Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Habemus opinionem: The New York Times experiments with more structured online comments
- In Mexico, tweeting about the drug war to fill the void of traditional media
- This Week in Review: The lessons of Google Reader’s death, and the free labor of news sources
- The Boston Phoenix closing is another sign that glossing up print doesn’t work miracles
| Habemus opinionem: The New York Times experiments with more structured online comments Posted: 15 Mar 2013 10:17 AM PDT
New pope, new approach to online comments for The New York Times. On Wednesday afternoon, as Catholics celebrated the white smoke, the Times rolled out an experimental approach designed to enhance discussion by adding structured data. Times readers who went to the paper’s story on the election of Pope Francis were asked them to define themselves three ways: Were they happy with the decision or not? Were they surprised by the choice or not? And are they Catholic or not? (They were not asked to declare alignment as lawful good or chaotic evil.)
Those framing questions shape the kind of responses the Times could expect; instead of cutting readers loose at the tail end of an article, it’s asking for a specific reaction — and limiting them to 100 words rather than the normal 800 characters. The new system was also accompanied by a slight design change that added a little more breathing room to individual responses and increased the size of the text. And the new comment metadata meant readers can filter comments by perspective — not unlike how Amazon product reviews separate “helpful” reviews into positive and negative varieties. The result is something that reads like an edited selection of pullquotes from a magazine rather than walking into the middle of shouting match on a subway platform. But don’t expect to see this as a regular feature. The Times already limits the number of stories it opens up to discussion, and the approach you see on the pope story will probably be more like Grandma’s fine china: reserved for special occasions. “It’s definitely a case-by-case basis,” said Sasha Koren, the Times’ deputy editor for interactive news. “It’s something for stories we think will get a significant amount of reaction that we can then build something around.”
Like many newspapers, the Times has its own set of questions and concerns over online comments. The paper employs a rigorous moderation policy, so it’s not just the usual question of tone or decorum — it’s about improving the user experience. Marc Lavallee, assistant editor for interactive news at the Times, said news sites often get caught up in the decision of whether or not to have comments. That seems like such a binary decision because most media companies use a one-size fits all commenting platform, he said. But why can’t comments strategy be better tailored for a story or event? “What we’ve been doing on the newsroom side in the last year or so is build this collection of tools we can reassemble quickly in response to breaking news,” he said.  Some responses in the Times’ new commenting system. One part of that toolbox focuses on encouraging responses around a predefined set of answers. On the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, for instance, the Times asked readers where they were on 9/11 and received a flood of responses. They filtered the responses through an interactive map that was equal parts sentiment analysis and data visualization; readers were asked to declare themselves angry, fearful, unmoved, secure, or hopeful, and text analysis filtered the comments further by keywords. Last May, after President Obama announced support for gay marriage, the Times asked readers to chart their response on a defined grid and assembled a data visualization of the results. (It did something similar for Osama bin Laden’s death.) And back in 2008, emotions about Obama vs. McCain turned into a hypnotic data visualization. Koren said comments, much like data packages or multimedia features, can be a means of creating more value around a story. “People are interested in seeing what others have to say,” Lavallee said. The trick is asking simple questions that won’t impede people from commenting. The pope story received more than 3,200 responses — not a small number, though not record breaking, Koren said. “It’s a good thing in that it allows us to hone the conversation and guide the conversation a bit more strategically,” she said. Giving comments a shorter, structured nature meant moderators could approve responses quicker, Lavallee said. On the back end, the system bundles comments and pushes them to moderators, which also helps improve response time, he said. The majority of commenters didn’t have difficulty with the new system and they approved a high percentage of the comments, Lavallee said. It’s possible one benefit of guiding comments is that it forces readers to put a little more thought into what they want to say. Asking them whether they’re surprised or if their reaction is positive can serve as a helpful nudge, Lavallee said. “Some people knew what they wanted to say, but others it made them think,” he said. “So maybe they considered it more by the time they checked a box.” Lavallee said they wanted the design to encourage readers to add their thoughts and dive in to what others are saying. Parsing responses into categories tells readers they won’t have to devote too much time to reading comments: “It’s hard to have a sense of doneness on a comment thread that has a thousand comments,” he said. This is the second new spin on comments the Times has offered up this week, after unveiling its new article page prototype. In the prototype, comments appear to get lifted from the footer to a tab in the right side of the page. (Martin Belam commented on the shift.) If there’s a message in all of this, it’s that the Times takes comments seriously: Koren said there’s an ongoing discussion at the Times about the role they can play for the paper. Rather than focusing on abandoning or replacing comments wholesale, she said they want to discover new ways to highlight what people are talking about and find the right architecture for reader interaction. Photo by Catholic Church of England and Wales used under a Creative Commons license. |
| In Mexico, tweeting about the drug war to fill the void of traditional media Posted: 15 Mar 2013 08:24 AM PDT
A study on social media use in Mexico found that Twitter users are taking up the role of informal correspondents on the sidelines of the country’s ongoing drug war. In cities like Monterrey, Veracruz, and Saltillo, Twitter users are spreading the word on shootings, arrests, and clashes between the cartels and police. And, researchers say, they’ve developed a kind of media-esque ecosystem that values traits like sourcing and attribution. This is far from the first time conflict and citizen media have risen hand in hand, a pattern repeated in countries like Egypt and Syria, among others. That’s because there’s a common set of circumstances in many of these situations: “For many Mexicans, social media has become a fluid and participatory information platform that augments and often replaces traditional news media and governmental institutions,” the study says. The study, “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare,” comes from a team at Microsoft Research, that looked at the volume and frequency of tweets in cities that have seen the most violence as a result of battles between drug cartels and law enforcement. They found that tweets about the drug war were more spiky than consistent — chatter went up when specific events or incidents were happening in the community. And while the volume of tweets was often high around particular events or stories, the study found that only a small number of people are tweeting original information, with a majority retweeting:
As violence has escalated in Mexico’s drug war, news organizations are increasingly under attack and journalists have become targets. As a result, some Mexican news organizations have become wary of reporting on the drug war. When she accepted the Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism last month, Mexican journalist Marcela Turati said the silence from the media takes a toll on the public as well as reporters trying to uncover the truth. “When we interviewed people, these curators, they cited this need in the community because the media checked out of the equation of helping information flow,” said Andrés Monroy-Hernández, one of the authors of the study. The study focused on four cities, looking for the common traits among tweets, hashtags, and Twitter users who shared information. Most tweets had a similar combination of words referring to a place, people, city names, and the word “shooting.” Instead of providing a news wire, or something resembling regular reporting, Monroy-Hernández said the tweets acted more as a public service, advising people to stay clear of certain neighborhoods. Looking at Twitter users in particular, Monroy-Hernández said the best of the so-called curators typically had a high number of followers and high volume of tweets. These were people who found information on Twitter or elsewhere on the web and shared it. In order to examine the issue further, Monroy-Hernández and the other researchers tried to conduct interviews with the top curators. Not surprisingly, many of the Twitter users they contacted were reluctant to talk, he said; sharing information online presents many of the same risks as traditional journalism in Mexico, as cartels have threatened people behind Twitter and Facebook accounts. From those they were able to interview, Monroy-Hernández said people started spreading information both out of a sense of altruism and also out of frustration with government and local media. Over time, those users saw tweeting as more of a responsibility. In most cases, users were sourcing information from other tweets, reports on TV, and news from family and friends.
What was curious, Monroy-Hernández said, is that the community of narco-tweeters also took on traits of traditional media. Curators told researchers they often struggle with how to verify information. The authors also discovered there were varying degrees of collaboration and competition between accounts. From the study:
As active as these Twitter communities are in various cities around Mexico, their reach remains limited. As the study points out, just 34.9 percent of Mexicans had Internet access in 2010, up from 17.2 percent a decade earlier. According to a report from the Mexican Internet Association, social media is used by 61 percent of people with Internet access, but of those, only 20 percent use Twitter. While that paints an uneven picture for the future, Monroy-Hernández said Twitter users, and the Internet population in Mexico, both skew young, which suggests those usage numbers will continue grow. While Twitter itself may have limits for spreading information on the drug war, Monroy-Hernández said they discovered it is influencing other media. Much like in the U.S., politicians in Mexico are sensitive to younger voters and chatter online, he said. Maybe more importantly, Twitter is having an effect on TV news. “Instead of saying ‘John Smith reporting from,’ they cite social media,” Monroy-Hernández said. “They defer the responsibility to the social network.” In that way, Twitter acts as the intermediary, potentially providing journalists a safe distance from a story. By being a step removed from traditional media, Twitter may be helping to spread more information on the drug war, he said. Photo of police transporting a suspected drug trafficker in Hermosillo by Knight Foundation used under a Creative Commons license. |
| This Week in Review: The lessons of Google Reader’s death, and the free labor of news sources Posted: 15 Mar 2013 08:08 AM PDT Mourning the loss of Google Reader: Google announced that it would be pulling the plug this July on Google Reader, the dominant RSS reader on the web. There are plenty of alternatives, of course, several of whom (like Digg, Feedly, Zite and Flipboard) began actively courting Google Reader users within hours of Google’s announcement.
Chris Wetherell, one of Google Reader’s creators, lamented to Om Malik of GigaOM that the takeover of closed platforms like Twitter and Facebook have replaced the open Web 2.0 ethos on which Reader was built, eliminating the “common language of sharing.” Likewise, tech guru Robert Scoble saw it as another example of the death of the open web, and Felix Salmon said RSS has been dying for a while now. As Emil Protalinski of The Next Web detailed, former Reader project manager Brian Shih said on Quora that Reader’s death is directly related to Google’s focus on Google+ — specifically, moving its engineers and then its features over to the floundering social network. (Though as BuzzFeed’s John Herrman notes, Reader sends far more traffic than Plus.) Blogger Colin Walker proposed that there could be a way for Google to make Reader work within a Google+ framework, however. Instapaper creator Marco Arment saw Reader’s shutdown as a good thing, asserting that it should be the impetus for significant RSS innovation for the first time in years. Slate’s Matthew Yglesias agreed, adding that Reader has dominated the field and crowded out competitors. Others, such as TechCrunch’s Drew Olanoff and New York’s Joe Coscarelli, said that RSS never really evolved enough to catch on with the non-techie public. Others took away a different lesson for Reader users: Mike Masnick of Techdirt said it illuminated the danger of relying too heavily on a single provider for a service, and Alex Kantrowitz of Forbes said it should remind us that many of the technologies we use aren’t ours. Barbara Krasnoff of ComputerWorld made a similar point, wondering if we’re getting a lot of precariousness with the convenience of the cloud. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo said this should be a wakeup call to stop relying on free services. Said blogger Dave Winer: “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.”
Free writing, and free sources: The debate over the ethics of writing for free that started last week spilled over into this week, as well, with a few more thoughtful perspectives on the subject and a new avenue of discussion about labor in producing the news. Cord Jefferson of Gawker made the pertinent point that when organizations ask people to write for free, they’re propping up a system that overwhelmingly favors those who already have money. The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates noted that many accomplished writers and intellectuals are still doing work simply for exposure rather than money, especially when we consider that doing good, informed opinion writing is serious work, too. At Jim Romenesko’s blog, freelancer Ryan Glasspiegel explained why he keeps at it while often working for free. At The Washington Post, Ezra Klein introduced another group of people who do plenty of work to produce news stories without getting paid for it: sources. Klein argued that many sources get their ideas reshaped into news articles for little benefit other than exposure. Many of the people writing for free for major media organizations aren’t journalists, he said, but these experts in other fields. Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce disagreed, pointing out that many sources aren’t in it for the exposure (and indeed are pretty hostile to the idea of being exposed at all) and drawing a line between reporting and punditry. “Ezra, dude, all of journalism is not the op-ed page,” he wrote. “Most of the people you cite above couldn’t cover a one-car fatal on 128 on a Sunday night.” Blogger Dave Winer, a longtime champion of the idea of sources going direct, pushed back against Pierce, arguing that the news process has been reorganizing to allow sources to bypass professionals for quite some time, and not all journalism is done by reporters.
A first look at the Times’ redesign: The New York Times gave us a peek behind the curtain at its ongoing redesign efforts this week with the release of prototypes of their article pages for the web and tablets. Times digital design director Ian Adelman told Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon the prototype isn’t a beta of the real thing, but you could glean a few general directions the Times will be headed based on his comments — less clutter (including fewer navigational links), more options for multimedia arrangement, and more room for ads. Adelman also told New York magazine’s Joe Coscarelli the Times is removing pagination from longer articles and trying out comments side-by-side with articles. Tim Carmody of The Verge went deeper into the prototype’s design and pointed out that the post-PC, responsive design doesn’t mean the Times is moving away from its native apps. “It’s more that the NYT is taking elements from its native apps and one-off, designed stories like the acclaimed ‘Snow Fall,’ and making them part of the everyday web platform,” he wrote. At MIT Technology Review, John Pavlus contrasted the Times’ new approach with that of the traffic-gobbling Daily Mail, arguing that the Times is finally emphasizing the web’s affordances for readability while the Mail has found success by gearing everything doing clickability instead. The turn toward readability, Pavlus said, is an admirable one, though it may not also be commercially successful. Reddit and newpapers at SXSW: The SXSW Interactive conference drew quite a few in the media-tech tribe to Austin last weekend, and while there were undoubtedly plenty of fascinating panels (here’s one on social media post-Arab Spring and one on social media’s benefits for language), two in particular got a little bit of traction in the media world: The first was a panel critical of Reddit’s darker elements, especially its tendencies toward racism and sexism. The panel was panned by many in attendance, including Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore, who said it tended to eschew thoughtful discussion for generalization. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman was also critical of the panel, though he pinned some of the blame on Reddit’s apparent inability to engage in collective introspection. “By accusing Reddit of making victims, you make a victim of Reddit.” One of the panelists, Rebecca Watson of Skepchick, issued a defense in which she called attention to thoughtless responses from Reddit defenders at the panel and bullying responses from ones online. Fruzsina Eordogh of Motherboard recapped the post-debate discussion. The second session was a talk by New York Times media columnist David Carr on the state of the newspaper industry on the web. Caitlin Clark of The University Star wrote a good, short summary, and Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore put together a more in-depth Storify of the talk. The TL;DR version: He’s bullish on metered pay models like the Times’, bearish on online ads, and adamant about writers getting paid for their work. As Times public editor Margaret Sullivan noted, even though the crowd didn’t appear to be a newspaper-heavy one, the questions were pretty sympathetic to print newspapers. Reading roundup: Here’s what else you might want to catch from this week: — Reuters deputy social media producer Matthew Keys was federally indicted for allegedly working with Anonymous to hack a Los Angeles Times article in 2010. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick have the most comprehensive summaries of the situation and Keys’ background with Anonymous. — The Boston Phoenix, one of the U.S.’ most prominent alternative weeklies, is shutting down this week. Here’s the report from The Boston Globe and Poynter, and former Phoenix staff writer Dan Kennedy’s reflections. — The New York Times published three important pieces on the impact of the Bradley Manning case: One by Floyd Abrams and Yochai Benkler on the devastating precedent that could be set by sentencing Manning, the source of WikiLeaks’ most crucial leaks, to death. Former Times editor Bill Keller guessed at what might have occurred if Manning had leaked to the Times (as he tried to do) instead of WikiLeaks. And Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote on the dangers of the recently ramped-up prosecutions of government leaks. — All Things D’s Kara Swisher reported that the news-reading app Pulse is on the verge of being bought by LinkedIn. Swisher said it makes sense given LinkedIn’s recent push for more original content, and paidContent’s Mathew Ingram agreed, describing as yet another move by a social network into the realm of a media company. — After the contraction of hyperlocal news network Daily Voice, CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis drew some valuable conclusions about what works in hyperlocal (small, local sites — not large networks) and what can be done to help those on the front lines. — Karen Fratti of 10,000 Words urged news orgs to buck up and start working harder on new models of making money online — and to start by scrapping the word “paywall” for “subscription,” which she called “a quick fix to make balance sheets look better.” Free photo by Bradley Stabler used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The Boston Phoenix closing is another sign that glossing up print doesn’t work miracles Posted: 15 Mar 2013 07:48 AM PDT The Boston Phoenix, one of the nation’s most storied alt weeklies, closed yesterday afternoon. Here’s the goodbye letter from editor Carly Carioli. This is very sad news; a huge number of talented people worked there over the years — Susan Orlean, Joe Klein, Sidney Blumenthal, Janet Maslin, David Denby, Ellen Barry, Tom Scocca, Dan Kennedy, Gareth Cook, Charlie Pierce, Kristen Lombardi; the list could go on — and the Phoenix was an important part of the Boston media ecosystem. (With the Globe up for sale and the Herald in decline, that ecosystem isn’t in the best shape these days.) Others can write better reminiscences of its glory days than I can, but I did want to note one element of interest to the broader print newspaper universe. Last fall, the Phoenix merged with a sister Boston glossy magazine and switched from being printed on traditional newsprint like this:
to a glossy weekly that looked like this:
(To be fair, there were many redesigns between 1983 and 2012. I just wanted to show Randy Newman on the cover.) The goal of the move was to reignite interest from national advertisers by becoming more magazine-like and improving the quality of the print experience. That’s a move that gets talked about with some frequency among newspapers (dailies, too), and the Phoenix closing adds another data point that it doesn’t work. In 2010, we wrote about the San Francisco Chronicle, which had made a similar investment in high-gloss paper to try to be more appealing to advertisers. Did it work? Here’s Chronicle president Mark Adkins at the time: “I don't think so…It's not a good tactical move for other papers…On the ad side, advertisers have not responded to it at all.” Likewise, the Phoenix saw a temporary rise in national advertisers with its redesign last fall, but that quickly subsided, and that lack of national ad revenue was cited as the proximate cause of yesterday’s announcement. A shift upmarket in print has long been seen as one potential move for dailies, often in conjunction with cutting print days. (A major metro might decide to cut from seven days a week to three, but make those three days closer to a glossy city magazine in format and form, the idea goes, drawing in some new advertisers and producing a better product that takes advantage of print while letting the web do what the web does best.) Look, there are bigger factors at play here — alt weeklies, like their rival dailies, thrived in an environment of limited publishing choice, when both readers and advertisers had fewer options available to them. The model is in varying degrees of trouble everywhere, no matter what kind of paper stock they’re using. But the Phoenix’s closing hints that, for advertisers, the issue is less newsprint vs. glossy and more print vs. digital. |
Google Reader users collectively freaked out, with a petition to restore Google Reader 
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