Nieman Journalism Lab |
- By tweeting about a developing story, could you be inciting a riot?
- Still without a team in place, Project Thunderdome gets a surprise test drive
- SoundCloud expands its effort to become the YouTube of public radio and podcasts
| By tweeting about a developing story, could you be inciting a riot? Posted: 31 Jul 2012 11:03 AM PDT
You’re probably not going to like this, but we’re facing bigger Twitter problems than @GuyAdams having his account suspended. For those who haven’t been among the outraged on Twitter: Guy Adams, a Los Angeles-based reporter for The Independent, tweeted up a storm of criticisms about NBC’s handling of the Olympics. One of those tweets included NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel’s work email address. Twitter suspended his account for allegedly violating its user policy. The Internet went bananas. What’s making people so berzerk about all this is the idea that Twitter and a corporate partner — one that works in the news business, no less! — appear to have teamed up to silence a guy who said things those companies didn’t like. (Breaking: Adams apparently has his account back.)
But here’s a scarier thought: What if it were up to the government to choose what kind of Twitter speech is allowed? What if instead of account suspensions, Twitter users had to worry about being arrested for what they tweet? That’s a question that Yale Law School lecturer Margot Kaminski has been thinking about a lot these days. The premise of her recent research is that as people increasingly use social media as a tool for community organizing, government will try to impose regulations. Kaminski has delved specifically into “incitement to riot” statutes in the United States. These are the laws that add the “but” to that freedom-of-assembly bit in the First Amendment, and they vary in key ways from state to state. (How many people have to assemble for it to be considered a riot? What kind of activity constitutes a riot? What’s the difference between someone who’s acting violently, or just threatening violence? And what about intent? Etc., etc., etc.) Here’s a hypothetical: Let’s say I take to Twitter, and tweet that everyone in Cambridge should meet at the Out of Town News stand and start moonwalking at noon. Harmless flash mob, right? But what if instead I tweet that everyone should meet there for a looting spree? Am I inciting a riot? (For the record, I am decidedly pro-moonwalking and anti-looting.) Kaminski argues in her paper, “Incitement to Riot in the Age of Flash Mobs,” that “there is no real need to go after the speaker for a crime of ‘incitement to robbery’ or ‘incitement to riot,’ because the speaker's involvement in the robbery could be punished through other means.” A thornier question: What if I’m a reporter or some other passerby who tweets about a crowd that’s gathering at the newsstand, and my tweet notifies others who then turn up? “If somebody tweets there’s a protest happening at XYZ location, there’s a possibility that that might be seen as incitement to riot,” Kaminski told me. “So the thing that might be harmful to journalists is in reporting on something through social media: Your action might be seen as calling for that thing to happen.“ This isn’t just an academic thought exercise. Last year, Cleveland’s city council passed ordinance to prohibit “the improper use of social media to induce persons to commit a criminal offense.” Mayor Frank Jackson vetoed the measure. But in December, the council adopted a revised version of the original ordinance, making it clear that “electronic media devices” can be considered criminal tools. Kaminski says the Supreme Court has never addressed whether there should be a distinction between “direct and indirect advocacy of unlawful action.” The other thing to remember is that states define riots differently. Get the image of a torch-and-pitchfork-toting mob out of your mind: Only two states require at least seven people for a gathering to be a possible riot. Four states require only two people to gather for their assembly to be considered a possible riot. For most states, the minimum is three people. Many states already criminalize incitement to riot, and plenty of them in ways that Kaminski says are overly broad, even unconstitutional. She calls these statutes fascinating because they implicate not one but two protected freedoms: speech and assembly. In the landmark 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, justices unanimously ruled that the government may not punish speech unless it incites violent action. They drew a line between speech that advocated for violence versus speech that actually incited it. Traditionally, it was up to authorities — often in the midst of a crowd — to determine whether someone was inciting a riot. “Now there’s a particular fear of social media,” Kaminski said. “I use Twitter as the example because of the fact that cops are afraid that it creates instantaneous reaction. Before, the call to gather would have occurred by some kind of telephone chain, passing out pamphlets or putting up posters. Brandenberg put up this idea that the harm has to be immediate before you can legitimately go after it. It really meant you’re watching the speaker give the speech, and you’re seeing how soon bad stuff is going to occur.” In an age of virtual assembly, authorities are trying to figure out how to navigate incitement in a non-physical space. One high-profile example from last summer: When police in Britain threatened to bring charges against people for using Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger to incite widespread London riots. “Twitter brings this immediacy question back into play again,” Kaminski said. “You can have 100,000 followers and send out a message, and have something occur in 20 minutes. There’s a lot of potential for ex post facto justification. The chance that you, with 100,000 followers, put out this message and something really bad happens? Well, you might put out 50 messages with nothing happen and one thing occurs and post-legislators are going to try to apply this to social media. The core of this is making this really clear how much of a high level of intent you have. You have to be able to show that the speaker on Twitter wanted the gathering to occur, wanted it to be large, wanted it to happen immediately, and wanted to frustrate police ability to control it.” Image derived from photo by Dave Hogg and illustration by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Still without a team in place, Project Thunderdome gets a surprise test drive Posted: 31 Jul 2012 07:48 AM PDT
Not only are news organizations actually hiring these days, they’re looking to fill new positions. You could, for example, apply to become the first ever SWAT Leader at Project Thunderdome. What sounds like a gig that’s straight out of Saturday mornings in 1985 is actually a Digital First Media project more than a year in the making. And with a slew of new job listings just posted (and more to come), Thunderdome’s day-to-day operations are beginning to take shape. The SWAT Leader, I’m told, will be a newsy jack of all trades. Someone who can report, write, edit, and produce. Someone who’s willing to parachute into a faraway town on a moment’s notice. Basically someone who is up for any assignment, and has the skills and enthusiasm to dive in head-first. That last part is essential for anyone looking to join the Thunderdome team, which will require a basic startup mentality: Be willing to work, play, try, and fail in eight different ways a day. Then show up to work with a smile, ready to do it all again the next day. It isn’t for everyone — and that’s actually the point. The idea behind Thunderdome has always been to create a new infrastructure that will serve hundreds of local newsrooms still burdened by inefficiencies borne of a bygone era in journalism. (Read what we wrote about it in March 2011.) Here’s how Jim Brady, head of Project Thunderdome, explained the idea last year: Digital First jointly manages MediaNews Group and Journal Register Company, along with the hundreds of publications and websites that come with them. Thunderdome’s setting out to become a sort of clearinghouse-slash-newsroom, a mission-control center that both coordinates and produces coverage. One major goal will be to eliminate redundancies when a big national story breaks. Instead of having each paper create its own version of a story, the Thunderdome team will have a set of options in place. Kind of like an internal wire service. “Rather than having all these people do essentially redundant work, why don’t you do it once,” said Robyn Tomlin, who started her job as Thunderdome’s editor earlier this month. “Do it really really well, and do it for print and web, then send it out in a format across this wide network so they can have the value of that expertise. Because the person who is producing the world page is sometimes doing sports, features, entertainment, and obits. By centralizing these functions, we can hopefully do it better — and certainly more efficiently — across the board.”
Tomlin got her first test a couple of weeks ago when she woke up to the news of a deadly mass shooting at a Colorado movie theater. She was brand new on the job and still didn’t have the Thunderdome team in place. Knowing Aurora was near Denver, Tomlin wanted to immediately notify papers around the country that The Denver Post — MediaNews Group’s flagship paper — was already in full-on breaking news mode. “So the first thing I try to do is say, ‘How do we try to alert all our papers across the country that Denver is covering that story and we can distribute that information?’” Tomlin told me. “We didn’t even have an accurate email list. One didn’t exist. Nothing that had all the people who needed to know that information right then. So all of the sudden we’ve got to figure out how to put this together right now, today. Using email, toothpicks, and scotch tape, we tried to pull together essentially an internal wire service to distribute the content out of Colorado and also California, because the alleged shooter grew up in California.” So Tomlin and two Digital First web producers began curating tweets, gathering information, and coordinating communications between newsrooms across the country. “What I didn’t want was every single newspaper calling Denver and saying, ‘Can we take your stuff?’” Tomlin says. “That wasn’t efficient. So I became sort of that point person who was coordinating with Denver. They took a picture of the [story budget on a] white board and emailed it to me. [Denver] created a Google Doc with their budget, and I was able to send that out to folks.” As the day went on, Tomlin was sending out copy, Storify embed codes, and generally orchestrating coverage sharing between far-flung newsrooms. Just as Digital First was created as a way for two newspaper companies to combine efforts without merging, Thunderdome is a way for newsrooms to coordinate action while still working as standalone operations. Tomlin says she ended up glued to her computer — still in her pajamas — all day, her apartment transformed into a “strange bedroom central communications unit.” That’s essentially what Thunderdome is going to be, only in a lower Manhattan office building and with a different dress code. “Just try and connect the dots of this very large group of newspapers across 18 states,” Tomlin said. “Help facilitate communication and sharing, best practices, tools, training, whatever we need to do. We really weren’t ready, and certainly we weren’t prepared to staff it all weekend long, but we did. We figured it out.” But Thunderdome will be about more than coordinating communication in the wake of major breaking news. A lot of it will be about preparation, and giving newspapers a choice by taking some of the scramble out of the production process. Conceptually, it’s a pragmatic approach. But how can Digital First serve so many papers — some big, some tiny, just like the communities they’re in — and expect that the same content will work for all of them? “You don’t,” Tomlin said. “You do the best you can. Every site is going to have an elections page on it that’s going to have the nationally managed elections content, but they will also be able to add in their own local content. We’re not going to manage the homepages for these sites just like were not going to make front-page decisions. They can choose what they want to promote. The idea is not to have cookie-cutter coverage. I believe strongly that every local community has a different set of sensibilities. You can’t create a one-size-fits-all. What you can do is try to find as much commonality as you can.” To do that, Thunderdome needs to recruit the right people. Digital First has posted a dozen job openings in recent weeks, and they include roles like Politics Channel Manager, SWAT Team Leader, Mobile Producer, and Data Manager. There are basic requirements — experience, excellent writing and editing skills, enthusiasm, a desire to take risks and try new things — but the nuts and bolts of these jobs will be largely up to the people who end up taking them, which is one of the delightful things about working for any news startup. What’s unusual about this particular startup is that it exists within a legacy organization. Tomlin says that her goal is to hire people with the right “journalistic DNA” for the job, then hand them an audience. What they make of it — down to how much they opt to report, curate, produce, assign, etc. — will be up to them. For now, Digital First is still moving into its New York City office. Tomlin describes the space as open, cubicle-free, and modern — with one exception. Digital First CEO John Paton opted for a centuries-old antique publisher’s desk. “You walk into this very modern tech-like environment, and over in the corner it’s this old wooden desk, this wonderful anachronism of old and new,” Tomlin says. “To have the CEO, to have him sitting in what is in essence a newsroom in the middle of all this craziness is such a different cultural statement than I think I’ve seen in any legacy media company. Everything is built around this concept that news is at the center and at the heart of what Digital First is trying to do.” Photo of John Paton at his desk by Robyn Tomlin. |
| SoundCloud expands its effort to become the YouTube of public radio and podcasts Posted: 31 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT SoundCloud is arguably the biggest music-sharing community since MySpace, but now the company is eyeing a different kind of audio: the spoken word.
Now, as part of its effort to “unmute the web,” SoundCloud is courting radio news professionals, podcasters, and indie storytellers. A year-old team of about a half-dozen people is focused on spoken-word content. The company just hired Jim Colgan, formerly a producer and digital experimenter for WNYC public radio, to manage partnerships with audio providers. “In our outreach…we highlight that if you’ve got great audio, appreciate it for what it is,” said Manolo Espinosa, SoundCloud’s head of audio. “It does not need to have an overlay of a video container. It doesn’t have to have a separate experience. … You don’t have to have a stock video image of a tape player or a microphone on there. The audio stands by itself.” A recent example: Audio from police scanners captured during the Aurora shootings, edited and posted to SoundCloud by The Madeleine Brand Show. Producers of radio stories don’t need to be told how powerful sound can be. The problem is, the form has long suffered from neglect on the web. Sample a variety of public-radio sites and you’ll find proprietary Flash-based widgets or direct links to MP3 files. The HTML5 Video producers might still be having this conversation if not for YouTube. Do you remember what it was like trying to embed video in a blog post before YouTube (or Vimeo)? Pretty terrible. YouTube became a de facto standard for video because it nailed three things:
It’s uncommon for a news organization not to upload original video to YouTube — at least those organizations without their own infrastructure for video. There’s no need to fiddle with file formats or pay for server space, and it’s dead simple to embed the file in a web page. Plus people might actually see it. Standardization, in addition to simplifying things for news outlets, can go a long way in providing a consistent user experience. SoundCloud, of course, wants to be that standard. Think of it as an aspiring YouTube for public radio. SoundCloud is itself a social network, within which fans can like and comment on tracks. But the content is portable, easily embedded in other sites. And the player is offered in HTML5, which means mobile devices (without Flash) can still render the audio. Some producers are signing on. L.A.-based KPCC and KCRW, North Carolina’s WUNC, St. Louis Public Radio, and (newly relaunched) CNN Radio are among the traditional outlets actively uploading to the site. Boston’s WBUR and WGBH program The World have switched to using SoundCloud’s player on their websites. A number of other shows are on the platform, free to download and share, including Roman Mars’ wildly popular 99% Invisible. SoundCloud also provides a way for producers to solicit audio from users. Last week Michael Caputo of the Public Insight Network wrote about American Public Media’s new effort to collect audio responses to survey questions:
Espinosa told me one of his challenges is winning over commercial outlets, who are, for better or for worse, more focused on monetization and concerned about releasing control of their product. Unlike YouTube, SoundCloud offers no built-in options for advertising or other ways to monetize. That could stall broad industry adoption. Espinosa said SoundCloud’s focus now is on maximizing distribution. |
The website was founded five years ago by two sound guys who wanted to make it easier for musicians to share their work. After a series of smart moves — releasing 
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