Selasa, 16 Juli 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The tech behind mapping shootings in Chicago

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 11:31 AM PDT

The Chicago Tribune debuted a new shootings map recently, and Andy Boyle from its news apps team wrote up the process

The data had more than 4,000 rows, entered by humans, who, despite doing their best, occasionally entered typos or wrote ages as "40ish" instead of an integer. Anyone who's dealt with any large dataset made by humans can attest this is pretty normal. So I had to write many functions to clean every field of data we were importing. We also wrote a function that checks if any data has changed for each record and updates the database accordingly.

They’re using the increasingly common triad of Leaflet.js, Stamen Design map tiles, and data from OpenStreetMap. And they tried charting with D3.js, but found it “kind of complicated,” falling back on Rickshaw instead.

It is, unfortunately, a boom time for Chicago crime coverage; the Sun-Times has a Homicide Watch instance going, and DNAInfo has an interactive homicide timeline.

For public radio and television stations, collaboration around the news proves challenging

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 09:18 AM PDT

Tanya Ott is used to editing news. Right now, she’s waiting for some of her own: a yay or nay from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting about funding for the public radio collaboration she oversees, the Southern Education Desk.

“We have job descriptions ready to go — from an HR standpoint, we’re ready to pull the trigger,” said Ott, the vice president of radio at Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Whether she’ll get the chance to execute it is unclear. Eight stations across five states were previously involved, but just Ott and one reporter are now keeping the Southern Education Desk brand alive, since its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ran out in March.

As part of a big bet on regional collaboration, seven Local Journalism Centers, including the Southern Education Desk, were born in 2010 and 2011, joining public radio and TV stations across chunks of the U.S. to report on big topics: agriculture in the midwest (Harvest Public Media), energy and the environment in the Northwest (EarthFix), immigration and the border in the southwest (Fronteras Desk), and education in the southeast, among others. They started with $8.1 million from CPB, and a few of the projects received additional third-year funding — a significant investment, especially when you compare it to NPR’s $3 million Project Argo, or the $4.8 million NPR spent to support StateImpact, two other prominent public media collaboration efforts.

The partnerships were hailed as a way to improve local journalism, help stations battle shrinking budgets, and experiment with collaboration. They produced high quality work in many areas; one collaboration won awards for its coverage of coal’s environmental impact in the northwest, and another has produced impressive series on both retirees and the local drug wars in the southwest. But momentum also ground to a halt in others, when relationships between stations soured, the projects faced delays getting off the ground, and stations couldn’t find the support to continue the projects.

As CPB weighs the Southern Education Desk’s future, the organization is also preparing to announce two new centers. Three years after its first announcement, I asked reporters and editors: What lessons can be learned from the experiments, and what would you tell the new collaborations on the block?

Figure out who’s in charge

Collaboration is hard — particularly in the uniquely networked environment of public media, where stations both stand on their own and are part of a mesh of institutions and entities. At most Local Journalism Centers, reporters for the project answer to the LJC’s editor, usually based in another city. That structure played out in different ways, since the reporters’ involvement in day-to-day coverage ranged widely. In a number of cases, stations’ own news directors ended up feeling alienated from the collaboration, and reporters got caught in the middle.

Dalia Colon recalled tension about her role when she was a reporter for HealthyState.org, a collaboration which focused on health issues in Florida and was one of the first LJCs to close down. “I’m sitting in a newsroom, but the news director is not my boss,” she said. “So I felt sort of useless to the newsroom sometimes. If there was a big event, they’re looking around saying, ‘Who can cover it? Dalia can’t cover it — she can only cover health stories.’”

Micheline Maynard went from being a New York Times senior business correspondent to the editor of Changing Gears, which shut down last April. Not coming from a public radio background meant she underestimated how different the personalities of the stations were, she said, and how difficult it would be to make content that was relevant to audiences in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Cleveland. “I sort of thought it would be more of a news bureau situation, where people would say, ‘You can do whatever you do and we’ll take it,’” she said. “We were learning to get along with each other, learning what the stations wanted, and reporting the news at the same time,” she said. “To anyone doing collaboration: Get on the same page as soon as possible.”

The sum of the reporting must be greater than its parts

Turning TV content into radio content is not always an intuitive process, and turning radio into TV can be even more difficult, editors said. The collaborations that worked had clear reasons to work together — issues that united a region, and gaps that others could fill.

Public radio station WSKG in Binghamton, N.Y., decided years ago not to put their limited resources toward a news operation. But when fracking became a huge issue in their backyard, the reporter based at WSKG who was a part of the Innovation Trail collaborative — now in its third year covering tech, business, and energy in upstate New York — picked up the story. As community demand grew for more information on fracking, the Innovation Trail operation became more important to the station, and it’s now building up its own news operation to supplement that reporting. “It’s massively increased the quantity of reporting that’s been done,” Innovation Trail editor Matthew Leonard said of the collaboration’s effect on the region.

A lot hinges on the topic that brings the collaboration together. Many reporters cited Fronteras Desk’s border focus as a topic that benefits from reporting from many different cities. Meanwhile, the Southern Education Desk was tackling a topic where policy varies immensely between states, with stations in cities that ranged in size from Monroe, La. (population: 50,000) to Atlanta.

Christine Jessel, an education reporter based in Tennessee who worked for the Southern Education Desk, said the regional approach made her coverage better, pointing to a situation when covering a battle over teachers union negotiations in the state capital informed later coverage in Knox County, where her station is based. Still, Ott — who only began overseeing the collaboration in January — called the scope of the project “a huge challenge.” Her solution? Have everyone focus on education through the lens of race and poverty. Former reporters say the narrowed focus was helping, but the funding clock just ran out too soon.

Time is precious

“This job didn’t come with a standard operating procedure manual,” David Steves, the editor of EarthFix, said. Even so, his collaboration had an easier time getting off the ground quickly. It was in the second round of LJCs, launching in 2011, so Steves was able to look into what was and wasn’t working around the country. Second, some of its stations had already worked together on the Northwest News Network, another public radio collaboration that had existed in its current form since 2003.

“That was a big advantage coming right out of the blocks, having that collaborative nature,” Steves said.

For other centers, getting started was more difficult. At Healthy State and Southern Education Desk, it was months into the project before some positions were filled, and Maynard at Changing Gears said it was about eight months or so before things started to gel between the stations. For a permanent newsroom, those hurdles wouldn’t be impossible to overcome — but with only two years of guaranteed funding, delays ate into the collaborations’ room for success. “It took us a while to get on the same page in terms of what was expected of them, when stories would be on the air, what the specific focus would be of the stories,” Maynard said.

Funding is difficult to come by

CPB has recognized the challenges many of the Local Journalism Centers faced, commissioning a report about their strengths and weaknesses in 2011. (CPB wouldn’t share the full report with me, but here’s a summary.) In response to some early difficulties, the guidelines that CPB distributed for this year’s would-be collaborators include explicit best practices, like weekly calls for everyone involved on the project and the creation of a five-year business plan.

The centers’ biggest challenge has been not knowing how they will continue after the initial funding runs out, and few of the collaborations have a clear idea whether they will be able to sustain their work. The CPB funding was never supposed to sustain the projects for longer than three years, but editors said they had expected to be able to find outside grant funding — and no one’s biting when it comes to the LJCs.

“People just see the content out of their radio like it’s Morning Edition or All Things Considered, so it’s very hard to sell the LJC as a brand,” Leonard, the editor of Innovation Trail, said. “You’ll likely hear people say, ‘Okay, we’re going to do a 10-part series around universal pre-K’ — around a story idea — then you can get that. But around the LJC itself: ‘Isn’t that attractive and appealing to you as an underwriter?’ Not so much.”

Earning traditional support from listeners isn’t an easy proposition either, since the difference between news produced by the LJC and the news they’re used to getting from their station isn’t always clear. Some stations cross-post projects to their own websites, while others keep all of the LJC’s work on a separate site, which can mean confusion for those looking to view that content (and donate to its creators).

The evolution of Innovation Trail is an example of one solution. Leonard said that he’s still not sure where all of the funding will come from to support Innovation Trail next year, when its CPB funding concludes. But the participating stations have indicated they’re willing to each put in some money to support a looser coalition, where reporters spend only half of their time on collaborative work instead of being full-time Innovation Trail reporters, and the project’s focus is expanded to include more social issues and data-driven reporting. The plan is for those reporters to work together on regional projects — some hopefully sponsored — with the understanding that covering local news events is a part of their jobs, too.

When longtime public media news director and consultant Mike Marcotte heard that CPB was looking to start new collaborations this year, he was interested in getting involved. But when he asked stations if they were interested, he heard crickets. “I don’t know if it’s collaboration fatigue, or just that those who are predisposed to do collaborations have already got theirs going, but there was no hubbub, no buzz,” he said.

There is still momentum behind the project, though. CPB got five applications from a total of 15 TV stations and 15 radio stations this year, and CPB’s senior vice president of radio, Bruce Theriault, said they still believed strongly in the power of collaboration in an age of limited resources.

“I think we start with the premise that our journalistic workforce is small in public media and it’s going to require a greater scale and greater capacity to play the role we think is needed in society,” Theriault said. “A typical way is to hire your way through it, but everyone acting individually — that is a very hard thing. Only every couple of years adding a reporter isn’t going to get the job done.”

He said that CPB has focused on learning from the initial group of fundees: “one, to look at the impact of our funding, but more importantly to help shape adjustments in the current group and provide good feedback. We tried to bake in the learning up front so we would save some time and missteps for anyone new.”

CPB has given significant grants to other types of collaborative projects in the last two years, including Localore. Theriault wasn’t eager to promise more resources for existing LJCs, though. “I think our expectation is they need to take on most of the responsibility for that, and let that evolve naturally,” he said.

Most of the reporters agreed that the model of the Local Journalism Centers has the potential to make local coverage more meaningful — but only if the partners are set up to succeed. “From a listener’s perspective, the benefits are huge,” Ott said. “What we’re figuring out is the station side of things — how do we actually make this work.”

Image by OCV Photo used under a Creative Commons license.

Reinventing American cable news from Qatar: Why everyone’s talking about Al Jazeera America

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 09:15 AM PDT

Al Jazeera America will launch on August 20 and, according to increasingly contentious recent coverage, it’s either going to save American cable news or be a disaster.

Apparently, TV news in the U.S. could use some saving. In a Sunday blog post, Glenn Greenwald accuses cable news of being, “inoffensive, neutered, voiceless, [and] pro-US-government.” In a story by Joe Pompeo published Friday, Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal was quoted as calling cable news “cannibalistic and opinionated and right and left and in some ways completely bonkers.”

Greenwald’s piece focuses on the politics around foreign policy, and voices concern that, in attempting to represent America’s main streets, Al Jazeera America could destroy the news org’s reputation for providing “strong, fearless, adversarial journalism.” Meanwhile, Pompeo focuses on what it takes to build a station from the ground up in the current media environment — including how to sift through 21,000 resumes for 400 editorial jobs. (Al Jazeera America has made a total of 689 hires, according to Pompeo.)

But will the over half a billion dollars Al Jazeera spent to get the project off the ground be worth it? Writes Pompeo:

In a recent Toronto Star column, former Al Jazeera English chief Tony Burman questioned Al Jazeera America’s independence from its patrons in Qatar, which backs the larger enterprise. He also has doubts about Al Jazeera America’s, well, Americanism. “Al Jazeera seems to be making compromises, probably to placate the cable and satellite companies,” Burman, who left the broadcaster in 2011, tells me. “If you live in Washington, or L.A., or Chicago, or any city for that matter, why would you turn on Al Jazeera? You’d turn it on because, like the BBC, it could help Americans get a window on the world that otherwise wouldn’t be available to them.” Will Americans watch a version of Al Jazeera that provides a window into their own world? “Of course they won’t,” says Burman. “Will American cable and satellite companies continue to keep it on the air if Americans don’t watch? Of course not. I hope I’m wrong.”

For even more background on the American perception of Al Jazeera and the company’s U.S. strategy, check out this Newsweek feature from a few months back.

The alpha of CivOmega: A hack-day tool to parse civic data and tell you more about Beyoncé’s travels

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT

Want to know how many times Beyoncé has visited the White House?

How many bills has Rep. Darrell Issa sponsored?

How many Dominicans live in New York City?

The idea of “a Siri or Wolfram Alpha for government data” — something that can connect natural language queries with multfaceted datasets — had been kicking around in the mind of MIT Media Lab and Knight-Mozilla veteran Dan Schultz ever since a Knight Foundation-sponsored election-year brainstorming session in 2011. But CivOmega, a new data-mining tool designed to answer questions about government and civic life, only became a reality after this year’s Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Hack Day late last month.

civomega-logo(Answers, by the way: Beyonce’s been by the Obamas at least twice; here are Issa’s sponsored bills, 17 of them in the current Congress; New York City is home to 586,920 Dominicans.)

The Hack Day was held in conjunction with the Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference last month (which we summarized here). This year’s theme was Insiders/Outsiders, so the focus of the hack day was making data more accessible to “outsiders” — those who don’t have the luxury of time or advanced coding skills to parse enormous caches of data. After all, as Schultz wrote in a blog post introducing CivOmega: “If nerds and people who have too much time on their hands are the only ones who can use government data then it won’t change the world. Plus, why should those people get to decide what is and isn’t important?”

Schultz teamed up with Knight Foundation’s Chistopher Sopher, Knight Lab’s Joe Germuska, Knight-Mozilla fellows Mike Tigas, Manuel Aristaran, and Friedrich Lindenberg, The Texas Tribune’s Travis Swicegood, and more (all collaborators are listed here) to code the project. What they ended up with was a prototype for a civic data search engine with the potential to make huge swathes of government data legible to average citizens. Users type a question into CivOmega in plain English and receive a number of possible answers, complete with links to sources and information about the calculations.

“If you go to Data.gov and browse data, or Census.gov even, it’s just a bunch of numbers. A lot of times, open data is just kind of, ‘Here’s a mass of data without context,’” Tigas told me. “So by providing ways for people to find the very local impact of certain data sets or bits of information — like ‘How many people live around me? How many car accidents happened in my neighborhood?’ — CivOmega and tools like this, they kind of help bridge that gap between being completely transparent, where people can understand data, and the umbrella of open data.”

Using some ready-made APIs from the Sunlight Foundation (creators of CapitolWords and Congress for iOS) and Germuska’s Census Reporter, the hack day team built CivOmega to be “super-modular,” as Tigas said, so individual hackers or journalists would be able to plug in their own APIs and create parsers. The source code, along with a simple how-to guide to using (and contributing to) CivOmega, is available on GitHub.

“The whole thing right now is open source, so there’s already a few modules that we have built that show you, if you have an API that can take text searches, and if you can think of ways to craft questions around your API that people in theory would ask, you can basically use our code as a starting point to bolt your API into CivOmega, and use this as kind of like a search engine for free,” Tigas said.

“The vision would be to provide a toolkit that would allow any API — anyone who’s passionate about their data set or about their API, they could use some tools that we provide that make it really easy to map their API to the questions,” Schultz said.

CivOmega’s potential is especially exciting in light of an executive order President Obama issued in May, which mandates that “the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable.” The move, as Alex Howard noted in Slate, is a really big deal when it comes to leveraging data for innovation and efficiency — and means that there will be much more information for tools like CivOmega to make accessible to the public.

“The point is, the APIs are going to be out there — whether they’re going to be provided directly by the government or the Knight Foundations of the world or the individuals and organizations who care about it,” said Schultz.

Last week, Obama met with senior officials and cabinet members on the status of his open government initiatives in a presentation at the White House in which he emphasized the impact of the executive order and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

Open data projects, like the Department of Better Technology’s Screendoor and Knight News Challenge winner Outline, a real-time simulator of the financial impacts of public policy, were among the highlights of the Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference.

But the fact that data is open doesn’t mean it gets used — and that means it’s important that tools like CivOmega make it beyond the prototype stage. (The project’s GitHub repo was last updated, at this writing, on June 27.)

“Right now, it kind of works like a Mad Lib: We use exact sentences, and you kind of replace the nouns or whatever the subject is that you want to find data on: ‘How many X live in New York,’ where we know X is some demographic slice,” Tigas said. “The thing we really want to work on, other than just adding more data sources, is to get in touch with people who do natural language processing, which is how you’d be able to ask more broad questions rather than just filling in the blanks.”

“There’s a lot to be improved going forward, in terms of the patterns that it’s able to detect and how it’s able to detect those patterns, and increasing the scope of the kinds of data sets its using,” Schultz said. “Going forward, the vision would be to basically have a way of developing a more robust way of matching questions to answers. Once we’ve done that, then we can start to do what Wolfram Alpha has done — it’s smart enough to connect it to different answer that might not be answers to the questions you’re asking.”

CivOmega has a better chance of a long and useful life than some hack day projects because it was built to be scalable: Individual developers, not CivOmega’s creators, are responsible for making sure their modules work. “The important thing from our perspective is going to be to make sure that there is a good way of alerting developers that their module isn’t working anymore,” said Schultz. “In other words, it’s sort of a decentralized maintenance proposition.

“The point of CivOmega is to make this government data more useful,” he said. “It’s not like the existence of CivOmega will make that happen — what we need to do is make it really easy for a developer to spend not very much time bridging that gap between an API and the human question.”

Photo by justgrimes used under a Creative Commons license.

Monday Q&A: Jake Batsell wants to build a guide on how to build a successful news nonprofit

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 07:00 AM PDT

At the International Symposium on Online Journalism this year, SMU journalism professor Jake Batsell presented a paper on taking the idea of engagement out of the web browser and into the real world through events. Batsell had visited newsrooms all over the country because of an interest in finding alternative revenue streams in panels, parties, bar nights, quiz bowls, sports events, cook offs, and more. He’s currently wrapping up the manuscript of a book on the subject, Engaged Journalism: Rethinking News in an Era of Digitally Empowered Audiences.

But news evolves more quickly then academic publishing calendars can allow, so he’s diving into a new role. Texas Tribune CEO and editor-in-chief Evan Smith recently announced that, beginning in August, Batsell will be one of two Knight-funded fellows at the news nonprofit. In Smith’s own words, Batsell will

have a charge to travel the country and the globe, collecting, chronicling and disseminating juicy bits about all the innovative and impactful (and hopefully replicable) work going on…Jake knows more about who’s doing what in our fast-changing world than just about anyone we know. It will be a pleasure, not to mention enormously enlightening, to be a regular visitor to the new website he’ll curate as part of his fellowship.

When I caught up with Jake, he was continuing his ongoing tour of newsrooms in London with the Telegraph. We chatted about monetizing niche news, getting out from behind the desk, experimentation in metrics and measurement, and a hoped-for esprit de corps when it comes to transparency in business.

O’Donovan: Are you going to be spending most of your time in the Tribune newsroom or are you going to be doing the same kind of travelling you’ve been doing in your most recent research?
Batsell: It’ll be kind of a mix of both. I will have a desk in the newsroom, I’m told.

Part of my mission, as I understand, is certainly to travel to newsrooms around the country and kind of look for best practices to share and to put together a curricular resource for the industry to look at for guidance — especially for folks who are starting out to build nonprofit sites of their own. But part of my mission, too, I think, is to leverage the Tribune’s experience.

The Tribune certainly hasn’t figured everything out, but they’re doing a lot of things right in the arena of nonprofit news — so I think really my mission is to immerse myself in the Tribune newsroom and culture and get a sense of how they’re doing things, but then to broaden the perspective a little bit and get out there to some of the Tribune’s peers, both nonprofit and for-profit, around the country and see what they’re doing that the Tribune isn’t. So I think the Tribune is looking to learn from this fellowship as well, and to have me as a window to some of what their peers are doing in the industry.

Another thing is that the Tribune gets a lot of requests from, whether its students or researchers like myself or other nonprofit news organizations around the world, and they’ve never had a go-to resource. And it can be kind of a drain on their staffing — it takes away from the journalism that they’re doing.

They enjoy and are very flattered by the attention and the requests for guidance that they get, but I think part of the mission is to — through a website, white papers, through other platforms — to put together a pragmatic, almost evergreen curriculum that when people call or they’re starting up their own news venture and they’re coming to the Tribune for advice. So the Tribune can first point them to this resource, and hopefully that will answer a lot of questions that folks have and be a one-stop-shop sort of place.

O’Donovan: So it’s going to be taking the wisdom that the Tribune has stumbled upon in its early years and comparing that with what’s going on in the field?
Batsell: Yes, absolutely, but really focused especially in a really pragmatic, business-oriented sustainability focus. Obviously, Nieman Lab does a lot of great work, CJR, Poynter, GigaOM — there’s a lot of operations out there that are covering the future of news. So we don’t want to replicate any of that with this fellowship. I think it’s to take a specific focus at the business side of things in a way that the Tribune can learn from and a lot of the news industry can learn from. So I’m going to certainly do my best to not replicate the great work of Nieman Lab and Ken Doctor. INMA does great things as well.

I’m going to really try to make it as pragmatic as possible. How do you put on your first event? How do you handle a situation if a major donor becomes a major story? What are the different types of membership models that work? Really how-to, granular stuff from the Tribune’s perspective and what they’ve learned, but then branch out and go to some of the other interesting news experiments going on around the country and combining what I’ve learned at the Tribune with what I learned by visiting newsrooms for the past year or so working on this book.

I’ve visited two dozen newsrooms. Now that I’m here in the U.K. — I visited the Telegraph on Tuesday — I’ve done over 100 interviews, and there are certain themes and best practices and common elements of audience engagement strategies that I’ve encountered in my visits to different newsrooms. So I really see the fellowship as a continuation of the research with the book.

O’Donovan: It sounds like you’re aiming for something a little more prescriptive. Will there be a blog component, or are you really focusing on being more curricular?
Batsell: I think we’ll figure more of that out once I actually start. I’m going to start in August sometime with a soft launch of the blog, probably in Tumblr form, with some of the things I’ve learned here in the U.K., and also explaining what the goal of the blog is going to be.

And then, I think I’ll be simultaneously working on longer term things like white papers and more of the evergreen curriculum sort of thing that can be a standing resource.

I do hope to build an audience. I think of the audience as certainly people in the industry who are working valiantly but sometimes get frustrated in terms of trying to figure out this equation. It’s not just about journalism anymore. You’ve got to figure out how to pay for that journalism in a much more direct way than you ever have before. That’s what I kind of see as my mission: looking at the business aspects of how to do online journalism right.

O’Donovan: In a lot of your research for the book and what sounds like will also be a part of the new job, you write about the importance of face-to-face events, but you also yourself in researching them seem to put an emphasis on meeting these people face-to-face and spending physical time in the newsroom. Why is that important to your process?
Batsell: Absolutely. I think just by going and establishing face-to-face contact and kind of hanging out in a newsroom — even if it’s just for a couple of hours in an afternoon — you build a level of trust there. They get a better sense of what you’re up to. I’ve gone into some of these newsroom meetings and come out with internal documents and people have told me, “Don’t tell anyone but, we’re reshuffling this department,” or “This person’s only going to be here for a couple more weeks.”

I was a reporter for The Dallas Morning News and The Seattle Times and there’s that whole adage of getting out from behind the desk or computer and doing shoe-leather reporting — you’re going to open yourself up to so much more by hitting the pavement.

So I’ve done a few interviews via phone or other, but most of what I know comes from face to face interviews. I get more of a sense — you know, I’ll read about something and then I’ll go in there and experience it. One example was the open newsroom up in Torrington. So much was written about that. For the Digital First chains, they’re kind of a poster child for their reader engagement efforts, and I read about that and I had cited it in my own research. But when I actually went there, I came away with a much better understanding of what makes that place tick and how it’s evolved a little differently than when they first embarked on the experiment.

I feel very fortunate to have received some travel grants from SMU and had a research sabbatical in the fall to visit some of these newsrooms. And they’ve been really supportive about this fellowship opportunity — to take a year of unpaid leave and come back in a year — as well.

O’Donovan: It can be challenging to get that business-side information, for obvious logical reasons. Do you think that when you’re trying to do the same research as an employee of The Texas Tribune that it might be a little more difficult than as a researcher for an academic institution?
Batsell: I hope not! I hope that there’s sort of an espirit de corps here — because this is under the auspices of the Knight Foundation and it’s something meant to benefit the industry at large — that most people would see the value in being as transparent as possible.

The Tribune is an open book with it’s finances. Of course, they file the 990 forms that they’re required to, but Evan Smith and his T-Squared column does, if not quarterly, then very frequent updates about everything from finances to unique visitors. Coming to some of these organizations and being willing to share that information, I would think and hope that the places I visit are going to see the value in that and be forthcoming.  

But we’ll see. I’ve been a business reporter before. I’ve run up against business entities that didn’t want to disclose certain finances or proprietary information. I hope I’m not being overly optimistic.

O’Donovan: In your travels, you’ve been mostly focusing on issues of engagement. I’m curious if there’s anywhere you’ve been that you’re excited to go back to and look at some other aspects of their models.
Batsell: Let’s see. Geographically, I haven’t been to California at all. Been to Seattle, Las Vegas, Chicago, Michigan, the east coast from Boston down to D.C. Been to Austin, obviously, and throughout Texas. But California and Florida are two conspicuous places I have not visited yet.

Thematically, I’ve broken my book research up into chapters, one of which is an extended version of the events paper I presented at ISOJ. But I’m also looking at the two-way conversation through social media, the idea of data interactives, gamifying the news.

One thing I hope to dig deeper into thematically is niche journalism, in terms of a strategy for sustainability. Niches, whether it’s a political nonprofit like the Texas Tribune or GeekWire up in Seattle covering the Seattle tech community. Just assembling a passionate niche community — I wrote an article about The Dallas Morning News’ realtime high school football app. I think that there’s really things going on all across the board with respect to how to monetize niche audiences that are demographically desirable but also just really passionate about that subject. That’s something I’d like to dig even deeper into than I’ve been able to so far.

And then, of course, the explosion of mobile. That’s something that’s been a challenge with the book: It’s growing and changing so fast, and there’s obviously a process of several months between when I turn in the manuscript and when the book comes out. So I think the blog and the fellowship will give me a chance to stay even further on top of trends in mobile and how to monetize mobile, because that’s very tricky.

You know, the whole banner advertising model that’s worked to a certain degree on desktop and laptops doesn’t translate real well to mobile — and at the same time, there’s so much demand to mobile news. I don’t think it’s any secret that the news industry knows that and that they’re going after it, but just to really dig in and see not only how they’re serving the information needs of their community in a mobile form, but actually, you know, extracting revenue from that that feeds into the journalism.

O’Donovan: I’m interested in the question of measurement of these strategies, or metrics around them outside of a direct connection to revenue. Is that something you’ll be focusing on — different ways of measuring success?
Batsell: Yes, yes. Some of the newsrooms I visited are actually coming up with their own internal algorithm on how to measure that, and it depends — some folks look at unique visitors, some look at return visitors, some look at pagеs per visit, some look at pages per month. Sometimes it’s the frequency of visit, sometimes it’s the length, and then there’s other behaviors, too, when you factor in things like Facebook likes or retweets and that sort of thing.

And then now, increasingly, I was just at the Telegraph and — I don’t want to steal too much thunder of a blog post that I’ll work on in the initial phases of the blog — but they introduced a paywall within the past year. So subscriptions are starting to be part of their metrics, as opposed to just sheer volume of pageviews. Now they’re taking a closer look at what motivates people to subscribe, and that’s becoming a more valuable metric in terms of measurement of engagement.

O’Donovan: So data on what drives people to cross a paywall?
Batsell: Exactly, because there’s a metered paywall that comes up at a certain point — what gets people to click through and subscribe? So yeah, measurements depend on the goals of the organization, but in visiting two dozen newsrooms, I’ve asked that question of everyone and I’ve probably gotten two dozen different answers in terms of how their newsrooms measure success.

I know J-Lab did a report where they surveyed a lot of especially nonprofit news organizations who were screaming for help in measuring the effectiveness of engagement efforts. I don’t know that my book or this fellowship wil provide the ultimate panacea of answers to those questions, but it’s those questions that I really want to dig deeper and investigate.

O’Donovan: When you distinguish between the fellowship and the book, what are the big differences? Is it along the lines of helping people with problems versus just presenting what you’ve learned as a whole?
Batsell: I think they’re very complimentary and very related. The book is going to follow a format very similar to the paper for ISOJ I did, where at the end there are certain common elements that don’t necessarily say “You should do it this way” or “You should do it that way,” but “These are the questions that you should consider,” or “These are the strategies that you should explore.”

The book is meant to appeal not only to professionals but also to academics and students — to give a survey of the landscape but also some pragmatic useful tips that journalists can take away. But as I understand, the fellowship is gong to be much more targeted at the industry at large and much more pragmatic and news you can use.

But I’m supposed to wrap up the manuscript of the book in August, before I’m full time in the beginning of September.

O’Donovan: Sounds like there will be a temptation to just keep on writing, so best of luck with that.

I was reading over your paper and there was a reference to the Chicago News Cooperative. You quote one of the founders saying that they regretted not having done more events and focused more on revenue, but there was sort of a quip of, “Well, we spent all of our money actually trying to report the news.”

I’m curious if, in your travels, does that tension still exist, or is it lessening?

Batsell: I think there’s a growing appreciation that revenue is…good for sustaining journalism. [laughs] But I do think there’s still — journalists, it’s been in our DNA, those of us who were trained in journalism schools up through the end of the 20th century, that journalists did their thing and the business side took care of itself.

So I think there’s still a natural resistance sometimes, and I was among those at the time who weren’t really comfortable about taking a more direct role on the business side of things. I think with events that manifests itself a lot — if a news organization is going to do events, they have to really get buy in from the newsroom that this is important.

Some reporters — most at the Tribune — are really on board with that, but I did encounter others in other newsrooms who weren’t real comfortable with it. They felt like it was kind of a marketing exercise and it wasn’t what they signed up for when they went to journalism school. That’s why news managers need to make the case to their reporters that there are ethical ways to be involved more directly in the business side without violating journalistic ethics — but still recognizing the value of good journalism and how it does really need to support itself and pay for itself in ways that it didn’t before. Because we don’t have the same advertising model that subsidized everything.

So I’ve encountered growing acceptance of that, but I think there is still some aversion to it because so many people who go into journalism see it as a calling. They don’t do it for the financial reward, but for what’s satisfying to them professionally from doing it. So I’m seeing, I think, a growing appreciation for the need to be a bigger part of revenue generation, because obviously that pays for more journalism and pays for more newsroom jobs, and that’s something any journalist can support.

O’Donovan: I spoke to Evan Smith yesterday, on an entirely separate topic, but we were talking about philanthropy and journalism and the best way to fund things, and he was making this point about what can be really helpful is when you have money for a project that goes on a little bit longer than many grants do. This is not meant to scare you, but you guys only have a year to accomplish what you’ve been tasked with, which isn’t a small task. How do you plan to make the best of your time? Were there someone to follow you, what do you hope to leave?
Batsell: I do feel fortunate that I have a running start because of the book research, and that was one of my pitches in applying for the fellowship.

But I would love to leave behind sort of a core, curricular resource that sums up the whole of my work during that one year, and then certainly the blog — we’ll present that story in small nuggets throughout my time, so that will be there. I just feel fortunate that this is very much in the wheelhouse of my research interests as a professor. I’ll be returning to SMU as an assistant professor of journalism and I’ll continue to dig deeper into this.

So whether it’s under the auspices of the fellowship, or if the fellowship ignites that and I end up writing more articles for things like the ISOJ journal or academic journals or more books — although, oh boy, let’s finish the first one first — I think it will just really expose me to more ideas to just continue the research agenda that I have been pursuing for the last couple years anyway.

I don’t get the sense — I know there will be a series of blog posts and white papers and some sort of summary document that chronicles everything I learn — but I certainly don’t think it will be the end of the story come fall 2014.

O’Donovan: So when everyone in the industry is stable and profitable, you’re done?
Batsell: Exactly.

Photo by the UT Knight Center’s Lea Thompson.
di