outsources coverage, in some cases to the Philippines, and which until recently used fake bylines on some of its stories.

And it matters in the Boston area, where GateHouse Media — the national chain that owns more than 100 community newspapers here — is preparing to unveil a centralized in-house content farm whose work could eventually find its way into eastern Massachusetts.

Newspapers, the source of most local journalism, are weighed down by chain ownership and corporate debt. Independent online news sites are a promising alternative. But for-profit sites like The Batavian and Baristanet are too small to provide the full range of community journalism that was typical a generation or two ago. And larger nonprofits like the New Haven Independent and Voice of San Diego are rare, in part because the IRS has put a hold on new ventures.

So what can be done? Later this year, a community news site based on an entirely different ownership model is scheduled to debut in Haverhill, Mass., a blue-collar city of 60,000 about 45 minutes north of Boston on the New Hampshire line. The site, to be called Haverhill Matters, will be cooperatively owned, similar to a credit union or a food co-op. Neither for-profit nor nonprofit, the site, if it is to succeed, will depend on the goodwill and support of its members. And it is designed to be easily replicated in other cities and regions.

“What I'm hearing from an awful lot of new people is, how do I find out what is going on in Haverhill?”

Haverhill Matters will be the first visible manifestation of the Banyan Project, an idea that veteran journalist Tom Stites has been working on for several years. I recently met Stites, whose long resume includes editing stints at The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and Mike LaBonte, who chaired the site's local organizing committee, at a restaurant in Haverhill to discuss their plans. (LaBonte stepped aside a short time later, citing health issues and the pressures of a new job.)

It was something of a reunion. I'd written for Stites several times when he was editor of the UU World, the Unitarian Universalist Association's denominational magazine. I knew LaBonte through his volunteer work as an editor at NewsTrust, a social network that evaluates journalism for qualities such as fairness and sourcing; he'd led several workshops for my students.

What attracted Stites to the co-op model was his belief that newspaper executives, in their relentless pursuit of high-end advertising, had abandoned all but their most affluent readers. It's a subject he has spoken and written about passionately, including at the 2006 Media Giraffe conference at UMass Amherst and in a series for the Lab last December.

Banyan sites such as Haverhill Matters are aimed at serving "news deserts," a term Stites consciously adopted from "food deserts" — that is, lower-income urban neighborhoods where grocery stores are scarce and fast food restaurants proliferate. The idea is that a lack of fresh, relevant news can be as harmful to civic health as a lack of fresh, nutritious food can be to personal health.

That all sounds good, but where will the money come from? Stites said that Banyan sites would be supported through a combination of membership fees, grant money, and advertising. I told him that sounded exactly the same as the model used by nonprofit sites such as the New Haven Independent. Stites responded by emphasizing the benefits of membership in a co-op.

So let me draw a few comparisons between the Banyan model and the Independent. Stites hopes to sign up some 1,200 people who would pay $36 a year, bringing in a little more than $43,000 annually. The Independent asks for readers to pay $10 to $18 a month voluntarily; editor and founder Paul Bass told me he's got about 100 voluntary subscribers paying a total of about $13,000 a year, which comes to less than 3 percent of his site’s $450,000 annual budget. Given that the Independent has been around for nearly seven years and serves a city twice the size of Haverhill, Stites' goal is ambitious indeed. But there are differences in terms of the incentives.

Banyan sites such as Haverhill Matters would be free, as is the Independent. But in order to participate on the Haverhill site using community tools that Stites promises will be unusually sophisticated, readers will be asked to pay — a request that would become a requirement after several months. The Independent, by contrast, does not assess any mandatory charges. In keeping with the cooperative model, paid-up Banyan members will elect a board, which will in turn select the full-time editor. Readers will also be able to become members by contributing labor rather than time — perhaps by writing a neighborhood blog that appears on the site. If it works, in other words, a Banyan site would foster a sense of ownership and participation that other models lack.

"This is different from a hyperlocal news site," Stites told me. "This is a community institution owned by a widely distributed, large number of community members. It has to be owned by members of the community, and they've got to support or it doesn't happen."

The next few months will be crucial ones. Currently, Stites is trying to raise money for the launch with a pitch at Spot.us. He and the organizing committee are planning a community meeting in Haverhill this September. And if all goes according to plan, Haverhill Matters will go live by the end of the year.

Stites is planning to launch Haverhill Matters with two paid staff members: a full-time, professional editor with roots in the city and a "general manager" whose job would be to build a community around the site and to write. Beyond that, his ideas for covering the news are evolving. Journalism students from nearby Northern Essex Community College would be involved. High school interns might be put to work assembling a community calendar. In our conversation, it came across as amorphous but potentially interesting — worth watching, but with compelling, useful journalism by no means assured.

Strictly speaking, Haverhill is not entirely a news desert, but it comes pretty close. The nearest daily, The Eagle-Tribune, is based in North Andover and owned by CNHI, a national chain based in Montgomery, Alabama. The paper publishes a daily Haverhill edition and a weekly, The Haverhill Gazette. But LaBonte told me that both were a far cry from the days when the Gazette was an independently owned daily paper.

"That was a thriving daily at one point," LaBonte said. "What I'm hearing from an awful lot of new people is, how do I find out what is going on in Haverhill?"

By early 2013, one of the answers to that question might be a start-up website called Haverhill Matters.

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 of Haverhill by Fletcher6 used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Newspaper survival strategies, and the price of change in New Orleans

Posted: 13 Jul 2012 07:30 AM PDT

Evaluating newspapers’ various strategies: Several wide-ranging strategies in the newspaper industry have been making headlines lately (Newhouse’s draconian cuts in New Orleans, Warren Buffett’s aggressive newspaper purchases, outsourcing hyperlocal news to Journatic), and The New York Times’ David Carr tied a lot of them together in a sharp column identifying the severe financial difficulties facing the newspaper industry. The piece of news he reported was the fact that pension funds at major newspaper chains like Gannett and McClatchy are underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars. Gannett Blog’s Jim Hopkins said that finding deserves some attention.

One of the most prominent responses to these financial threats has been the implementation of online paywalls, a strategy that Ebyline’s Peter Beller reported is more common at larger papers, to the point where it now affects a third of America’s daily newspaper readers. Closely tied to that strategy is a doubling-down by publishers on “original reporting” online, which media analyst Frederic Filloux contended is a losing proposition, because aggregators’ tech- and marketing-savviness are trumping the quality of traditional publishers’ work in the battle for online readers. British journalist Adam Tinworth said part of the problem is that publishers are trying out and pitching new digital strategies far too often, instead of being patient enough to see one through.

Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor responded to all the hand-wringing with a list of reasons for hope in the news industry, including the potential in digital circulation, the growth of tablets, community blogs, and customer data.

Elsewhere, media analyst Alan Mutter categorized three strategies for newspapers dealing with the new digital environment — keeping up the status quo as long as possible (“farming” it), accepting print’s decline and extracting as much money as possible before it finally goes (“milking” it), and leveraging old media resources to aggressively invest in digital innovation (“feeding” it). He mapped a different publisher to each approach — Buffett to farming, Newhouse to milking, and Rupert Murdoch to feeding — and ultimately endorsed Murdoch’s plan.

Peter Kirwan of The Media Briefing also praised Murdoch’s efforts to turn up the pressure on his print properties to start making money through digital innovation: Some of the experiments might backfire, he said, but “whatever it takes, speeding up the pace of digital transition can only be a good thing.”

Newhouse’s detractors and defenders: One of those newspapers has drawn particular attention over the past month or so — the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which has now undergone its drastic layoffs and plans to cut down its publishing three days a week this October. This week, the Newhouse family, which owns the paper, rejected a request by several New Orleans bigwigs to sell the paper to an unnamed buyer whom they have reportedly lined up. One local court also moved its public notices from the TP to the weekly paper the Gambit, and the paper is also receiving rants from its reporters about its poor website.

Newhouse’s moves continue to draw strong criticism from media observers, including former newspaper editor John L. Robinson, who attributed the changes to the fundamental conflict between public service and profits. “Profit trumps readers every time. The owners may appreciate the public service journalism the paper may produce, but it isn't what they value the most,” he wrote. And former Baltimore Sun reporter and “The Wire” creator David Simon argued in the Gambit that what’s being lost in newspapers’ evisceration is the public accountability provided by beat reporting.

But Newhouse has its defenders, too, including Digital First CEO John Paton, who argued that while the company is handling the transition poorly, it’s still making the type of difficult, digitally centered change that’s necessary for the business to survive. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram concurred. Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review acknowledged that arduous change is necessary for newspapers, but said the clumsiness with which Newhouse has handled its moves in New Orleans has swallowed up its goodwill and set the cause of change back.

Two studies with good news for mobile news: Two studies with interesting implications for digital news were released this week, one on mobile news consumption and the other an international study on digital and mobile news consumption. The first, conducted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, found that users of large tablets (i.e. iPads and the like, rather than Kindle Fires) were older, more likely to pay for digital news, and particularly enjoyed reading on the tablet compared with other media. Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman noted that those results makes “tablet readers seem the best hope for print publishers that want to make a digital transition based on paid content.”

Slate’s Will Oremus echoed that idea, though he cautioned that tablets may do more to eat into evening news’ audience than help the traditional publishing industry. This study was the final part of a three-part study on mobile media, and Amy Gahran of the Knight Digital Media Center gave some suggestions for future mobile news research, including focusing on community news in particular.

The second study, issued by Oxford’s Reuters Institute, looked at digital news use in the U.S. and four European countries, with findings focusing on the rise of smartphones and tablets, as well as young people’s changing news consumption habits. PaidContent’s Robert Andrews highlighted the increasing willingness to pay for news among young smartphone and tablet owners. J-prof Alfred Hermida dug into the numbers and pointed out that while the use of social media for news is up sharply, it’s driven by a small core of heavy news sharers.

Does outsourcing have a place in local news?: Last week’s controversy regarding fake bylines at the hyperlocal content provider Journatic continued to generate debate this week, especially for newspaper columnists who defended the value of locally produced news (such as, say, the news that appears in their newspaper). WNPR public radio hosted a discussion on outsourcing local news, and while former Patch editor-in-chief Brian Farnham didn’t defend Journatic (he said it “gives me a cheap feeling”), he did say the overwhelming nitpicking and self-criticism coming from within journalism makes it difficult for any digital journalism initiative to survive.

Danish j-prof Rasmus Kleis Nielsen argued that with news’ business model collapsing, the question isn’t whether some aspects should be outsourced, but what and when. If this episode illustrates that the article is untouchable, though, the scale of news production is going to have to decline, he said. “Cottage production works for the few, I don't see how it will work for the many.”

Reading roundup: No big stories this week, but lots of smaller ones to keep up with:

— Some continued discussion about CNN’s (and others’) Supreme Court reporting fiasco: The New Republic’s Amy Sullivan urged journalists to stop caring about scoops, and reporters responded by defending the importance of speed in news. Sullivan replied that it’s not really about speed per se, but obsession with being first with information that will become widely distributed almost immediately anyway. Poynter’s Craig Silverman pulled some lessons for newsrooms from the fiasco.

— Next Issue Media, a digital media joint venture among several top media companies, issued its iPad edition, which allows subscribers to read all they want of 39 magazines for a flat monthly fee — what Shawn King of The Loop and others called the Netflix model for magazines. Time’s Harry McCracken said its audience will probably be limited to print magazine junkies, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram was skeptical of the plan as a way to emulate print reading experiences.

— A group of media moguls met this week in California to talk about a variety of issues, one of which was the defeat this winter of their SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy laws. The New York Times and Forbes have more details about how that fight between media and tech is progressing, and Bloomberg broke down some of the other issues the executives would be discussing.

— The New York Observer’s Kat Stoeffel reported that News Corp.’s money-losing tablet news publication, The Daily, has been placed “on watch,” to be evaluated (and possibly killed) after November’s election. Business Insider’s Henry Blodget said The Daily has failed because it failed to carve out a niche or a distinct perspective.

— A few thought-provoking pieces that deserve a read this week: Two from the Columbia Journalism Review on making freelancing sustainable in the digital world and on the battle over the network nightly newscasts, and one here at the Lab by Jonathan Stray on getting ourselves out of like-minded “filter bubbles” in our online information consumption.

Photos of vertical stack of newspapers by J E Smith and of Jackson Square in New Orleans by praline3001 both used under a Creative Commons license.
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