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Kamis, 28 Februari 2013
journalism - Google News: Dewi Persik Penuhi Panggilan Mabes Polri - Liputan6.com
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Nieman Journalism Lab
Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Nikki Usher: The IHT wasn’t just a brand or a history — it was an alternate editorial lens Posted: 27 Feb 2013 08:30 AM PST
The New York Times marked the end of an era Monday with its announcement that The International Herald Tribune would be losing its name. The newspaper will now be named The International New York Times. The masthead, seen on newsstands from Pakistan to Paris, will change too. This has been a long time coming if you’ve watched at the words and actions of the Times Company. In 2007, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. noted his flagship newspaper’s international presence:
But The International Herald Tribune is not the International New York Times in culture, practice or personality, nor do its journalists particularly want it to be. I can tell you this based on my time spent in 2010 gathering data from both the IHT’s Paris and Hong Kong bureaus. Then, IHT executive editor Alison Smale explained to me what she saw as the identity of the IHT’s European edition:
And then she laughed and noted that all New York thought Paris did was sit and have two-hour lunches over wine. Philip McClellan, the IHT’s deputy managing editor for Asia, saw his paper as the “hometown newspaper” for expats, or for people like himself who happened to be from everywhere. It was distinctly global in nature and not American-focused. In Paris, journalists would sit around a conference table trying to get a meager staff to cover stories that The New York Times foreign desk was likely to find insignificant: tales of movers and shakers in the British Parliament, protests in Italy, European privacy concerns on the web. As IHT journalist David Jolly put it: “We have a distinctly European point of view. We write things differently. We cater to a different audience.” McClellan noted that the IHT practiced a de-Americanizing of Times-generated content:
One wonders whether the end to the print branding of The International Herald Tribune will be a death knell to this distinct way of approaching news coverage. Already by 2009, The International Herald Tribune was being stripped of its identity, with its website IHT.com (once considered an innovator in news design online) redirected to global.nyt.com. The loss of this branding hit both Paris and Hong Kong in the gut. As one top editor noted:
Watching the IHT in operation, particularly from Paris, made it abundantly clear how the newspaper had gradually lost its autonomy to New York. The IHT staff was small, and Times foreign correspondents got first dibs on the big story. Editor Lauren Cabell compared it to a “staff at a college newspaper.” New York wouldn’t cater to issues IHT journalists thought their readers might want to read about. In fact, when I was there, the Paris operation had only recently been invited to Page One meetings (whose scheduled time had recently been changed, in part to accomodate the IHT) via teleconference. And all Smale could do to state her interest in a story she’d like to get finished in time for European IHT deadlines was simply pipe up over the teleconference that she was particularly interested in a story. Generally, there was little communication about whether this story would actually be ready on time, as it was often of secondary interest to The New York Times. Deadlines in Paris had gotten shorter and shorter due to New York dictates — creeping backwards from midnight to 9 p.m. That meant that, given the time difference with New York and the lack of original IHT content, that Paris journalists simply had to hope that Times writers were done with their copy in time for the print edition. IHT writers got extra kudos if their stories made the Times’ front page, with the working assumption that IHT stories were less significant (and less well written) than Times stories. Reporter Nicola Clark told me what a big deal it had been for her to be on the front page of The Times when the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajokull interrupted European air traffic in 2010. In New York, I would walk by or listen to editors who would snipe at the quality of IHT coverage; they might laugh at the layout of the newspaper, question the quality of quotes or the conception of a lede, or otherwise deride the produce as inferior material worthy of sticking into a slot on the web during the morning hours before better material came in — or on the inside of the print paper. Managing editor Tom Redburn was viewed as legitimate because he had previously been at the Times, so the Times’ business desk had an amicable working relationship. Working at the mothership — even for just a little bit — was viewed by International Herald Tribune employees as a sign that they were valued and noticed by the Times Company. (Redburn returned to New York last year.) The International Herald Tribune has been a brand for 40 years, but the idea of an expat paper written for the leisure/elite business class seems distinctly at odds with the hard-charging vision of The New York Times. Perhaps in a globalizing digital world, stopping to sip coffee and read an American newspaper in Paris is a luxury two centuries old. But the death of a brand is also a signal of a change in mission — with equally the potential for reinvention as well as the potential for loss. With the end of The International Herald Tribune, I can’t help but see the loss of a particular identity for journalists and readers abroad. Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Her dissertation research, which she is currently turning into a book, included ethnographic research at The New York Times. Still from Breathless (À bout de souffle) (1960), featuring New York Herald Tribune vendor Patricia (Jean Seberg) wandering the streets of Paris with Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo). |
| Posted: 27 Feb 2013 07:00 AM PST
Editor’s note: There’s a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist's Resource, that's who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they spend their time examining the new academic literature in media, social science, and other fields, summarizing the high points and giving you a point of entry. Roughly once a month, JR managing editor John Wihbey will sum up for us what’s new and fresh. The latest fruits of academia offer something for almost everyone interested in the digital media future — from newsroom coders to global Twitizens, from executives pondering paywalls to political junkies musing on the meaning of the Internet. Below is an à la carte menu of studies recently published online or in the hard copies of journals. “Innovation and the Future of Journalism”: Paper from Northwestern University in Qatar, published in Digital Journalism. By John V. Pavlik. For media organizations to remain viable over the long term, Pavlik suggests, they must link innovative practice and experimentation with core journalistic values. This paper touts model practices such as those variously pioneered by New York magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. But innovation implies a careful balance, namely “taking new approaches to media practices and forms while maintaining a commitment to quality and high ethical standards.” The author proposes four core principles to guide the future: (1) research intelligence, or gathering systematic data that can help measure impact and guide new design; (2) strong advocacy for freedom of speech, while reinforcing the public’s appreciation for the press; (3) adherence to truth and accuracy as core values in order to “maintain the trust of the public”; (4) a commitment to ethics. This research paper is distinctive for its emphasis on values and relationships with the public as inextricably tied to technical innovation: “Ethical decision-making insures the long-term viability of digital strategy, as well as promotes the social responsibility of that strategy.” “Major Memory for Microblogs”: Study from UC-San Diego, the University of Scranton, and the University of Warwick, published in Memory and Cognition. By Laura Mickes, Ryan S. Darby, Vivian Hwe, Daniel Bajic, Jill A. Warker, Christine R. Harris, and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld. The study explores how social media content is read and remembered. The researchers conducted three experiments to assess how well Facebook posts are remembered as compared to other types of information — particularly news such as CNN articles or entertainment stories — and the extent to which remembering is enhanced by a perceived social connection or post content. The researchers also compared reader comments and the content of news articles. The findings defy expectations that social media posts are ephemeral and fleeting; in fact, in many cases they are more memorable than professionally produced content. “Especially memorable Facebook posts and reader comments, generated by ordinary people,” the researchers write, “may be far closer than professionally crafted sentences to tapping into the basic language capacities of our minds…Some sentences — and, most likely, those without careful editing, polishing, and perfecting — are naturally more ‘mind-ready.’” The study proposes that the language of social-networking sites and microblogs has shifted contemporary expectations for writing from formal conventions toward increased spontaneity. “Who’s Reporting the Protests?”: Study from the London School of Economics and the BBC, published in Journalism Studies. By Maximillian T. Hänska-Ahy and Roxanna Shapour. The study documents how journalism recently changed before our eyes. Subtitled “Converging practices of citizen journalists and two BBC World Service newsrooms, from Iran’s election protests to the Arab uprisings,” it notes how journalistic norms shifted over a crucial 18-month period, between the 2009 Iran uprising and the 2011 Arab Spring. User-generated content played an increasingly bigger role in the news gathering process, with Iran serving as something of a “testing ground.” The authors interviewed many journalists with the BBC’s Persian and Arabic services, and they argue that these events were a “catalyst” in changing reportorial procedures: “While at the time of Iranians’ election protests, journalists felt some trepidation about having to use material and sources they would rather not, by the time of the Arab uprisings they had grown more familiar and comfortable doing so.” Further, citizens or lay journalists on the ground during these uprisings also became more fluent in the ways of the BBC, appearing to gain better knowledge of editorial process and journalistic practice and, for example, doing more to document dates, times, and locations. “Digital Media and Traditional Political Participation Over Time in the U.S.”: Study from UC-Santa Barbara, published in Information, Communication and Society. By Bruce Bimber and Lauren Copeland. The researchers note that digital media use has often been linked to increased political participation — voting, donating, participating in campaigns and much more — but that findings are inconsistent and the precise relationship remains unclear. The topic has already seen a vast amount of academic research. The new UC-Santa Barbara study analyzes a dozen years of American National Elections Survey data to establish a very broad sample, over multiple election cycles. It turns out that each election year has seen different dynamics: “We find that the set of relationships present in 2008 does not appear in any of the other years. In fact there is no pair of years in which the Internet measure predicts the same set of political acts. For example, in 2004, seeing political information online predicts persuading, attending an event, and voting…In 2000 it predicts only voting, in 1998 only donating, and in 1996 just attending an event.” The relationship seems to be growing stronger. The 2012 election was not part of the study’s field of analysis, and so it will be interesting to know if the trend continues. “Crisis Mapping Intelligence Information During the Libyan Civil War: An Exploratory Case Study”: Study from researchers at Georgetown and the State Department, published in Policy & Internet. By Steve Stottlemyre and Sonia Stottlemyre. This eye-opening paper (from authors who have U.S. government and intelligence affiliations) examines whether or not Twitter users in Libya effectively provided “tactical military intelligence” that proved crucial to Western intervention and helped enforce a no-fly zone. The answer seems to be “yes.” Following crisis-mapping models like those employed during disasters in Haiti, Chile, and Japan — using the open-source platform Ushahidi — the United Nations-backed Libya Crisis Map was set up but suffered from weak data, the authors explain. However, alongside this effort, networks of social media users went to work on their own maps: “Some Twitter users, along with many media outlets, collaborated to create what resembled finished intelligence products.” Certain Twitter handles provided highly useful and accurate maps that seemed geared to help with military targeting, and even included hashtags like #NATO or included @NATO handles in map-based tweets. Of course, the study’s authors hedge a little about the direct Twitter-bombing connection, but suggest a brave new world may have blossomed here: “There is no public information about the extent to which military commanders used information from crisis maps during the Libyan Civil War. Nevertheless, commanders had access to such information, and likely used intelligence products derived, at least in part, from information pulled from social networking websites.” “Front-paging Online Newspapers”: Paper from the University of Thessaly, published in First Monday. By Ioannis Koutsaftikis, Nikolaos Nanas, and Manolis Vavalis. Newsroom designers, here’s a paper for you: The researchers note that many media organizations still want front pages that are often unfriendly to readers’ needs, interests, and desires to explore. Instead, they want to design a platform for “creating the next generation of digital front pages for mass media that recognizes and utilizes the interests of readers.” To that end, the paper explores principles and models to help produce better, more “adaptive” pages. The researchers look at current practices at sites such as Flipboard, Paper.li, Reddit, and The New York Times and establish a spectrum running from static to dynamic, from customizable to collectively designed. The researchers ultimately endorse a more adaptive model that is embodied in an “electronic front page prototype, quite close to the philosophy and the presentation of a real newspaper front page with the additional benefits of Web 2.0.” Their paper even looks at specific coding practices and design layouts, displaying graphics and offering applicable JavaScript, CSS, and XML code for interested programmers. “Networked Gatekeeping and Networked Framing on #Egypt”: Study from the University of Illinois at Chicago, published in The International Journal of Press/Politics. By Sharon Meraz and Zizi Papacharissi. The researchers analyze some 1 million tweets published during the 2011 uprising in Egypt and examine the fluid dynamics of how certain citizens, activists and media members came to prominence and were elevated by the crowd. They look at the dynamics of networked “gatekeeping” and curation, and ultimately at how online dynamics helped frame these events around a particular narrative: “Our analysis revealed that online, #egypt was driven by several individuals, some activists, some journalists, and some nonelite media supporters who were crowdsourced to prominence through the pluralizing practices of retweeting, mentioning, and other addressivity markers. Prominent gatekeepers arose from elite and nonelite media institutions, with activist or journalistic agendas, or both, contributing to the labeling of this movement as a revolution….” The study suggests new norms are at work in communications and media: “The status of the elite is contingent on the crowdsourced actions of nonelites, suggesting a new symbiotic interrelationship between the influential and the ordinary in a manner that elevates the actions of nonelites as active participants in the realization of what is newsworthy.” “Online News Consumption”: Paper from the University of Texas at Austin, published in Digital Journalism. By Hsiang Iris Chyi and Angela M. Lee. The paper constructs some new theoretical models for trying to figure out the problem of when to charge for online content. Highly germane as metered paywalls are being weighed now by many media properties, the study analyzes data from a survey of more than 700 respondents. The magic formula for getting online news users to pay proves to be elusive, as different people are incentivized by different things: “As many as five factors (age, gender, news interest, preference, and online news use) have direct impacts on paying intent,” the researchers write. “Among these, age…and news interest…are the strongest predictors. This presents a dilemma — while younger people are more likely to pay for online news, they tend to have lower interest in news compared with other age groups.” They also produce counter-intuitive findings about print news, overturning long-held assumptions; the data suggest the “possibility that the long-lasting print business model is supported not by particular demographic groups, contrary to popular misconception, but by attitudinal factors such as format preference as well as news interest.” The researchers suggest all these research implications might be useful for both scholars and media professionals. “Beyond Participation: Designing for the Civic Web”: Paper from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, published in the Journal of Digital and Media Literacy. By Eric Gordon. The article, published in a new peer-reviewed journal supported backed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, explores ways civic organizations and government can foster digital experiences that help citizens learn about important issues, create content and stay engaged with one another. Organizations need to view the web as more than “just a portal to information and efficient transactions”; we now must imagine a broader “civic web” that is focused on more than paying parking tickets and giving feedback through established channels. The author lays out six new principles for communities to live, govern and code by: (1) tools solve problems; (2) audience matters; (3) networks are composed of people; (4) scale matters; (5) the civic web is on- and off-line; (6) design for distraction. The bottom line? Be skeptical of “flash functionality” and token new media gestures by government and organizations; digital tools should always serve a larger civic goal of engaging citizens. “America’s Global Standing According to Popular News Sites From Around the World”: Study from Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, published in Political Communication. By Elad Segev and Menahem Blondheim. In a globalized world in which so many countries are rising in their relative cultural and communications power, what kind of presence does the U.S. maintain in the news agenda of other countries? The answer: still quite a lot, unless you speak French or Arabic (in certain places). The researchers gathered data from 35 news sites across the globe — 10 different languages — over the period 2009-2010. The results suggest that the U.S. still gets three times the coverage of its nearest “competitor”: 18.6 percent of news items mention America; China comes in second at 5.5 percent. In France, though, the U.S. gets mentioned in only 4.3 percent of items and in Egypt it was only 6.4 percent during the period examined. Not surprisingly, the “size and power of a country are very strong predictors of its news prominence.” An exception again is Egypt, where news focused more on neighboring countries. The researchers note that America’s prominence is “surprisingly close to what previous studies found over the past generation,” and this has implications for the debate over purported U.S. “declinism.” “Communication About Health Disparities in the Mass Media”: Study from Cornell, Harvard, Indiana University, and the University of Minnesota, published in the Journal of Communication. By Jeff Niederdeppe, Cabral A. Bigman, Amy L. Gonzales, and Sarah E. Gollust. Relevant to the ongoing U.S. debate about health care, the study notes that Americans continue to have a low awareness of health disparities among many communities — minority, disadvantaged or otherwise. To the extent that the media covers such issues, outlets usually focus on African-Americans. The study explores the most effective framings and the strong potential of narrative stories. Though primarily a paper focused on communications theory and future research directions, it serves as strong reminder that the topic of inequality in matters of health remains undercovered and that the way journalists present these issues — how they present those suffering and attribute the root of the problem — matters in terms of public understanding. One takeaway is that there’s room for a lot more examination of how differences in sex, age, socioeconomic status, and geographic location are linked to health outcomes. Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license. |
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Rabu, 27 Februari 2013
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Nieman Journalism Lab
Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Breeding unicorns and building off others: Lessons from a meeting of j-schools and the field Posted: 26 Feb 2013 09:13 AM PST
Editor’s note: Earlier this month, the University of Florida hosted Journalism Interactive 2013, a two-day conference that brought together journalism educators and practitioners. The conference focused on four official themes — data, design, mobile, and participation — and aimed to foster conversation between teachers, researchers, and professionals working in digital media. Matt Sheehan, director of UF’s 21st Century News Lab and of the 2013 conference, shares some of his takeaways from this year’s session. Journalism schools need to rip up the curriculum every year. That was one big point of agreement among the attendees at the Journalism Interactive conference. There are a few very good summaries of the conference online; here are some of the highlights. Journalism is ‘creating job descriptions that Jesus himself would not qualify for’
We must redefine what we consider introductory journalism. Traditionally, we focus on mechanics and AP style as the first steps to a journalism education. Panelists called for more discussion of what journalism can do, rather than only how to do it through traditional story structure. Writing is still important, and a critical skill. UF professor Mike Foley, citing his half-hour lecture on commas, asked panelists where a lesson like that fits into a curriculum increasingly focused on digital skills. Medill’s Jeremy Gilbert fired back: “You don’t think a comma in code also matters?” Writing is not going away — if anything, it’s becoming even more important. But we should focus less on the historic frameworks of text (e.g. the inverted pyramid, how to write an obit) and more on news judgment, finding a lede, ethics, tracking information, and analysis — all important skills that journalists can apply across platforms and even to data projects. The time-intensive focus on specific software tools or types of code is not how we should teach journalism; Gilbert equated it to teaching about Watergate through an analysis of how the reporters used AP Style. Unfortunately, our credit-hour structure creates a zero-sum game — the question we constantly hear is “What do we take out to put all this in?” If we focus less on specific tools and more on the higher-level discussions and exploration of possibilities, we will produce students who are able to adapt and meet employers’ expectations. The expectation should be that we produce journalists not who can “do it all,” but who know how to find out how to do what’s needed at the time. Employers aren’t really looking for the candidate who can do it all, either. What they really want — although they may not realize it — is a candidate who is nimble, asks important questions, and can figure out how to tell the story in the best possible way. ‘Nobody builds anything from scratch anymore’One of the paradigm shifts (to which many academics and professionals are still adjusting) is fundamental: Everything Is a Remix. With the information and resources available online, there’s no need to recreate the wheel every time. Panelists called for educators to teach students how to browse the resources available — the “giant junkyards of code” like GitHub and other open-source repositories — to find frameworks, inspiration, or snippets for solutions. Remixing is nothing new. It’s an introductory step in art education to take the works of the masters and recreate — enabling the artist to reference that work in the new pieces he or she makes. Journalism should embrace this change. We’re not advocating plagiarism (which the digital age also makes much easier), but we need to teach how to link properly, give credit, curate, and create derivative works. Facebook didn’t create the social network. Apple didn’t create the smartphone. But each — and many other companies — has had great success building on existing work. Journalism — and journalism education — can do the same thing. Teaching yourself
One of the recurring themes in the discussions onstage and off was the need for colleges to become much more responsive to external forces. We should design our courses to be less rigid, perhaps even subscribing to the Lean Startup model of “build, measure, learn.” Or take a page out of programming project management and the agile development method. Anyone who has ever worked on curriculum in higher education knows the frustrations of the slow pace and red tape. We’ve all read the perspectives from outside academia, and the conversations at this conference centered on individuals serving as change agents — not institutions. Positively, it seems that some of those in the trenches are embracing more of a guerilla style of curriculum change.
Academics must embrace a “teach yourself” philosophy when designing courses, and be willing to embrace the fact they may not have all the answers. In the opening session, panelist Lisa Williams said we should stop expecting everyone to know everything and instead know how to find what they need, when they need it. Memorization of every line of code or tool is not required. There are resources available for educators and students, said Cindy Royal of Texas State University. Mentioning Codecademy and Lynda.com, Royal said we must be willing to let go of only teaching what we know and teach students how to teach themselves. Students must become comfortable with professors asking them to discover information themselves; we must avoid oversupplying what UNC’s Laura Ruel jokingly called the “let me Google that for you” service. Preaching to the choirJ/i’s mission is to build the type of common ground and camaraderie among the folks who are in the trenches of change and for those who don’t get to travel to every ONA, AEJMC, SPJ, or other journalism conference each year. (Many of us are on academic budgets, after all.) Admittedly, these types of confabs preach to the choir. We are, however, expanding the flock. To paraphrase UF’s Mindy McAdams, the best part of the conference was bringing together the “folks like me” and meeting the others out there who are facing the same struggles of leading the charge. J/i started in 2011 at the University of Maryland. In the summer of 2012, Maryland and the University of Florida entered an agreement to continue the conference and find a sustainable model for keeping the conversation going. An idea to form an informal consortium of journalism schools was born. Missouri and North Carolina signed on shortly before the 2013 conference opened. We plan to take advantage of the groundswell of support following our successful conference in Gainesville and move toward the planned third installment of Journalism Interactive in October 2014 in College Park. We hope to continue the discussions among leading journalism schools and expand the consortium. We firmly believe j-schools should be on the forefront of the sweeping changes in our industry and information culture. We, and our deans, are firmly committed to seeing that happen. Can we get an amen? |
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Selasa, 26 Februari 2013
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Nieman Journalism Lab
Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Second screen first: Oscar night lets The New York Times explore being a live-event companion
- Hiding in public: How the National Archives wants to open up its data to Americans
- A proposed Florida law targets mugshot sites, but hits journalists’ First Amendment rights
| Second screen first: Oscar night lets The New York Times explore being a live-event companion Posted: 25 Feb 2013 02:43 PM PST
For New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, the thought of enduring this year’s Oscars — and host Seth MacFarlane in particular — alone at home on the couch was not a happy one. “I’d be in a state of metaphysical despair,” he said. Lucky for him, he spent the night instead working alongside his buddy, Times columnist and media reporter David Carr, as the two provided live play-by-play and running commentary of Oscar night, on the paper’s website and across its other digital platforms. Depending on your point of reference, the night was very Statler and Waldorf or, as Scott says, “A Mystery Science Theater 3000 type of thing.” It also represents the next step for the Times as it expands its coverage of live events and tries new approaches to second-screen viewing. On NYTimes.com, the video was only one component of a lively Oscars page that included live discussion with Times reporters and critics, photography, social media, and an interactive Oscar ballot. “What you can’t say is — don’t say ‘sideboobs.’ ‘Sideboob’ is — that’s verboten.” The classic second-screen scenario involves sitting on the couch with a smartphone or tablet, and the Times’ Oscar efforts shined in its app for iPhone and iPad, where you could literally have Scott & Carr in the palm of your hand while you watched a snappy show tune about, well, boobs — you watching the show tune, Scott & Carr watching the show tune, you watching Scott & Carr, Scott & Carr reading your tweets. “It was built as a mobile experience from jump, and that was the whole idea,” Carr told me Monday. That appears to be where people spent most of their time Oscar night. More than half the traffic to the Oscars dashboard came from mobile, Fiona Spruill, the Times emerging platforms editor, said. The Times — a huge national and international news brand — lines up naturally with the huge live events that can assemble a big audience — a presidential debate, an election night, a Super Bowl. Each of those shared experiences generates shared conversations, and the Times wants to be in them. That means adding to the discussion through content, but it also means creating a platform — serving as a host. A show like the Oscars — which can be unpredictable in production, if not always in the outcome of the winners — is a natural opportunity. “It’s a strange phenomenon,” Scott said. “It’s one of these broadcasts that millions and millions of people tune into, but a lot of people don’t especially like.” The goal, more or less, is to create the atmosphere of an Oscar party at your friend’s house, Carr said. The second-screen approach has moved beyond novelty to something media companies have to have a plan for, Carr said. The combination of video, live blogs, and Twitter, is a way of annotating any event and creating new value for people, Carr said. “This is Seth MacFarlane. And this is my spoken word performance of Seth MacFarlane.” Regular Times readers may be accustomed to the sight of Carr and Scott at a shared desk in the Times newsroom (and their brand of chemistry) thanks to The Sweet Spot, the video series launched last year hosted by the duo. The Oscars livecast expanded on the format, as the two dissected everything from offensive jokes to the merits of the orchestra “playing someone off,” along with contributions from Times writers on speakerphone breaking down things like red carpet fashion. Like many things the Times does, the Oscars production was a big undertaking, involving video producers, editors, photographers and reporters on both coasts. But while they prepped a few talking points and conversation topics, Carr described the night as “incredibly seat of the pants,” and it showed in the loose, conversational tone. Think of all the careful craftsmanship that goes into honing the lede of a major front-page Times story, all the tight editing, the measuring of each word — and then forget all about it. There were props, like a remote control helicopter to symbolize “Zero Dark Thirty” and beards and top hats for “Lincoln,” (obviously) — all live from the Times newsroom, with the evening shift’s editors wandering around within camera view. For a guy who has lived primarily in print and segued to video, Carr said he was a little anxious about wearing fake beards and working without a net. “I was determined to get through the night without cussing,” Carr said. “Oh, wow — it rubbed out his soul.” Video and mobile are very much front of mind to the Times at the moment — two of Arthur Sulzberger’s stated areas of emphasis. Last year new features in to the iPhone and iPad offerings to allow in-app video. They also increased the production of video shows as well as live events. That trend should continue as Rebecca Howard, formerly of Huffington Post Media Group, joined the Times as general manager of video production and as former Times assistant managing editor Rick Berke was named director of video content development. And of course the Times Company’s new CEO, Mark Thompson, comes with an extensive background in video thanks to his time at the BBC. The Times was preparing for Oscar night long before award season started: Julie Bloom, culture web editor for the Times, said they applied lessons, and templates, from previous events like the 2012 Summer Olympics and the election to the Oscars dashboard. But there were many moving parts, Bloom said, involving various departments at the Times, from reporters to video producers, photographers, and developers working on things like the Red Carpet Project. While the Times takes its Oscars coverage seriously, the night itself makes for a good technology test run for events of more consequence. “That’s the nice thing about the Oscars too: It’s fairly low stakes,” Bloom said. “We feel this is a place we can experiment a little bit.” Brian Hamman, deputy editor of the Times interactive news team, said they purposefully made the Oscars site responsive so that it would be accessible on any platform, including mobile. The Oscars site opens up in a web wrapper in the Times iOS apps, but it was also available through mobile browsers. Hamman said they knew a good chunk of their audience would be on smartphones and tablets, so they built the entire Oscars experience from that perspective and scaled it up. The goal, Hamman said, was to make the user experience so good that people no longer think of it as the second screen: “It’s almost a first-screen experience,” he said. “Ben Affleck and I went to the same summer camp.” This is the Times’ third go-round for live Oscars coverage online. The first attempt was basic counter-programming — think Puppy Bowl — a webcast that only went live during commercial breaks. Last year, they produced a webcast in front of a live audience at the Paley Center, an outing that Carr called “something of a disaster.” Being funny in front of a room of people is a different beast than sitting in front of a camera talking to the Internet, he said. Of course, the difficulty of being funny in front of others proved to be one of the biggest topics of conversation Sunday. (Not everyone thought the Times’ show succeeded on that count.) The Oscar broadcast itself provided the usual Hollywood brand of puff and circumstance; Scott said the night “ran the gamut from offensiveness to tedium.” But Oscar’s stumbles (figuratively and literally, in Jennifer Lawrence’s case) are the kind of fuel the Internet feeds on. That’s something that may outlast the shelf life of Sunday’s Oscars: “They almost seem to be engineered to be unmemorable,” Scott said. |
| Hiding in public: How the National Archives wants to open up its data to Americans Posted: 25 Feb 2013 09:11 AM PST
“Hostage” might be a strong word for a organization responsible for 4.5 million cubic feet of physical documents and more than 500 terabytes of data, most which can be accessed online or by walking into one of their facilities around the country. But the challenge, Mayer explains, is making NARA’s vast stockpile more open and more discoverable. “They’re held hostage in a number of centers around the country — they’re held hostage by format,” Mayer said. Mayer and other officials from the National Archives visited MIT recently to talk about how the agency is trying to increase access to records and deal with the challenges, and legal complications, of electronic documents. The archive is responsible for records from executive branch agencies, courts, Congress, and presidents. It preserves only 5 percent of the federal government’s records, and there’s a 15-year lag before records are available. But an estimated 30,000 linear feet of new records come in from agencies annually. A visual summary of the National Archives’ MIT presentation by Willow Brugh (CC). In order to deal with all of that the archive has to be smarter, quicker, and more technologically savvy in the way it catalogs the nation’s paper trail. In a way, the biggest obstacle the archive faces is itself. “The issue at hand is setting free these records,” Mayer said. “At the heart of what the archive is about is promoting access.” That’s one of the reasons the archives created an office of innovation last fall. After experimenting around the edges for several years, it was time to put more energy behind finding new ways to surface interesting material and involve the public in the record-keeping process, said Pamela Wright, the archive’s first chief innovation officer. What started with a small project making archive photos available on Flickr has now expanded into more than 135 projects running on outside platforms, like the Today’s Document Tumblr. The archive works with companies like Ancestry.com, which helps digitize records in exchange for a brief window of exclusive access to the data. They also have a deep partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation. The National Archives has a Wikipedian in Residence who helps coordinate an open transcription project that lets the public transcribe physical documents online through a simple interface. Another project, the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, asks the public to help tag photos and other imagery, as well as contribute edits to a research wiki. It’s a focused approach to crowdsourcing, not unlike the open scientific surveys of the ocean floor or deep space. The archive’s partnering and outreach is getting results, with an increase in visits to its website, more than 100,000 images in Wikimedia Commons, and almost 100,000 followers on Tumblr. But the goal of the National Archive’s strategy isn’t to chase social media metrics, Wright said: By working with partners and increasing their reach through social media, the archive is fulfilling its mission to make their collections available to the public. “It goes directly to the mission of our agency: You can get at participatory democracy in new ways,” she said. “You are helping your government provide access to the records of the people.” As more federal records become available in electronic form, that creates a new set of complications for the archive. One, Mayer said, is that even through the archive can get records more quickly, the custody of those records remains with the home agency. So even if that fisheries database you made a FOIA request for is technically at the National Archives, it may still belong to the Department of the Interior for several more years. Another challenge — one that will come as no surprise to data journalists — is dealing with messy or incomplete federal data. The archive has to work around proprietary or outdated file formats just as newsrooms do, Mayer said. “This is actually the scary monster in the room in terms of format obsolescence,” he said. “We can maintain access to things that are currently available. But in the future? Who knows?” One solution: Work with outsiders. “We’re looking now at how do we work with the developer community,” Wright said, “working with people who want to do things with electronic datasets we can make available now.” Wright said they want to follow in the footsteps of agencies like NASA that have held hack days and other events for coders. Finding life for the data beyond spreadsheets and XML files would be another way to accomplish their mission of openness and access, Wright said. Photo of John F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Kennedy from the National Archives’ Flickr account. |
| A proposed Florida law targets mugshot sites, but hits journalists’ First Amendment rights Posted: 25 Feb 2013 07:53 AM PST
Editor’s note: We’ve talked before about the rise of (and backlash against) mugshot sites — those skeezy sites that get mugshots through public records, post them online for Google to find, and then take payments from the arrested to take them down. In court and in legislatures, efforts are afoot to go after these sites — but legitimate news organizations are threatened by overly broad approaches.
A new bill proposed by Florida legislator Carl Zimmermann seeks to end “mugshot websites,” a relatively new industry that exploits the marriage of the Internet and open records laws in order to make a profit. (See our prior posts on mugshot websites here, here, and here.) But while ending these sites may be a morally laudable goal, the proposed law is blatantly unconstitutional. Not only would it infringe upon the protected speech of these mugshot websites, it would also stifle a substantial amount of socially beneficial online speech, specifically crime reporting from legitimate news sources. The proposed law, House Bill 677, would require “the operator of a website that contains the name and personal information, including any photograph or digital image,” of a person charged with a crime, within 15 days of receiving written notification that the person has been “acquitted or the charges are dropped or otherwise resolved without a conviction,” to remove the person’s name and personal information. Failure to comply would lead to a fine and, after 45 days, create “a presumption of defamation of character.” Under HB 677, a website operator may not ask for payment to remove content, but the bill would penalize websites regardless of whether they charged a fee — it targets content, not commercialization. Mugshot websites — websites that obtain mug shots through freedom of information act requests (including mug shots of people who were never charged), post them online, and remove them only upon payment — have been offending American sensibilities since at least 2011. Unlike many organizations that file FOIA requests and provide the open records to the public, mugshot websites do not seek to provide a public service. Instead, these sites exploit laws created to protect open government and free speech for the same reason they exploit people trying to get their mugshots removed — to make a profit. Even staunch free speech advocates recognize that these mugshot companies are, at the very least, distasteful. But, of course, the First Amendment does not allow the government to regulate content simply because it is distasteful. In United States v. Stevens, the Supreme Court rejected “a free-floating test for First Amendment coverage based on…balancing of relative social costs and benefits.” Courts have explained that society has to put up with thoughtless, insulting, and outrageous speech in order to “provide adequate breathing room for valuable, robust speech — the kind that enriches the marketplace of ideas, promotes self-government, and contributes to self-determination” (J.S. ex rel. Snyder v. Blue Mountain Sch. Dist., 2012). Mugshot websites’ smarmy speech sits comfortably in the “breathing room” required by the Constitution. Even accepting the premise that Florida has a real, compelling interest in regulating mugshot websites, HB 677 cannot survive strict scrutiny as outlined in Stevens because it is not “narrowly tailored.” Government action to “punish the publication of truthful information seldom can satisfy constitutional standards” (Smith v. Daily Mail Pub. Co., 1979). And here, “where the government has made [mugshots] publicly available,” it would be “highly anomalous” to sanction a subsequent publisher (The Florida Star v. B.J.F., 1989). Indeed, when the government is the original publisher, “a less drastic means than punishing truthful publication almost always exists” (Florida Star). Additionally, HB 677′s “presumption of defamation” would unconstitutionally shift the burdens of proof on issues of falsity and fault which the Supreme Court outlined in cases such as Philadelphia Newspapers v. Hepps and Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. The First Amendment does not prevent the government from punishing defamation, but it does require the party alleging defamation to provide evidence that a statement is not true. In Hepps, the Court held that it is “a constitutional requirement that the plaintiff bear the burden of showing falsity.” As the Court explained in Gertz, allowing publishers “to avoid liability only by proving the truth of all injurious statements [would] not accord adequate protection to First Amendment liberties.” While mugshots could arguably constitute defamation if they are used to convey the false impression that someone who had merely been arrested had actually been convicted, the plaintiff must bear the burden of proving that defamation. In other words, there can be no “presumption of defamation” under the Constitution. The bill is also unconstitutionally overbroad — and particularly disturbing — because of the large amount of productive speech it would penalize. Journalists are currently working to maintain their right to keep content online in the face of ever more common requests to “unpublish,” or remove content. HB 677 would eliminate that right. As operators of websites containing “the name and personal information, including any photograph or digital image,” of numerous people charged with crimes, news sources would be forced to remove content any time a subject was “acquitted or the charges…dropped or otherwise resolved without a conviction.” The bill also appears to apply to legal databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis, which store records of arrests and legal proceedings. Under the plain language of the statute, news providers would be subject to fines for every day they left stories on prominent criminal prosecutions on their websites. For example, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Miami Herald would all be penalized if they refused to take down stories documenting the Casey Anthony trial. After all, she was acquitted.  The text of the proposed bill. In recent years, news organizations that publish content online have received more and more unpublishing requests. As people realize that their youthful transgressions, embarrassing public circumstances, and unpopular stances, once recorded, are “Googleable” forever, there is mounting public pressure for journalists to remove content or alter it to protect subjects’ identities. In fact, similar concerns about the permanency of online data prompted the European Union to create a “right to be forgotten” last year. Journalists in the United States, however, rarely comply with unpublishing requests, because they conflict with journalistic values of accuracy, accountability, and transparency. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have policies establishing that they generally do not unpublish accurate articles. As Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star, has written, “to simply remove published content from the archive diminishes transparency and trust with…readers and, in effect, erases history. This is not a practice engaged in by credible news organizations or in line with ethical journalism.” This is, she states, “an issue of integrity and credibility and reflects [journalists'] sense of responsibility to [their] readers, [their] community, and the historical record.” Kelly McBride from Poynter has also stated that unpublishing should occur “only in extreme cases,” because unpublishing has “a destabilizing effect on the audience, which will place less trust in other information that you publish. If stuff just disappears, without a thorough explanation, people get very suspicious. So ultimately it’s bad for democracy and citizen participation in the marketplace of ideas.” However, journalists have acknowledged that tough cases arise. For instance, many community papers publish police blotters and do not routinely follow-up on acquittals or dropped charges. This troubles many journalists, especially when subjects were minors at the time of arrest. Journalists have handled these situations in different ways. For example, many sites will update original articles to note that the person was never charged. According to a report by English (see p. 5), GateHouse Media at one point considered instituting a “sunset” policy pilot project under which the company would remove police blotter reports from the organization’s online archives six months after publication; the company’s current ethics guide on covering crime does not mention this policy, but prohibits posting police blotters online and states:
Regardless of the way journalists choose to address these often difficult situations, this is a question of journalistic ethics. It is not an appropriate place for government intervention. As the Supreme Court held in Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo, a “responsible press is an undoubtedly desirable goal, but press responsibility is not mandated by the Constitution and like many other virtues it cannot be legislated.” While some speakers may capitalize on open government and free speech laws, those laws preserve all citizens’ rights to speak freely and access accurate information about the world around them. If mugshot websites are so egregious that they truly demand state intervention — which seems unlikely — the state must tread carefully in finding ways to regulate them. Instead, HB 677 would casually stamp out a substantial amount of reporting and require journalists to alter the historical record. Jillian Stonecipher is a student at Harvard Law School and an intern at the Digital Media Law Project. She served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Texan at the University of Texas from 2009-2010. |
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