Selasa, 25 September 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Quartz: The new biz-news site is a technological and structural innovator, with only a few hiccups

Posted: 24 Sep 2012 03:05 PM PDT

Quartz, the new business news site from Atlantic Media, launched today. It’s one of the most high-profile launches the online news business has seen this year, and that’s because of what it promised: a tablet-first mindset; a digitally appropriate structure; an app-like interface; a new-world business model.

I’m rooting for Quartz, both because I like to see news orgs innovate and succeed and because I know some of Quartz’s higher-ups. (Zach Seward, Quartz’ senior editor, was my first hire here at Nieman Lab back in 2008. And Kevin Delaney, the editor-in-chief, and I worked on the same college newspaper back in the 1990s.) I think it’s got a lot of promise — it feels of-the-moment and fresh in a way I haven’t seen in a new news site since The Verge debuted last year. But its ambitions also run up against some hard questions of how people consume news in 2012. Here’s my quick take on what Quartz offered on Day 1.

Giving first-class status to web-native modes of discovery

Quartz launched with a great dig at its competition, in Kevin’s letter to readers:

Quartz is intended to embody the era in which we're creating it, like Wired in the 1990s, Rolling Stone in the 1960s, Fortune in the 1930s, and The Economist in the 1840s.

Ouch! (Emphasis mine.) An interesting strategy: Take a field where gravitas and institutional standing rule and turn it on its head. But the important structural differences between Quartz and its peers aren’t about 2012 vs. 1843. They’re about 2012 vs. 1996 — roughly the time when the early traditional news organizations started going online.

When newspapers moved to the web, they took their design metaphors with them. News site front pages err on the side of information density — stuffing a slew of headlines into a relatively small space — with editorial judgment guiding a story’s placement, which was an indicator of its importance or merit. (The important stuff got the bigger headlines and placement “above the fold,” as it were.)

Quartz — born with around 20 years of web experience already behind us — doesn’t bring the same design ideas. So three views — Top, Latest, and Popular — are given first-class status in the left sidebar. News designers have long debated the merits of each view — think nytimes.com’s front page vs. Times Wire vs. the most emailed list. But giving those three options such prominence means Quartz is as close as any news site has come to becoming view-agnostic.

(It’s also part of Quartz’s general positioning as app-like without being an app. Giving equal weight to multiple views is a natural in, say, a word processor or a spreadsheet. Switching is only a quick trip to the View menu away.)

Beyond view agnosticism, Quartz feels 2012-born in other ways. Linking out also gets first-class status; aggregated posts that point readers off-site live alongside full articles, with roughly equal weight. It has a JSON-spitting API at launch, so if you don’t like its design, you could mash up an alternative without too much trouble. The great gift of a media startup in 2012 is the ability to leap over the cruftiness the industry has accumulated, and Quartz seems set on doing just that.

App-like experiences are still a little buggy

The downside of making that leap is that technology sometimes doesn’t keeping up with our ideas. Quartz at launch feels a bit janky; it relies so heavily on JavaScript and DOM manipulation that stories just won’t load properly on a low-end device without it.

It apparently just won’t work in Internet Explorer, even the relatively modern IE8. While my inner web developer wants to stand and applaud undercutting a browser that’s caused nothing but pain to the industry, its users are still a healthy chunk of the web. Windows Phone and Android users are reporting problems, and on Twitter there seems to be a tension between the appealing flash of the new design, the mysteries of its user interaction layer, and the slowness of its code.

It’s launch day, and some of that will be fixable. And over time, people get newer and faster devices who handle stressful scripts better than their predecessors. But even on new hardware and a modern browser — like my new iPad — it’s not quite as responsive and fluid as you’d like. Scrolling on a trackpad regularly sends you places you didn’t intend to go.

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said that counting on HTML5 was the company’s biggest mistake on mobile platforms — that while building out native apps on a variety of platforms is a pain, it also provides a far smoother experience. I wonder if, once Quartz has a good idea of how its users are accessing the site, it’ll consider picking a few spots where native development makes sense. (There’s a reason that Java went from “Write once, run everywhere” in the minds of developers to “Write once, debug everywhere.”)

Of course, what makes sense for Facebook won’t necessarily make sense for Quartz. Facebook is a destination and a platform. Quartz wouldn’t mind being either, but it knows a healthy chunk of its traffic will come from social platforms, which are good about dumping users into browsers and bad about dumping them into apps. (Being paywall-free, social spread promises to be one of Quartz’s big strengths.)

Three other quick tech notes:

  • I couldn’t get starred articles (sort of a read-later system) to work.
  • Quartz intercepts “open in new tab” requests — command-clicking a link keeps you in the same tab. That’s app-like! But speaking only for myself, geez that’s enraging.
  • The site’s built on WordPress VIP and is a pretty good advertisement for the open-source platform’s ability to build out unusual taxonomies and other CMS-like elements.

Scrolling over picking

Remember those newsprint design metaphors that got carried over to the web? Another was scannability — the idea that a good front page should pull in a healthy number of options and then ask the reader to choose among them.

There’s a long-term trend away from that model and toward making the first choice for the reader. If you wanted to chart this geologically, you might mention:

  • 1982: USA Today launches and becomes famous for mandating most stories on the front page be self-contained.
  • 2009: The BBC News iPad app launches with a front page that isn’t a front page — it’s a menu of options on the left and a complete story on the right. The two panes interact with one another, but the key is that at launch, you’ve already got a full story staring back at you.
  • 2012: Quartz launches with a lead story always displayed in full on the front page.

Considering the number of people who view a news site’s front page and click nothing at all, there’s something appealing about throwing you right into a story. It’s a natural impact of the nichification of media. Quartz isn’t trying to present “All the news that’s fit to print” and leave the choice up to a diverse group of readers; it believes it knows its audience well enough to say “Start over here.” And when you’re done with that story, bam, here’s the next one.

It’s not a risk-free strategy. That story had better be good, for one thing. And it does makes the site harder to scan; it’s disorienting to see only five story headlines on a screenful of my MacBook Air and have the page be so dominated by a single headline and image. And it plays into one of Quartz’s biggest problems, which is that its navigation can be confusing; we’re used to clicks leading to predictable actions, and Quartz disrupts some of that.

But the scrolling stream — the river, as Dave Winer would call it — is the design metaphor of our media moment. It’s not just about Twitter or Facebook feeds; it’s a visualization of how we deal with information overload. Things appear at the top and disappear at the bottom. Instead of surveying a stack of piled-up options, it’s about ingesting content in a moment’s time. It’s the framing of the anti-archive, the promise that a story’s long-term life will come from social propagation instead of front-page placement. Even when the stream isn’t strictly chronological (as Quartz’s default view isn’t), it’s still about the passage of time.

Two other thoughts:

  • I admire the JavaScript magic invoked when you scroll that top story on the front page. Once you get past a certain point, the URL in your browser’s address bar changes to the URL of the story, not the qz.com front page. That makes it easier for someone to copy/paste the URL into an email or a tweet. Smart. And the same happens when your scrolling takes you from story to story in the stream.
  • Interesting that the advertorial sponsor content — the site’s chief revenue model going forward — doesn’t show up when you’re scrolling from story to story. (It’s in the headline well on the left, but not in the actual space where the stories appear; sponsor content gets magically skipped over.) On one hand, that’s good if a big chunk of advertorial would annoy scrollers and drive them away. But on the other, the ability to inject those ads in a scroll interface is a big part of its appeal — putting paid readable messages right where people are reading.

Oh yeah, the content

While Quartz’s design cues and content structures are interesting to news nerds and web types, it’ll be the content that’ll ultimately determine how it’ll do. That’s hard to judge on Day 1, but the mix of content seems just as global as promised and nearly as high-end. (It’s so high-end it doesn’t allow comments. For Quartz’s desired audience, it’s probably welcome to soar above the ground-bound commenting riff-raff.) It’s also not above a little Atlantic-style clickbait now and then.

As C.W. Anderson wrote here last week, Quartz is organizing its editorial capacity around what it calls “obsessions” rather than beats. That is an interesting idea, but it’s one that in practice is less of a big deal than some first thought.

Chris (C.W.) writes that an obsessions model could help free reporting from an institutional structure (the cops beat, the courts beat, the schools beat, etc.) that influences which stories are told and why. True, but that’s also a bigger deal for a newspaper than for an operation like Quartz that has only about 20 staffers, yet claims as its coverage area something as amorphous and all-encompassing as global business.

Of course they’re not going to tie up their reporters with the captain-of-industry equivalent of school board meetings — they’re going to pick their shots, as Businessweek or Fortune do. Remember Quartz is more a magazine than anything else: from staff size to parentage (Atlantic Media) to inspiration (see that list of magazines-in-their-age).

Quartz’s list of “current obsessions” doesn’t sound all that far from what would be considered beats at other news orgs: the mobile web, the Euro crunch, startups. A few are bigger trends that are abstracted up half-a-layer: China’s slowdown (rather than the Chinese economy), low interest rates (rather than central banks), energy shocks (rather than energy policy). But I think it’s more of a slight evolution than a revolution.

(I’d link to Quartz’s list of current obsessions, but the site’s giving me two different URLs for it, and both point to 404s. Live by JavaScript, die by JavaScript. It’s under “About.”)

What I do like about the obsessions model is that obsessions are destined to be temporary and responsive to reality. (Newspapers rarely think: “Let’s stop covering courts for a while and really focus on artisanal bread for the next few months.”) In the site’s top topic navigation, temporary obsessions rank alongside permanent topics. The URL structures are even different; obsessions get “/on/” in the URL, while topics get /re/.

The challenge

Technical problems aside, Quartz has had a promising start. But it’s in an extremely competitive space and I still see a few questions.

  • By being free, Quartz is a better match for the social web than its paywalled peers. But its user experience for a social reader — someone dipping in and dipping out — is slowed by its app-aspiring ways. Can it strike a balance between the two and build something that works for reading built around individual URLs and around something more immersive?
  • Can a web-native platform achieve the same sort of prestige among elite business leaders that a print-native outlet can? The FT, The Economist, and others are going to defend their turf, and many of its competitors have editorial resources that far outstrip Quartz’s. They also look good sitting on a tray table in first class. How quickly can Quartz join that club?
  • What will be its publishing pace? The Atlantic has remarkably (and profitably) managed the transition online by shifting from high-quality, not-so-frequent content (the print monthly) to really frequent and somewhat-more-mixed-bag-quality content (the various Atlantic websites, which churn out enormous amounts of content every day, some of it quite good, some of it only passable). How much does an online-native site that’s aiming for a high-end audience produce? What’s the right editorial rhythm?
  • Can it really own a particular topic? The promise of building your work around “obsessions” is that you had better dominate them — or at the very least produce a ton of exclusive, high-value work around them. Quartz is trying to reach an audience of very busy people; can it be essential for them?
  • And can its business model succeed? It has launch partners for the rest of this year in place. But for all the talk of an ad model built about sponsor content and not on banner ads, there were still plenty of display ads. Presumably future advertisers/content partners will be looking both to see raw numbers and strong evidence that Quartz has attracted the right crowd of readers.

I wouldn’t advise betting against Kevin, Zach, and the other smart folks at Quartz. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps along the way.

We print-tweeted the Online News Association conference

Posted: 24 Sep 2012 02:03 PM PDT

You may have dipped into the fast-moving stream of #ONA12 tweets that came out of the Online News Association conference in San Francisco over the weekend. We wanted to mix things up a little, asking attendees to create physical tweets by jotting down thoughts, drawings, overheards, and other moments from the conference — then tweeting your #IRLtweets creations.

Think of it as a slow tweet movement.

Many thanks to those of you who joined in, and to everyone at ONA for getting us thinking. Here’s a sampling of what we all made:


We also really dug some of the sketched notes that came out of the conference. Check out some from Susie Cagle:

Plus some of Dan Carino’s sketches of the conference:

As well as a few of Graham Clark’s session notes:

What did we miss? We’d love to add your #IRLtweets from ONA to this collection.

Monday Q&A: Andrew McGill on Philly Rap Sheet, his automatic arrest-tracker

Posted: 24 Sep 2012 10:28 AM PDT

Crime reporters in Philly can thank Andrew McGill, who in his free time created a tool that scrapes docket sheets to produce a database of arrests in the city.

The result: Philly Rap Sheet, a responsive-design site that auto-tracks recent arrests by charges, name, age, hometown, bail range, and arrest date. New arrests are posted every half-hour, and alerts send customized updates — email me whenever someone’s arrested for trespassing — straight to your inbox. It’s a small entry in the growing tradition of data-journalism innovation on the cops-and-courts beat — from chicagocrime.org to EveryBlock to Crime L.A. and many more.

McGill made the site after having developed a non-public version of it for his newsroom at Allentown’s Morning Call. He took a reporting job at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in July, and is thinking about the next regional iteration of the site — and also grappling with some ethical questions related to it.

I caught up with him at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco over the weekend. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.

Adrienne LaFrance: What made you want to build this?
Andrew McGill: In my other life, I was a general assignment reporter, so I was picking up the news of the day and making sure there weren’t any arrests in my section of Pennsylvania. It was really annoying because you had to go to the district justices’ offices and look through the reports and spend time and gas to get there.

Meanwhile, there’s this database the state has that lists all of the arrests, and there are all of these docket sheets — really good information — but it’s really hard to search by date. So you can’t really find out what the recent arrests are. If you know someone’s name you can get information, but you can’t really figure out the most recent things that happened.

So what I did, to save myself time and effort, I made it so a script would query this database every half hour to see if there were any new records at all. I brute-forced it: If there were, it would notify me. I was thinking, “Hey, this would be a tool that would be really helpful to people in larger communities like Philadelphia,” where I’m from. I wanted to see if it would work in a big city or if it would overwhelm the system. And I was curious about exactly how many arrests there are a day. That’s sort of how it was born.

Adrienne: So these are PDFs you have to deal with?
McGill: Yeah, but the nice thing is the URLs are formulaic, so if you know the docket number, every time someone’s arrested, it goes up by one. So I query that URL and I always add one, two, three, four, five to it. So, yup, these things are PDFs. It pulls it off from the server, parses it, and converts it to text. It basically scrapes the fields I want.
LaFrance: How did you decide on which fields to show? I know you list someone’s hometown, but you’re not putting up people’s home addresses for example.
McGill: Well, that’s partially because the data doesn’t have it. It’s kind of strange what these docket sheets do and don’t have. They don’t have race. It does have date of birth, so at least you can see the age range.

LaFrance: I was looking at the graph and saw you even got a few as old as 70-something. Those 22-year-olds are out of control, though.
McGill: Oh, yeah.
LaFrance: What other demographic fields are on your wish list?
McGill: I really wish there was a specific address of crime. That’s really the motherlode. If you can say, “Okay, here’s a database of where all the crime in Pennsylvania happens,” that’s huge.
LaFrance: So the docs you’re dealing with don’t even include arrest location? That kind of thing would typically be in the public arrest log at a police station, right?
McGill: Nope, it does not. It has the arrest city. These records aren’t meant for reporters. They’re meant for courts people to look things up and follow the status of the case. Unfortunately, Philadelphia doesn’t really have an online system that has arrest data, so we have to rely on this state thing.
LaFrance: It’s a clever workaround at least. Have you seen any newsworthy names pop up yet — a mayor’s aide or something?
McGill: I don’t track it — it kind of does its thing. But I know people use it for news. Some friends of mine at the Inquirer use it. The Daily News, some folks monitor it there. Also the Police Advisory Commission monitors it. I don’t know if there’s been a notable political arrest. I know they’ve used it to track down recent murders. A lot of times, it’s kind of uncanny — these court clerks will have entered the arrest information before the person’s booked. It’s a secret path into the mind of the court system. I do know there was one time that someone called My Love was arrested at the airport.
LaFrance: That’s a good little back-of-the-book news item.
McGill: They did a blog post at the Inquirer on it. Here’s another one: Ken Jennings.
LaFrance: The Jeopardy guy!?
McGill: Well, a Ken Jennings was arrested. And Ken Jennings the Jeopardy guy tweeted and was like, “Guess I was arrested in Philadelphia,” and my traffic spiked a lot that day. It was not him, unfortunately. Well, not unfortunately, but if Ken Jennings wants to joke about Philly Rap Sheet, he can do that. That’s just fine.
LaFrance: So what’s your vision for this thing?
McGill: I don’t know. It’s tough. I want to add historical data. So I spent a little bit of money to get data back to around 2005, which is not that far back, but at least it’s historical data. I want to backload that in. But in terms of the next step, it’s tough to say.

I want to get into a little bit more analytics. I think it’d be nice to add more realms of information to cross reference. I might look again at some things and see if I can pull some more data out of the existing sheets. Geography-wise, I do have what police district arrests are in, and I haven’t done a lot with that. So I want to try to start doing that, and maybe have a newsletter. Right now, I just have alerts.

LaFrance: And as a reporter, those are so helpful, I’m sure. You can be tracking all the murders.
McGill: That’s what I have set up for my alert. Unfortunately, it also pulls in attempted murder and stuff like that. I want to be able to get a summation newsletter out that you sign up for and say, “Okay, you’re in this neighborhood, and these crimes happened in your vicinity, and this is how it compared to last year,” and you would get this once a month or something. I don’t want to inundate people, but I think there’s room for a little more statistics pushing.
LaFrance: And in your current newsroom, any plans to build something similar?
McGill: I think the Post-Gazette probably would be interested in having something, and I don’t know if they’d want it to be open or not.
LaFrance: Aww, why not?
McGill: Well, I think it’s a powerful news reporting tool. And I think that it gives you an advantage over your competitors. In Philadelphia, I didn’t really have a dog in the fight. I didn’t live there at the time — I was in Allentown — so I was like, “Here’s a public resource everyone can use.” But now that I’m working for somebody, it would be to their advantage to keep it private. I haven’t really spoken to them — if I did something like that here — if they’d want it to be forward-facing or inward-facing. I think in terms of data being public, you want something to be out there. But in terms of news competition, you also want to keep your advantage.

There’s one interesting issue that I’m wrestling with, and that’s keeping names associated with crimes when there’s the real fact that people get their crimes expunged. So I’ve gotten calls and I’ve gotten one cease-and-desist letter saying, “Listen, my records have been expunged. Take down my name.”

LaFrance: Well, you don’t have to. It’s public record.
McGill: I don’t. It is public record. It’s like saying, “Hey newspapers, you put my name in an article, you have to take that down.” So I’m not legally obligated — but in a social justice kind of way, I don’t want to screw someone’s career up if they were wrongfully arrested or charges were dropped. If they’re clear everywhere else, but they’re on Philly Rap Sheet and someone finds that and says, “We’re not going to hire you.”
LaFrance: But how realistic is it for you to take the time to assess each claim of expungement?
McGill: It’s not. Fortunately, the one in which I received the cease and desist letter, they forwarded me the expungement notice. So that was helpful. I believe it was true.
LaFrance: Did you take that one down?
McGill: I didn’t take the arrest down. I would never take down the crime itself, but I made it so the name is not published. It’s still in my database, but it’s private. What I’m considering — I talked to an expungement lawyer, and he really was concerned about this — I’m considering having it so after a month the names are no longer included on the records. So you could still have the breaking-news aspect, but after a month you wouldn’t be able to search by name.
LaFrance: It’s hard.
McGill: I want to be as neutral an arbitrator as I can. And people are usually pretty sensitive about having their names associated with crimes. And again, I don’t want to mess up anybody’s lives. If I have the power to do less harm, I want to. But I also understand people are using this database to look for specific people.

So I’m trying to balance that with the chance that — the way the expungement lawyer explained it to me was that for a long time in Philadelphia, it was common practice in the District Attorney’s office to overcharge people. So if you were involved in a bar fight and you someone got hurt, you might get charged with attempted murder instead of drunk and disorderly. So on my site, you look like an attempted murderer. And I’m not going back and scanning thousands of docket sheets every month just to make sure nothing’s changed. I’m considering at least putting a link saying — I don’t know how to phrase it — but essentially, “If you had your record expunged, here’s a formal process to get in touch with me.”

Robert Hernandez: Reboot journalism school? Take control of your education instead

Posted: 24 Sep 2012 08:00 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. Here’s Robert Hernandez, journalism professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, with ideas on how students can make the resources of the j-school, and the web, better work for them.

“J-schools aren’t changing fast enough.”

“J-schools need new blood in academia.”

“J-schools need to be more like teaching hospitals.”

All these are true, but… there are some people who don’t wait. Students, if you are waiting for the curriculum to be the cutting edge journalism that will guarantee you a high paying job, you are wasting your time.

Yes, I said that. Because if you think a school’s curriculum or teaching structure determines your education, you are mistaken. That era is over. The era of textbooks being the authority is over. The era of professors having all the answers is over.

The reality of our current era is disruption. And it’s extremely exciting.

That means you can bypass the j-school debates and take control over your education by taking the most important step: Be actively involved in your education. This is even more important that deciding what school you’ll attend. Don’t wait for academia to determine what you need to know for modern journalism. Be proactive and find out by using digital media to help you learn those skills.

Think DIY. Think horizontal loyalty. Think of ways to hijack your school’s assets to selfishly improve your skills.

This means more than just attending the required classes. This means more work than is assigned. This means more than a letter grade or GPA. This means meeting and engaging with more than your classmates and professors at your school.

This means using the power of the web and social media to augment your education and introduce yourself to more than just the curriculum outlined by your individual school.

This means realizing that an older professor you have written off as “irrelevant” has so much more to teach you about life and journalism than you think.

This means working weekends on projects you are passionate about with friends who share that passion.

As you’ve heard time and time again, the journalism game has changed. So has the education game. And the biggest change is that you have the power to shape your own destiny — far more than just deciding which school you’ll attend. (Also, go to USC Annenberg.)

When I taught my first Intro to Online class, I introduced my students to the term “Google it.” At first, they thought I didn’t know the answers and I was using the search engine to cover up my shortcomings. (For the record, I don’t have all the answers. And, yes, I do use the search engine to find some…usually many different answers to the same question.) But those who have truly embraced the web know what that simple phrase really means: Empower yourself.

It’s the modern version of teaching someone how to fish. But why wait for someone to teach you how to fish when you can teach yourself? Since you are in an incredible learning environment, you can use the expertise and context from your j-school to make sure you are fishing correctly (and ethically). Make the effort — and it is extremely easy today — to find a diverse set of answers to your current question.

OBLIGATORY NOTE: When exploring the web, be a smart information consumer and consider the source. There is bad info out there. There is occasionally an echo chamber. But there is gold for you to mine. Be a journalist and treat “Googling” as reporting. I know I’m stating the obvious, but there are always people who need a reminder.

Teach yourself something new, like I taught myself CSS many years ago, and am now teaching myself JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and more today. (Here’s just a list of resources to start with: Codecademy, Learn Python The Hard Way, and The Bastards Book of Ruby.)

Go crash/audit a class. And make sure some of them aren’t about journalism.

Look, you can sit back with your arms folded expecting someone to teach you something, or you can do more. Go out and hunt for knowledge. And, while I said be selfish to find it, don’t be selfish in sharing it. Engage and educate your classmates, as well as your professors. But remember one more thing: You don’t have all the answers either.

Photo by Jeroen Bennink used under a Creative Commons license.

Pop Up Archive is open-source software to help producers preserve sound, painlessly

Posted: 24 Sep 2012 06:55 AM PDT

Journalists, especially those who collect sound and pictures, are hoarders. To dump raw material onto a hard drive is effortless, thoughtless. To delete it — what if you need something again some day? — is harder. And to find that something again some day is, often, excruciating.

Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith, winners of a $300,000 Knight News Challenge grant, are the creators of Pop Up Archive. They are building open-source software and partnering with the Internet Archive to streamline the entire workflow of a radio producer — from ingestion to cataloging to eventual distribution.

“What’s closest to our heart is saving oral history. It’s actually easier to lose your material that’s digital than it is to lose something that was on a tape,” Smith told me. Data gets corrupted, or just lost. Thousands of files called 000001.WAV become meaningless to humans.

Wootton and Smith have developed plugins for Omeka, the open-source archiving and publishing software. Once the user drops raw audio files onto an FTP site, she can tag those files in Omeka with rich metadata (record date, air date, location, interviewer, interviewee) using a web-based form. Their software normalizes the metadata using PBCore, an emerging standard in public media. (For example: Is it called a story, feature, or piece?) The user could also upload copies of the audio to the Internet Archive, which has agreed to host the files free of charge and forever, as well as SoundCloud.

Pop Up Archive graphic

Wootton and Smith said their software is in alpha. Their first test case is The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, a pair of independent radio producers who have 30 years’ worth of tape, the last decade of it digital.

“They are a relatively small shop that, like many in public media, survive largely on grants and private funding, private donors and…lack any sort of archivist or technologist on staff,” Wootton said, “and yet are looking — especially as their production workflow is increasingly digital — to refine, reuse, repackage content, collaborate with others.”

The Kitchen Sisters’ stacks of filled-up hard drives amount to a “huge stew of dead media,” Silva says in a video promoting the project. “People call us and say, ‘Oh, you guys did that piece about the sonic memorial about 9/11, where is all that raw material? Where’s the original?”

Wootton and Smith are working with The Kitchen Sisters to upload all of their raw material for a public archive. That could be a boon for projects such as Blank on Blank, which mines old interviews and forgotten footage for new radio stories.

Wootton said she got interested in digital archiving as a student at Brown, where she led an effort to digitize the 120-year history of The Brown Daily Herald. She “saw these bound volumes of pages from 60 years ago just literally rotting on the shelves of the Brown library, and managed that project, did fundraising for that project, really enjoyed it — and was incredibly flustered by the fact that I didn’t understand a lot of the technology that they were using.”

That’s the kind of person they hope to reach with Pop Up Archive: someone good at creating content but who isn’t a professional archivist.

There’s one missing piece that would complete the perfect archive, of course: transcription. That would let people search through years of audio archives as though they were documents. Speech-to-text software is still too immature to translate audio into text on the cheap. PBS, for its part, is transcribing thousands of hours of video archives using a combination of advanced software and human editors. Amara, formerly Universal Subtitles, is a crowdsourced approach to transcription used by PBS NewsHour and others.

Wootton said she hopes their project would one day harmonize with the Public Media Platform, a so-called “super API” that would link content from all public media producers and distributors (PBS, NPR, APM, PRI, PRX). That long-planned project so far has not gotten off the ground.

The Knight grant will let the duo focus on the project full-time and, they hope, scale the project up to work for more producers and stations. Also on the team are researcher Christen Penny and software engineer Daniel Vizzini.
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