Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Knight announces a data-centric class of News Challenge winners
- The newsonomics of all-access delight
- What happens when news organizations move from “beats” to “obsessions”?
| Knight announces a data-centric class of News Challenge winners Posted: 20 Sep 2012 07:30 AM PDT
This shift to tools has been gradual — this year’s winners look quite different from, say, the first year’s winners, which were more likely to include community journalism projects themselves. I think it’s a smart move. There’s a new infrastructure of digital tools slowly being built that, collectively, will make journalism and journalism-like work easier to do. Many of those ideas come from people in news organizations, but their potential value spreads far beyond one outlet’s boundaries — perhaps making it harder for that outlet to invest the time and money in building and maintaining it. So it makes sense for an outside force to deal with that commons-based issue. (Obligatory disclosure: Knight has also been a funder of the Nieman Journalism Lab.) The winners will be presented at ONA on Saturday. (As an aside, the Nieman Lab staff will be at ONA this afternoon too, once our flight from Boston lands. We love to meet our readers, so come say hello.) Here are the winners, with Knight’s writeup: LocalDataAward: $300,000
New contributor tools for OpenStreetMapAward: $575,000
Census.IRE.orgAward: $450,000
Pop Up ArchiveAward: $300,000
Open ElectionsAward: $200,000
Safecast Radiation & Air QualityAward: $400,000
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| The newsonomics of all-access delight Posted: 20 Sep 2012 07:00 AM PDT
Remember the first time you got cross-platform delight? For me, it was when I started a second look at “Lost in Translation” on my TV, happened to click on my Netflix app while working out the next day, and was astounded to see the film paused precisely and ready to start where I’d left off, at the literal single touch of a finger. Pandora is a similar wonder: Create an Adele/Tom Waits station on the web and it’s instantly available on the iPhone. Start with Comcast’s Xfinity app on the iPad and, with a touch, you can record tonight’s baseball game or launch a series recording of “Homeland.” Such ease is the payoff for true all-access subscriptions: Pay us once, and we’ll really get you our content whenever and wherever you want it. Until recently, that seemed distant, always a bit unreachable. Now, it’s becoming, fitfully, both reality and consumer expectation. But our news reading is much more disjointed. Read a story on a smartphone and it may be grayed out there when you come back, but it won’t be grayed out on the tablet or web. Save a story on one device, and you won’t find it saved on another. Start a 10-page opus on the phone, and you’ll have to reopen on the web. In truth, news — and its steady, unending stream — is harder to tame than finite movies, songs, and TV programs. Yet consumer appetite — and now that pesky expectation — has been whetted by those near-miraculous entertainment plays. Tell readers that all-access is the new name of their subscription, as many hundreds of publishers are doing, and they’ll soon think it should be as smooth as their entertainment device switching. Get it right, if you are a news publisher, and you’ll reap the dividends. It becomes a new reason to be more than an anonymous visitor to a site, to at least register. Of course, registration seems so 1999; it’s paying digital circulation, or all-access customers, that are today’s game. You’re also on the road to proving out what membership might mean. That’s hugely important as bigger dailies, from the Boston Globe and the L.A. Times to New London’s Day, fill in this hazy notion of membership as a key strategy of the next three years. Connecting these dots is no longer something to put on a wish list in a month of multiple iPhone and Kindle Fire releases. If you take a look at the recently released Ipsos-created, Google-commissioned research on multi-screen usage, we see that consumers are mixing and matching their own cross-platform experiences quite rapidly. Consider a few of the datapoints in that work, well worth sharing and brainstorming around within news companies:
Then, it gets even more intriguing, as the study starts to put numbers on new behaviors we see in ourselves and our customers.
So, long story short, the need to rationalize cross-platform usage should now be an imperative for news companies. Luckily, we have some good news. Leading publishers are indeed starting to knit together this cross-platform, semi-personalized experience. As has been the case as mobile news reading took off, it’s the top national/global publishers who are leading the way. And as has often been the case, most regional and local players are moving less quickly, and that chasm between national/global and local offerings looks like it will continue to grow. For all those publishers, it’s well worth thinking — now — how to really fulfill this promise of one price/all-access across smartphones, tablets, web (with some print), in ways that will delight customers, keep them paying, and allow for price increases to work. So where will we see this first advances in the news world. Let’s quickly explore seven of them, as we look at the newsonomics of all-access delight:
That’s seven to begin with. What would you add to the list? There’s a lot more on the drawing boards — we’ll all hear much more about day-pathing, active personalization, passive personalization, and “making platforms responsive to the need state” — as publishers understand both unique capacities of these devices and how we’re using them. For us, as mere pre-Singularity humans, we’ve already begun to offload our memories. Such cross-platform utilities both extend our intellectual power and give us a few fewer things to think about. For news companies, all of these functionalities have great potential to act as glue between above-average news brands and their customers. Will they be a big hit? Hard to say. As Marc Frons points out, Instapaper and Read It Later, among other cross-title save-and-read services, have their loyal customers. But only a handful of premium, mostly-daily-read products, like national/global news companies, may be able to sustain brand-identified on-site saving. That becomes more important to a site like the Times, which has been moving forward with lots of curating/sharing/creating tools. As cross-platform matches up with these utilities, the site becomes stickier. That glue may keep them on a particular news site — or, even more interestingly, may be extendable. “How do we make it [these kinds of cross-platform utilities] accessible through those other apps too?” Bowen asks. So, in a distributed world — think reading The New York Times on Flipboard or the Journal on Pulse — of multi-device reading, it may be possible that consumers will see multiple benefits without having to be confined within a walled garden. As Patrick Cooper, an NPR senior product manager and alum of CNN, The Washington Post, and USA Today, puts the changes in perspective, we can see this next world of all-access delight unfolding — and causing more headaches for publishers unprepared: “Everyone finally must cede control to the user. Imagine if Netflix or Spotify didn’t recognize you or give you your queue or materials on different platforms. They’d fail on day one. “The news industry has to develop to meet that standard. CRM becomes an investment every major news organization needs to make. These are massive changes for how news organizations spend their money, even purely digital ones. Major infrastructure and back-end data management become one more thing to compete with salaries, reporting costs, and front-end news activities, like news apps. User management becomes far more real than in the simple login/member-or-not-a-member systems we all have now.” |
| What happens when news organizations move from “beats” to “obsessions”? Posted: 20 Sep 2012 06:30 AM PDT
I’ll be honest: There aren’t a lot of “future of news” meta-posts these days that get me to stop the other things I’m doing and read them, closely, from beginning to end. One recent exception, though, was this very smart analysis of the journalistic beat structure (and how to move beyond it) penned by Gideon Lichfield, a global news editor at the new business startup from The Atlantic, Quartz. I noticed Lichfield’s essay because it speaks to some of the questions Clay Shirky, Emily Bell, and I are wrestling with as we finish up our report on what we’re calling “post-industrial journalism.” I also noticed it because it is just really insightful, and very well done. In the essay, entitled “On Elephants, Obsessions, and Wicked Problems,” Lichfield argues that the journalistic “beat” structure, that mainstay of modern journalism, is an anachronism that needs to be rethought:
Lichfield argues that, in order to truly understand the world, we need to replace “beats” with “obsessions”: “the patterns, trends, and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in…as the world changes, so will they.” Beats existed for technological reasons, Lichfield argues, as well as economic ones. The technology and economics of news have changed, so it stands to reason that the patterned ways journalists collect and verify information would change as well. The thing is, though, that beats exist for sociological reasons as well as economic and technological ones. There’s something to the structure of the modern organizational form that makes the beat structure seem both efficient and natural — but there’s also something about the way journalists have thought about their roles in society that makes the beat structure appealing to the normative stories journalists tell about what they do. If other organizations were to eventually follow Quartz’s lead, it would be a fundamental sea change in the structure and purpose of modern journalism. Lichfield correctly notes that one of the reasons beats have emerged in modern journalism is that institutions tend to produce specialization, and that therefore reportorial specialization is needed to understand them. Another reason why journalism has embraced the beat structure, though, goes by the name institutional homophily. This is just a fancy way of saying that organizations charged with interacting with large bureaucracies often become bureaucracies themselves, because it makes the interaction easier. In other words, because so much of journalism has been dedicated to covering the activities of bureaucracies and bureaucrats, it made organizational sense for news companies to be bureaucratic as well. Why? Because the standardized, routine production of information requires a standardized, routine-driven organization to process, analyze, and monitor that information. If the FCC holds regular public hearings, produces reports at regular intervals, and produces them in a routined, bureaucratic way, it stands to reason that a reporter operating in a routined, bureaucratic structure is the best person to keep an eye on that other bureaucracy. Or at least, that’s one form of the argument. Of course, one problem with this argument is that not all public issues — what causes them, what the conflicting perspectives on them are, how they might be best resolved — can be reduced to the actions of institutions. As Lichfield correctly notes, so-called “wicked problems” “often cut across beat boundaries, taking in politics, economics, technology, and other issues.” You can’t understand climate change, or help point toward solutions to climate change, just by covering the EPA. Another aspect of the beat structure has less to do with institutional homophily than it does with the way that journalists understand how what they do adds value to the democratic public sphere. This is a type of “value added” that often gets overlooked in discussions about the future of news, where value is often seen in a strictly economic sense. But one of the things that makes journalists “professionals” is their belief that what they do has a public value that can’t be measured solely in terms of dollars. Its’ the idea, common in many lines of work, of a higher calling. As Jay Rosen (and before him, my old mentor James Carey) have argued, this “higher calling” usually consisted in the journalistic belief that news organizations monitored centers of power in order to keep corruption at bay and inform the public about the doings of government (and occasionally businesses and civil society organizations). This idea of “keeping an eye on those in power” is usually what we’re talking about when we mention things like “the iron core of news” or “accountability journalism.” This belief had a corollary: the argument that because the public couldn’t keep an eye on government all the time (except during elections, and only then for a minute), the press had to stand “as a substitute” for the public, informing that public about what they couldn’t see but occasionally acting in the public’s stead. In this case, journalism (as a profession) convinced itself that what was largely an sociological, technological, and economic requirement — the beat system — was also a great democratic service. I think the idea of the beat structure as a democratic force is what David Simon is getting at in this excellent piece on “why beat reporters matter.”
Here the thing: the argument for moving from beats to obsessions implies, at its root, that this David Simon notion of public accountability is now in crisis. Instead of focusing on beats, “we’ll try to fit the framework to the audience,” Lichfield writes. “We want to reach a global, cosmopolitan crowd, people who see themselves as living ‘in the world.’ [Our audience is] keenly aware of how distant events influence one another; their lives and careers are subject to constant disruption from changes in technology and the global economy.” In other words, Quartz is arguing that a well-educated audience is capable of understanding the world as a whole and acting upon that knowledge. What this audience needs is not the “monitoring of beats” but help in “making sense of the world.” Public accountability comes not from staking out a beat, but from helping members of the public understand how complex things fit together. Because they understand how the world works, citizens will be able to act democratically in new ways. And when the important issues in the world change, than the focus of coverage will likewise shift. The wicked problems journalism tries to understand, in short, go far beyond their institutional containers. We no longer need a monitorial press in the same way we did before. There are new accountability mechanisms and new forms of civic action, and in this new world, journalism has a new and different role. Or so goes the theory. Let’s just end on a cautious note. The bureaucracies of government and business continue to wield tremendous power. Just because the public sphere is networked and newspapers are in financial crisis doesn’t mean that slow, grinding institutions no longer matter. What Quartz is arguing, in effect, is that democratic accountability can come from new directions, ones that aren’t tied to the accountability structure implied by the beat system. It is, in short, a gamble. A gamble that the public can rise to the occasion, figure things out, and act upon that knowledge. In today’s world of collapsing journalistic business models, new social movements, and new technologies for democratic accountability, it may be a gamble worth taking. At the least, it may be the only option left. Photo by Roger H. Goun used under a Creative Commons license. |
Today at the Online News Association’s annual conference in San Francisco, the Knight Foundation will present its newest class of Knight News Challenge winners. This cycle — the 
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