Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Four reasons why an open-source newsroom is harder than it looks: Lessons from Al Jazeera
- Mindy McAdams: Don’t just teach skills, train young journalists to be lifelong learners
- NPR’s Todd Mundt says public radio needs to innovate or die
| Four reasons why an open-source newsroom is harder than it looks: Lessons from Al Jazeera Posted: 17 Sep 2012 09:30 AM PDT
Editor's Note: Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis are academic researchers studying the intersection of journalists and technologists, or “hacks and hackers.” The latest part of their work included Usher’s two-week visit to Doha, Qatar, in June to study how this phenomenon is playing out at Al Jazeera English. DOHA, Qatar — Open-source software might at first seem easy for a news organization to get behind: It's owned by no one, improved by everyone, and costs nothing to acquire. At Al Jazeera, the network’s top voices have advocated open-source for years. Al Jazeera English was an early partner of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, now OpenNews. The Drupal-powered live blogs at AJE captured more traffic during the Egyptian uprisings, at times, than the main website. And within the past year, Al Jazeera launched the Drupal-based Al Jazeera Balkans site and plans to use Drupal for the forthcoming Al Jazeera Turkey site. But after visiting the AJE newsroom this summer, it became apparent the much-heralded open-source movement was a lot more complicated, despite Al Jazeera's advances. The internal debate at Al Jazeera mirrors what is often a larger conversation about the merits between proprietary and open-source technology. Using Al Jazeera as a case study, we can draw some larger lessons about the challenges facing open-source in the newsroom. 1. Open-source may not be widely understood by the newsroomAs Moeed Ahmad, head of new media for the network, explained to me, open-source is often equated with "hackable" — and not in the good way. At Al Jazeera, hacking is a real concern: Syria launches regular, if not daily, server attacks on Al Jazeera servers, and there are dozens of unfriendly countries and groups that would love to exploit Al Jazeera's content. Still, as Ahmad noted, "Open-source is quite remarkable…really, if you talk to other people, Windows is not so secure." Ahmad and others pointed to the fact that Windows has a long history of hacker malfeasance. Open-source, however, seemed safer in his view because thousands of eyes are patrolling not just for bad code but security holes. Open-source, he argued, might be more secure. Proponents of open-source in the newsroom also face another misunderstanding: that open-source equals free labor and require zero upkeep. This could lead to a lack of dollars to invest in maintenance and support. Dick Olsson, the lead (and only) Drupal developer for Al Jazeera English, kept reminding me of the Richard Stallman maxim: "Free as in speech, not as in beer." There may be no cost to acquire open-source software, but someone has to install and maintain it. The question, then, becomes whether newsrooms are going to shoulder the necessary operations costs to go open-source, and whether an open-source content-management system offers enough benefits to outweigh running a proprietary system. As Ahmad and Olsson acknowledged, the costs for both may actually be the same, but the benefits of access to a wider open-source community made them advocates for the newsroom. Despite the supporters at Al Jazeera English, there were no signs the entire site would move to open-source any time soon. 2. Proprietary systems are well-entrenched in newsroomsAt Al Jazeera English, in-house developers have built a proprietary CMS and tinkered with it for the better part of a decade. These are dedicated developers who know every bug in the system. (Talk about job security.) If it ain't broke, they argue, don't fix it. And if it is broke, these guys (at Al Jazeera, it's almost all dudes) know how to fix it. When Nikki spoke to some of them, they resisted the idea of running an open-source CMS in the newsroom. To them, open-source means leaving "development up to a community who decides when they want to build things for you," explained one senior developer who did not want to be named to protect his job. Inside Al Jazeera, there was a team of eight or so developers who had built the CMS from scratch. These developers were attached to their product and convinced that what they had was more finely attuned to the needs of the newsroom. A CMS change, for better or worse, is a big change for the newsroom, and those who might lead the technical support for switching the entire system had little interest in doing so. 3. Relying on the open-source community for development may not be practicalThere are only a few projects running on open-source platforms at Al Jazeera: two Arabic-language projects, Sharek (a citizen sharing site) and Mubasher (a C-SPAN for the Arab world); the live blogs run by Al Jazeera English; an Arab history project; and the Creative Commons news site. Is there enough support for these sites to scale up to something big? As Olsson explained to me, it's going to take a lot for Al Jazeera English, for example, to run solely on Drupal. "For an organization, the open-source community is not sufficient to rely on for support for the long-term return on investment," he said. "The day-to-day needs are not covered by the community, so more open-source developers are needed in-house for products. In some cases, we use a third-party platform or host. Al Jazeera has to spend money because it doesn't have enough people in house with LAMP stack competence." In his view, there simply weren't enough resources for Al Jazeera to try to work with open-source full-time. Going outside Al Jazeera would require money, but he'd fall back into the trap of managers who didn't understand that they had to pay for support because open-source support is not free. The software developer quoted above complained to me there weren't enough resources from the open-source community specifically geared toward news. "It's unpredictable. Those libraries are out there but are for e-commerce, not news." During this part of our conversation, some of the Windows-focused software developers asked me to hunt around for examples of open-source CMS elsewhere — that is, a newsroom whose entire content-management system is open-source. We did but didn’t find very many. The website theopensourcenewspaper.org features Savannah Now, the New York Observer, The Economist, Mother Jones, Fast Company, Slate France, and France 24 (as well as some Scandinavian news organizations we don't recognize). Notably, France 24's website has been open-source almost since its inception in 2006 — and it's a part of the newsroom’s technology-oriented philosophy. Other examples from mainstream media of open-source include the use of WordPress for blog software at The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and elsewhere, as well as smaller Tribune Co. properties, including some of the Tribune's local sites. It remains an open question whether there are indeed enough resources for developers to reliably build on existing open-source news platforms. The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews challenge has created buzz about open-source and news, but are there really enough casual developers who care to engage with open-source journalism development? 4. There might simply not be the talent — or the cultureAhmad was sad to report he had trouble persuading anyone at DrupalCon to take advantage of the tax-free palm-tree life in Doha. In the Middle East, especially, the culture of open-source has been shunned in favor of proprietary systems, according to Ahmad, Olsson, and others. In Jordan and Tunisia, the open-source friendly Hacks/Hackers even goes by another name, Media Innovation Initiative, in part because open-source and hacking carry such negative connotations. In Doha and other parts of the Middle East, it might be impossible to find open-source programmers to work for news organizations. This leads me to think about the backchannel gossip that newsrooms, aside from the big fancy ones, can't find enough programmer-journalists — let alone get people into their newsrooms to work on open-source. Olsson wasn't drawn to Al Jazeera because it was a news site: "I came here for the Drupal challenge," he told me. One wonders if there are enough talented open-source developers who want to work for newsrooms even outside the context of the Middle East. At Al Jazeera, there were a lot of good arguments from people about why open-source would be beneficial to their newsroom — from security to prototyping to the value of the open-source community. We know these arguments. But it's important to step back and think about why open-source might be harder than the hype might suggest. Photo of a busted computer in the desert by Jasson Steffan used under a Creative Commons license |
| Mindy McAdams: Don’t just teach skills, train young journalists to be lifelong learners Posted: 17 Sep 2012 08:45 AM PDT Editor’s Note: It’s the start of the school year, which means students are returning to journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world? We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Over the coming days, we’ll be sharing their thoughts with you. Here Mindy McAdams, journalism professor at the University of Florida, says that teaching code isn’t enough — you must teach students why code is worth struggling with.
My next thought: “There’s something wrong with that idea.” I’ve been teaching journalism students how to make things that work online for more than 10 years, so I’ve spent some time figuring out ways to introduce them to industry best practices for programming, animation, and web design. Most journalism students are not very eager to learn those things. And why not? Most of them chose journalism because they like to write. Anything that involves HTML, CSS, code, or programming makes many of them almost shut down, shrink away, move toward the door. We have all kinds of challenges in journalism education, but this one is front and center, right now. It’s not just students’ avoidance of things perceived to be somehow math-related. It’s also:
This applies to storytelling as much as to technology. Any time a student says “You didn’t tell us we had to do that” in a conversation about a poor grade on a story, you’re hearing evidence of this challenge. The more students insist on explicit instructions, the further they are from independence. Journalism doesn’t come with an instruction manualThe problem with my (or any teacher’s) spending 20 or 30 hours learning a set of tasks for doing, say, data journalism, and then distilling what I’ve learned into two or three hours of teaching, is this: My students still don’t know how to do what I did. Even if they get the same end result I got, they don’t know how to start from zero and get there. And for the next task, it’s the same. I’ve been thinking about how to get the students to start at zero and figure out how to do something. The first thing they’ll need is an example. There are two types of good example:
Journalism students often have very little experience with the kinds of end products they will be producing, so their instructors need to select, show, and discuss specific suitable examples of both types. Later, students should be able to search and find good examples on their own. How will they learn how to deconstruct the simpler examples, take them apart and see what all the pieces do? In the case of programming or code, they need a set of definitions to help them recognize what the pieces are (variable names, if-thens, while loops) and how they are used. They need to understand the building blocks. Students need similar definitions for reporting: What is a source? How are sources found? What roles do sources play? If students continually turn in lackluster quotes, maybe they haven’t grasped the purpose of sources. If they can’t deconstruct simple code, maybe they don’t understand the syntax of a loop. The unbearable necessity of gradingThe ability to learn on your own and teach yourself new skills depends on your willingness to play, experiment, make mistakes, and stick with things that take much longer than you had expected. But the reality of American education in 2012 is that if the teacher is not going to grade an assignment, the student will not do it. Unless, of course, they must do it under the teacher’s nose, during class. Some tasks can be adapted for in-class completion, but many cannot. I see a frustrating incompatibility between students performing repeated iterations of a task (play and experimentation) and teachers assigning a final grade to a finished product, which must be completed by a deadline. Deadlines are real in journalism work, but actual learning doesn’t always conform to a deadline. Something I’m experimenting with this semester is refusing to give a grade (or ultimately giving zero points) for work that’s less than good. In other words, if A is “excellent” and B is “good,” then anything less than a B must be done over, or it earns a zero. So we still have deadlines, but in the world of journalism work, we can’t publish or broadcast or upload C work. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to get good at doing journalism. Nobody brings this home like Ira Glass, talking about storytelling in the third of four videos on YouTube (here are the first, second and fourth videos too). We get into doing creative work, he says, “because we have good taste.” For a long time, while you are still learning: “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.” Glass continues: “A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people, at that point, they quit.” One of the age-old frustrations for people who teach Reporting 101 classes is that so many students do not want to be that kind of journalist — they don’t want to cover local crime, court cases, school board meetings, city budgets. (And how many jobs like that are there today?) The students didn’t choose journalism because they wanted to be a reporter; they chose it because they like to write. To hang in there — to produce data-driven journalism, or design a mobile app, or write a long-form profile story — students need to have both good taste and a desire to master something. What if they lack one of those? What if they lack both? At the root of all this talk about programming, apps, and so on, is the idea of story. But have our students seen the story in the data, in the graphic, in the app? I was afraid when I started reading Miranda Mulligan’s article here at Nieman Lab that she had written what I wanted to write. She put an emphasis on learning code in j-school. I agree with everything she said. But before we can teach journalism students about code, we have to bring them to a place where they can appreciate what journalists use it for. |
| NPR’s Todd Mundt says public radio needs to innovate or die Posted: 17 Sep 2012 07:41 AM PDT
NPR has become a poster child for legacy news organizations’ ability to reinvent themselves for the digital age: Its website and mobile apps are used by millions of people, NPR Music is a runaway hit, office hack days are a model for other newsrooms, and the network’s news apps team is attracting top talent. And then there are individual NPR stations, so many of which have no reputation for innovation. As consumers find more ways to get NPR in their ears, they have fewer reasons to tune in to their local broadcaster. “I think there’s great opportunity, but what I’m afraid of is that many stations won’t embrace the opportunity and they will have the emperor-has-no-clothes moment,” said Todd Mundt, editorial director of NPR’s Digital Services division in Boston. “They will be revealed as rather pedestrian repeaters of national content.” Mundt — long an innovator in both the FM and digital spaces — joined NPR in April after working at a number of stations. His job now is to dole out NPR’s resources and know-how to stations in need of digital training and strategy. (And that’s whether they like it or not: NPR caused much consternation when the Digital Services fee became mandatory for all stations last year.) I caught up with Mundt last week at the end of the Public Radio Program Directors conference in Las Vegas, where he had just spent few days thinking meta about his industry. Here’s a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation. Andrew Phelps: Let’s start with your bio. Todd Mundt: I listened obsessively to public radio when I was a teenager, and there was just something about the sound and the quality of the voice of public radio that really drew me in. I knew that that was the kind of radio I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go into radio right away and did it, from ninth grade on. And since that period of time, from college to now up to this last April, it was a standard kind of public radio career of being on the radio. You know, I did Morning Edition for 20 years, I hosted a talk show for a while, and I kind of moved also in a management track, but always kept an on-air piece. The management track was a way for me to express new ideas that I had or even new interests that I had, but the interests were a lot around digital. I thought it was very exciting that digital was changing the medium. And it became apparent I think to all of us very quickly that that was happening even though we weren’t exactly sure the ways in which it was happening or going to happen. Kinsey Wilson told me once that he wasn’t native to digital originally, obviously, either. There’s a whole bunch of us in my generation and older who had to learn this as we went along. And I think a number of us stumbled into it first as an interest and then tried to build the skill around it. Which is a real effort. Phelps: Why was your experience going the member-station route, to different markets, important? Mundt: To me, it’s going to be very interesting how the landscape of public radio evolves over the next few years, because central in my mind is this question about the position of the member stations going forward. It’s not a question of whether they will exist or not in the future — it is a question, in my mind, as to how many will exist and what part they will play in the public radio ecosystem and the radio ecosystem more largely.
I don’t have the answers to those questions now, so what I’m trying to do is trying to work in such a way that I or people at NPR are positioned at least to care about local stations. Some of it is what my team does in the digital news training, but some of it is us working with NPR to take some of their resources and make them more available to stations. I think we have to make them as strong as possible and bring as many stations into the loop in terms of generating more content for the web. For a long time, we’ve thought that would mostly be text content. Now of course, with mobile, we’re trying to be more aware of the ability to leverage the core competencies to produce really great audio — and not just audio that was on the air, but try to think of new and smart ways to generate more kinds of audio that would be interesting to people with a mobile device. You know — on a larger view, carry the station brand forward as the generator of that great content and help the station preserve its place going forward. So I feel like what I’m doing now is trying to make sure they’re all as strong as possible. Phelps: Arguably the monopoly of the radio tower is what has kept local public radio alive and well, more so than a lot of other media. The car — I wonder how big a deal you think the IP radio thing is and, honestly, why a user shouldn’t just go directly to NPR? Why bother with a station when I have access to the world at my fingertips? Mundt: This first part is hard for me because it’s colored by my own practices. I don’t own a radio anymore, and I haven’t for a long time, and I don’t have a car anymore now that I live in Boston, so I don’t even have a radio in the car. And so all of my listening is online, just naturally. Frankly, for many public radio stations, I don’t know what the difference would be between listening to the public radio station and turning on the NPR app and listening to the Infinite Player. Or even just using the NPR app or a local station app and zooming to another local station. I mean, at this conference I’ve been at, even this morning, there are people up there saying local is really important to people. Local news is important and local connection and weather and traffic, and I guess I get that in a way — and again it’s probably colored by how I use radio and the kinds of information I seek — but for me to actually go to a local station there has to be something there that’s important that I think I want to hear. Otherwise I don’t see the point of it.
I don’t believe in having a gloom-and-doom future for radio stations, because I think there’s great opportunity. But what I’m afraid of is that many stations won’t embrace the opportunity and they will have the emperor-has-no-clothes moment. They will be revealed as rather pedestrian repeaters of national content. And just because NPR isn’t in the business of delivering Morning Edition live now doesn’t means that the bypass issue isn’t real, or that stations can’t slowly become irrelevant. It’s concerning to me where this goes, especially as mobile listening increases. Terrestrial radio listening is still very powerful, but I think there’s a belief in this industry that the phone makers are gonna give us an FM chip in our phones — which is ridiculous. It’s utterly ridiculous. I mean, you look at the technology inside the phone — where are you gonna put that stupid little chip, and why? We have to understand that we have to embrace the digital space, but we also have to be prepared that the days of some kind of panacea making it possible for us to continue to operate as we have, it’s just gone. And again it’s not bad — because a lot of stations do good work — but I feel like a lot are kind of just moping along, you know, in 1995. Phelps: So say you make this case to stations and a few of them hear you and they say, “You know what, we are worried about the disruption coming. We hear you, Todd.” What do you advise a smaller station — maybe not the one-person station, but not the fifty-person station — what do you tell them? What should they be doing? Mundt: To the station, I would say — and this is not easy, so just saying it, it sounds glib — but I think that there are people inside almost every station who are very original and very thoughtful audio creators. And so stations are struggling on the web with websites and trying to generate enough news, and that is a struggle, it's probably important in some way. But there are great audio people inside the station. And I feel that, you know, sometimes we force them into creating the five-minute pieces for radio and those pieces get repurposed on the web, but they don't — you know, that's not what the web is really about. It's trying to come up with new things.
And I think we have to find a way to open it up to people on staff to do new and interesting things. And it's not about, you know, necessarily producing everything at a Radiolab kind of quality, where they're spending 50 hours trying to come up with a half-hour of online material and you can't use them on air at all. When you look at Andy Bowers, you know, he goes to Slate and, as you guys have reported at Nieman, sometimes the most compelling stuff is just very simply produced podcasts. I think sometimes we don't understand that we can be very creative in very simple ways. And it's looking at your staff and saying, you know, who is potentially creative, what might they do, it might be a highly produced thing, or it might be — you know, there's ways that you can differentiate yourself and produce something that attracts attention. It doesn’t have to be at the level of Here's The Thing or it doesn't have to be at the level of 99% Invisible — but these are really interesting shows, some of them tied to stations, some not, that have created a really great brand. And not every small station can generate that, but I think a number of them can. You know, just something that attracts some local interest and attracts a following, I think that's a really good thing. And so stations have to figure out where those talents lie in their building and which producers — a lot of them are young producers who can do this, but there have been producers who have been there 20 or 30 years who discovered they wanted to do longer-form pieces than radio will allow, and maybe there's a chance you can fit that in your time schedule. Then I want to say one thing about the industry as a whole. If the industry won't consider consolidation, then I guess it will have to have it forced upon it by some major event — whether it be the fiscal situation or rethinking of support for public media by the government or some other leg of the stool that disappears. And again, certain consolidations, you know, may not make sense. But there are ones that do. Commercial radio consolidated just by going in and throwing everyone out the door, goodbye. And it's all done. Public radio could consolidate in such a way that the operations that keep public radio functioning, that can be replicated across multiple stations and can be consolidated without much effort — can happen. And will make sense, and will save a lot of money. And then that money can go into, you know, “How about that larger newsroom? How about a producer or two who are just allowed to roam and come up with really amazing things?” There has to be a certain scale at stations before you see creativity really begin to grow. Because there have to be enough people who aren't completely tired out by just the general production of radio every day to come up with ideas. I think that's some reason why WNYC — 200 or so people there, everybody is busy, but so many people have just a little time every day to think of a really great idea and do something on it. We have to be able to do that in public radio, and if all the stations are really small, and they all kind of compete against each other in markets, and they counter-program each other, or even sometimes program the same thing at each other, their management structures are duplicated from station to station — that's a lot of money. You know, in a $1 billion public radio economy, how much goes to the back end and how much goes to the front end? I think that's telling. Phelps: I'm wondering what you heard at the conference, given what we've been talking about. Mundt: You know, these conferences have turned very positive and people are in a good mood, but I don't know that we've solved any of the issues. The ones that are out there, about finding the right kind of talent for our organization or even really thinking how well we're going to position ourselves. This morning, one of the speakers said — I think it was probably Mark Ramsey, who does so much work with radio, public and otherwise — that, you know, we've come to the point now where it's almost like a checklist again, now that we've gotten over our fears. Like, well, you have the Facebook, and you have the Twitter, and if you post five times on the Facebook, you're all right, and if you post 10 times a day on the Twitter and some of them are real and some of them are auto tweets. You know, it's all become a formula. It's about engagement, and so we're saying a bunch of words, I don't think we're actually doing a lot of those things. I think the struggle of these conferences is to try to find ways to give new ideas to people. And we are moving forward every year. |
After spending about five hours learning 
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