Rabu, 15 Agustus 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab


OpenCourt wins another legal challenge to online streaming in the courtroom

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 03:14 PM PDT

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has again ruled in favor of allowing OpenCourt to continue broadcasting online.

Since May 2011, OpenCourt — a judicial transparency project (and Knight News Challenge winner) that provides videostreams of court cases — has been broadcasting from Quincy District Court, offering online viewers a look at things like arraignments, traffic infractions, and drug cases. Last month, a local district attorney sued the court hosting OpenCourt to halt plans to begin streaming jury trials from the Quincy courthouse. In today’s ruling, the judge in that lawsuit said OpenCourt should be allowed to go forward and must be subject to the same rules that govern other news media, writing: “There is no reason to single OpenCourt out and impose on it a variety of restrictions that do not apply to other media organizations.”

This is not the first time the project faced a legal threat aimed at stopping the streaming. In March, the Supreme Judicial Court reinforced OpenCourt’s right to broadcast after the state sued to stop the project from recording and archiving court cases.

“There is a presumption that Massachusetts courts are open to media access and this ruling today clarified OpenCourt’s contention all along it should not be singled out as anything different from any other broadcast media,” said John Davidow, executive producer of OpenCourt and executive editor of new media at WBUR, the Boston public radio station where OpenCourt is a project. Davidow said he’s pleased with the ruling because it not only strengthens OpenCourt’s position but also furthers the project’s goals of transparency. “This isn’t about OpenCourt,” Davidow said. “This is really about the public’s access to what goes on in their courtrooms.”

In July, OpenCourt was scheduled to begin broadcasting jury trials in Quincy. Norfolk County DA Michael Morrissey sued the Quincy District Court justices, arguing that OpenCourt needed concrete guidelines from a special judiciary committee for broadcasting within the court that would protect victims, witnesses, and minors.

Davidow said Tuesday’s ruling would allow OpenCourt to move forward with plans to stream those cases from courtroom A at Quincy District Court. Davidow said the cameras and other preparations were set for recording in the jury room prior to the lawsuit — meaning OpenCourt will be ready to livestream once jury cases are scheduled. Davidow said streaming jury trials is important because those are the cases most of the public is familiar with. “The public, outside perspective of the court is trials,” Davidow said. “It’s the essence of what the public thinks takes place in courthouses across the commonwealth.”

In denying Morissey’s request, Justice Margot Botsford said the project can operate under preliminary guidelines that were put in place as a result of the decision in the earlier OpenCourt case. In that case, Commonwealth v. Barnes, the court said a special committee must create guidelines for OpenCourt to broadcast and archive court cases. In June, a preliminary set of guidelines for OpenCourt was released by the Quincy District Court. The final rules from the judiciary media committee are expected to be drafted by October.

In a statement, Morrissey said his office may seek to stop OpenCourt from recording on a case-by-case basis in order to protect victims and witnesses. From the statement:

The judiciary media committee is currently meeting and presumably working on the guidelines that this injunction asked the court to wait for before adding a second session to the live streaming. We hope that committee will expedite that process, and that the rules will provide appropriate protections so that violations of victim privacy, as occurred so many times in the Barnes case, do not occur.

After a deal falls apart, Homicide Watch D.C. is going on hiatus

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 10:17 AM PDT

The Internet famously enabled anyone to become a publisher. A tiny outfit of one or two people can, when the stars align, have the same claim on your attention as a major media company with thousands of employees.

But one thing large companies are built for is sustainability. A site driven by the passion and will of one person runs into trouble when that one person wants to take a new job, or take a vacation, or just focus energy elsewhere for a while. When an editor at a large newspaper leaves, it’s occasion for cake; when a small startup’s founder steps away, there might not even be anyone else around to eat it.

Something along those lines is playing out with the lauded crime site Homicide Watch D.C., and, full disclosure, we here at the Nieman Foundation play a role. Founder Laura Amico applied for a Nieman-Berkman Fellowship earlier this year. When she got the fellowship — which lets her and husband Chris Amico spend a year studying sustainable models for crime journalism here at Harvard — she planned on finding a way to keep the site alive for the 10 months she’d be in Cambridge.

Unfortunately, a licensing deal with a local news organization that would have taken over operation of the site fell through at the last minute. Now, Amico says it’s inevitable that the site will be shuttered for at least some period of time.

“It’s tough because Homicide Watch D.C. is undoubtedly what I’m most proud of in my life,” Amico told me. “At the same time I have to take this incredible opportunity, and that’s not something that I could ever pass up either. That the future of the D.C. site is uncertain — I really have to separate myself from that and say that we have done everything we can, and we have given it everything we could. That there’s no one here willing to take it on is not a statement on the site but [on] the editorial values of this community right now.”

For those who don’t know about Homicide Watch, it’s a site that reports on every homicide in the city of Washington — following the case from the crime itself through the pursuit of suspects and the cases’ path through the courts. It’s been lauded for its devotion to blanket coverage and for its ability to build communities of interest around the kind of crime stories that might get a few inches of coverage — if that — in the local daily. As the site’s tagline puts it: “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” (We wrote the first piece about it back in 2009, when it was still just an idea, and have covered it several times since.)

“That there’s no one here willing to take it on is not a statement on the site but the editorial values of this community right now.”

In Homicide Watch’s first full month of operation, she was thrilled when the site got 500 pageviews. Last month, it got 301,000.

The Amicos — broadly speaking, she does the editorial side and he handles the coding on the backend — have built a licensing business, helping reporters in other cities build their own iterations of Homicide Watch. They’ve created a model that she says is “doing well,” but that may not be enough to save the flagship site.

It’s rare that journalists stay with one company for the course of their career these days, and Laura says after her fellowship year, she might be ready to go back to being part of a larger newsroom. (She was previously a reporter at the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.) Understandably, she wants to explore her options. But she also wants what she created to live on.

“In D.C., my firm belief is that many newsrooms are still thinking about covering homicide in 2012 the way they covered it in 1992,” Amico said. “Homicide has changed dramatically. The drug wars are not the same as they were in 1992. That has impacted and changed who is being killed, and where, and for what reason. Despite that, those criteria that newsrooms are using to determine what homicides are and are not important has not changed. There’s a divergence of news values and realities.”

The Amicos are holding out hope that the site’s hiatus will be brief and that its reporting can be sustained while they’re in Cambridge. On Tuesday they launched a $40,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign. “What we want to do is bring on paid interns — five throughout the course of one calendar year — and turn operation of the site over to them, with guidance from Chris and myself,” Amico said. “Everything from the daily reporting to the database entry to monitoring comments, keeping track of cases, year-in-review stories, investigative reports.” (Watch our Twitter feed; we’ll let you know when it launches.)

The database is part of what makes Homicide Watch special because it enables the site to go beyond the intimate coverage — every victim by name — of homicide. The database allows the quick creation and collation of maps, demographic info on victims and suspects, and information on the progression of cases.

“This is all data that I’m gathering because it’s in the course of our normal reporting,” Amico says. “Really, at a moment’s notice, I can write a story saying 35 people have pled guilty in this period of time and here’s a list of them.” Amico can also check those anecdotal reporter’s hunches that come with closely covering a beat. A couple of weeks ago, for example, three homicides in one weekend felt like more than usual over a relatively quiet couple of years.

“I got to thinking: Have there been more homicides? Well, I can check, and that took me just a couple of minutes.”

But as the site freezes next week, so too will its collection of data. Amico says she just received an email from a woman thanking Homicide Watch D.C. for its work, and describing the teenagers she sees around Washington wearing T-shirts printed with names, photographs, and dates that memorialize homicide victims. “It’s tragic that they have to go through this,” Amico says the woman wrote. “You all are giving such an important service. I’m moved by your website.”

That was a particularly tough email for Amico to receive.

“This woman doesn’t know that in a week the site isn’t going to be updated,” Amico said. “The site has had incredible editorial success in a way that I didn’t imagine was possible. But we can’t find a partner to hand it off to.”

Forget display ads: Technically Media’s events-based business model is working

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT

PHILADELPHIA — The year was 2008. Leaving their school newspaper behind, three Temple University graduates went looking for journalism jobs. Freelancing helped pay the bills, but they weren’t having any luck finding the full-time gigs they imagined.

The more they looked, the more it seemed like the kind of jobs they wanted — smart, high-impact, tech-focused local reporting — didn’t really exist. There were local tech writers out there, sure, but the amount of ink spent covering the Philly tech scene didn’t match its recent growth. The news organization this trio wanted to work for didn’t really exist, and the media companies that did exist weren’t really hiring.

So they decided to start their own. With a $50 WordPress theme, Technically Philly was born. It already had a staff, a distribution platform, and a vision fit for a bumper sticker: “A better Philadelphia through technology.”

The question was: How to pay the bills?

Display advertising revenue didn’t seem like a viable option. Grant money could — and ultimately would — help. But the group wanted to find a diverse, sustainable business model.

“We looked at larger entities like TechCrunch and a few other sites that we admire that were doing events,” co-founder Brian James Kirk told me. “It was really about diversification of revenue and just trying to pound the pavement — looking outside of that world for journalism and figuring out how to make it work.”

Today, Technically Philly’s flagship event is Philly Tech Week, an eight-day conference that shows the local tech scene is “alive and kicking ass,” as one Twitter user put it. It’s free for tech companies to participate, and free for anyone to attend. (Revenue comes from sponsors.) This year marked Technically Philly’s second ever Tech Week, and attendance more than doubled to some 10,000 people.

Kirk estimates about 40 percent of the revenue pie comes from events, 40 percent from consulting gigs, 10 percent from ads, and 10 percent from grants. That’s a shift compared with last year, when events revenue only represented about 12 percent of the pie.

Technically Philly’s consulting work has been to help develop web and events strategies for clients like the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and other companies that have “limited interaction in the tech world” that Technically Philly covers. (If there were any overlap, Kirk says the person covering the company would not be the person consulting for it, and that the relationship would be disclosed to readers as per the site’s ethics policy.)

Technically Philly points to the events-based business model as the foremost reason it has become a profitable business, and that’s the area it will focus on expanding in coming months as it plans to “significantly scale down” its consulting efforts.

“The big pitch has been that it’s a geographic niche publication,” Kirk said. “That’s what entices our sponsors and that’s what entices our readers because they can’t get that niche anywhere else. Why does it work? I think sponsors immediately react to people in a room. They want to meet people. We essentially see Tech Week as, ‘This is our annual “ask” of the community.’ We try to limit when we do ask businesses for support, and it resonates with the people who are within our community.”

An event of that scale comes out of a surprisingly modest workspace.

Technically Philly’s budget is “definitely under half a million dollars” — closer to a quarter-million, Kirk later says — and the newsroom is in a Temple University building surrounded by classrooms and across the street from City Hall. The space has an administrative feel to it. (From her perch at the front desk, reporter Juliana Reyes is easy to mistake for an office manager.) Yet there are hints of color here and there. An American flag drapes over a cubicle partition. There’s a “Let’s Go Temple” sign on one wall, and a Mark Howe — of Philadelphia Flyers fame — poster on another. In between, printer paper with simple, printed-in-bold sayings: “Nobody Cares About What You Do As Much As You Do,” “Err on the Side of Action,” and “We’re Totally Fucked. I’m Sorry.”

It’s enough room for the lean four-person staff, but Kirk says they’re looking for new office space, something that will better integrate Technically Philly with the scene it covers. They’re also looking for new office space in other cities. Technically Media already expanded with a new site, Technically Baltimore, which formally launched over the summer after a soft roll-out earlier this year. Next month, that site’s hosting the first-ever Baltimore Innovation Week.

“We evaluated about a half-dozen markets,” Kirk says. “Baltimore just made sense because it looks a lot like Philadelphia. The narrative that’s playing out there is something we’ve seen popping out in Philly or on the tip of Philly’s tongue. There is a very similar trajectory. It’s been amazing how many of the conversations are so similar.”

From an editorial standpoint, Kirk says Technically Media tries to combine the sensibilities of a community newspaper with the advocacy of a modern journalism startup. Coverage goes into one of three buckets: Tech business, tech education, and tech-related civics. “So looking at municipal government informed through tech,” Kirk said. “The bigger issue — or the more important one we push on a lot — is open data. And then the other side of it, infrastructure. Are they providing wifi or Internet access to citizens? What does City Council’s access look like?”

Technically Philly has also worked directly with the city. For example, it launched an initiative with the mayor’s office that gave people an SMS-enabled tool to help people find the closest wifi access point. Now that Technically Media’s Philly and Baltimore sites are humming, it plans to expand to two or more additional cities by 2014. Some of the cities in the running as of this writing: Boston, New York, Detroit, and New Orleans. “It could be that we’re focused on those post-industrial cities that really have burgeoning tech communities, or the alternative would be that we’ll look at how the Mid-Atlantic is connected,” Kirk said.

Also high on the Technically Media to-do list is a substantial site redesign, which is scheduled to go live in January. “It’s not the most attractive site right now,” Kirk says. “We’re still running on that same WordPress theme that we bought three years ago. People browse us mobilely, or have tried and given up, because we didn’t have the operating budget for it.”

If all goes as planned, Technically Media will have switched to responsive design in a matter of months. Determining what’s next after that comes down to a simple calculation, Kirk says: “Evaluating what value — what specific value — you provide to the community you cover. What kinds of services or products can you offer? We don’t think we’re doing anything particularly innovative. We just happen to be doing it online.”