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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