Kamis, 20 Desember 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The return of sentiment

Posted: 19 Dec 2012 10:06 AM PST

Change is gradual. We see more of certain trends and less of other tendencies over time, punctuated by bursts of innovation. It is these latter bursts that we interpret as change, even though they are not. They present reactions to the long durée of change. For this reason, I checked my crystal ball at the door when I entered academia — I don’t believe in and am not interested in predicting the future. I would rather be surprised.

That disclaimer made, here is what I would like to be surprised by in 2013: The return of sentiment to news reporting, co-creating, curating. Not sentimental news, but news made better, through (yes, algorithmically generated propagation, but not redaction of) sentiment, that drives, directs, informs, and pluralizes news processes and values. Journalists have always struggled with sentiment in reporting, trying to either manage their own emotions against the objectivity dogma of Western journalism or to find meaningful ways to integrate emotion into a story in general.

This is because the balance between emotion and news is delicate. The most masterful journalists, in their most memorable reporting, attain this perfect balance between emotion and information, color and news, the affective and the cognitive. By contrast, the form of news reporting least memorable is frequently characterized by excessive emotion, and the misinformation that excess produces.

Journalists have a rare opportunity to use social media to resolve a longstanding conflict regarding the meaning of emotion in journalism, and to resolve it in ways that evolve beyond subjectivity/objectivity binaries. There is not one recipe that fits all. Different contexts call for different approaches. But, a true balance between sentiment and news can be rendered through social media, and can drive toward avant journalism(s) — that is, hybrid journalism(s) of liminality, pluralization, and disruption.

Zizi Papacharissi is professor and head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and editor of Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.

The broadcast-ification of social media

Posted: 19 Dec 2012 09:13 AM PST

There is an inherent tension in social software between content discovery and the quality of conversation around that content. Group conversations get worse as groups grow, and groups grow as group discovery improves — if it’s easier to find something, more people will find it. Therefore, the easier time I have finding good conversations, the less likely those conversations are to be any good (e.g. Reddit’s front page vs. subreddits). Paradoxes should be named, so let me know if you have any good ideas.

Let’s look at Twitter through this lens. Twitter began as a space for conversation — a messaging platform. It exhibited characteristics of a “many-to-many” network. Anyone could publish, anyone could follow anyone else, and “discovery” in this context meant discovering people to follow, not content to consume.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen Twitter evolve its focus towards the discovery of content — hiding @mentions from user streams, the #NASCAR page, the Summify acquisition, the new Twitter email, the Discover tab. Today, it looks more like a broadcast medium than a distributed social network. Large groups of users (consumers, really) follow a small number of very large brands. Some of those brands are people (Bieber) and some of those brands are publishers (@cnnbrk). Lots of talking, very little listening.

Why is it in Twitter’s interest to focus their users around a relatively small number of mega-publishers?

First, Twitter needs to reach late adopters with a product that late adopters can understand. It’s much easier to bring people onboard to “a real-time feed of news links from publishers and celebrities that you’ve heard of” than it is to explain “a distributed messaging platform where you follow friends, some people you don’t know, some celebrities, and some brands…where you make lunch plans, share what you had for breakfast, and post your favorite links of the day…where sometimes it’s a chat room and sometimes it’s the nightly news.” Try explaining Twitter to your parents and see what works better. On a unique active user basis, evolving into a more traditional broadcast medium will be a boon for Twitter.

Second, brands (you know, the $$$) don’t know how to join small group conversations. They do, however, know how to shout at large groups of passive media consumers. If Twitter looks more like a broadcast product, then brands will have an easier time fitting Twitter ads into their campaigns (and budgets).

As with any piece of social software, as Twitter evolves from a space for conversation into a space for discovery — prioritizing features that support a one-to-many model at the expense of the many-to-many model — we will see its value as a conversational platform erode.

For lack of a better term, you might call this the “broadcast-ification” of the major social media platforms. I’m picking on Twitter, but it’s happening in different ways across the industry — see LinkedIn Today or Facebook’s asymmetric “Subscribe” feature. These platforms are all evolving towards a more traditional broadcast media model, because it’s more palatable to late adopters and because that’s the environment in which brands know how to communicate and, more importantly, spend.

So 2013 will bring two things: more ad revenue for the major social media platforms, and a massive opportunity for upstarts like Branch, Reddit, Digg (hopefully), and a company or two that doesn’t exist yet, to create spaces where small groups can engage in high quality conversations.

Jake Levine is general manager of Digg. Before that, he was general manager of News.me.

From real time to slow social

Posted: 19 Dec 2012 08:25 AM PST

My prediction for 2013 is really more of a wish — for a slow movement in social media.

Over the past two years, newsrooms have finally begun to “get” social media. Reporters are live-tweeting weather events, city council meetings, and combat coverage. Social media producers are sprouting in newsrooms large and small to curate events happening down the block and around the world.

We turn to social media during news events for immediate updates and eyewitness accounts, constantly refreshing and trolling for every possible bit of news and commentary. There isn’t a major event (earthquake, election, bin Laden raid) that we can’t visualize through social trends.

But in our fixation on immediacy, we’re missing opportunities to tell a larger story through social means. At times, we’re even perpetrating rumor for the sake of “real-time” coverage (see: Newtown shootings social media disaster). In both cases, we’re letting readers down.

In 2013, we are going to see more of a backlash against real-time rumor-mongering and a move to mine social channels for more substantive narratives. We’re already seeing glimmers of this approach:

The New York Times maintains a catalogue of eyewitness video from Syria dating back to August. “Watching Syria’s War” goes beyond of-the-moment curation to provide context around raw video and images found from Aleppo to Damascus. The Times provides context for each YouTube clip — what is known, and more importantly what isn’t. It fosters connections between readers and reporters in hopes of advancing the story:

The beta site Syria Deeply offers another approach to contextualizing citizen video, surfacing trends but mapping them in the context of refugee and fatality counts.

Both of these examples go beyond perfunctory retweeting and social streaming to paint a bigger picture where context is king. I challenge news organizations to think about how a “slow” social media movement could better serve our journalism and our readers in 2013.

Amanda Zamora is senior engagement editor at ProPublica. Previously, she was national digital editor at The Washington Post.

When live interactive video gets boring

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 10:40 PM PST

2012 was a big year for live video interaction — we got to broadcast our hangouts to the world (thanks Google!) and HuffPost Live debuted. Both have done a brilliant job of showing the potential of video interaction, but uptake among news organizations is mixed and the ease of use still needs to be perfected.

My prediction is that 2013 will be the year that live video interaction with the news becomes de rigeur. By the end of 2013, if you’re a news website that isn’t offering users the chance to watch live video debates and interact in realtime, you’ll be missing out. Readers don’t want to, well, read a debate, or bother typing when they can simply face their webcam or iPhone and go. They’ll want to interact live, face-to-face with each other, and with newsmakers.

Chatroulette is so 2009 — video conversations and debates have grown up, and they’re about to become smarter, more informative, and more selective. Unlike 24-hour news networks who are forced to broadcast live around the clock, online news organizations have the luxury of picking their moments (look to The New York Times’ election night coverage). Over the past year at The Globe and Mail, we’ve had everyone from top politicians to genetic experts participate in live reader Q&As and debates. There are plenty of problems with the technology, but it’s incredible how far it’s come in a short time. It won’t be long now before any foreign correspondent can report live breaking news and interact with readers in realtime.

News organizations have always struggled with how to offer readers meaningful ways to become more than readers — to become part of the live debate, to contribute, to connect. 2013 is going to be a watershed year for turning readers into something much more.

Jennifer MacMillan is communities editor at The Globe and Mail.

More code, more love, and more flavor

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 10:40 PM PST

At a conference last year, I said that prognostication is a mug’s game, and I suspect it’s probably true. I’m going to try to limit my damage by sticking to two things that have blossomed in the last year and look likely to continue, and one that I hope in my optimist’s heart to be true.

1. Data journalism & newsroom code: more + smarter

2012 brought us dozens of news-org-sponsored hack days, the launch of The Data Journalism Handbook, and the arrival of the second year of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellows, who will be bringing their hacker-journalist skills to newsrooms in 2013. Maybe even more importantly, we saw “news apps” teams flourish all over the world: Their investigative journalism and coverage of emergencies and disasters, civic data releases, the 2012 Olympics, and the U.S. elections won richly deserved attention. As the tools of news code get stronger and the community itself gets more chances to show its work and learn from one other, we can expect to see more projects, more efficient approaches, and less overlap between newsrooms, as designers and developers seek to differentiate their teams by making tools and features that offer new insights and richer contexts for news.

The emergence of data journalism and journalistic code is exciting to me not only because it’s a relief to see aggressive hiring anywhere in journalism, but because this work enables active reading, in the sense Bret Victor illustrates on worrydream. When journalists produce narratives with useful interactive components and explorable data sets, readers get the chance to handle, sort, and manipulate information, instead of reading only a single interpretation. Point-of-view is embedded in data journalism and interactive news apps as much as it is in “traditional” reporting, but multiplicity and polyphony are harder to exclude when you offer full access to data and let readers play with math and scenarios themselves. In projects like ProPublica’s reader-sourced investigations, news “consumers” get even closer to the process of parsing and interpreting data.

The mainstreaming of this work allows journalists to tell stories that don’t fit neatly into a traditional narrative frame, and to tell other stories more effectively. The tools of journalism are broadened and deepened.

2. More love for readers

After years of getting more and more comically horrible, the experience of reading news made enormous progress this year, and I expect to see it improve even more next year. Tablet and smartphone usage has spiked and the sleek design of read-later tools has helped push more news organizations toward visual choices that help mobile and desktop readers alike: responsive design, bigger type, more generous leading, and above all, much less clutter. But to call this a move toward “app-like” design, or to assume that it stops with better layout and typography misses the point: On the web, a good reading experience accomodates active readers, and that’s just as true in apps.

Quieter reading experiences are necessary for immersive reading, but to end there is to give up our burgeoning ability to read together. Real “sharing” isn’t about a row of buttons. It’s about giving active readers the handles they need to use information in the way that makes the most sense to them — via Twitter or Facebook, in emailed links or chunks of copied text, or in info-storing tools like Evernote, Findings, or Kippt. These behaviors require certain affordances whether you’re on the web or in a native app: live text you can copy and paste, unobscured direct links to content, and thoughtful handling of paywall permeability. A shift to slow-downloading, image-based native apps that exercise strict control over sharing is the opposite of good reader experience. In 2013, we’ll see more and more smart news organizations foreground a respect for their readers, and demonstrate it by offering kind interfaces and paid access schemes that don’t break the web. (Sadly, we’re also going to see some organizations continue to go the other way, and continue to lose readers to competitors who offer a better experience.)

3. Distillation

Beyond these tightly bounded areas, there is a larger question about the shape of journalism for which I hope 2013 brings interesting answers. In cooking, over-boiling produces bland, textureless food — but a careful simmer concentrates flavor. As the pressures of crashing ad revenues and changing reader habits force news organizations to adapt — and often, to shrink — it’s my hope that our journalistic institutions will manage to distill and protect their animating principles, and that they’ll emerge from the ongoing transformation changed, but more potent.

Oh, and GIFs.

No, I’m serious. More GIFs. Count on it.

Erin Kissane is editor of Contents Magazine and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews’ Source. She previously edited A List Apart and works as a content strategist.

The rise of the robot

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 10:40 PM PST

It is one of the great truisms of our time that we live in an age of technological acceleration; the new paradigms keep rolling in, and the intervals between them keep shortening. This acceleration reflects not only the flood of new products, but also our growing willingness to embrace these strange new devices, and put them to use…It took ten years for color TV to go from the fringes to the mainstream; two generations later, it took HDTV just as long to achieve mass succeed.

In fact, if you look at the entirety of the twentieth century, the most important developments in mass, one-to-many communications clock in at the same social innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From:

The Natural History of Innovation, 2010

As I gaze in the coming year’s crystal ball, I suspect that, at this time next year, we will be talking about 2013 being the rise of the robot.

A colleague of mine, Larry Birnbaum, likes to talk about how artificial intelligence has witnessed significant breakthrough in the past couple of years and that its tools are coming into maturity. In 2011, a computer won “Jeopardy” and Google gave us the driverless car, and this year, we began to see significant adoption of Apple’s virtual personal assistant service. Siri’s founder, Dag Kittlaus, made the rounds this year talking about how technology is good enough when its accuracy is around 90–95% — the tipping point from cool and experimental to utility. He has high hopes for the coming year in artificial intelligence development.

If I get my wish, 2013 will produce the ultimate to-do/productivity app that not only tracks my tasks for me, but also completes some of them. It would be the smartest task-tracker robot ever, because it would know which tasks it could (and could not) complete, and it would just do the work for me.

If journalism gets its wish, 2013 will bring tons and tons of robots to the future of news — and I think it just might happen.

Perhaps we will develop and start to see significant adoption of computer systems that do the mundane reporting and writing work for us, like Ben Welsh’s idea of human-assisted reporting. The dream of the ultimate “reporters’ dashboard,” complete with smart notes, data management, analysis and notifications, doesn’t seem all that far off.

Perhaps we will build more, better, stronger robots that write some of our stories for us. In fact, friends of Knight Lab — Narrative Science — have made significant strides in automated story generation since 2010. Each year, there seem to be more and more startups and projects in the market of automating stories through datasets.

Perhaps we will build systems that learn our user’s social media behavior, providing us with more significant understanding of our audience’s desire for news. Perhaps we’ll learn more about how our readers perceive us, based upon the specific words we write. Perhaps we’ll get machine-learning design and publishing systems.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

In whatever form they take, it’s darned exciting to think that we are not far off from having armies of robots all around us that collectively make it easier to be a journalist.

While automating journalism in order to save money is not terribly inspirational to me — and I am not the type who gets excited over the novelty of the technology (automating for the sake of automating) — I do think 2013 is primed for tools that make reporting and information gathering easier, removing obstacles to significant journalism work. Computers will never replace journalists, but they sure can make it easier to do our jobs.

Miranda Mulligan is executive director of the Knight Lab at Northwestern University.
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