Sabtu, 04 Agustus 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The 2012 Summer Olympics are turning into a giant coming-out party for the animated GIF

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 11:18 AM PDT

Did you hear about the Olympic fencer who refused to leave the piste after losing to a computer glitch? I didn’t watch it on television or on NBC’s web livestream, since I don’t have cable. But I did watch the next best thing — maybe the better thing: BuzzFeed’s strangely compelling and haunting recap, presented in videos, still images, and animated GIFs.

GIFs — the low-quality animated images that seem never to go out of style — have emerged as a new form of storytelling during the 2012 Olympics. And what better place to push the form than BuzzFeed? Deputy sports editor Kevin Lincoln has created an impressive oevure of GIF stories for the London Games, including one for that Korean fencer, Shin A Lam:

That story was a team effort between my editor, Jack Moore, and me. I noticed what was happening after the South Korean coach started protesting the end of the match, and we were discussing it, and rather than only pulling video of the controversial moments — which we also did — Jack thought it would be a good idea to lay out the narrative, since it was so interesting and bizarre. From there, we both pulled video and made GIFs and grabbed the best images from the wire and used all that to tell the story as best we could in a scrolling format.

Lincoln used an app called Snapz to capture the video from the live stream and then opened the resulting MOV file in Photoshop, isolating the frames he needed and saving the file as a GIF.

For each piece of the story, Lincoln selected the format best suited for the moment. To convey the devastation of a fencer alone on the piste, a still image worked best. For the chaos of the coach’s protest, the audience reaction, the drama of an athlete standing defiant, video was ideal.

“What GIFs do,” Lincoln said, “is sort of bridge the gap between an image and a video, which becomes incredibly useful in sports — you don’t have to wade through and listen to an entire highlight/video, but at the same time, you get the motion and action that makes sports sports.”

There is a lot of down time in sports that serves no useful purpose for the reader, Lincoln said: That story of the fencer played out over the course of an hour. GIFs allowed Lincoln to condense the story, “whereas in a video it would’ve been clumsy and hard to show,” he said.

Consider Lincoln’s roundup of the 25 most absurd moments of the opening ceremonies, which I would argue is more entertaining (and hilarious) than sitting through hours of the ceremony. For people who don’t have time, or don’t understand, or don’t have the attention span for the Olympics, GIFs are surprisingly information-dense containers.

Elspeth Reeve, a writer for The Atlantic Wire, is giving a BuzzFeed a run for its money with her explanatory GIF reporting. Last month, as Americans began paying attention to gymnastics again, Reeve wrote:

Gymnastics is one of those Olympics sports that lots of people watch every four years, meaning whatever happens during the competition is exciting and surprising but also confusing. Who are these women? Which one is the underdog? The veteran? Who is good at what thing? How can I tell when a flippy thing was good?

Reeve’s explainer was told in GIFs. GIFs in slow motion, GIFs in beautiful black and white, GIFs that zoom in on the action. What’s the better way to describe a “Pak salto to a stalder Shaposhnikova half” — words, or a moving image?

“I found they were perfect for explaining the sport to non-fans (my husband), because they isolate one trick. It makes it so much easier for the untrained eye to see how amazing each skill is,” Reeve told me.

SB Nation is doing it (Michael Phelps’ day in a single GIF). Business Insider is doing it (Ann Romney’s horse tap dancing). Even The New York Times is doing it, not for the Olympics but for its positively lovely Still Life series.

The GIF, invented by CompuServe in 1987, has many advantages over video: It requires no Flash and works in any browser on any device. It is silent, and therefore viewable in environments where sound is not available or desirable (i.e., the office). It’s incredibly shareable, as any visit to Tumblr will attest. And, perhaps most interestingly, a GIF is harder to take down than, say, a YouTube video, where one DMCA notice or the whim of the uploader can turn a video into a black void. (Try to watch this hilarious, adorable, RIDICULOUS video of U.S. gymnast’s Aly Raisman’s parents on YouTube, and you’ll get the dreaded “This video has been removed by the user.” Gawker was able to snag the video in a different format.)

“People aren’t quite sure about the rights involved with GIFs as a medium,” Lincoln said. Sports journalist Scott Lewis has reported the notoriously protective MLB is trying to crack down on GIFs within 48 hours of a game. (But “sports and animated GIFs were made for each other,” laments David Holmes of The Daily Dot.) Good luck with that.

Like any disruptive, creative medium, the GIF is easy to spread and difficult to control. The files are small; anyone can host them without relying on third-party servers. Most importantly, a GIF is a moving story compressed to its most essential form. If the 2008 presidential election was a coming-out party for Twitter, perhaps the 2012 Summer Olympics are the coming-out party for a 25-year-old file format.

Watch a creepy guy smell someone: The New York Times builds contextual multimedia into the flow of a story

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 07:54 AM PDT

Sharp-eyed readers of The New York Times may have noticed an unusual collection of links within Amy O’Leary’s Thursday story on sexual harassment in the world of online gaming. The links had a shaded blue background and tiny icons, and when clicked, up popped a video or an image — floating on top of the story but integrated within the flow of reading it.

The Times calls them “quick links,” and they’re intended to add a new way for Times reporters to add depth to online storytelling. And at a time when mainstream news organizations are criticized for barely linking at all, it’s an attempt to embrace a reading process that isn’t completely linear, one that allows for optional digressions. While the idea, and the technology, for the pop-up link is not new, quick links show the Times wants to openly experiment with its storytelling.

The Times has only used quick links about a half dozen times. Josh Williams, a multimedia producer with the Times who wrote the code for quick links, said the Times doesn’t have a standardized process for using the links yet; in the handful of stories where they’ve appeared, they’ve had to be handcoded each time. Describing it over email, he wrote:

As for how it works, it’s a little JavaScript I wrote that we inject into the page that finds specially formatted links that the reporter puts into the story. Those links have some encoded information describing what and where the primary source material is. I build the appropriate pop-up window with that information.

When I spoke with Williams, he said they use quick links in spots where they can add significant value: “What we’re really looking for are moments where we can add highly contextual multimedia that doesn’t distract you and doesn’t take you away from a story.”

The Times first developed quick links last November in conjunction with Amy Harmon’s story on a year in the life of Justin Canha, a young man with autism trying to prepare for a life of independence. The links were built out of need, Williams said, as Harmon wanted to find a way to make the story more impactful through using video. Rather than embedding a full six- or seven-minute video, the editors wanted to find a way to intersperse clips of him throughout the piece without breaking up the flow of the story. The solution was quick links.

Williams said he worked with people from the Times editorial design department on developing the links. The key, he said, was simplicity: making something that fits into the visual language of the Times but still looks unique. “I only had one real requirement in my head and that was it doesn’t interrupt the primary narrative,” Williams said.

The Times has also used quick links on stories about the creation of the Sept. 11 museum and the connection between opera and food. The Times employed a similar feature in the multimedia package on Derek Boogaard; the video feature would pause and point to related documents, maps and slideshows.

The sparing use of quick links is a conscious choice, but also a production issue, Williams said: They aren’t built into the Times CMS, which makes a broader deployment tricky. But Williams said the links are most effective when used sparingly and in the right stories.

In the case of Amy O’Leary’s look at sexual harassment against female online gamers, there are key parts of the story that can be referenced in video; watching a creepy guy smell a female gamer does something that reading about it can’t. O’Leary told me the links are effective at immersing readers in a part of a story. “It helps people to see directly some of the incidents that spurred this new stage of discussion about harassment in gaming,” she said.

O’Leary, who previously worked as multimedia producer and editor for NYTimes.com, said the quick links are a way of making online video and slideshows more versatile: “I think multimedia doesn’t always have to be this lavishly produced, multi-chapter documentary experience.” She said this allows writers to take a cue from blogging; find the right medium to express various parts of your writing. “Online, you’ve got all these different tools in your box — why not use each one to the most powerful effect when the story calls for it?”

This Week in Review: NBC’s tape-delay economics, and Twitter’s free-speech crossroads

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Twitter’s censorship snafu: The world’s been watching the Olympics this week, and the media world — especially in the U.S. — has been focused on NBC’s largely tape-delayed coverage of it. NBC’s tape-delay controversy (more on that later) spiraled into a much bigger issue when one of the most prominent critics of the network’s Olympics coverage, Guy Adams of Britain’s The Independent, had his account suspended from Twitter after he tweeted the business email address of an NBC executive.

The Independent published the email exchange Adams had with Twitter regarding the suspension, in which the company told him it had suspended his account for posting a “private email address.” Adams disagreed, saying the address was a corporate one available to anyone who knew how to use Google. Twitter restored Adams’ account the next day and published a blog post in which it confirmed that one of its employees had alerted NBC to Adams’ tweet, prompting NBC to file a formal complaint. Twitter apologized for doing that, saying it does not proactively monitor and flag content. BuzzFeed’s Matt Buchanan and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram broke down Twitter’s post, emphasizing Twitter’s aversion to monitoring content itself and being seen as a publisher.

Danny Sullivan noted at Search Engine Land that the email address Adams tweeted wasn’t that easy to find on Google, and wrote on Marketing Land about the several celebrities who have tweeted private information and gotten away with it. Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman tracked the evolution of Twitter’s position regarding censorship, and Adams himself said he thought this type of censorship had ended with the Internet age.

Several observers expressed alarm at what this incident said about what Twitter’s becoming. Forbes’ Mark Gibbs called Twitter a “corporate stooge,” and his Forbes colleague Jeff Bercovici said Twitter is struggling with the task of building scale and ramping up its revenue, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram cautioned that Twitter must prioritize its network’s information value over its economic value. The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor said this could be a defining moment for Twitter, and Mat Honan of Wired urged Twitter to take this as seriously as if it were over an international political issue, rather than sports.

At Culture Digitally, Tarleton Gillespie provided a useful framework for understanding this issue, presenting Twitter’s possible free-speech obligations on a scale from totally private business to public trust. On one end of the spectrum, tech blogger Dave Winer wrote that “All this time the press has been acting as if Twitter were a public utility, when it is nothing like that. It’s a service operated for free by a private company.” Likewise, Forbes’ Michael Humphrey said we need to remember we’re just users of Twitter, while NBC is a partner.

On the other end, j-prof Jeff Jarvis said Twitter is fundamentally a platform rather than a business, and called for Twitter to build a wall between business interests and user trust. Similarly, Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic warned Twitter, “You’re a real part of what it means to have free speech now, Twitter, and you better start acting like it.”

The Olympics and NBC’s news/entertainment tension: Now, to the issue that got Guy Adams so riled up at NBC in the first place: The network’s Olympics coverage, which tape-delayed most marquee events to maximize prime-time ratings, enraging some viewers (many of them on Twitter) who wanted to see events live. A Storify by Brandon Ballenger chronicled Twitter users’ many problems with NBC’s coverage, and The New York Times’ Richard Sandomir summarized the issue well: NBC’s online live streams, available only to cable subscribers, have been spotty, leading viewers to find alternative ways to access live coverage online.

Meanwhile, NBC’s TV broadcasts continue to pull in massive numbers of viewers, and GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham argued that live-streamers simply aren’t a large enough minority to put a dent in the existing TV model. Tech blogger Dave Winer said NBC looks at those users and sees not people, but hamsters and demographic categories, while TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler argued that it wouldn’t hurt NBC to air big events both live and in prime time.

NBC Sports’ Mark Lazarus defended his network’s strategy to Sports Business Daily by arguing that “It's not everyone's inalienable right to get whatever they want,” and pointing out that NBC’s strategy revolves around creating “story arcs.” From a sports perspective, The Classical’s Eric Freeman said such a drama-oriented philosophy is cheapening the Olympics, while Will Leitch of Sports on Earth argued that it’s easy for Twitter users to forget that they way they consume media is not the way most people do.

Others argued that NBC’s plan was a loser from a media economics angle. J-prof Jeff Jarvis wrote that the media lesson here is that “business models built on imprisonment, on making us do what you want us to do because you give us no choice, is no strategy for the future.” At The Guardian, Heidi Moore argued that tying online streaming video to the cable-TV model is forcing users “to give CPR to a corpse.”

There were also defenses of NBC: Jaime Weinman of Maclean’s said that in a fragmented media world, it makes sense to do more, rather than less, to maximize viewership in prime time, and Jarvis noted that NBC’s big ratings indicate that people still value high-quality TV channels. And The Atlantic’s Megan Garber argued that in straddling the line between entertainment and information, NBC is merely facing a sharper version of the tension increasingly faced by much of the entertainment media industry.

WikiLeaks’ hoax and online verification: As Julian Assange fights extradition to Sweden (which could lead to U.S. prosecution), his group, WikiLeaks, made headlines this week with convincing yet baffling hoax aimed at The New York Times and its former executive editor, Bill Keller. WikiLeaks posted a fake column purportedly by Keller on Sunday morning supporting WikiLeaks and alleging that financial companies had banned donations to WikiLeaks based on pressure from the U.S. government, then also created a fake Keller Twitter account and fake PayPal blog post to buttress its claims. In a Storify, Josh Stearns of Free Press detailed the detective work into the hoax and drew some lessons from it about information verification.

WikiLeaks acknowledged responsibility (along with “our great supporters”) for the hoax via Twitter, and afterward, Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon pointed out several of the giveaways. Keller was not amused, calling it a “childish prank” and “lame satire.” Many others lamented WikiLeaks’ thoughtlessness, including j-prof Jay Rosen, who wrote on Twitter that “Their ship was launched on the sea of verification. They just sunk it. For attention.” Fruzsina Eordogh of ReadWriteWeb said WikiLeaks’ critics missed the point — that the type of censorship directed at WikiLeaks could happen to the Times, too.

Poynter’s Craig Silverman said the WikiLeaks prank represents an emerging form of social hoax, while Glenn Greenwald of Salon argued that far from proving the unreliability of information online, the debunking process show how powerful the web’s collaborative verification process is. “It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly,” he wrote, “but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do.”

Fabrication catches up with Jonah Lehrer: New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer, who was caught re-using old material last month, was nailed for a much more serious offense this week when Tablet magazine’s Michael Moynihan wrote about his unsuccessful efforts to verify several of Lehrer’s quotes from Bob Dylan in his recent book Imagine. After the article was published, Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker, and his publisher pulled its copies of Imagine from the shelves and issued a note from Lehrer stating “The lies are over now.”

Andrew Beaujon and Steve Myers of Poynter did a thorough job of rounding up reactions to the episode in a series of posts, the highlights of which included former New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair’s comparison of Jonah Lehrer’s behavior with his own in articles at Salon and The Daily Beast, and incoming Times public editor Margaret Sullivan’s reflections on why talented writers resort to fabrication. The New York Observer also talked to Moynihan about story behind his exposé.

Salon’s Roxane Gay and The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates tied Lehrer’s rise and fall to our society’s glamorization of young male genius and counterintuitive oracles, respectively. Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard acknowledged both their arguments as legitimate, but said fabricators like Lehrer and Blair will always be anomalies. Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic connected the Lehrer episode to our insatiable demand for making meaning from almost everything, even if it doesn’t really fit.

At The New York Observer, Paul Tullis defended Lehrer, saying his transgression wasn’t as serious as it’s being made out to be and he’s less a journalist than a “purveyor of ideas” — and therefore far superior to the likes of Blair. Meanwhile, Poynter’s Craig Silverman identified warning signs of a possibly plagiarizing or fabricating writer.

Reading roundup: The Olympics may have dominated most people’s attention, but there were plenty of other things going on this week:

— The New York Times reported that Apple has been discussing an investment in Twitter, while The Wall Street Journal reported that those talks were a year old and involved integrating Twitter into Apple’s mobile operating system. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said investing in Twitter would make sense for Apple, but VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt, and Forbes’ Robert Hof all said it won’t happen.

— CNN president Jim Walton resigned last week, saying it was time for the network to get some new thinking. Salon’s Alex Pareene gave some ideas for a new direction, including experimenting with programming and going more international. The Guardian’s Michael Wolff looked at how CNN got to this point, and Jay Rosen explained why the status quo is so entrenched there.

— Soon after it was bought by Betaworks, the social-news site Digg relaunched this week. Greg Finn of Marketing Land declared it dead on arrival without user profiles or commenting, but GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said it looks good — though the hard part is building a community around it. BetaBeat’s Jessica Roy, meanwhile, reported on Betaworks’ big-picture plans for Digg.

— In the wake of the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s announcement of severe cutbacks in its staff and publication, NPR and the University of New Orleans announced a new nonprofit news organization in New Orleans this week called NewOrleansReporter.org. The Wall Street Journal has the details, and Poynter has a good roundup, including the press release.

Photo of Jonah Lehrer by PopTech, photo of South Korean archers by Korea.net, and Assange caricature by Robert Cadena used under a Creative Commons license.
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