Selasa, 18 Desember 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Device-aware content, integrated video, and the Internet of things: Some of Spark Camp’s big ideas to watch in 2013

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 11:03 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.)

To wrap up the series, here are a variety of quick thoughts from a range of Spark Campers — including Melody Kramer, Matt Thompson, Amy Webb, John Davidow, Scott Klein, Hari Sreenivasan, Benet J. Wilson, Joe Webster, Matt Waite, Jonathan Stray, and Tony Haile — on trends they’ll be watching in 2013.

Melody Kramer, former associate producer for online media at Fresh Air with Terry Gross: The rise of the parody meme, the consolidation of news and social media platforms, the growing success of Reddit’s AMA, public radio’s transition to mobile platforms, and hyperlocal news projects like Philadelphia’s GunCrisis, which is working to document a specific topic in much greater depth than any local news organization here in Philly.

Matt Thompson, Spark Camp co-founder, manager of digital initiatives, NPR: I’m one of many folks fascinated by Nintendo’s Wii U. When the concept of the original Wii started leaking wide in mid 2006, it was a sign that gestural interfaces had arrived. The iPhone’s launch a year later demonstrated exactly how central gestures would become to the future of digital interaction. As Ian Bogost has brilliantly laid out, Nintendo’s now making a really interesting guess about how the screen experience is evolving. I’m definitely paying attention.

Amy Webb, Spark Camp co-founder, CEO of Webbmedia Group: I’m fascinated by the notion of “atomic units of news” and device-specific content. We know that consumers don’t spend hours and hours reading lengthy stories on their mobile phones. We also know that consumers spend more than 50 minutes a day reading on their tablets. So why are media organizations simply launching responsive websites that display the exact same content everywhere? Content-driven organizations that produce individual stories intended for different devices will do well in 2013. I should be able to start with a basic unit of news on my mobile phone (one that’s appropriate for my subject knowledge level), then dive deeper once I’m on my tablet, and then participate in discussion when I’m sitting at my desk with some more time. The same story package should be customized — written at different lengths, in different styles and have varying kinds of multimedia — depending on the device, type of story, and time of day.

John Davidow, executive editor for digital, WBUR: One journalistic truism has always been “follow the money.” But when it comes to economic viability for media organizations in 2013, it will be be even more important to follow the data. Data is where the dollars are when it comes monetizing online content. In 2013, the more targeted the messaging, the more money news organization will have to not only survive, but to thrive.

Scott Klein, editor of news applications, ProPublica: We’re really starting to learn how to integrate video and other forms of news data. We all loved The New York Times’s “Navigating Love and Autism” story, which integrated wonderful, short, contextual videos in the text itself and Frontline’s video “A Perfect Terrorist,” which integrated high-definition video and interactive data elements in an interesting way. I’m excited to see how this develops, and if we get a chance to try these techniques out at ProPublica, we’ll jump at it.

Hari Sreenivasan, correspondent, director of digital partnerships, PBS Newshour: Will be watching the work of the public media accelerator getting kicked off in San Francisco. Hope to see the ideas incubated there spread quickly.

Benet J. Wilson, social media/newsletters editor, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and Chair, National Association of Black Journalists Digital Journalism Task Force: Storination. I used it to document the NABJ and Unity conventions and felt it was great that folks could read Storifys from a single event in one place.

Joe Webster, director of marketing, SmartBrief: Content marketing or native advertising. Brands will hatch newsrooms as an extension of their social media efforts. They’ll license content from sources like NewsCred and/or create their own. There is an opportunity for legacy media to spin out parts of their editorial muscle to for-profit content creation. It doesn’t just have to be Gawker. The next time Reuters, AP, the Tribune, etc. plan layoffs, they should instead look at using the staff to create content for agencies and brands.

Matt Waite, professor, University of Nebraska: Using mobile devices as both passive and active sensors, writing software for the realtime web, and citizen science + the Internet of Things.

Jonathan Stray, project lead, Overview Project: I’m fascinated by Quartz’ concept of obsessions not beats. I think Prismatic might just be the first truly good personalized news aggregator. And I am deeply concerned about the outdated and inconsistent law on personal data privacy, because I believe that data is our generation’s civil rights issue — we just don’t know it yet.

Tony Haile, CEO, Chartbeat: Two trends have been sticking out recently. One: The move from juicing pageviews to building audiences. Advertising in publishing is struggling — RTB platforms mean buyers can aggregate the demographics they want more cheaply elsewhere. Publishers are having to move from trying to increase commodity pageviews to building a loyal audience that they can monetise in a variety of ways (paywalls, events, etc.). The promise here is that, possibly for the first time, the goals on the business and on the editorial side could actually align behind common metrics they all believe in: creating quality to build loyalty.

Two: At Chartbeat, we’re constantly watching the evolving relationship between content, brands, and advertising. Everybody’s talking about content marketing/native advertising/bespoke content (I love the name bespoke content — “I get my content from Saville Row”), and while understandably a lot of journalists aren’t in love with the former, it’s a trend that is only going to grow. Without judgement, I’m interested to see how much the church-state separation becomes less hard and fast and what that means for our ethical shibboleths.

Easier interactive documentaries, building for social, and learning from MOOCs: Some of Spark Camp’s big ideas of 2012

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 09:31 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 Golis, director of digital media and senior editor at Frontline.

— David Karger, professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
— Cyndi Stivers, editor-in-chief, Columbia Journalism Review.

— David Gehring, news content partnerships manager at YouTube.

Andrew Golis

2012 was the year of the GIF and the ’gram.

But, as big as those two forces themselves seem at the moment, I think they’ll most likely be remembered in retrospect less for memorializing Joe Biden reacts and beautiful meals than for signifying the baby steps of a new, more visual web.

What started with lo-res, 2-second looping videos and framed, color-corrected photos won’t stop there. New tools and platforms will emerge that allow us to easily create even more complex forms of visual media. Tools that launched this year like Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker and Zeega suggest a future in which longer visual interactive stories will be possible without a team of developers building the tech that underlies each project. As we saw with blogging software’s effect on text-based media, as those barriers come down, the possibilities will go up exponentially.

Tie that trend to the explosion of tablets and the web’s inevitable invasion of the television and you have the simultaneous emergence of tools to create more complex visual experiences and devices that lend themselves to consuming them.

For the reasons outlined above, I’ll be watching closely to see how far along tools like Popcorn Maker and Zeega get.

Right now, building complex interactive experiences is expensive, and that cost creates a catch-22 for interactive storytellers: You don’t have the money to experiment enough to figure out how to make your interactive experiences work, and until they work, audiences won’t flock to them to make them worth the money you spend. (The National Film Board of Canada seems to be the one exception to this rule. A socialist paradise for interactive media is just to our north!)

New tools could break us out of that rut and enable enough experimentation that storytellers and audiences start to understand what’s possible and what works. We’ll see how good they get (in terms of production output and usability) and how fast they get there.

David Karger

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are widely believed to be revolutionizing education. But I think they also suggest some really interesting futures for journalism. In particular, I’m excited about the online discussion forums that accompany the MOOCs. These forums transform students from passive consumers of information into a community of inquiry who are actively engaged in asking questions and collaboratively working out answers. We need the same in journalism.

Too often, the forums hanging off news sites are troll-filled wastelands, where the best content one can hope for is a particularly well crafted putdown. In contrast, the MOOC forums exhibit high quality discussion where questions are asked, answers proposed and critiqued, and conclusions drawn in a style that supports and encourages other students. We’ve even seen the emergence of student leaders who are particularly adept at guiding others to find or construct needed information.

For most people who’ve finished school, journalism is probably the primary source of new information. What can we do to improve the news consumer’s “education”? Can the news “anchor” become the course “teacher”? With current events as the source material, what kind of MOOC in foreign affairs or government policy could be taught by a big-name journalist? Driven purely by interest in learning, thousands of MOOC students are doing “homework” to improve their knowledge, exercises that are graded by the computer and essays graded by peers in the class. What assignments could the journalist create to enhance a student’s understanding of a foreign country or a difficult budget or policy question? What would it be like if readers could submit peer-graded essay responses instead of grouchy complaints about biased media? Could this student-authored content actually start contributing to the news?

Journalism and education are siblings: if you’re informed but not educated, you have no context to interpret the information you’re getting; if you’re educated but not informed, you’re living in an ivory tower. In MOOCs I see the beginnings of a trend that might draw these two information-delivery mechanisms together in a powerful way.

Cyndi Stivers

I’m fascinated by evolving media business structures, and one that I haven’t seen widely discussed is The Conversation, an 18-month-old nonprofit Australian site that draws on the expertise of some 4,000 academics to present and analyze current news. It claims more than a half-million monthly users in Australia, and it’s anything but dry and professorial. According to a 2012 stakeholder report, 15 editors help spruce up the content, which is available for republishing under Creative Commons licenses. I’d say it lives up to Its tagline: “Academic rigour, journalistic flair.” I wonder whether this model could work in America — perhaps with advertising. The Oz demographics are certainly enviable.

I’m currently obsessed with how young people get their news — apparently on their phones, via social referrals from their friends. So how will they know what information to trust? And then how will content creation be funded? Probably not by advertising revenue: We’ve all heard how print dollars dwindled to digital dimes, and now, presumably, mobile pennies. With fewer legacy players cranking out good stuff to comment on, the social sphere will likely fragment even further. I’m also fascinated by the experiments in “subcompact publishing” (shorter/smaller editions such as Matter and The Magazine), new ways of assembling information into stories (Circa, Storify, et al.), and innovative filters and discovery mechanisms (Upworthy, Evening Edition, Jason Hirschhorn’s Media ReDEFined, Paper.li, etc.). They’re all basically editing, presenting good work at a much lower cost than previously possible. So how will the young’uns choose to find their way through the onslaught of chatter and data? That’s the future of media, seems to me.

David Gehring

I think the role social plays in the perpetuation of digital media gained some focus this year. I don’t mean the role social networks play per se: I mean the laser focus on creating content built to share seems to have come into more acute relief. And it makes sense to me. Media as “presentation” is best suited for traditional forms of content distribution. Media as “conversation” is something that leverages the innate qualities of the web. Generally speaking, people go to the web to engage with humanity. People sit on their couch to escape it for a while. Conversations are social. Presentations are individually consumable. The more digital media is actually a conversation, the greater the sharing potential and thereby the greater the audience. This distinction seems to have gained definition this year.

If I could note a second trend from this year, it would be the rise of socially curated, user-generated source video for news. Companies like Storyful are succeeding in developing robust methodologies for using social to discover content that matters faster than can be done with search. And then using those same global social networks to verify the content in a way required for authenticated news reporting. This powers the democratization of news while at the same time maintaining the journalistic integrity expected of the news institution. It got a kick start in 2011 with the Arab Spring; 2012 was about the scaling and institutionalization of that trend. We’ll look back and see the world changed this year as a result.

The traditional role of the journalist has been to give the population the information we need to be free and self-governing. I think the role of the journalist in a digital framework is to facilitate a conversation about the information we need to be free and self governing. I’m going to be on the look out for who does a killer job of that!

Is “post-industrial journalism” a U.S.-only phenomenon, or are the lessons worldwide?

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST

You may have already seen the new report from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present.” It’s written by my friend Chris Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky, and as you’d expect with that kind of lineup, it’s good. If you haven’t already, read it — or at least Nieman Lab’s summary of it.

The report lays out clearly some of the key things happening to American journalism today — the profession and the industry that has supported it is losing the relative coherence it had for much of the 20th century and being redistributed, diffused, and displaced away from the organizations that used to occupy the commanding heights of the news media system as new actors, practices, and platforms change the context.

There’s increased competition for people’s attention and their media spend, as well as for advertisers’ budgets, many audiences are fragmenting and only partially overlapping, reduced margins leads to cost-cutting as mid-sized, middle-brow, mass-oriented general news providers have a hard time competing with new digital giants, with specialist high-quality providers, and sometimes with smaller startups. Many of these trends are also trends I’ve discussed in my own work, including my most recent report “Ten Years that Shook the Media World.”

But the report focuses on the media ecosystem in the United States. Can it also help inform discussions about what’s happening to journalism outside of the U.S.?

The answer to that has to be: “Yes, but.”

America is truly exceptional, and observations made there and lessons learned there are not always immediately applicable elsewhere.

It is clear that some of the trends described by Anderson, Bell, and Shirky are also apparent elsewhere. But their main concern is with the peculiarly American ecology that can be broadly divided into big (declining) commercial news organizations and a multitude of much smaller (often struggling) nonprofit news organizations — plus PBS, NPR, and their various affiliates.

In this environment, even though the industrial model of for-profit journalism (supported by newspapers and broadcasters) is under immense structural pressure, a new undergrowth of specialized entities are experimenting with all sorts of other, mostly not institutionalized (and often exciting) forms of journalism.

Even within the world of similarly affluent Western democracies, the American situation is, however, exceptional. Most Western European countries, for example, never had the kind of overwhelmingly commercially-dominated news industry found in the U.S., and have not yet seen the kind of experimental undergrowth seen in the U.S.

First, public service broadcasting has represented a far larger part of the overall media ecosystem. While these organizations face many strategic challenges, their funding broadly seems relatively secure and they exhibit few tendencies towards post-industrial forms of production — they are still large, bureaucratic, integrated enterprises.

Second, especially in Southern Europe, large parts of the newspaper industry have never really been commercial — in the for-profit sense of publicly traded newspaper companies in the U.S. — but are instead owned by wealthy individuals, diversified business conglomerates, or well organized interest groups, who ran their papers less to make money than to exercise influence. And as long as their patrons (Dassault in the case of Le Figaro in France, Fiat in the case of La Stampa in Italy, etc.) can afford to foot the bill, these news organizations too can maintain their integrated model.

Third, with a number of notable exceptions, most Western European countries have yet to see the emergence of a whole ecology of innovative journalistic startups akin to what we’ve seen in the U.S. With smaller markets, less of a tradition of nonprofit work and foundation funding, and fewer journalists out of a job looking for new ways to practice their craft, many of the preconditions haven’t been there yet and the startups we have seen have often struggled to survive.

These cross-national differences are important to keep in mind as those of us outside the U.S. read the many interesting reports on the present and future of journalism that comes out of there: America is truly exceptional, and observations made there and lessons learned there are not always immediately applicable elsewhere. Analytical insights have to be tested in a comparative fashion, business models and journalistic innovations translated into practice in sometimes very different contexts.

For example, while commercial news media in Western Europe feel the pressures described by Anderson, Bell, and Shirky — and journalists and media of all kind face some of the ecological changes they describe — it’s worth keeping in mind there have always been at least two motives other than profit for paying journalists to do their job: public service and propaganda. And the accelerated decline of the private, for-profit model does not necessarily entail the collapse of the two other rationales for supporting institutionalized news production.

We see this in terms of the boomlet in the U.S. of nonprofit support for public service journalism, a phenomenon the report pays a lot of attention to. It may also underlie something that the report barely mentions — the resurgence of the political proprietor, in the form of Philip Anschutz, Douglas Manchester, and the new owners of the Philadelphia Media Network.

In terms of understanding these latter developments, perhaps Americans can learn as much from European experiences as we can learn from them in other respects.

Full disclosure: C.W. Anderson is a good friend and the authors of the report are kind enough to thank me in their acknowledgements. Oh, and I also got my doctorate in communications from the Columbia School of Journalism.
di