Sabtu, 13 Oktober 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

For politically playful news orgs, the 2012 election means social interactivity

Posted: 12 Oct 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Wanna make your own over-the-top Bobby Newport-style political attack ad?

PBS NewsHour is on it. This week it launched Ad Libs 2012, an interactive feature that has you pick quotes and photos from your own Facebook profile and cobbles them together in an attack ad against yourself.

The idea is to engage voters by highlighting some of the oldest campaign-ad tricks in the book: Roiling storm clouds, ominous voiceovers, out-of-context quotes, and so on. As you build your campaign ad, PBS NewsHour features links to various historical ads, pointing out tactics used to denote negativity. Check it out:

Ad Libs 2012 was created using Mozilla’s Popcorn toolkit, and the team at PBS NewsHour collaborated with Mozilla and Ocupop. (The project was funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

PBS NewsHour’s creative director, Travis Daub, says they opted to build something linked to Facebook to keep things simple — users don’t have to upload any photos or text because Ad Libs 2012 uses what’s already in their Facebook profiles — and so that people can only make attack ads about themselves. “We were quite frankly concerned about people misusing it, taking the tool and using it to bully other kids in high school,” Daub told me.

Plenty of other organizations have found ways to use Facebook for election-related games. Over the summer, MTV launched Fantasy Election ’12, in which players pick teams of presidential and congressional candidates who get points for honesty, polling well, and social media engagement. Honolulu Civil Beat created its own civics-oriented Facebook game, Our Hawaiian Spring, with a goal to encourage voter turnout in Hawaii, where it’s the lowest in the country. (Disclosure: I’m a contributing reporter at Civil Beat, where I used to work full time.)

After the vice presidential debate last night, The Guardian introduced a feature called “Spin It!” which is kind of like a politically-themed digital version of magnetic poetry. It lets you select words from Joe Biden and Paul Ryan quotes to form misleading sentences.

Politically oriented or not, the team over at BuzzFeed often finds ways to interact with readers. Recent example: Make Your Own Paul Ryan Photoshoot. That project skews goofy where other news organizations go a bit wonkier, but the idea is the same: Bring people together to play in the election space.

PBS NewsHour’s Hari Sreenivasan says the gamification of the election makes sense for the first time this year: Many newsrooms are more willing to try new things, and audiences’ expectations about social interactivity have shifted. Elections-related interactivity used to mean voting in a web survey about who you liked better in a debate, or taking an issues quiz to see which candidate shared your views. Those kinds of features, while still around, now seem positively quaint.

“Thanks to all of these different apps, the different level of capability of how content is created and how it’s interactive, they have a different level of expectation and a different level of understanding,” Sreenivasan told me. “If you threw this in front of someone five years ago, they would flip out. This is a whole level of shared knowledge that we didn’t have before.”

Come have a drink with Nieman Lab Monday

Posted: 12 Oct 2012 09:39 AM PDT

Did you know? The term “happy hour” probably originated in the U.S. Navy. Quoth Wikipedia:

In the 1920s, “Happy Hour” was slang for a scheduled entertainment period on board a ship during which boxing and wrestling bouts took place; this was a valuable opportunity for sailors to relieve the stress accumulated during the long periods at sea.

We thought, briefly, about building on that tradition with the Nieman Lab happy hour and featuring media wrestling matches, with bout cards that include cross-media (ink-stained wretches vs. TV anchors! radio reporters vs. bloggers!), intra-media (Globe vs. Herald! WBUR vs. WGBH!), and cross-discipline (coders vs. writers! UI designers vs. GA reporters!) matchups. Justin even had a lovely Mexican wrestling mask all picked out. But safety concerns won out in the end, and we decided to just have a nice evening of drinks and conversation with some of the Boston area’s most interesting journalists and technologists.

That’s the idea behind the Nieman Lab happy hour, which returns on Monday, October 15 at 6 p.m. (You can also tentatively plan on November 19 and December 17 — the third Monday of the month.)

We’re doing it again at The Field, which is in Central Square, roughly 8.2 seconds’ walk from the Central Square T stop and thus easily accessible to anyone with a Charlie Card. (Map here.) Assuming it won’t be warm enough to be in the back patio, look for us in the room to the left of the entrance. Come say hello and meet a bunch of journalists, nerds, and that rarest of species, the journonerd. Beautiful plumage.

Luchador photo by danksy used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Discerning truth and lies in political coverage, and the value of digital-first news

Posted: 12 Oct 2012 07:30 AM PDT

How far should journalists go in judging political lies?: The U.S. vice presidential debate was held last night, and moderators remained in the spotlight during the leadup to it, as ABC’s Martha Raddatz received scrutiny from conservatives because President Obama attended her wedding 21 years ago (he was a classmate of her now ex-husband). The episode reminded The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone of similar attempts to “work the refs” in 2008. After the debate, though, she was praised at The New York Times and NPR for her tough, smart style.

The moderator from the first presidential debate, PBS’ Jim Lehrer, also continued to explain his much-criticized hands-off style. NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen synthesized Lehrer’s statements about his approach and connected them to PBS NewsHour’s brand of get-out-of-the-way journalistic impartiality. Elsewhere in debate coverage, the Lab pointed to Pew research that found that a lot of young people are watching the debates on something other than a TV.

In between debates, meanwhile, the talk about campaign coverage continues to center on questions of truth, falsehood, and the ability of journalists and the public to point out the differences between the two. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Ruby Cramer wrote that an environment where neither side can agree on a basic conception of reality is making political discourse harder and spurring a cottage industry in “unskewing reality.”

Meanwhile, Time’s Michael Scherer wrote about the difficulty of declaring (and especially determining) which campaign is being more deceptive as the election unfolds. Forbes’ John McQuaid gave Scherer kudos for wrestling with the issue, but argued that just because the question is virtually impossible to definitively answer empirically doesn’t mean it can’t be addressed. He took issue with Scherer’s assumption that if journalism isn’t strictly empirical, it’s less credible: “If we've seen anything in recent weeks, it's that data is no shield. If your conclusions come under attack, so will your data.” Jack Shafer of Reuters argued that despite all our ongoing fact-checking efforts, lying will still dominate politics because it works — we prefer to vote for liars.

Does free, digital-first news work?: Two interesting debates this week focused on the value of free, digitally centered approaches to journalism: The first reached back to last month’s bankruptcy of the Journal Register Co. newspaper chain and its much-heralded “digital first” strategy. Editor & Publisher’s Kristina Ackermann wrote a column throwing cold water on the idea that a digital-centric approach is the way to rescue the newspaper industry: “Digital first may well come to be the industry standard, but we're not there yet, and we won't get there until we figure out a way to make some money doing it. The next time a media guru comes along to tell you how to run your business, take it with a grain of salt.”

British j-prof Paul Bradshaw responded with a post arguing that to dismiss web-first journalism is to act as though progress will stand still for newspapers to get their houses in order. Even if we don’t know how to make digital journalism pay yet, he said, “we should at least acknowledge that the old system is broken. We cannot go back to print profit margins: readers have left, and advertisers are following.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram echoed his point, saying that while there are many different approaches to the transition to digital-first news, the fact that the transition has to be made isn’t in question.

Media consultant Martin Belam noted, though, that digital-first news orgs are competing against digital-only companies, and John Bethune of B2B Memes countered that digital-first at news orgs should exist alongside print, rather than becoming digital-only. The Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance reported on one paper making a major print-first expansion — the Orange County Register.

The second debate centered on free vs. paid news, and also tied in part to last month’s Journal Register bankruptcy. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman continued his ongoing argument with Mathew Ingram about whether making news free leads it to be lower-quality. Starkman argued that the free model is by and large intended to produce volume, which, despite some exceptions, isn’t particularly compatible with quality. Ingram countered that there’s plenty of evidence than a primarily ad-supported model — in old or new media — is (or isn’t) compatible with quality journalism, and a business model doesn’t predetermine anything about the actual product.

Steve Buttry of Digital First (which manages Journal Register papers) also chimed in to disagree with Starkman, though unlike Ingram, he said the business model does affect the journalism. But he said the drive for volume (i.e. traffic) at free news sites isn’t incompatible with quality and in many cases encourages it, and he also noted that paywalled websites are gunning for more traffic, too.

The Times’ labor conflict gets testy: The New York Times’ ongoing conflict with its unionized employees reached a head this week, when several hundred staffers staged a brief walkout. Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo reported on the walkout and included the union memo that outlined its grievances regarding the Times’ pay and benefit proposals, and Poynter’s Julie Moos Storified reactions to the move.

According to a union memo posted by Jim Romenesko, Times management responded by walking out of negotiations after 10 minutes the next day (after both groups nudged closer with counteroffers) and declaring a final offer coming Thursday. Before that final offer could come, both sides agreed to use a mediator to help nudge along the resolution process, in which one Times staffer said “we were getting nowhere.” Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman reported that a deal could come anytime between now and early November. Meanwhile, DNAinfo’s James Fanelli reported that the heirs of the recently deceased Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger are working to sell the $41 million of stock he held in the company.

Reading roundup: Here’s what else is worth a look this week:

— Nicholas Lemann, who has been the dean of the Columbia Journalism School since 2003, announced this week he will step down next summer. Bloomberg and The New York Times have good summaries of what he did during his tenure, and Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman talked about what’s next for the j-school.

— Last Friday marked a year since the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs. You can read about Jobs’ legacy from Wired’s Mat Honan, about what Apple’s missing without him from Robert Scoble in a BBC column, and about what’s ahead for Apple from Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng.

— Salon’s Will Doig wrote a column arguing that alt-weeklies’ days as the alternative voice of a city are over, while Carly Carioli of the Boston Phoenix wrote a rebuttal defending their continued relevance.

— A few thoughtful pieces to leave you with: Craig Kanalley of The Huffington Post cautioned news orgs about an addiction to social media, j-prof Cindy Royal wrote at the Lab about the importance of reaching female students with journalism tech instruction, and MediaBistro talked to The Wall Street Journal’s David Ho about the work of incorporating mobile technology into journalism.

Photos by tq2cute and Niall Kennedy used under a Creative Commons license.

International journalists, it’s time to apply for a Nieman Fellowship

Posted: 12 Oct 2012 07:00 AM PDT

It’s starting to feel downright autumnal in Cambridge, which means it’s time to start talking about the Nieman Fellowships — our 75-year-old program that brings around 24 journalists to spend an academic year at Harvard studying, researching, and building around a study plan or project of their choice. The fellows are half U.S. citizens and half non-U.S., and the first deadline to approach is for those internationals — December 1. (Americans have until January 31.)

You can read much more about the fellowship on the Nieman Foundation website: the program at a glance, eligibility information, types of fellowships, and maybe most practically, how to apply.

But another way to get a handle on the fellowship is to read the bios of our current class of fellows and see the kind of person we’ve selected in the past. It’s a diverse group, including international fellows from Germany, France, Tunisia, South Korea, China, Spain, Israel, Chile, Canada, South Africa, and Vietnam. (A few of them are international enough that they could be considered a credit to several different nations.) Those bios include a brief summary of how they’re spending their year at Harvard, which will give you some insight to the kinds of ideas we like. (And it’s worth mentioning that it’s not just Harvard: MIT and the rest of Cambridge and Boston are also open to you.)

It’s really a tremendous opportunity; I’ve been able to observe the past five classes of fellows and see what kind of an impact it can have on a journalist’s career and life.

What does applying entail? Again, read the full details, but the basics are a personal statement, a proposed course of study, some samples of your work, and some recommendations.

One note: If you’re a resident of Canada, South Korea, South Africa, or the Philippines, there’s a special application process for you. Click your country’s name on the how-to-apply page to get the details.

And a second note: We’ll have more information about the Nieman-Berkman joint fellowships soon.

And a third note: If you have any questions about the fellowship itself, I’m happy to answer questions. If you have any questions about the application process and requirements, best to reach out to our fellowship administrator John Breen.
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