Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Would you let your browser track what you look at if it meant a better content experience?
- The Washington Post launches a new site focused on state and local government
- This Week in Review: Nate Silver takes his talents to ESPN, and can Google’s Chromecast change TV?
- In Brazil, Mídia NINJA’s indie journalists are gaining attention and sparking controversy
- At the intersection of journalism, data science, and digital media: How can j-schools prep students for the world they’re headed into?
| Would you let your browser track what you look at if it meant a better content experience? Posted: 26 Jul 2013 11:10 AM PDT Mozilla Labs is sharing some results of experiments around personalized content (or what they call UP — User Personalization). Writes Mozilla’s Harry Anderson of giving consumers more individualized control over content, “One recent example is The Guardian giving users the option to turn off coverage of the Royal Baby on their website. This encourages and allows them to participate in the content exchange based on their personal interests.” The basic idea behind the Mozilla Labs experiment is, if you let it, your browser can track your interests and help content platforms provide with you more relevant information.
Those intrigued by the project and interested in giving feedback can check out their Google Group. |
| The Washington Post launches a new site focused on state and local government Posted: 26 Jul 2013 10:10 AM PDT The Washington Post is taking a different approach to its government reporting. On Aug. 19 the Post will launch GovBeat, a site that focuses on the interaction between Washington, D.C., and state and local governments around the country. GovBeat will be led by Reid Wilson, who joins the Post from National Journal, where he was editor of Hotline. (One presumes he’ll change his Twitter handle from @HotlineReid.) Here’s the memo:
The Post also recently announced a new tech policy blog. |
| This Week in Review: Nate Silver takes his talents to ESPN, and can Google’s Chromecast change TV? Posted: 26 Jul 2013 08:50 AM PDT Nate Silver jumps back to sports: Nate Silver, the blogger who shook up political journalism last election cycle with his stat-driven analytical style, made a surprising leap this week away from The New York Times, where his FiveThirtyEight blog has been housed for three years, to ESPN. Silver will be running his own sub-site within the ESPN universe dedicated to statistical analysis, similar to the model set up with ESPN’s sports-and-pop-culture site Grantland. His FiveThirtyEight site will be owned outright by ESPN, in contrast to the licensing deal he had with The Times. Politico’s Mike Allen reported on the details of Silver’s negotiations with both The Times and ESPN, including the role of ABC News, which will lend a platform to Silver for political analysis during election years. Business Insider called the move brilliant for Silver, pointing to the contrast between ESPN’s growing online clout and The Times’ stagnation. Tech blogger Dan Lyons praised ESPN for its willingness to provide freedom and resources to its top talent in developing quality digital content. David Holmes of PandoDaily noted, though, that Silver is joining a pundit-heavy culture at ESPN very similar to the one he’s leaving in politics and wondered if he can save it from itself. Slate’s Matt Yglesias said the more constant audience attention given to sports will fit Silver’s role well, though Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum was skeptical about Silver’s plans to extend his analysis into fields like weather, economics, and education. As for The Times, the paper’s reporters who broke the story noted the move will probably be interpreted as a blow to the paper, and Reuters’ Jack Shafer suggested that Silver ”may be the only Times employee who gave the paper more than the paper ever gave to him. But The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, reported that several top Times journalists disliked his work, which ran against the narrative-based political journalism they’ve traditionally done. The New Republic’s Marc Tracy argued that Silver only challenged poor punditry, not the skilled political reporting that the Times practices. NYU’s Jay Rosen provided a particularly useful post by putting Silver’s move in the context of the rise of personal franchise sites within larger news organizations. The model, he concluded, “is a recognition that the formal structure makes no sense. The personal franchise site allows for innovation without toppling certain fictions that editors and some reporters hold dear.” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall saw the model as a way for big media to domesticate blogging. Dan Lyons and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram both pointed to the personal franchise model as an indication of the increasing power of the individual over traditional media institutions, though Digiday’s Josh Sternberg said Silver’s move showed the limits of the personal brand — it still needs a big media property with deep pockets. And Dan Shanoff of USA Today noted that the Silver model isn’t very replicable for aspiring writers. Other writers talked about the value of Silver’s quantitative style: John Sides of The Monkey Cage argued that it gets dismissed by traditional journalism despite explicitly valuing the work of journalists, The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein praised Silver for his skill in turning data in engaging narrative, and grad student Brian Moritz argued that every news organization’s sports department should have someone doing Silver’s style of statistical analysis.
Can Chromecast change TV?: Google made a big move into the quickly shifting web TV world this week with the launch of Chromecast, a small, $35 stick that plugs into TVs and allows users to move web-based video, images, and sound playing on their mobile devices onto their TVs. The Verge has the details on the device itself, while The New York Times has a good overview of where it fits into the web/TV industry. Several bloggers were pretty bullish on its potential. Cory Bergman of Lost Remote called Chromecast a far bigger innovation than Google TV with its ability to simply connect mobile second screens with TV’s first screen. Wired’s Mat Honan noted that other companies have tried similar functions, but Chromecast is a leap forward because of its device flexibility, cheap price, and device flexibility. CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis put together an extensive list of potential implications, arguing that its simplicity should make middlemen like cable companies and networks sweat, and MediaShift’s Eric Elia said we’re close to a streaming TV tipping point. Others saw a more limited impact. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman said Chromecast may be convenient, but it doesn’t bring any big content breakthroughs: “the content viewers crave, and the content that internet TV is still gaining access to, isn't hiding in a Chrome tab.” Dan Nosowitz of Popular Science wrote that in order to replace cable TV for people, devices need to offer more features, not fewer, like Chromecast. Peter Kafka of All Things D noted that TV (obviously) objects to Chromecast’s blurring of the lines between what’s on TV and what’s on web browsers, and that they’re developing alternatives to keep that division intact. Reading roundup: A few other stories and pieces to catch up on this weekend:
— Helen Thomas, the pioneering White House reporter who covered every U.S. president since John F. Kennedy, died last weekend at 92. The obituaries by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR give a good sense of her character and legacy, and Investigating Power has a helpful timeline of her career. The Post’s Karen Tumulty wrote a thoughtful piece on what Thomas taught the women who came after her. — NSA leaker Edward Snowden was briefly thought to be able to leave the Moscow airport as Russia considers his asylum request, but it remains under review, and he’s still stuck in the transit zone. Researcher danah boyd explained why Snowden matters: “he's creating a template for how to share information.” — A federal judge ruled late last week that The New York Times’ James Risen must testify in the trial of a CIA official accused of giving him classified information. Risen’s attorney had argued that he wasn’t required to testify because even in the absence of a federal shield law, he’s covered by a common-law reporter’s privilege. Josh Stearns of Free Press, meanwhile, argued that what’s needed isn’t merely a shield law, but a shift in how Americans see journalists’ free-speech rights. — Pew’s Hispanic Center released a study on Latinos’ news media consumption, revealing, among other things, that more Latinos are consuming news in English. Poynter and The New York Times have good summaries of the study as well. — The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Project’s Dan Sinker posted the second part of his roundup of coder-journalists’ responses to the question, “Why develop in the newsroom?” (part 1 came last week). Current Knight-Mozilla fellow Noah Veltman also gave another thoughtful response after Sinker published his two summaries. Photos of Nate Silver by Nicolas and of Helen Thomas by Michael Foley used under a Creative Commons license. |
| In Brazil, Mídia NINJA’s indie journalists are gaining attention and sparking controversy Posted: 26 Jul 2013 08:50 AM PDT Editor’s note: Protest movements have long sparked protest media. In Brazil, this summer’s wave of protests has built an audience for Mídia NINJA, a collective of independent street journalists covering the protests from the inside. Here, Brazilian journalist Natalia Mazotte, in a post originally written for the Journalism in the Americas blog at the University of Texas’ Knight Center, writes about their rise. (Here’s the original in Portuguese.) A media phenomenon has emerged in Brazil in the wake of the massive protests that have spread throughout the country since June. The news collective Mídia NINJA — broadcasting live from the streets with its “no cuts, no censorship” model — has attracted the attention and admiration of thousands. NINJA is more than a reference to ancient Japanese warriors — it stands for “Independent Narratives, Journalism and Action” in Portuguese. And it’s that last word that has established the tone for their coverage and triggered another debate over the boundaries between journalism and activism. NINJA mainly uses cell phones and other 4G devices to produce their broadcasts, which are mostly improvised rather than prepared scripts. While it’s true that livecasting public events is not new, NINJA videos have been able to reach a substantial audience of more than 100,000 viewers. “Ninjas” share their content through social media and receive responses from their audiences that far surpass the number of interactions traditional Brazilian media outlets receive through their pages. Mídia NINJA already has more than 120,000 likes on its Facebook page, which the group opened only four months ago.
The traction and interest Mídia NINJA has generated is also evident at the collective’s open meetings, which attract hundreds who want to lend a hand and join the team. At the most recent meeting July 23 at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s (UFRJ) School of Communication, one participant explained why the collective has gained support: “We feel very represented by the way you report. The version of history that you provide is much closer to the version of the facts that we have witnessed.” The comments were met with applause. For ninja Filipe Peçanha, 24, independent media is beginning to attract more attention from some than the country’s largest media outlets. “We kind of turned into the point of reference during the protests, and people have shown their support for our work. It’s the opposite of what’s happening with the reporters from media outlets like [the country's largest TV network] Globo,” he said. On July 22, Peçanha was arrested by the Military Police while he covered the protests near Guanabara Palace (the seat of Rio de Janeiro’s state government) and charged with “inciting violence.” A few hours later, he was freed along with a second ninja who had also been arrested. Both remained near the police station until the next morning, waiting for others. Activist journalismThis type of engagement — putting reporters in the protesters’ shoes — is the key to the group’s allure, according to Ivana Bentes, director of UFRJ’s School of Communication: “NINJA works within the commotion and the desire for social participation. It’s a much more interesting type of narrative than the poor and corporativist one” offered by regular journalism, she said during one of the group’s meetings. It’s also the dot outside the curve of traditional journalism, which often aims to follow the facts unaffected and from a distance. In many of Mídia NINJA’s broadcasts, the viewer can run with the crowds and witness the ninjas’ reactions to confrontations between police officers and protesters — almost as if it were an action film in real time.
For Bruno Torturra, the most experienced journalist in the group, the narratives NINJA produces break away from some of the classic paradigms of journalism at the same time that they reclaim the profession’s main functions. “Our main role is to reclaim for journalism and communications their activist role as the public’s eyes and to offer information that is increasingly qualified to defend democracy,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re going to have a newsroom handbook; I think common sense will become our guide.” Regarding fact-checking, one of the main pillars of journalism, Torturra said he believed people following them through the web would help keep them accountable. Nonetheless, the group’s journalistic shortcomings recently became the target of criticism, when Rio de Janeiro mayor Eduardo Paes granted NINJA an interview. Thousands of people online watched the livecast — but after it finished, many criticized the ninjas’ lack of preparation and the way the interview was conducted. The group responded to critics on its Facebook page. “It’s in the process, in the experience, in the transparency, in the real test, live and without cuts, that we’re advancing. Building our base audience and our team. And thinking, with many right and wrong choices, on how to produce a journalism that is worthy of the great trust and expectations that people have placed on Mídia NINJA.” Journalism professor Sylvia Moretzsohn objected in a recent commentary: “There’s nothing like saying ‘it’s the experience, it’s the real test,’ etc., that can be advanced. It’s not just that; it’s so much more and it demands preparation. It’s not enough to just throw yourself headstrong into a situation you are not familiar with. It’s not enough to ignore the tactics that are taught in media training. You can perfectly refuse them. There will be no shortage of arguments to do so. In the way things were, you ended up serving those you wanted to criticize.” Once the episode was over, Torturra admitted that the collective failed at integrating the public into the interview process and taking the necessary time to prepare. “We need to bring experienced journalists into this conversation to understand where we failed,” he said. But despite the tensions between traditional journalism and the new form that is emerging, NINJA continues to grow. Rafael Vilela, a member of the collective who traveled to Egypt to cover the protests, said he sees NINJA as an incentive to seek new paths within journalism. “Today our contents have an enormous potential for repercussion. The most important thing NINJA has achieved is to give visibility to another path within journalism that doesn’t exist in mass media, and that’s encouraging for people looking for other ways of making a living in journalism. I’ve got two years living like this,” he said.
Photos (1, 2, 3, 4) by brasildefato1 used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Posted: 26 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT Editor’s note: Two journalism educators — Amy Schmitz Weiss of San Diego State and Cindy Royal of Texas State — have provided their own lenses on how journalism education might be reshaped to match the current media landscape students are graduating into.
Specifically, journalism and mass communication programs are at a fork in the road — they can either sit back and watch or take an active role in transforming how our students can enter a new, digital-savvy competitive workforce. Are the students we are training in our classrooms ready to take on the workplace they enter in tomorrow? When we consider that two years ago, specific digital roles and responsibilities in the workplace that are common today, didn’t exist before — we are at a crucial moment where journalism and mass communication programs must be thinking 10 steps ahead of the rest. Some higher education institutions are already embarking on this kind of educational experience where departments of computer science and mass communication or journalism are collaborating on special workshops, classes, graduate degree programs. Here is just a brief list but it is not all inclusive of other initiatives that may be currently underway:
A new realm of collaborationJournalism and mass communication programs as well as computer science and engineering departments represent a new realm of collaboration. What are the potential connections between journalism and mass communication and computer science programs? We share a focus on how to display and communicate information albeit differently. When we consider the mass communication landscape today, digital media is becoming pervasive and necessary for any aspect of communicating and disseminating information. When we consider computer science today, computer programming languages, frameworks and other applications are being driven by new technological advancements in society but also by the increasingly important role of data science and Big Data in society today. We can see that new scripts and programming languages are being developed to help understand how data can be organized, curated, segmented, and analyzed in a variety of ways. The potential for these two areas to come together is not fantasy but a reality. As future careers in these two areas continue to evolve, it will be not likely but necessary that computer scientists understand digital media technologies that drive the kind of work they do and that journalists and media practitioners understand Big Data and data science as they embark on issues important to the publics and audiences they serve wherein data will play a major role. In my own personal experience, I was fortunate to have the chance to bring together journalism and computer science students in spring 2012 to create a mobile news app for our campus called AzteCast. The class was co-taught by my colleague from computer science, Joseph Lewis and me. We received an AEJMC Bridge Grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to be able to offer the class and launch the mobile news app within six months. The students learned so much from each other during the semester. It opened their eyes to learning more about each others’ fields and how closely integrated they are. The mobile app is now a year old and continues to have much success on our campus with our student population. Since then, I have collaborated with other colleagues in our College of Sciences at our university to launch Digital Ninja Workshops with journalism and science students from other disciplines outside of computer science but in other areas such as geology. My own steps to do the mobile app class and Digital Ninja workshops show that collaboration can happen for our students in formal and informal learning environments, it’s up to the educator to take the opportunity by the reins. Recently, the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin also embarked on a similar collaborative experience in which they brought together journalism and computer science students for a semester for a mobile app course taught by Robert Quigley. The course was quite successful with about five mobile apps created by the students by the end of the semester. A digital media data guruWe are now entering a time period of what I would like to call the Digital Media Data Guru. This person is not a graduate of just computer science or journalism and mass communication programs, but they are a mixture of both worlds able to jump across and take on new challenges we have yet to predict in this 21st century. This Digital Media Data Guru can do it all:
Tips on how to implement this approachWe don’t have to wait for these Digital Media Data Gurus to come to us. As educators in higher education, we have the opportunity to help our students aim for this kind of skill set whether or not they realize these skills will prove valuable to them when they enter their chosen field. How can this be done? Here are a few ideas of how you can create learning experiences at your own institution toward this effort. Informal educational opportunities
Formal educational opportunities
Taking small steps toward informal and formal educational opportunities is one way to start and build this unique initiative at your own institution over time. Amy Schmitz Weiss is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University. Schmitz Weiss is a 2011 Dart Academic Fellow and has a PhD in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches journalism courses in basic writing and editing, multimedia, web design, data journalism, and mobile journalism.
Journalism is a specialized use of many other fields. We teach photojournalism in ways that are different than those taught in photography departments in art schools and video journalism differently than the methods used in film school. Language itself is taught in dedicated programs. But in English-speaking countries, English departments at universities have different goals for teaching language, ranging from appreciation of literature to creative writing to literary theory and research. While concepts overlap, the applied nature of journalism has specific tenets that most programs would not leave to an English department to address. This model provides a strong metaphor for the journalism-computer science relationship. The mission of computer science programs can range from artificial intelligence to robotics to scientific computing in the fields of chemistry, physics and health. While general concepts may be relevant, the applied nature of technology in communication requires more specific and focused learning. Computer science does not equal web development. The specific application of Web and mobile development is merely a subset of the computer science discipline, and not often considered a priority. But for communication technology, these delivery platforms are in the forefront. The rise of Web development schools demonstrates a market with a need to be filled. Programs like Starter League in Chicago, Flatiron School in New York and MakerSquare in Austin are popping up around the country to provide concentrated, in-depth Web development training over 8-12 weeks. This is a need that is not being directly filled by computer science programs. Design is a key element in the ability to communicate effectively. Design is another area that is taught in other departments, but journalism schools have long coopted for their own purposes for tasks like page layout and graphics. While computer science programs have not been traditionally focused on design concepts, many journalism and mass communication programs have been teaching Web design courses for years. Web development is a natural extension of this competency and can be used as the foundation for more advanced programming and data concepts. Knowledge of statistics is as important to the use of data as computer science. Many journalism programs have a math or statistics requirement that students must take. It is the rare program that offers its own “Math for Journalists” course. If statistics lessons are not focused on communication applications, the benefits of the course are lost. Statistics need to be integrated into exercises that are focused on storytelling and informing the public. This can serve as an introduction to and extension of more advanced data concepts.
This image conceptualizes a Digital Media/Data discipline in which elements already existing in journalism, like language, graphic design and multimedia, are combined with technology and math skills and are influenced by subject areas and specializations. Language and visual skills have been readily coopted by communication programs in the past, but technology and math skills have not, leaving the discipline with graduates who are less prepared to integrate these topics into their working environment. The gap represented by the gray circle represents the opportunity for programs to integrate Web development and data skills within a communications context. Further considerations for a digital media/data curriculumNeed for different teaching methods and approaches. Because we have different goals and applications, journalism programs will need to implement different methods of teaching than computer science programs. Students entering journalism programs may not have had the same preparation or expectation for coding as those who enter a computer science program. Thus, programming courses developed for journalists will need to have a specific context and level of support than those offered in computer science. In addition, collaborations with professional news organizations practicing data journalism will flow more naturally from a media-focused program. Rise of learn-to-code movement. Over the past year, many articles have been written on the importance of learning to code — children should learn to code, women should learn to code, everyone should earn to code. Sites like CodeAcademy and Khan Academy provide free and easy-to-use tutorials on the basics of coding. But students need help in applying these skills to journalism problems. The time is right to integrate these concepts directly into journalism curricula by providing the proper context and learning experiences. Opportunity to develop technology skills in different audiences. Journalism programs provide a unique opportunity to develop technology skills in groups who have been traditionally underrepresented in computer science. With the percentage of females in mass communication programs at 60 to 70 percent, we can reach women — as well as others who may not have been interested in a traditional computer science path — by offering relevant and supportive technology instruction. Approaches in computer science departments to include more women have not been successful. A different mindset will be instrumental to our ability to develop these competencies in a broad base of our population. The following skills will be necessary to integrate into a digital media curriculum, whether through focused collaborations with other departments or in-house competency development. These are not necessarily individual courses, but can be integrated into the curriculum via existing or new courses, through required or elective courses and could provide the basis for new sequences or majors.
This approach is not without challenges. While language and visual literacy were natural integrations, most journalists, journalism students and faculty are completely unfamiliar with coding. Finding educators who are trained and willing to experiment and stay up-to-date with the fast pace of technological change will be critical to the success of any program. I have experimented with data projects and mobile design in my courses through the support of AEJMC/Knight Foundation Bridge Grants, and each experience required significant learning and preparation. But the outcomes of each were valuable to students, and the skills I gained are an investment in our ability to expand curriculum in the future. For more programs to participate in these activities, they will have to consider faculty with different skill sets in their hiring and tenure practices. Changes to curriculum always meet with challenges in programs that are already packed with requirements and accreditation standards. These standards, however, will need to be modified to reflect the needs of the discipline now and in the future. And technology curriculum without relevance to storytelling and information sharing will only serve to confuse and frustrate students who are forced to make those connections on their own. We need to build on the foundation of skills most programs are already teaching, like Web design and multimedia, and push forward to update curriculum with the advanced topics the industry is going to need. Does your school introduce these concepts in the communication curriculum? Do you think it should? If these are the skills necessary to communicate and tell stories in the future, we need to consider both the competencies that we need to develop within our programs and how we might collaborate in meaningful ways with other disciplines. Cindy Royal is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University in San Marcos. She completed Ph.D. studies in journalism and mass communication at the University of Texas in 2005. At UT, she focused on the effects of the Internet on communication and culture. She will be a 2013-2014 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Panorama of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism commencement by Lam Thuy Vo used under a Creative Commons license. |
Conversations have been abuzz lately online and offline about the role of Big Data and data science in a variety of fields — from the pharmaceutical industry to the news industry. Data is all around us and it will only become more pervasive as digital technologies advance and our daily lives become centered on these two worlds. As educators, are we preparing our students to be able to manage these two worlds of data science and digital media together effectively and accurately? 
Beyond these collaborations that Dr. Schmitz-Weiss describes, questions remain. How much of this competency should ultimately be adopted by journalism and mass communication programs? Is it useful to continue to consider these as discrete disciplines? Or is it possible to develop an educational program that addresses the advanced concepts and skills needed for the future of media? There are many reasons why communication programs cannot simply rely on computer science to do the heavy lifting when it comes to programming and data education for communicators.
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