Kamis, 09 Mei 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

“It’s time for an apocalyptic journalism”

Posted: 08 May 2013 11:27 AM PDT

Robert Jensen teaches journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a self-described radical Christian and political activist. In an essay published today, Jensen is blunt about the fact that his beliefs would likely preclude him from ever being hired to run a traditional newsroom.

He also uses an unusual lens of Bible theory to analyze the ability of the American media to report on what he sees as a collapsing nation. Jensen says we need to do away with the “royal,” top-down, control heavy media, and replace it with a “prophetic” media:

Brueggemann argues that this isn't about intellectuals imposing their views and values on others, but about being willing to "connect the dots": Prophetic preaching does not put people in crisis. Rather it names and makes palpable the crisis already pulsing among us. When the dots are connected, it will require naming the defining sins among us of environmental abuse, neighborly disregard, long-term racism, self-indulgent consumerism, all the staples from those ancient truthtellers translated into our time and place.

None of this requires journalists to advocate for specific politicians, parties, or political programs; we don't need journalists to become propagandists. Journalists should strive for real independence but not confuse that with an illusory neutrality that traps mainstream journalists within ideological boundaries defined by the powerful. Again, real independence means the ability to critique not just the worst abuses by the powerful within the systems, but to critique the systems themselves.

Jensen’s point of view is unusual, but his argument — that we may be at a point where traditional journalism operating in the existing systems of power is no longer an effective media — is worth reading.

BuzzFeed brings its community front and center

Posted: 08 May 2013 11:23 AM PDT

BuzzFeed launched a new Community vertical today that creates a kind of stage for all reader-submitted BuzzFeed posts. BuzzFeed has allowed users to create posts for a while, but the new Community page collects them all in one place, and, as staffer Jack Sheperd writes, creates a pipeline to feature the best work on the site’s homepage.

BuzzFeed’s not alone in wanting to promote their community (and create a farm team of potential writers), Gawker’s new Kinja system (now up on all the Gawker sites) is also designed to bring content from readers out in the open.

Social + mobile = the “dynamite” combo ITV News needed to build reputation and audience

Posted: 08 May 2013 10:58 AM PDT

Since ITV News launched its atomized, live, streaming redesign a little over a year ago, they’ve adhered fairly resolutely to a single maxim: “We’ll tell you what we know, when we know it.” Julian March, ITV’s online director, argues that because of that philosophy, ITV has become widely considered the speediest outlet for breaking news in the U.K.

But March acknowledges that, especially in the digital age, there’s risk inherent in trying to become the fastest gun in the breaking news business. “That is the occupational hazard,” he says. March speaks from experience: He was working at Sky News during the 2005 London bombings. “It started off as an explosion in an electrical fault,” he says now, “and we all know what that turned into.”

The Boston Marathon bombings last month served as another reminder of how quickly misinformation can travel in a world of instant publishing. Thorough and reliable sourcing takes time, and while the papers of record focus on assembling traditional articles, less trustworthy sources take to tweeting with the slightest of substantiation.

But March believes he’s come up with a reliable newsroom solution. The ITV News homepage is a live-streaming, reverse-chronological feed (much like Twitter) in which ITV editors publish everything from stories of a few paragraphs in length, to merely a sentence or two. “While we will not compromise accuracy for the sake of speed, the beauty of our structure means you don’t have to have over-heavy mass stuff to publish,” March says. “We can publish just one line, and we will make sure that line’s right, and use all the normal journalistic conventions of sourcing, just like a 24-hour news channel would do.”

Take, for instance, today’s news that Sir Alex Ferguson was retiring as manager of Manchester United. Rather than update a single story as tidbits and comments come in, ITV posted it in 49 (at this writing) separate updates — some no more than a single photo or statistic or tweet — all grouped together in a scrollable set, but also interwoven with other stories on the news homepage.

That sort of approach is becoming more common on a huge story like Ferguson’s retirement — for instance, the BBC had an analogous liveblog today. But ITV takes the atomized-stream approach on stories with fewer moving parts: a ship crash in Italy, say, or reaction to an immigration proposal.

ITV has reporters in 10 bureaus, nine regional and one national. They give their editors access to information as they have it, and it’s the responsibility of the editors to make it live as soon as possible. That’s how ITV became the first British publication to publish the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death — with a tweet that linked to a short story on their site. Says March: “What we’ve got now is a very fast and agile machine.”

In its first year of operation, that machine has worked pretty well. The site’s unique views in January were up a whopping 518 percent year over year, with a record total of 3.9 million visits. March was promoted from head of ITV’s digital news and sport divisions to overall online director a few months after the new site’s launch.

While the unique numbers are impressive, returning views are also an important figure. Almost 60 percent of ITVs visitors are returning, which, he says, “indicates to me that we are growing our fan base.” Monetizing ITV news was never the goal — building a respected digital news brand for ITV was. (ITV has seen “double digits earnings growth” for the last three years in a row.) Those new fans are an essential part of what March calls a “reach and reputation” strategy. (Although, having accomplished that goal much faster than he expected, March says he would consider commercializing the site to some extent — perhaps with post-roll video ads.)

If March was surprised at the extent of the site’s success, then upper management was shocked, he says. Even after months of prototyping, March says the board was still not convinced that responsible journalism could be done in this format. “I do remember some very interesting board-level presentations where people didn’t necessarily understand that we could do this quite easily,” he says. Their concern was that there wouldn’t be enough support to do reporting 24 hours a day. But the way March saw it, the existing staff was already doing enough work to make his vision a reality: “All you’re doing is surfacing the news as you go along.”

March says the bosses at ITV weren’t fully convinced that a live streaming homepage could work until they saw the numbers. The original design was meant to give priority to what March calls “skimming,” or reading behavior that is more akin to scanning the headlines than reading a full length investigation. For that kind of behavior, March says, “the combination of mobile and social is dynamite.”

itv_news_use_case_quotes

ITV news doesn’t expect readers to linger on its pages, but to toggle back and forth between social sites as often as they need new information. They get about 35 percent of their traffic from social media — Facebook and Twitter, but also sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon — and 40 percent from mobile. It’s the mobile traffic that most excites March and makes him feel confident that readers are using the site the way he expected them to. “The way forward for us is mobile first,” he says.

March made a good bet on the stream metaphor, but it’s been a lot of work. He spent the better part of the last year and half flying around the country helping reporters adjust to the new newsroom structure and workflow. Early on, March realized he wanted to take advantage of the existing 10-bureau structure in a way that allowed regional reporters to focus on breaking stories while editors made sure that the most interested audience, be they national or local, got the right kind of context.

“We took it one step further within those regional newsrooms in that we smashed down the silo between the digital and TV part of the operation,” March says. “That was really the biggest part of the mindset change that we had to affect to make this project successful.”

But while the national ITV news desk is acting as an aggregator, it’s a much different process than copying and pasting content, which March says “destroys” SEO power. ITV will also often include tweets from prominent figures in their stream, or links to stories from other sources.

“We see that as part of the job of modern digital journalism, which is as much original content as contextualization among others,” he says.

But the biggest part of the success was the enthusiastic adjustment of ITV’s reporters, says March. “Their competitors were doing stuff in digital media which was surpassing what they were doing, or what they could do, and they really, really wanted to do the same. Journalists are journalists at the end of the day. That’s the reason I didn’t become a spy — journalists can’t keep secrets. You’ve got a great scoop, you want to break it. You don’t want to wait until 6 p.m. It played into their natural journalistic instincts.”

Of course, journalists also instinctively want readers to have access to the most important story of the day, not just the most recent — to have bring editorial input into story ranking and presentation, something the reverse-chronological stream format deemphasizes. “Coming to the site is a bit like flicking on a 24-hour news channel,” March says, “You’re not necessarily going to be on the top story when you flick on the telly.”

To combat this, ITV has incorporated highlight windows at the top of the front page that can point the reader to the headlines — or headline — of the day or a larger news project. March says the four windows can be used to link to articles, updates, or a themed stream, making the page more dynamic. They also use a tagging system that allows readers to view “microsites” based on regions or specific stories.

March says that, while the atomized stream is gaining in popularity, he hasn’t seen as many of his competitors build similar feeds as he would have expected. There are some key examples in North America — WorldStream (The Wall Street Journal’s reverse chronological video stream), Global News’ recently relaunched homepage, and Boston.com’s “Your Town” pages, to name a few. March also points to Summly, the startup recently purchased by Yahoo that shrinks longer articles down to a more consumable, bite-sized posts. But at the same time, March says he realizes there’s a market for more than one kind of news online.

“There’s always going to be The Economist kind of depth versus the breaking news,” he says, which is how March knew over a year ago that he couldn’t compete head on with outlets like BBC, CNN, and Sky. Blogger Martin Belam wrote in 2012 that, in breaking news situations, it’s usually impossible to tell the leading competitors apart. You can look at a traditional news site during a disaster, he wrote, and then “return half-an-hour later, and it was impossible to get a view of what had changed.”

With an approach like that, says March, “we wouldn’t have made any impact.” So instead, in hopes of building a reputation, he turned the entire process on its head and gave readers direct access to updates as they come in. “I think it’s being marked,” he says. “Fortune favors the brave.”

NPR launches a new mobile site, bets on the scroll, and gets closer to being fully responsive

Posted: 08 May 2013 09:46 AM PDT

npr-mobile-site-screenshotIt must be mobile-news-site launch season. Last week it was The New York Times debuting a sleeker presence in smartphone browsers; today it’s NPR’s turn. It’s nice! (If maybe a touch on the staid side — it’s more Carl Kasell at the top of the hour than Carl Kasell reciting limericks.)

You can see the new look here and read about its features here. Three quick thoughts:

The rise of the scroll

Compare the new site to its predecessor and one thing becomes clear: Everyone’s becoming more comfortable with scrolling. The old mobile site only took up about two screenfuls on an iPhone; the new one, on first load, takes up 14. (That screenshot on the right is only about one quarter of the full mobile homepage.) And if that’s not enough, you can keep loading more stories in an infinite scroll.

It wasn’t that long ago that news companies were hesitant to put significant content “below the fold” — the old newspaper metaphor moved from newsprint to screenfuls. The BuzzFeeds and Snow Falls of the world have taught publishers to think of scrolling less as a hindrance and more as a useful, tactile part of the content consumption experience.

For a long time, mobile content experiences were built around the idea of restraint — slow bandwidth and less powerful processors, yes, but mostly the constraint of user time. “Mobile” became shorthand for “30 seconds of attention while you’re waiting in line somewhere.”

But as devices and networks improve — and, more importantly, mobile moves from being an edge case to just how people get the Internet — publishers are getting more comfortable with offering a less abbreviated experience on phones. We’re getting closer to content parity. NPR’s intro blog post also notes:

Visitors entering our site through the mobile homepage will now have access to story comments, advanced searching and extended NPR listening opportunities, such as NPR Music’s First Listen series.

That makes sense — the more people use smartphones as their primary Internet device, the more they’re going to want to do things like leave comments — things that might have previously been considered something they’d go their laptop to do.

The move to responsive

Despite the web design world’s headlong push into responsive design, NPR (like the Times) isn’t quite there yet. Like the Times’ new mobile site, the NPR site’s homepage does adjust based on device width, but only from tablet to smartphone sizes — the desktop site is still separate. (Play with the width slider here to see how it reflows at lower device sizes.)

However, unlike the Times, NPR’s article pages — where the vast majority of its traffic lies, one assums — are fully responsive. (Again, check it out. iPads get the smallest version of the desktop layout; anything smaller gets the smartphone view. Reduce the pixel width from 768 to 767 to see what I mean.) The Times still uses separate m.nyt.com URLs on mobile stories.

The URL of the mobile homepage doesn’t sell it’s mobile-ness: Rather than npr.org/mobile or mobile.npr.org, it’s npr.org/home. That interesting (lack of) distinction is explained by this note in the intro post:

What’s next: This new homepage for phone-size screens is the first step in creating a fully responsive NPR front page that will work for people using a wide range of devices, from phones to tablets to desktops. Stay tuned.

That makes sense — the desktop NPR homepage is one the last relics of the old look; the mobile homepage looks much more like the recently redesigned article pages than the desktop does. Here’s NPR Digital senior project manager Patrick Cooper:

Homepages, with their myriad modules and ad units, are a much harder job, responsively speaking, than article pages, which usually can be reflowed into a smooth column of text without too much difficulty.

The question of ads

One thing I didn’t see anywhere in the new mobile site: ads. (Maybe they’re there somewhere, but I didn’t see any on the couple dozen pages I checked out.) Ads appear on responsive pages only when they’re on screens 1000px wide or wider — below that size, they disappear. (See what I mean here by dropping the width slider.) Ads in responsive design are problematic, just as ads on mobile devices in general are problematic. But it’s an issue that NPR — like other news organizations — will have to figure out if they want to benefit from the (massive, irrevocable) shift to mobile devices.

Who did all this work? Some credits in this tweet:

A roundup of resources from the School of Data Journalism

Posted: 08 May 2013 07:25 AM PDT

At Idea Lab, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Lucy Chambers has a set of videos and links from Europe’s biggest data journalism event, just concluded in Perugia. Along with the usual U.S. suspects, the videos feature a mix of European data journalists who might be less familiar to American eyes. And don’t miss the workshop videos and resources.

Should media companies be doing more to protect their readers’ — and commenters’ — right to privacy?

Posted: 08 May 2013 07:17 AM PDT

In Massachusetts, a series of incendiary comments on local newspaper websites led government officials to subpoena the paper for the identities of the commenters. The papers’ owner, GateHouse Media, has complied, but some, like Jeff Hermes at the Digital Media Law Project, remain concerned about a violation of the commenters’ right to privacy:

As Andy Sellars has written previously for the DMLP blog, the willingness of intermediaries to stand up for the rights of their users is the lynchpin and weakest link in freedom of speech online. If GateHouse did notify its users about the subpoenas, the users would at least have been afforded a chance to assert their rights. Nevertheless, GateHouse’s privacy policy does not guarantee that it will provide notice of a subpoena, leaving its users’ First Amendment rights a matter of the company’s discretion.

New AP social media guidelines tell reporters to tweet with caution

Posted: 07 May 2013 09:45 AM PDT

The AP is fine-tuning its social media guidelines for reporters, specifically on how to exercise caution while tweeting. Given the confusion and misinformation that spread around the Boston Marathon bombing story, not to mention its recent recent Twitter hacking, the news service wants its reporters to exercise extreme caution, saying “Staffers are advised to avoid spreading unconfirmed rumors through tweets and posts.” More:

Today, we're releasing the latest version of our social media guidelines for AP employees, and a key update is a new set of guidance on how (and whether) to use social networks to get information and amateur content from people who are in danger, or who have suffered a significant personal loss.

In Australia, print might soon be as gone as the Brisbane Bears

Posted: 06 May 2013 09:27 AM PDT

Apologies for the Australian football reference, but Rick Edmonds catches Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood saying print may have a shorter lifespan in Australia than some may think.

Talk about digital disruption. The CEO of Australia's giant Fairfax Media said last week that he is preparing the company to abandon printed newspapers entirely "in three, five or 10 years."

"Print revenues have been going down and are going down faster now," Greg Hywood recently told the annual World Congress of the International News Media Association in New York. To the extent print newspapers have a future, he said, they will be "expensive, bespoke and narrowly distributed."

Pressed on when Fairfax papers in Sydney and Melbourne might reduce frequency to a few days a week, Hywood declined to offer more specifics. He did add, however, that just dropping a day or two might have a minor impact on fixed costs, and "you can lose revenue without comparable savings."

The boom in newspapers selling digital marketing services continues

Posted: 06 May 2013 09:22 AM PDT

Ellen Sterling at E&P goes deep on the boom in digital marketing services at newspapers.

"We've found digital sales take longer, and the knowledge the salesperson needs is more extensive. Our first thought was to have a separate digital staff, but we decided not to because we didn't want to leave people behind. They may take longer to acclimate and, in fact, they might never acclimate, but we still need these people," McQuestion said.

Since the Kenosha News began the digital media component of its business, McQuestion said, "We have 34 clients and are still growing. My projection is for double that amount by the end of the year. Our average digital customer pays between $400 and $2,000 a month. We got out of the red in the first six months and are bringing in between 20 thousand and 25 thousand dollars a month in revenue. That percentage is constantly growing."

Add Vogue and Wired to the list of print brands with video channels

Posted: 02 May 2013 11:14 AM PDT

Can Des Moines Register TV be far behind? Lauren Indvik at Mashable:

Conde Nast Entertainment is ramping up its digital video network, launching channels for Vogue and Wired later this month. New weekly shows, including the network’s first scripted series, are also being added to the channels Glamour and GQ debuted in March. The announcements were made at Conde Nast Entertainment’s Newfront presentation Wednesday.

Vogue’s channel will launch on May 8; Wired’s, on May 15. Vogue’s lineup includes “From the Vogue Closet”; “Elettra’s Goodness,” a cooking show… with a model; and “Vintage Bowles,” which follows Vogue International Editor at Large on his hunts for vintage garments and accessories (see below). Teasers for those have been posted on Vogue’s YouTube channel. Wired has released just two teasers for its forthcoming series: “The Window,” a behind-the-scenes show about industrial engineering (see top); and “Angry Nerd,” in which staffer Chris Baker sounds off about “aggravating issues in the tech world.”

Everybody’s chasing those high video ad CPMs.

It’s not quite The Times-Picayune, but there’s something coming back to seven-day print in New Orleans

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 11:11 AM PDT

Advance’s bold bet on cutting print days at New Orleans’ Times-Picayune just became…a little less bold. And maybe a little more confused? It’s creating new print products for the days of the week when it had previously stopped printing the Picayune. Here’s the new plan:

Monday – TPStreet, only for street sale. 75 cents. Available to subscribers in e-edition.

Tuesday – TPStreet, only for street sale. 75 cents. Available to subscribers in e-edition.

Wednesday – The Times-Picayune, home delivered and for street sale, containing the full lineup of news, sports, editorial pages and entertainment features. 75 cents. Available to subscribers in e-edition.

Thursday – TPStreet, only for street sale. 75 cents. Available to subscribers in e-edition.

Friday – The Times-Picayune, home delivered and for street sale, containing full lineup of news, editorials, entertainment features and sports, plus Lagniappe and Inside/Out. 75 cents. Available to subscribers in e-edition.

Saturday – Early Edition of the Sunday Times-Picayune, with Sunday features, distinct breaking news and sports content, advertising inserts and coupons. Only for street sale. $2. Available to subscribers in e-edition.

Sunday – The Times-Picayune. Full Sunday package and special Sunday-only news features, as well as full lineup of news and entertainment features, expanded sports and editorials, advertising inserts and coupons. Home delivered and for street sale. $2. Available to subscribers in e-edition.

Clear as the Mississippi River under the Crescent City Connection. Which is to say, not particularly clear.

As nutty as this seems, it’s similar to what the two Detroit papers have been doing for several years and what the Picayune’s sister paper in Cleveland recently announced.

Don’t sleep on email

Posted: 30 Apr 2013 10:01 AM PDT

Digg publishes the results of a user survey and finds that email remains a more popular link-sharing tool than Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or carrier pigeon. (Those Google+ numbers are surprisingly high, though.)

Interestingly, the survey data also supports buzz that Pocket has taken a clear lead over Instapaper and Readability in the read-later space. (This despite Digg parent Betaworks just having bought Instapaper.) Also, on its Google Reader-replacement app in the works:

Free products on the Internet don't have a great track record. They tend to disappear, leaving users in a lurch. We need to build a product that people can rely on and trust will always be there for them. We're not sure how pricing might work, but we do know that we'd like our users to be our customers, not our product. So when we asked survey participants whether or not they would be willing to pay, we were pleased to see that over 40% said yes.

On Betaworks’ slow build of an online news ecosystem

Posted: 29 Apr 2013 09:34 AM PDT

At The Atlantic, Rob Meyer notes that the various pieces New York mediacentric microconglomerate Betaworks has assembled are starting to fit together:

Any link in any tweet from a news organization was probably shortened to something cute and custom — and the market leader there is Bit.ly, owned by Betaworks.

Even before that, the publication might use a tool to figure out when it should post stories on Twitter — a tool sold by a company like Social Flow, which is owned by Betaworks.

Littorally-proximate journalists will likely use a real-time analytics dashboard — like Chartbeat, a Betaworks product.

The leading social news aggregator of the moment is Digg, which — yes — Betaworks purchased and remade last summer.

And when someone saves a story for later, they’re likely to use the oldest product in that space, the product which has advertised on the Howard Stern Show and given itself away as Starbucks’s free app of the week: Instapaper.

Indeed, the only part of the cycle where Betaworks doesn’t now have a product is the reading stage, the Newsblurs and Flipboards of the world, where power consumers keep up with their blogs sans Twitter — but Betaworks plans to debut an RSS reader after Google shutters its Reader this summer.

NYT to cull its herd of blogs; whither Media Decoder?

Posted: 25 Apr 2013 11:49 AM PDT

The indefatigable Joe Pompeo at Capital New York reports that the Times is reviewing its stable of blogs, and notes that its media blog doesn’t look long for this world:

Media Decoder hasn’t posted any content since April 14. For the time being, “they’ve moved all media coverage over to an article format,” according to a source familiar with the situation, who added: “I think it’s part of a broader effort to prune the blogs and push everything into our own new CMS, called Scoop. Better for the coming redesign that the paper has previewed.”

Asked about the status of Media Decoder, which had become a topic of interest among media wonks on Twitter these past few days, a Times spokesperson said the blog is “dormant, not dead.” Media editor Bruce Headlam was out of the office today and didn’t immediately respond to emails.

To be fair, most Times blogs have always been home to very article-y posts — the transition shouldn’t be a hard one to make.

In headline unimaginable two years ago, BuzzFeed hires journalist from New York Times to take on breaking news

Posted: 25 Apr 2013 11:44 AM PDT

Ex-Nieman Labber Megan Garber has the story at The Atlantic:

The outfit is bringing on a News Director who will manage its breaking-news coverage on a day-to-day (and, if situations call for it, night-to-night) basis. To fill the role, Buzzfeed has made yet another big hire from The New York Times: Lisa Tozzi, an editor on the paper’s news desk. Tozzi, Smith says, is that Buzzfeed-ideal combination of hard-boiled news reporter (“she’s covered murders,” he points out) and savvy social-media user. She is also, to extrapolate from Buzzfeed’s News Director job description, “an experienced, fast, obsessive, and Twitter-savvy player-coach.”

At Buzzfeed, starting mid-May, Tozzi will supervise a team of ten reporters. Her role, though it’s new and still somewhat to-be-determined, will be to oversee a mix of what Smith calls “straight-ahead news stories” and more image-focused, list-friendly, generally Buzzfeed-y fare. Though Tozzi will assign and write stories, her job will also be strategic: to figure out how best to use social platforms as both reporting and delivery tools, and to determine Buzzfeed’s particular role to play in an environment where news is fast and furious and, at first, not always factual.

For data nerds: A look at how The New York Times built interactive tools during the Olympics

Posted: 25 Apr 2013 10:49 AM PDT

Today at Source, NYT interactives assistant editor Jacqui Maher explains how the Times built its 2012 Olympics coverage. She discusses the workflow used for breaking down rapidly updating and diverse data about the competitions and how their approach has changed over the last few Olympic events.

Working on three consecutive Olympics for the Times has given me ample opportunity to consider how to approach a massively complex data project. I've walked you through the major issues produced by the sheer volume of data and the speed with which we needed to make it usable, how we thought through those issues to find solutions, what worked consistently, and what we've had to adapt along the way. The lessons I've learned are ones I'll take with me on any project, Olympic or not. Be flexible and open to changing gears, but also be open to keeping battle-proven solutions around. Don't dismiss older technology solutions—like saving to a filesystem—out of hand. Get out of your comfort zone, though, and don't be afraid to try something new.

And if that didn’t sate your thirst for knowledge, here’s a presentation given by Cindy Royal from Texas State University at the International Symposium for Online Journalists on the same topic.

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