Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Students: Spend the summer working with Nieman Lab via the Google Journalism Fellowship
- This Week in Review: A red flag for media regulation, and are news paywalls inevitable?
- App-like news design, real-time fact checking, and personalized services: Some of Spark Camp’s big ideas of 2012
| Students: Spend the summer working with Nieman Lab via the Google Journalism Fellowship Posted: 14 Dec 2012 10:07 AM PST Hey students: Want to spend next summer working with Nieman Lab? I’m very happy to say that we will be one of the host organizations for the new Google Journalism Fellowships. Here’s Google’s description:
It’s a chance to come spend time in Cambridge working with us as we research and report on the future of news — writing stories, working on projects, and generally trying to learn more about where the news ecosystem is headed.
The way it works is that you pick one specific host organization to apply to — so if, say, investigative reporting was your main interest, you might pick CIR, IRE, or ProPublica. But in your application, you can also choose to allow the seven other host organizations to consider at your application if your first choice doesn’t select you. There’s a stipend: $7,500 for the 10 weeks (which starts June 3), plus a travel budget of $1,000. You can read an FAQ about the new program (including eligibility info), learn about all the host institutions, and apply. The application deadline is January 31. (One last nomenclature-related thing: Even though this uses the word “fellowship” in its title and is based at the Nieman Foundation, note that it’s quite different than our traditional Nieman Fellowships, which allow working journalists to come spend a year taking classes and working on a course of study at Harvard. This is an opportunity for a student to come work with Nieman Lab staff for the summer, reporting on the future of journalism. Apologies in advance to anyone confused by the terminology.) |
| This Week in Review: A red flag for media regulation, and are news paywalls inevitable? Posted: 14 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST
A warning about press regulation’s downside: We’re now two weeks removed from Lord Justice Leveson issuing his report calling for a new regulatory body for the British press, and at this point, we’re waist-deep in the messy work of figuring out what to do about it and how the British press should function in relation to the government. The Labour Party presented its own plan to implement Leveson’s proposals, in response to the prime minister’s plan. The London School of Economics has some interesting data examining the initial response to the report among newspapers and bloggers, and Leveson reiterated that he wants to see the law enforced on bloggers and Twitter users just as it is on traditional journalists, lest those journalists get tempted to cut corners in order to compete online. There was also a warning this week about the inevitable downside of government regulation of the press: The Telegraph reported that advisers to Maria Miller, the secretary of state for Media, Culture, and Sport, warned the paper of her role in implementing the Leveson report when it informed her of a story it was publishing on her official expenses. (The Telegraph published the story anyway.) Opponents of regulation saw the Miller case a clear example of the type of blackmail and political pressure that would accompany government oversight of the press. “Don't kid yourself that every editor will be as principled in future, and that this is not a foretaste of what may come,” said The Spectator’s Nick Cohen. His colleague, Fraser Nelson, made the “putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse” analogy. Michael White of The Guardian, on the other hand, said he’s giving Miller the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, the man who was heading up the British newspapers’ negotiations with the government over compliance with the Leveson report, James Harding, surprisingly resigned as the editor of News Corp.’s Times of London this week. As the Press Gazette noted, Harding’s had his own run-ins with the Leveson Inquiry over his role in News Corp.’s phone hacking scandal. There was initially a lot of speculation as to why, but it seems the move may ultimately be a precursor to consolidation with the Sunday Times. City University journalism professor George Brock said the merger is probably the key to the move as a cost-cutting measure, and The Guardian reported on News Corp.’s possible plans to merge the two papers even before Harding’s ouster. Afterward, The Times itself reported that it was looking into turning the two papers into one seven-day-a-week paper.
The paywall dominoes keep falling: I noted this briefly in last week’s post, but it’s worth going through in a bit more detail this week: The Washington Post is reported to be planning to institute a paywall in 2013. The Post had been the highest-profile paywall holdout in the U.S., and there are numerous other media companies moving with it across the paid-content divide. As Ad Age reported, the Daily Beast — which also includes the remnants of Newsweek — is also considering a paywall, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds also summarized reports on paywall progress and plans from Gannett and Scripps at an industry conference. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici made note of the influence of paywall proponent Warren Buffett on Post publisher Donald Graham and also argued that it’s way too late for a paywall to salvage the Daily Beast. Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review said it’s not too late for the Post’s paywall to be successful, though. The Guardian’s James Ball, meanwhile, wrote a smart explanation of why U.S. and U.K. papers are differing on paywalls, pointing out that unlike their British counterparts, American papers seem to be sticking close to their metro roots. In light of the Post’s move, The Economist and The New York Times’ David Carr both offered good, big-picture assessments of why the U.S. newspaper industry is moving so aggressively to a paid model online. Carr was a bit more pessimistic about the prospects of generalizing the success of larger papers like The Times or The Wall Street Journal to their smaller metro cousins: “The subscription model represents a moment of truth for publishers, who are owning up to the fact that they will be operating as smaller businesses, with smaller audiences.” At CNN, Howard Kurtz made the argument (pretty familiar by now) that paywalls are necessary for reporting to survive on a large scale. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan agreed that paywalls have become a necessity for traditional news orgs, but said they won’t work at a lot of places where the content simply isn’t worth paying for: “The fact that readers like you is not enough to support an online paywall; readers must need you.” The paywall critics are also still making their case — in the best of those, Digital First’s Steve Buttry wrote a smart post arguing that newspaper paywalls are not a settled issue, which drew a point-by-point rebuttal from CJR’s Ryan Chittum. His colleague, Dean Starkman, also looked at the struggles of the Cleveland Plain Dealer as evidence of the failure of the free model.
Twitter’s photo filters vs. Instagram’s community: Less than a week after Instagram disabled its integration with the program that let its photos display properly on Twitter, Twitter struck back with its introduction of its own photo filter features. Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web gave an overview of Twitter’s filters, concluding that they’re easy to use, even if their range and quality of filters isn’t as strong as Instagram’s. The question is whether these filters will be enough for Twitter to seriously edge into Instagram’s photo-sharing territory. Panzarino and Wired’s Mat Honan said no — Instagram’s service is popular not because of its filters, but because of the community it’s built up around photo sharing. ReadWrite’s Jon Mitchell also said Instagram has the advantage of being exclusively devoted to photos, while Twitter is general-interest. The Verge’s Ellis Hamburger summarized those arguments for Instagram’s superiority best: “Instagram's success is about a new way to show what you're up to. It's about creating a photographic timeline of your life you can flip through as easily as thumbing through a child's picture book. The filters are just gravy.” Reading roundup: A few other stories and discussions also floating around this week: — The New York Times reported that Michael Bloomberg is considering adding the Financial Times to his business-news empire, prompting journalism professor Christopher Daly and The Atlantic Wire’s Adam Clark Estes to speculate on why Bloomberg would want to buy a newspaper (not so much money, but power). Reuters’ Felix Salmon and Business Insider’s Henry Blodget focused on the nugget that Bloomberg might also be interested in LinkedIn, with Salmon looking at why he might want it and Blodget arguing that it’s too expensive. — A nasty fight sprung up between Matthew Inman, proprietor of the popular web comic The Oatmeal, and BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed published a nasty (and inaccurate) article about Inman, prompting an equally nasty defense (and counterattack) from Inman. BuzzFeed responded with a half-apology. HyperVocal and GigaOM have good explanations of what happened and why the conflict matters for the web, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Sara Morrison wrote that despite some nuggets of truth to BuzzFeed’s article, it was fatally undermined by shoddy Internet research. — A few retrospective pieces on the role of fact-checking and asymmetry in the U.S. presidential election: The Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin asserted that the mainstream political press missed the biggest story of the campaign in not holding Republicans accountable for their consistently tenuous relationship with the truth. The New York Times’ Margaret Sullivan countered that the traditional media are improving in accounting for political asymmetry, while Brendan Nyhan of the Columbia Journalism Review said the problem doesn’t lie with the fact-checking movement. — A couple of really interesting articles were written this week on the editorial decisions embedded in the algorithms that we might think of as objective. Nick Diakopoulos at the Lab explained the concept of algorithmic bias, and The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal expanded on that point regarding Google News in particular. |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST  Editor’s Note: What were the most interesting and provocative ideas in journalism in 2012? We’re partnering with Spark Camp to produce a special end-of-year series to ask a group of smart people — Spark Camp’s alumni — that question. (Learn more about Spark Camp at the first post in this series.) Here are thoughts from: — Andrew Pergam, Spark Camp cofounder and director of video at The Washington Post. Previously, he was editorial director of J-Lab, examining and funding innovations in interactive journalism, and managing editor for digital of NBC Connecticut. — Mónica Guzmán, digital life columnist for the Seattle Times and GeekWire. Previously, she spent a year at Seattle-based startup Intersect. — Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat and named one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company this year. Andrew Pergam
On the other hand, HuffPost Live, the video extension of the Huffington Post, has built a video site where video takes up less real estate than engagement tools. Users are encouraged to join the conversation with their webcam, to join the chat stream, and to find more information on the current segment without navigating off the page. These integrated experiences make sense. Finally, the Circa app seems to be a hidden gem: The concept is smart, with an acknowledgement that a story is just a series of news nuggets tied together. As the story evolves, new elements appear, and the site lets you follow those stories of interest, giving you just the updates you’ve missed. And it’s display is well imagined. In all these cases, design seems to drive the discussion of how best to present the news — a welcome trend as we approach 2013. In the coming year, I’ll pay particular attention to the sophisticated integration of sponsored content. In the recent past, our business has taken a sledgehammer approach to getting that square peg into a round hole. Now some major players are revealing smart ways to make advertorial content as compelling as editorial content — to name a few: Forbes launched Forbes BrandVoice and the Gawker family of sites offers sponsored posts, in a similar tone as the rest of the site. The challenge, of course, is to maintain the transparency and separation that have been hallmarks of our industry. Those needn’t be excuses to avoid integration, but they should be guideposts we use as navigate the terrain. Mónica Guzmán
In 2013, I hope to see more experiments in news monetization and community service that go beyond the commodity article into events, news apps, and other ways to offer understanding. I’m checking out the Circa app at least a few times a week; I’m excited about the idea of separating news into points, and being able to follow developing stories in a new way. I’ll hope against hope that no other newspaper will make the mistake The Seattle Times made earlier this year, when it ran ads in support of political campaigns in its own paper. Tony Haile
Take Sherpaa — they finally give users direct phone and email access to guides that give them the right care options and direct them to the appropriate physicians. It’s built within the natural behavior-flow of their users — and helps people make better use of their health care. And Simple is loved by everyone for the same reason — they’re built, first and foremost, on user experience, removing as many daily pain points banking customers experience as possible. What was the most overhyped idea in media and technology in 2012? The Nate Silver election prediction hype — because how is data not already part of every decision we make? Nate Silver does a great job of making data accessible and understandable to the masses with The New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog. I personally love that — it’s our whole mission at Chartbeat. I’m just surprised that in 2012 there are people out there who think his use of data to make decisions is shocking. Data is incorporated in all aspects of our lives — we look out the window before we get dressed in the morning to determine what to wear, we check our calendar to mentally prepare for how crazy our day is going to be (and if we deserve that mochaccino on the way to work). I hope Nate Silver just kicked some more companies in gear — they’ve got to realize they don’t have a choice but to build and take everyday actions with data. Even the White House has an open API initiative to make executive departments more focused on real-time data. I hope in 2013, stories like Nate Silver’s are more and more commonplace. |
In an effort to help develop the next crop of reporters working to keep the world informed, educated and entertained, we have created the Google Journalism Fellowship. As a company dedicated to making the world's information easily accessible, Google recognizes that behind many blue links is a journalist and that quality journalism is a key ingredient of a vibrant and functioning society.
We’re one of eight journalism institutions that will be hosting Google Journalism Fellows in 2013. The other seven are pretty great, too: the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Investigative Reporters & Editors, Knight Foundation, Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Poynter, and ProPublica.
Most intriguing to me has been a design trend away from traditional layouts and into more bold, engaging experiences. In particular, I look at the new 
I’m fascinated by the fact-checking trend that took off in the months leading to the election. I followed critiques from Jay Rosen, James Fallows, and many others about this emergent flavor of news and the experiments in real-time fact checking of live events like political speeches and debates. Can journalistic fact-checks help hold newsmakers more accountable to truth? Are they a sign that we’re finally ready to get aggressive defending it?
What was the most interesting idea in media and technology in the past year? Personalized, efficiency-focused services like | You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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