Kamis, 01 Agustus 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

“The Art and Science of Hiring for Media Startups”

Posted: 31 Jul 2013 11:01 AM PDT

This is a few days old, but Rafat Ali (of paidContent and now Skift fame) has some good advice at Idea Lab on how to hire the right people for media startups. Some highlights:

Product thinking: Typically media startups have been stuck in "post thinking," as in a blog post, a story post, etc. In a multi-platform environment, product-led thinking that continually tweaks to keep the brand fresh in digital becomes the driving force. Iterate, test and build — a thinking in mainstream consumer startups, has to come to media startups as well. Hire people who get it…

Curation thinking: This is another critical hiring and company culture parameter. No media startup can survive doing just original content, it has to be a mix, of original, of curated or aggregated, of licensed if that is an option. It means hiring people who have the ability to mix content types, and not be moral about it. You'll be surprised at how many journalists look down upon curation. In a small team, curation thinking also means learning to do a lot more with a lot less…

Agile development, a methodology that came out of the software world, is increasingly being implemented across other parts of companies as well, especially as a buzzword by marketers. For a media startup, agile would translate into building quick, fast and dirty, with few resources, whether it is edit, business, sales, and of course tech development. That means a cross-functional product manager who is almost a junior COO, working with founders to keep everything running and launching on time, amidst the requisite amount of chaos.

The Guardian’s editor opens up on Reddit

Posted: 31 Jul 2013 10:45 AM PDT

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, answered questions in an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit today. Most of the conversation focused on the NSA PRISM leak, but he also goes into detail about his understanding of the paper’s business model and strategy.

Asks redditor davemolloy:

The news business is notorious for not making money. Do these big, global scoops have any noticeable effect on circulation or any positive business impact?

Or are they part of the civic duty element of news reporting, to be investigated no matter how much they cost in man hours, legal fees,and so on?

Or, put another way: what do the accountants make of these big investigations? Thanks!

To which Rusbridger responded:

Complicated answer: huge readership on mobile and website. Hasn't made much impact on print sales. So, no direct revenues. It has also been very expensive: it's involved a considerable number of reporters, several lawyers, a great deal of cost in travel/hotels etc etc.

Happily, the Guardian has been owned by a family Trust since the 1930s. That means that the main imperative for what we do is journalistic. The business side of the operation completely support this kind of editorial endeavour because they understand that's the mission.

Having said that, we do have to make money. And this kind of reporting does – hopefully – reinforce a perception of the Guardian as a paper that still does proper journalism. And that, in the end, builds a readership and a reputation. And that's being reflected in our digital revenues (grew last year 28.9% to £55.9m). So, in the end, good journalism = good business. That's the theory, anyway!

Also of note, Rusbridger was asked a variant of the now traditional Reddit query: Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?

rusbridger-ducks

Come have a drink with Nieman Lab

Posted: 31 Jul 2013 09:03 AM PDT

Things that have happened on August 1:

— MTV airs its first video, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a paean to the transformative powers of technological disruption (1981).

— Joseph Priestly discovers oxygen (1774).

— Pierre Bourdieu and Dom DeLuise — I always think of them together — are born (1930 and 1933, respectively).

— Nieman Lab holds a happy hour for journalists, technologists, business-side types, and anyone else interested in the future of news (2013).

Yes, it’s the return of our sometimes monthly, occasionally occasional happy hour for Bostonians and near-Bostonians. You should come have a drink with us on this very lovely Thursday, August 1, at 6 p.m. or so. We're doing it again at The Field, which is in Central Square, roughly 8.2 seconds' walk from the Central Square T stop and thus easily accessible to anyone with a Charlie Card.

(Why Thursday? We usually do these on Mondays, after all. Well, our Google Journalism Fellows are leaving us this week, so we wanted to squeeze in one more happy hour before they jet. And we’ll be taking some vacation time in August, so we wanted to make sure to squeeze one in before we disperse.)

If the weather’s nice, we’ll almost certainly be in the back on the patio. If it’s raining, check the side room on the left. First five people to come up to me and repeat the magic phrase — “Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick” — get a free beer on me.

Dis bonjour à LesEchos360, a French Techmeme for biz news

Posted: 31 Jul 2013 08:41 AM PDT

A news site in 2013 can't be flat. That's why French business daily Les Echos is gearing up to release LesEchos360, an aggregation tool that will cull articles from around the web to provide readers with an "expert filter" of business news. The project is now in private beta and is slated to be released in September.

Frédéric Filloux, general manager of digital operations for LesEchos — and maybe better known in the Anglophone world as co-author of the media and tech column Monday Note — said that he first had the idea for the project several years ago, when he discovered the popular tech industry aggregator Techmeme. "The idea of LesEchos360 is to give an overview of what's going on in the economy by setting up a single unique homepage that will analyze in real time the business news cycle," said Filloux.

Like the Lab's own heat-seeking bot Fuego (now open source!), LesEchos360 will collect information from the Twitter accounts of Les Echos journalists, looking at who they are following and what stories are being shared on their networks. From there, it’ll rank articles according to a scoring mechanism determined in part by the number of retweets and the originality of the source, as Filloux explained to journalism.co.uk. He's aiming to find sites that are off-the-beaten path: "The idea is to spot a very good blog, specialized on a very precise topic…we would like our system to be able to insulate and lift this stuff." What they don't want, he explained, is "a source which would be concentrated in the 20 best media companies and ignoring the rest."

Using semantic analysis to group stories

To make this all happen, Les Echos has partnered with French semantic analysis firm Syllabs, which specializes in web analytics and natural language processing. The project with Les Echos is an extension of the firm's existing ventures in automated text generation and data mining, and the hope is that Syllabs will do for the paper what it promises to do for its business clients: increase visits to LesEchos.fr and make the site more adept at "informing and seducing" readers.

lesecho360-screenshot

Syllabs cofounder and CEO Claude de Loupy explained that articles will be sorted reverse-chronologically into "clusters" according to their subject. "The problem is of course how to cluster — how to aggregate the different articles that are talking about the same subject,” said de Loupy. “For this we use semantic analysis. We want to do the same in English and other languages."

de Loupy stressed that LesEchos360 is still "very beta," and that they are still developing how the algorithm will rank and sort news items. For now, LesEchos360 relies on natural language processing to identify keywords identifying people, companies, or locations of interest.

"The semantic technology behind it is quite effective, but now the problem is how to clean the information," said de Loupy. “You have a lot of links in the RSS feeds, so we have to clean these feeds, and I think the aggregation will be much better.” The beta version largely culls stories from major news sources, and a collapsible LesEchos360 top bar follows readers as they click through links. The page also features a sidebar of original Les Echos content.

"We went for a pragmatic approach," said Filloux. "I wanted to do something which could be both an aggregator and a filter. My take is that we are fighting for time, we are fighting for the attention of the people, for their eyeballs — we need to make the experience of using the Internet and our content the easiest possible, in the most productive way."

LesEchos360, like Techmeme, will not be fully automated, and is built to accommodate a "simplistic back office" for manual editing. Techmeme began as an automated aggregation service in 2005 and hired a team of real-live human editors in 2008.

Creating a reader experience and a product to sell

As a news aggregator specifically for economic news, LesEchos360 shares some characteristics with Reuters' Counterparties, the Felix Salmon-powered personalized link blog that he described to us in 2011 as a "BuzzFeed for finance." The idea is the same: provide the most important stories of the day, as told by the best sources. But though the content of Counterparties is culled from an automated algorithm, the headlines are not; Salmon and fellow editor Ryan McCarthy isolate the most interesting part of the story and make that the headline, adding tags to each piece. This makes for a curated page of witty, sometimes even funny, straightforward content, and Counterparties has been able to experiment because money was never the end goal. For LesEchos360, that's not quite the case.

"This is going to be a traffic driver for us. Since we have by far the largest business newsroom in France, because we are the only business newspaper, we [are] automatically very well placed," said Filloux. LesEchos.fr attracted 3.7 million unique visitors in April 2013, according to Nielsen.

"It's not a philanthropic project. We are going to run some advertising on it," said Filloux, explaining that he hopes to be able to sell the semantic extraction algorithm driving Les Echos 360 to businesses looking to increase the profile of their home pages. "This won't bring a huge amount of money, of course. We want to make an [example] of this technology — basically we want to be able to tell the business community, and the companies we already work with, that for your specific sector we can build a machine that will extract the relevant info to your sector."

One of the main reasons for developing LesEchos360 is that the aggregator is a precursor to larger changes to the paper's digital presence. Filloux said that a redesign of LesEchos.fr slated to debut in 2014 will allow readers to create a personalized "dashboard" of news items according to their interests. Readers will be able to choose whether they want to see the news through the 360 lens or not. Les Echos also recently announced that it’s working on a semantic enrichment project with Temis which will make it easier to cross-link Les Echos content and extract article keywords. Filloux said the Temis partnership is aimed at “re-assigning some value to our stock of one million-plus stories by Les Echos people over time. We are going to put our stack of stories in the system, extracting names of companies, geolocation, names of people, all sorts of codes.”

If all goes as Filloux hopes, it could be a heartening experiment in how text generation technologies could help journalists get more out of their original content, and potentially increase the premium on original news analysis. Whether it will be monetizable in the way Les Echos imagines, though, depends in part on how much companies would like to see themselves as providers of industry news. It’s hard to quantify exactly how much value semantic enrichment and analysis can add to news organizations, but as the French say, il n’y a pas de fumée sans feu.

Equirectangular panorama — 360 degrees, get it? — from the Pont de Bir-Hakeim by Alexandre Duret-Lutz used under a Creative Commons license.

Lessons from a veteran: What 10 years of community journalism has taught iBrattleboro

Posted: 31 Jul 2013 07:08 AM PDT

iBrattleboro.com is a citizen news site for Brattleboro and surrounding southern Vermont. The site has had over 46 million pageviews, 22,000 stories, and 103,000 comments since it began in February 2003. Over 2,500 people have registered to contribute stories, events, photos, and videos, in a town with a population of just over 12,000.

When we began, cofounder Lise LePage and I set a 10-year plan to grow from an unknown upstart into a vital resource for the town. Blogs were relatively new, there was no YouTube or social media, and people were used to passive reception of news from their newspapers and televisions. Our radical idea was to allow people to write their own news and to use the web to communicate between neighborhoods.

It worked. New users often registered as news impacted their lives, such as fires and floods. Others joined to express views on town projects and politics. Others enjoy having place to discuss the little things of town life, or to be able to stay connected when mobility is an issue. Real-world friendships have evolved from online interactions. But as sweet and useful as the site can be, it can also be a source of debate. Depending on the issue, the debate can get quite heated.

With 10 years’ experience running iBrattleboro.com, we thought we’d share some of the biggest challenges we’ve faced. These are the tougher issues we’ve wrestled with while carving out a niche known as citizen journalism.

1. Who said that?

iBrattleboro allows for pen names, but some readers want to judge the author as well the content of their submission. They feel it is necessary to know the real name of a writer, and would like to rid the world of “anonymous attacks” by those using a pseudonym. But using a pseudonym is not the same as being anonymous.

Other readers recognize a piece written with a pen name as having an author, and are happy to be able to keep their online identity distinct from their real world interactions. Many people are known by their nicknames around town and wouldn’t be recognized if we required their real name.

Using one’s real name has not been an indicator of quality or civility of contributions, either. Some of the best information is supplied by those using pen names, and the sole libel case we’ve seen involved users using their real names.

2. What’s civil discourse?

It’s easy to say that we allow and encourage civil discourse, but “civil” means different things for different people with different ages and backgrounds. What I consider fair game may not match up with my neighbors’ impressions.

Is a comment harmful or just embarrassing? Should some speech be limited or deleted? Is anything gained by knowing not everyone in town agrees?

3. Who is a public figure?

In a small town, many people are well known for their work in the community. They serve on boards and committees, lead local organizations, and publish their views on blogs. Are they private or public figures?

Should there be a different standard for writing about public figures, or should we all be held to the same standards? Can someone be both public and private? Where do we draw the lines?

4. Can it be wrong to ask a question?

Some people are made uncomfortable by questions. They think some questions are rude or disrespectful (see #2 above) and should not be allowed. What’s fair game for discussion?

Can someone’s motives be questioned, or is questioning those motives slanderous? Can citizens question the process by which a project was approved? Can someone have questions about the events of 9/11?

5. Is criticism an “attack”?

Some feel criticism is like an assault, and use physical terms like attack, pounce, and destroy to characterize what they see as unfair. Others feel they are offering fair and useful feedback on an issue. Is criticism an attack? If someone is thinking it, is it all right for them to write it down and share it?

Members of the community each have their own perceptions of what is fair. (Again, see #2 above.) Some people are unable to tolerate any criticism at all. Some appreciate a wide range of views and encourage debate and feedback.

6. Is an error forever?

Some of the most important stories develop over time. Is it okay to allow information to come out as it becomes available? What if some of the early details are incorrect?

When there is a big fire or crime, the earliest information is often less accurate than details known later on. Citizen news encourages assembling the pieces of the puzzle using group effort as it happens. If someone gets a piece wrong, others may be confused temporarily until it is sorted out. Should that information be deleted, or should it remain as part of a historical record of what people thought was happening?

Are we helping to spread a rumor, or is the rumor being given a chance to be controlled with feedback and fact-checking by neighbors?

7. Are readers idiots?

Do readers believe everything they read? Some feel that if something negative has been written by someone, everyone will read and believe it.

Others think that trust develops over time and writers earn that trust from readers by building a reputation for sharing useful and reliable information. These people judge a work by the content, not the author.

Site moderators can be seen by some as endorsing the worst opinion by allowing it to be said. Can we trust readers to be smart enough to come to their own decisions?

8. Should someone be able to delete the record?

Someone uses the site for a long time, then requests that their submissions be deleted. Should they be able to purge the historical record? What if they are applying for a job? What if it is a public official concerned about their reputation? What if it is embarrassing but true?

And with nearly instant search engine crawling and archiving, can anything actually be deleted at all? We may get rid of something from our site, but that doesn’t remove it from other archives.

9. Are obnoxious jerks a part of the community?

We’ve banned a handful of users for ongoing disregard for the site policies, but it never feels good. Are there some members of the community who shouldn’t be allowed to participate because they are rude or obnoxious all the time? What if they think they are just being funny?

Are we fascist censors for helping to shield others from comments they find distasteful, or are we Orwellian overlords sending legitimate, real history down the Memory Hole and limiting free speech? We’ve been called both.

10. How flexible with the rules?

iBrattleboro has policies. Some view them as rough guidelines. Others see them as hard and fast laws that others must obey. How much leeway should someone be granted? Can someone have a bad day? What about the person who rides a fine line to narrowly skirt the policies on a regular basis? If you let one person slide, must you allow all the same flexibility?

Ultimately, in the hearts and minds of the community, we are responsible for everything on iBrattleboro regardless of what the laws say. If there is a heated issue and the debate happens on our site, we are seen as encouraging and allowing it to happen. But if the site went away tomorrow, heated discussions would still take place around Brattleboro. We plan to keep going, and to continue to wrestle with the difficult issues of online community news and discussion.

Christopher Grotke cofounded iBrattleboro.com in 2003 and has been creative director of MuseArts since 1997.

Photo of downtown Brattleboro by Professor Bop used under a Creative Commons license.
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