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Highlight reel: Some of the best from this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism Posted: 01 Aug 2012 10:30 AM PDT Back in April, we went down to Austin for this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism. As far as journalism conferences go, this is one of the special ones — highly recommended. We’ve already written about much of what was covered there, like smart-fridge strategies, O Globo’s crazy-engaging tablet-only evening edition, an examination of journalistic behaviors on Twitter, and a study that pinpointed the most likely demographic to pay for the news. (Check out our roundup of lessons learned from the symposium.) Now, ISOJ has posted a complete collection of video from the conference. Watch them all. Here’s a smattering to get you started: Welsh: Let’s get to workThe Los Angeles Times’ Ben Welsh will make you love robots. He’ll also effectively shut down anyone who’s still arguing that computer-assisted reporting is somehow inherently bad for the industry. He’s genuinely passionate, and that’s just fun to watch. Highlight: Skip to 11:08 to watch a minute-long crescendo that ends with the best F-bomb of the conference. Boyer: News is a craft, not purely an artBrian Boyer, who this summer joined NPR’s news apps team, wants you to think about news function. “Data visualizations are not on their own useful,” Boyer says. “If we only make art, we are doing our audience a disservice.” Highlight: Skip to 3:03 to hear Boyer break down why journalists, engineers, and designers need to learn from one another. Brown: Don’t fight the audienceUniversity of Memphis journalism assistant professor Carrie Brown-Smith tracked the use of #Memstorm on Twitter during severe weather in her region. She examined the use of hashtags in centralizing real-time news. She also explored what kinds of information was shared, and how journalists’ coverage of the storm fit in. One key lesson for newsrooms: If your audience starts doing something cool, join in. Highlight: Skip to 3:37 to watch her account of what happened when a local Fox affiliate tried to change the hashtag. Doria: Make something beautifulThe iPad is special. That’s why Pedro Doria, digital platforms editor for Brazilian newspaper O Globo, wanted to give readers an iPad app that was specially made for the device. Doria felt that the paper’s basic mobile app wasn’t making full use of the platform. (Read our article about the app.) Highlight: Skip to 8:14 to see Doria break down the numbers about engagement with the app, which jumped from an average of 26 minutes to a mind-boggling 77 minutes. Gingras: There’s too much newsAnyone else feel like Google’s Richard Gingras is everywhere these days? It’s likely you’re familiar with his views by now. Bottom line, Gingras says, “we have to rethink it all.” To him, print is nothing more than a “derivative mechanism” and the big problem in news is that “there’s too much of it.” Highlight: Skip to 7:45 to hear someone challenge Gingras on the idea that there are no gatekeepers anymore. Who gets to decide who a news organization is and is not? Audience member: “You do.” Whurley: You already have the answers“I don’t do slides, ever,” said Whurley, general manager of Chaotic Moon Labs. So instead, he opted to crowdsource his slides — asking journalists to shout out questions that he addressed later in the presentation. Highlight: Skip to 6:12 to hear Whurley sum up his experience coding and developing The Daily, and what it demonstrated to him about the fundamental problem in journalism: “What they did is fantastic for one reason, and the reason that we participated was one reason: Nobody wants to be the first.” |
Christopher Daly’s “Covering America” brings journalism and technology full circle Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:30 AM PDT Mark Twain's latter-day career as a public speaker had its origins in a hulking mass of metal and wood. The Paige Compositor, as it was known, set type 60 percent faster than the Linotype machines of the 1880s. Twain sunk a fortune into James Paige's invention. But the Linotype already had a head start in the newspaper industry, and the Paige units proved too temperamental for heavy use. Paige died broke. Twain declared bankruptcy — and hit the lecture circuit. As the story of the Paige Compositor suggests, the evolution of journalism is closely intertwined with technological change. Improvements in printing presses gave rise in the 1830s to the penny press, bringing a mass audience to newspapers. The telegraph and the photograph revolutionized the news business, and radio and television turned it upside-down. Of course, it scarcely needs to be said that technology is now transforming the practice and even the meaning of journalism.
The strength of Covering America is Daly's emphasis on story. In a genre awash in mind-numbing recitations of names and dates, Daly has pared matters down to their essentials and given his characters room to breathe. (The book comprises 461 pages, not counting footnotes.) The result is ample space for people who deserve it. To name just a few, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Dorothy Thompson, Edward R. Murrow and Ernie Pyle are all discussed at some length. But it is Daly's attention to larger forces, including technology, that makes Covering America stand out. He writes about matters I had never heard of before. Learning about the role of urine in Colonial-era printing shops left me gobsmacked. Trust me on this: Life as a printer's apprentice in the 18th century was nasty, brutish, and malodorous. More substantively, I was fascinated with some statistics Daly offers on the cost of launching a newspaper. In 1835, he writes, James Gordon Bennett started the New York Herald with $500. By 1851, the cost of entering the newspaper market had risen so much that Henry Raymond had to lay out $100,000 to start the New-York Daily Times. Several decades later, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Adolph Ochs all paid between about $350,000 and $500,000 to purchase and reinvigorate their papers. Those rising sums, though, were pocket change to what Gannett paid to start USA Today in the 1990s — about $200 million in annual losses over five years before the paper finally broke even. "In all likelihood," Daly writes, "the $1 billion figure will stand as the all-time highest barrier for entry into the news business, if for no reason other than that there will probably never be a launch of a daily newspaper on that scale again." Indeed, Daly notes that Ted Turner spent a fraction of that amount in launching CNN and steering it to profitability. But if technological change was responsible for underfunded visionaries such as Bennett being replaced by wealthy moguls such as Hearst and, finally, by publicly traded corporations such as Disney and Comcast, technology is now fueling a new era of small-scale media entrepreneurialism. At the national level, Josh Marshall, Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington, and others have demonstrated that it's possible to create alternatives to mainstream journalism. At the regional and local level, hundreds of websites are reporting on their communities — although, at this early stage, only a few are large enough to deploy paid journalists. Given that these projects share some DNA with the tiny newspapers that blinked on and off during the 18th and early 19th centuries, their proprietors might consider the journalistic philosophy articulated by Benjamin Franklin in his "Apology for Printers," published not long after he started the Pennsylvania Gazette. It’s well worth reading in full, but here’s a sample:
This is journalism as a community forum — an outlet for civic engagement where people can come together and discuss issues of importance to them. Daly rightly calls it "one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of American journalism, one of the bedrock statements of its philosophy." It's an old idea that's new again, and it's at the heart of independent local news projects such as the New Haven Independent, The Batavian, Voice of San Diego and others. In retrospect, we can see that two or three decades ago, when the media were at their richest and most powerful, they were also at their most profoundly lost. Daly describes a time of bottomless expense accounts, ever-rising profit margins, and a journalistic elite that was entirely out of touch with the public it supposedly served. Thus perhaps the most significant development described by Daly is that technology, after pushing journalism from small, cheap and interactive to massive, expensive, and top-down, is now helping us to return to something like Franklin's original vision. Maybe few will get rich in the new media world that's being created. But if journalists become less arrogant, more willing to listen, more connected to their communities, then we will have gained something of infinitely greater importance. 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. |
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