Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Now websites can send push notifications — not just apps
- Push notifications for news stories, better background downloads, and more of Apple’s new promises to news orgs
- ProPublica at five: How the nonprofit collaborates, builds apps, and measures impact
- Saving “The Wisconsin Idea”: How the battle in Madison threatens a century of innovation
- “In the news business, modernity no longer resides in the Western hemisphere”
| Now websites can send push notifications — not just apps Posted: 10 Jun 2013 03:36 PM PDT
In my writeup earlier of the elements of today’s Apple announcements of interest to news app developers, I mentioned that there was a reference on Apple’s site to the new ability of websites to send push notifications — websites, not just apps. In other words, if big news breaks in your city, your local daily could, with your permission, send an alert directly to your iMac or MacBook Pro — the same way that a news app on your iPhone might send an alert to it. But the site was unclear about what these alerts might look like. Well, a little birdie gave me some details. Apple will support two kinds of push notifications for OS X Mavericks: OS X Website Push Notifications and Local Notifications. Local notifications are built on a web standard and require (a) some JavaScript and (b) the website in question being open on your computer. So if you have NYTimes.com open in a tab and there’s a big story, the Times could push a notification to the desktop. That’s not new; Chrome and Safari (and maybe more) have supported that for some time, and Apple currently supports it in Snow Leopard. But having to keep the news site open in a tab is an obvious limitation. The new model — OS X Website Push Notifications — is more promising, even if they’ll be limited only to Macs (not iOS, not Windows, not Android). From Apple’s documentation:
So it seems like a process similar to the one used to send regular ol’ iPhone push notifications. That probably makes it beyond the technical level of your average blogger to set up him or herself. But there are push providers like Push IO who will probably be able to serve them up, at pretty reasonable prices. And untying it from app development (still too costly or not useful for many publishers) could open up a new, more granular kind of alert: — See, I’d let The Times-Picayune alert me if a New Orleans Saints player gets injured. — I’d let The Dallas Morning News alert me if there’s a front-page education story. — I’d let The Verge alert me when they publish another one of their long features. — I’d let FiveThirtyEight alert me whenever Nate Silver publishes a post within the last two months of a presidential campaign. — I’d let New York magazine alert me whenever Vanessa Grigoriadis writes a feature. — I’d let HitFix alert me when Alan Sepinwall writes a new Mad Men recap. My point is that what I want from alerts is granularity — a little bit from here, a little bit from there, tied to my interests. The New York Times, for instance, used to send out news alerts about both issues of major national and international import…and maneuverings in the New York state senate. I don’t care about the New York state senate. But there was no good way to tell the Times that — it was all or nothing. There are lots of reasons that granularity is hard to get — primary among them the fact that most news orgs don’t have the kind of story metadata, user behavior data, or tech chops to be able to connect specific kinds of content to specific users. But one big reason why is that push notifications have been primarily tied to apps — these big, undifferentiated piles of content lying behind a single icon. Even when news organizations have good metadata on their content, it’s unlikely that level of information carries over into the app’s packaging. Moving push notifications usably to websites — while keeping them persistent even when the website isn’t loaded on a computer — aligns the delivery mechanism with where the technology assets are, the web. Realistically, this dream has no real chance of success if it’s limited to just the newest version of Mac OS X. It’s a small slice of the news-consuming market, and one that will only get smaller as mobile devices continue their surge. But Apple’s announcement today is a small, incremental step toward an alert system that is more useful, more customizable, and better at connecting news to readers. Effective, useful push has been a dream for a long time. This might take us a half-step closer. |
| Posted: 10 Jun 2013 01:33 PM PDT
I try to watch these events from the perspective of news organizations developing for the iPhone and iPad, and while most of the action was elsewhere, there were a few new developments worth noting. And that’s beyond the aethetic refresh that Newsstand is getting (right). More reliable content downloadingiOS 7 promises substantially better background updating, a key issue for news apps. Apple promises that updates will be more frequent, and tied to app usage:
The keynote highlighted CNN’s app as an example of the sort that would benefit from this invisible background downloading of new content. It didn’t specifically cite Newsstand apps, which are the ones that typically have much bigger payloads to download — I’m looking at you, iPad magazines — but one hopes they’ll be able to benefit too. Too many iOS news apps suffer from a lengthy delay from when tapping the icon to seeing the full content downloaded. As an aside, automated downloading of content is one of the key appeals of having a Newsstand app, as opposed to a generic iOS app. If frequent regular downloading is now available outside of Newsstand, it may push some news orgs to switch back to a “traditional” app. (Update, 5:45 p.m.: Benedict Evans points out another small point in this direction: Newsstand’s icon used to show tiny icons of the covers of the publications within. Now it’s just a generic icon with generic publications. A lot of publishers weren’t too keen on Newsstand taking away their allotted space on user’s iPhone screens and burying it in something else. If you can get in-app subscriptions outside Newsstand, and you can get background downloading outside Newsstand, what exactly is Newsstand good for? An auto-updating icon?) Moving push notifications to the desktopOur phones have gotten us used to the idea of push notifications, and while news orgs haven’t used them to their fullest extent in my judgment, they’re a great way to usefully attract attention to content people find valuable. In the new version of OS X, push notifications from your iPhone will also show up on your Mac. So when a news app on your phone sends an alert, it’ll show up on your desktop too. Needless to say, this is potentially really powerful — although, as with phone push notifications, hitting the right balance between useful and annoying interruptions will be key. There’s one other piece that sounds really interesting that I don’t remember being mentioned in the keynote — and we won’t know the details until we can play with the software. But check out this language from Apple’s website:
That language has a footnote: “Requires adoption by third-party websites.” That’s really interesting — the idea that you might not even have to have an iOS app to send push notifications to the Mac desktop. Individual websites could do it. We’ll have to see what that means — and what websites will have to do to send these pushes — but it could be a reasonably big deal. (Update: See more details about this here.) A way into SiriSiri still doesn’t have an open API for developers, which is disappointing. It would be great if you could ask your phone “What’s the latest from Syria?” and have a news app provide an answer. But there’s a new, semi-hacky way to get you 20 percent there: Siri will now show the most recent tweets from a Twitter feed the phone’s user follows in answer to “What is [Twitter user] saying?” So you really could ask your phone “What is The Guardian saying?” and it should pull up the latest tweets from @guardian. Small steps. Location, location, etc.The new version of the App Store highlights apps that are popular near your location. So if you’re at Fenway Park, it should highlight Red Sox, baseball, or Boston tourist apps; if you’re in Paris, it’ll show you apps about the Louvre or French translation apps. That might provide a small boost for local news organizations; one presumes that The Dallas Morning News app would be popular in Dealey Plaza, the L.A. Times app in Chavez Ravine, and so on. Could be a useful discovery tool for local-driven news orgs with apps. iBooks on the desktopApple’s ebook platform now comes to OS X too. A laptop screen is a much worse place to read paginated ebooks than a tablet (or even a phone), but for note-taking and the like, the physical keyboard will be a boon. For the many news organizations who are now selling ebooks, it’s nice to have even a small bump in addressable market. Finally, one inside-baseball update. For years, Apple liked to feature The New York Times’ website when it showed off a new version of its browser Safari, and it gave the Times’ pre-release access to the iPad to develop a news app to show off at its unveiling. But last fall, it was CNN that took over Apple’s most-favored-news-org status. This time around, CNN got some quality screen time, but it was The Washington Post that got showed off in Safari. Apple still holds a grudge, apparently. |
| ProPublica at five: How the nonprofit collaborates, builds apps, and measures impact Posted: 10 Jun 2013 12:09 PM PDT
But five years ago today, when the investigative journalism site first began publishing, there were a lot of question marks surrounding the venture. This was a new news organization launching during a terrible recession that was destroying journalists’ jobs across the country. It was relying on foundation dollars, not advertising, to stay afloat. And it was making a bet on the Internet and partnerships — not its own printing press or broadcast tower — to deliver their reporting. “I don’t think to those people who were joining in May, June, July of 2008, that any of them could feel entirely certain this was going to be a sort of thriving concern five years later,” ProPublica editor Stephen Engelberg told me. It’s obviously a different story today, as ProPublica has grown its staff, broadened its funding sources, and forged partnerships with many dozens of news organizations. It took less than five years for ProPublica to win two Pulitzer Prizes. Today ProPublica is known as much for its investigations as it is for the use of data for news applications and experiments with reader engagement through channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. But in the beginning, it was tough to imagine any of that. I spoke with Engelberg and ProPublica president Richard Tofel about the early days of the website, how they’ve incorporated the use of data and social media into their reporting, how to measure the impact of investigations, and the health of nonprofit journalism. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. Justin Ellis: Congratulations on turning five. How have things changed since those early days? What’s one of the biggest differences? Stephen Engelberg: The single biggest thing that’s changed is we went from, five years ago, a fairly large and intriguing question mark to something that clearly really works and is established. When we started this thing, when we posted our first story five years ago, we really could not be certain that other organizations, partnerships, would work, or that people would take our material. Since then we’ve published all over the place, from The New York Times and Washington Post to The Atlantic magazine, NPR, This American Life, Frontline, Los Angeles Times. I think that was a significant step that was unclear when we started. We had barely assembled a staff five years ago. It was kind of unclear to us to what extent being a new brand would get our calls returned and questions answered. I had the joy of calling from The New York Times and the larger challenge of calling from The Oregonian, which is a respected regional newspaper, and that was a big difference. I kind of imagined our reporters would be spending many years of their lives explaining what ProPublica meant, who we were and what we did. It didn’t turn out that way. Interestingly, it turns out that in a world where any blogger can bring down a CEO, people pay attention to inquiries from all sorts of people. I think we were very fortunate in being able to establish a reputation for fair and hard-hitting reporting very early on. The other big surprise, we didn’t really imagine when we started was the power, and journalistic value of data applications. We had the very good fortune to hire Scott Klein from The Nation to be our chief of development. He had a vision, which I don’t think any of us fully understood when we started, that you could use the new technologies to create these massive data applications like Dollars for Docs, or our dialysis app, or what we’re doing now with doctors prescribing drugs. I don’t think any of us imagined how powerful, popular, and important journalistically that could be. One of the things that resulted from that, which has been fascinating, is that those applications turned out to be a way to leverage our journalism. We always wondered: With 18 reporters, how much of a dent could we make in a problem that was obviously many times larger than that? One of the things that’s happened is you have a lot of local, regional, and sometimes national publications using our data to do their own stories. Richard Tofel: Dollars for Docs — now more than 170 separate news organizations have done local stories based on that data around the country. The database has been tapped into the tune of 5.74 million pageviews. Engelberg: I think none of us could have imagined that, first of all, we could even have gathered that data. Remember, it was scrapped from the websites of 14 different pharma companies, and having to write 14 different scrapers. That’s a phrase, frankly, when we started five years ago, I had never even heard. I don’t think any of us could imagine that it could be done, how it could be done, or we could do it with the kind of lean staff that we have. But Scott and his team had a tremendous commitment to this work, which I think has paid off very handsomely for us. The other thing that I think was a question mark is we had begun to assemble a staff, but these days it’s easy to forget what a kind of leap in the dark it was to leave a struggling, but established, news organization for a startup like ProPublica. Today, people talk about ProPublica and it’s obvious it’s going to survive and it fills this niche and we’re out raising money. But I don’t think to those people who were joining in May, June, July of 2008 that any of them could feel entirely certain this was going to be a sort of thriving concern five years later. They did something that was courageous, visionary, and were very grateful for it. We went out and felt from the very beginning we had to have a staff publication. There was a lot of talk back in ’08 that you could do this by hiring a network of freelancers around the country. We didn’t think that suited investigative reporting. You needed people that would take risks and have something of a safety net under them in the form of a staff job. And we wanted to recruit some of the best in the country. In order to do that we had to persuade them that this would work. Which was very much a question. Tofel: The only two things I would add are, first, social media. We looked the other day — at the end of June 2008, we had 58 followers on Twitter. Today, we have 217,000. That sort of gives you a sense. I’m not sure I had personally heard of Twitter, honestly, in June 2008. That’s a big change, not just for us, but for the news business as a whole. And as Steve indicated, diversifying our funding has obviously been a big thing. We had a number of early supporters in addition to the Sandler foundation, particularly the McArthur Foundation. But the Sandler Foundation was the vast majority of the funding. Last year, they were down to 39 percent of the funding, and this year it’ll be below a third, we think. That’s a very, very big difference. Ellis: But the other side of that is there’s more competition for those dollars today. There’s a growing number of nonprofit news organizations. Does it become easy to get funding as you mature and people can see the work you’ve done? Tofel: I suppose it’s more competitive in some sense — particularly, for instance, some of the institutional foundations have started in the last year or two to give grants to some of the struggling for-profits. So in that sense, we’re competing for those funds with a wider circle. On the other hand, and I think outweighing that, there’s a much greater recognition in philanthropy, both in institutional and families, of the need. Yes, there are more people going for a slice of the pie, but I think the pie in this area is growing, and I think the research suggests that’s the case. With individual and grassroots in general, I think the better known you are, and the more of a track record you have, where you can demonstrate particular impact from the work — sure, that makes it easier. As you’re better known, you’ve got the opportunity to get the message to more people. Ellis: You said that collaborating with other news outlets seemed risky at the time. But one of the interesting things to come out of that is that your national stories get turned into local stories. Was that a surprise or planned? How does that give the investigations ongoing life? Engelberg: I don’t think I anticipated the power of that. To tell a brief story: Paul [Steiger] had the insight originally of this collaboration model built upon the notion the original story would be exclusive, but then would be available on the web to all. I had been at The New York Times 18 years and The Oregonian for six — I was very skeptical that major news organizations, for reasons of ego, pride, or whatever, would be willing to take controversial work from outsiders. These aren’t just stories — they’re investigative stories, they’re hard-hitting stories. And Paul said to me, I remember it quite vividly, “Things have changed a little since you’ve been away.” In those six years, things had changed. We were founded in January of ’08. We opened our doors to an empty building and hired staff in the March, April, May, June, July period. By September, we had the economic meltdown. The world continued to change very radically in journalism. News organizations were far more willing, first of all, to directly collaborate, and second of all, to use material that was not their own. I had a conversation with an editor at a top regional newspaper yesterday, and she basically said, “Couldn’t you just produce thousand-word stories, or a thousand-word versions of every story you do so that we could run them in our Sunday section?” The underlying thing here is that a lot of these people are cutting back supplemental wire services, cutting back on staff. So content from outside, far from being a radical thought, is now very helpful. I think this notion that you can get ideas for investigations of your own, from organizations like us, might have been seen as a point of pride. I think people now realize that you need all the help you can get. And if you can get it from a nonprofit, if we are creating a database that no one regional newspaper can possibly create on its own, and it has applicability for all 50 states, why wouldn’t you help yourself? I don’t think that was something that we entirely foresaw, but it’s been fantastic. It’s turned out to be a major part of how we have impact. Ellis: You’ve found a kind of alchemy of being able to do the long-term investigations, which can be slow-moving, and having persistent news on the website. How did you get to that? When a lot of journalists think about investigative reporting, they think of disappearing for two or three months and then a story appears. Engelberg: To be honest, it has been a constant daily and ongoing struggle. As you quite correctly point out, there’s a real tension between the needs of the web for dynamic and constantly changing output and the needs of investigative reporting, which is to dive very deeply into things in a kind of obsessive and immersive way. We have tried to balance these two things. We have constant conversations on our staff. Deputy editor Eric Umansky, who kind of heads up our web operation, is very good at prodding and pushing to get stories of some value. We always knew we wanted stories, and initially we would start with a kind of aggregation thing. We would do stories that had minimal additional heft to them. We would simply pull together what others had done. We thought that would work well on our site. It didn’t turn out to. Turns out that if you want to do stories, even of a short form, on a site like ours, you need to add value. You have people, like say, Justin Elliot, who manages fairly routinely and in much shorter form than our deep dives, to break news and bring to light things you don’t know. I think that remains the key. It’s very difficult. I don’t want to say we’ve entirely cut the Gordian Knot here, because we are constantly talking about this and try to strike a balance. Tofel: I do think, however, that aggregation has been our friend. I think the nonprofit form encourages this. We did one yesterday. All of a sudden everyone wants to talk about the surveillance programs the government has been running. We pulled together the best stories that have been written on this over the last 10 years by other people. That was a very relevant thing, and a lot of people went immediately to look at it. It circulated quite widely on social media. It is remarkable, even now, how few news organizations are willing to suggest to readers that they might want to read something published by somebody else. Ellis: In that same vein, ProPublica has made a point of trying to use new platforms, whether it’s Twitter, Reddit, or the patient harm group on Facebook. What have you learned about making reader engagement work? Engelberg: If you start, as we did, as a web-based publication with no printing presses, from the beginning one of the questions we had was, “Okay, what are the advantages of that we might glean from that?” Both Paul and I came out of legacy newsrooms, which was often like carrying a piano on your back as you tried to walk into the next century. We’ve been very fortunate to have, first in Amanda Michel and now in Amanda Zamora, people working for us who had a sense where the cutting edge was and wanted to push beyond it. I have, myself, always dreamed, when I was at a newspaper, of really trying to harness the potential of the crowd. It’s very challenging. We’ve done a number of experiments on this. I think we’re finding a way to do it. When you give people discrete tasks, like we did with Free the Files — clear things that can benefit an investigation — or when you really create from scratch a community, as we have with this patient harm Facebook group, I think you can begin to get things of real journalistic value. People look at Wikipedia and say, “Look at that, we’ve created an encyclopedia with the wisdom of the hive, can’t we do investigative journalism that way?” I wish it were that simple. Some of the refinements we’ve come to over the last few years have made real progress in this direction. It’s very exciting. When you can engage a large group of people in furthering your journalism, your journalism is better and deeper, more interesting and more informed.
Ellis: A lot of organizations are doing news applications now. It seems like ProPublica was doing that earlier than most — specifically trying to collect data and make the data understandable and usable by the audience. How did you get from the idea of doing long-term investigations to what Scott has talked about, that news applications can be investigations themselves? Tofel: I think a big part of it is we hired — first in Scott and then he has hired in his team — people who are both developers and journalists. Every one of them is both. So it was not “create new gee-whiz tools because they’re cool new tools.” It was create new tools to tell new stories, see new stories, and think of how we could create a tool to tell them. I think we were a little ahead of the curve on that. Columbia now has, just in the last year or two, an academic program designed to turn out more such people. Our current grant from the Knight Foundation was designed to help train such people who are already in the business. I think that is the critical insight of it. You want people who go both ways. Ellis: How do you see the health of the nonprofit sector of journalism? Do you guys ever provide guidance or assistance to these newer nonprofits? Tofel: We talk to a lot of them. I think the field is very exciting, with a lot of terrific new entrants. Not all of them are going to succeed — not all of them have. But there’s a lot of great work being done in a lot of places. In addition to good journalism, I think there’s some sensible business thinking being done. The models are different — some are more investigative, some are more local. Some are more data-oriented. Some are more traditional-story oriented. It varies a lot. But I think the field is in a very good place. Engelberg: One of the things people said five years ago, which was interesting but completely incorrect, is not only would investigative reporting wither at the mainstream institutions because it was expensive, which is true, but it would wither because people weren’t interested. Nobody cared! Short! Short! Short! Celebrity news, that’s what drives traffic and drives people’s interest! We have a public of people who only want to read little nuggets! We now know that’s not true. We now know there is an important audience for news that’s reported in depth and done well. I think the rise in the interest of long form, the rise of various new formats like Kindle Singles, is a harbinger of something more. If you look around the field of journalism writ large, it’s true you do see a lot of decay and decline in certain sectors, like traditional print. But if you also look around you see new entrants that are coming in and following in the principles of quality and in-depth journalism. Look at the Al Jazeera English business plan, or what Univision is trying to do, and they’re talking about doing quality journalism and pouring money into it. We remain optimistic about the potential for audience interest in investigative journalism, and really the possibilities of continuing to publish stories that make a difference, that people care about. I think people are more engaged than a lot of the cynics would have anticipated. Ellis: I know one of the things ProPublica has been interested in is impact. That’s something all journalists are looking for with their work, but it’s difficult to measure. Have you found a way to measure the work you’ve done and the impact it’s had over the last five years? Tofel: This is a critical question for us. You’re exactly right — our mission is very specifically to spur change and reform through journalistic means. I actually wrote a paper about this with support by the Gates Foundation over the winter. Engelberg: The bottom line is we track impact closely. We can’t exactly turn it into a words-per-impact or months-per-impact metric that some people might like. But subjectively, you can have a pretty good idea. Sometimes it’s pretty darn clear, like when we published with the Los Angeles Times our piece on California nurses, and Governor Schwarzenegger fired the entire nursing board — that was impact. It’s always going to be a mix of things. I don’t think our reporting on New Orleans was solely responsible for each and every prosecution. But it certainly played a role in a number of them. And ultimately, putting the New Orleans Police Department in receivership of the federal government happened, I think in some measure, because of the work A.C. Thompson did. We can sort of track these things. It’s never going to be as perfect a metric as some might like, but I think it is actually quite measurable and trackable. Image by Andrew Eick used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Saving “The Wisconsin Idea”: How the battle in Madison threatens a century of innovation Posted: 10 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT
The Wisconsin state legislature’s attempt last week to evict the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism from the campus on which it operates poses a threat to one hopeful model for the future of journalism, and suggests that a long history of journalistic innovation at American universities may be in trouble. In case you missed it, the story so far is that a committee of the legislature wrote a provision into the state budget that would remove the center from the University of Wisconsin campus, and prevent university employees from working there as part of their duties. The provision still faces legislative hoops before becoming law. Republicans, who control the state Senate, House of Representatives and governorship, have indicated they intend to pass the budget wholesale; the center and university hope the hue and cry about the provision will change that. A host of concerns have been raised by the center’s supporters, resting mostly on arguments of academic freedom and the valuable job training the center offers student interns. Those are certainly the issues of the moment. But when the dust clears on this episode, we will be left with the larger question of what all of this means for the future of journalism and of journalistic innovation. “The Wisconsin Idea”One of the most exciting things about living in 2013 and imagining what the future of journalism looks like is that there is no single answer. We all know that traditional journalistic enterprises like newspapers are in trouble. This, combined with the ease of experimentation afforded by the Internet, has led to a rich and rapidly evolving media ecology. There’s no telling which of the new experiments will survive to become part of our 21st century media sphere; it is clear, though, that the center is the most recent in a long trajectory of successful journalistic innovation at universities, and in particular at the University of Wisconsin. Early administrators at the University of Wisconsin came up with the Wisconsin Idea — a notion that the university should reach to the very edges of this largely rural state. That inspired what many argue is the oldest continually operating radio station in the country, run out of the university. The first regular broadcasts began in 1921 and were meant to provide information to isolated farming communities, offering weather forecasts and the news from markets. Soon the station added lectures by university professors, put on the air so that people in farflung corners of the state had access to their state institution. The Great Depression brought with it concerns about a generation of young people who couldn’t afford to go to college — and WHA launched the Wisconsin College of the Air (“The school in your home”). That program offered a robust collection of courses starting in the 1930s, and by the 1960s had begun offering credit for these courses — the MOOCs of their day. The university was the ideal home for these journalistic experiments. There’s little money to be made in offering high-quality information to the sparsely populated areas at the edges of the state. As a public institution operating for the public good rather than for profit, the university was able to develop the technology and offer content driven by fulfilling the needs of Wisconsinites. Today, American journalism is full of innovative experiments, any of which may form important planks in the future of journalism. The center comfortably occupies a space in the historic trajectory of university-based journalistic innovation, while testing out an important new model that may yet become a mainstay of an evolving, 21st-century journalistic institution: the so-called teaching hospital model of doing journalism. In this model, students work in vibrant newsrooms within universities and under the direction of skilled journalists. These newsrooms offer important training for students and produce journalism for the communities in which they reside. Ideally, they also interact with the university, benefiting from and inspiring journalistic research. The number of such organizations has grown, and they came to occupy an important space in the conversation about the future of journalism last summer, when the heads of several foundations that fund journalism got together to petition university presidents accommodate this type of journalism on their campuses. Sharing content around the stateMany incarnations of the teaching hospital model exist; the Wisconsin center is particularly interesting because it addresses many of the critiques of the model. The center operates independently from the university. It maintains its own funding stream, largely from foundations. It employs professional journalists who work intensively with students, often for months on a single story, digging for data and developing the narrative. Concerns that the center would be unable to criticize the university appear unfounded; early on, it collaborated on a project with the national Center for Public Integrity, itself an important experiment in journalism, on a series of stories about the vast underreporting of sexual assaults of college campuses. At a time when the future of journalism is in flux, and when investigative journalism in particular is in serious trouble, the center’s staff of four permanent employees works with a handful of interns every semester to create the kind of deep-dig, investigative pieces that are increasingly rare in American journalism today. This kind of journalism is essential to the health of our democracy, but as news organizations suffer, it is often the first to go. “The reason investigative journalism isn’t commercially viable is that it takes a lot of money and time to produce it,” center founder and director Andy Hall told me. The center’s student interns learn more than how to be good journalists — they learn how to be good investigative journalists. One of the hopes is that these students take these skills with them, and advocate for and produce this kind of journalism throughout their careers. Finally, the center continues the Wisconsin Idea tradition of seeing its boundaries as extending to the edges of the state. From the beginning, the center decided to give its stories away to any news organization that would publish them rather than building its own distribution networks. Hall, the center’s director, runs through the numbers when he talks publicly about their work: the center has produced 90 major stories since 2009, which have been picked up by 230 news organizations and read by 25 million people. This includes the big state newspapers and organizations such as USA Today and The Washington Post. Perhaps more importantly, though, it also includes publications such as the Chippewa Herald and the Ashland Current, newspapers without the resources to do the kind of reporting the center does. Following a recent story about the systematic failure of nursing homes around the state to report deaths and injuries, for instance, one newspaper editor told the center that while his reporters did cover the local home, they would never have been able to contextualize the problem the way the center did. That particular story was based on state documents the center had to doggedly pursue through freedom of information requests — something small newspapers rarely have the luxury of doing. In some senses, the center is a small version of ProPublica, producing high-quality content that is published by other news organizations. In other ways, though, the center’s work is not scalable. ProPublica’s stories are typically carried by news organizations whose readers are used to this kind of reporting, though they perhaps see less of it today as newsrooms shrink. The Wisconsin center, though, gets its journalism in front of readers all over the state through newspapers that have never produced this kind of journalism before. For these reasons — its independence, training and production of investigative journalism, and a model that gets quality journalism to the most sparsely populated corners of this state — the center is a fascinating experiment in the journalism of the future. And so the state legislature’s affront on the center is more than a problem of academic freedom and student teaching. The center is one hopeful model of the journalistic institution of the future. But journalism needs to be independent, and the state legislature’s desire — and apparent ability — to reach into the university poses a particularly tricky problem for those who have felt hopeful about this model of doing journalism. It also violates a century of innovation and collaboration between journalism and the university, one that helped form the character of both institutions in this state. The center’s successes, in journalism and in fundraising, suggest that it would survive and thrive off campus. Pushing it out, though, would mean a loss for everyone involved in this particular experiment, and for the future of journalism. Magda Konieczna is a PhD candidate at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo of the Wisconsin capitol in the rain by Clarissa Richardson used under a Creative Commons license. |
| “In the news business, modernity no longer resides in the Western hemisphere” Posted: 10 Jun 2013 06:09 AM PDT A good summary from Frédéric Filloux of the World Newspaper Congress in Bangkok, just concluded:
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Apple just finished its semi-annual extravaganza of new product announcements, this time at its 
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