Sabtu, 10 Agustus 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Journalism and video games come together as a new form of storytelling in Brazil

Posted: 09 Aug 2013 03:31 PM PDT

mafianewsgame

Editor’s note: Our friends at the Knight Center for the Americas are taking a look into the spread of gamification of the news in Latin America. In a Q&A originally posted on the Journalism in the Americas blog, Brazilian journalist Natalia Mazotte talks with editor and game developer Fred di Giacomo about the process of making newsgames. (Here’s the original in Portuguese.)

Picture this: In order to understand how the mafia works, you take on the role of an undercover cop posing as a globe-trotting drug trafficker. You answer questions about sex education to continue a strip tease performed by a model. To better understand the teachings of major philosophers, you engage in a battle of theories with them. Though it may sound like a joke, video games are gaining traction as a new way to deliver information on news and current events.

Newsgames are a relatively new format for storytelling, spanning the divide between reporting and video games, and gaining more credibility in the journalism world.

Media outlets like The New York Times, CNN and El Pais have experimented with stories where readers become players in a simulated world. In Brazil, Superinteressante, a magazine from the youth department (Núcleo Jovem) of publisher Editora Abril, is making significant strides in the production of newsgames.

One of those responsible for its success is Fred di Giacomo, who until July of this year was Núcleo Jovem’s editor and is now pursuing an independent career. In this Q&A di Giacomo discusses how newsgames were developed at Editora Abril and offers tips for those seeking to create their own games.

Natalia Mazotte: How did your interest in digital infographics and newsgames begin?
Fred di Giacomo: I worked seven and half years at Abril. After I graduated college, I completed the Curso Abril de Jornalismo (Abril Course on Journalism) in 2006, and I ended up in the area of digital content. A month later, I was contracted to work for the online section of two magazines, Bizz and Mundo Estranho (Strange World). When I began working at Mundo Estranho, I began to work on developing one of the first games launched by Abril, Strip Quiz. Targeted at adolescents, the user had to respond to questions on sexual education (there were editions on sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, questions on ejaculation, etc.) and each correct response prompted a model to take off an article of clothing, until she was left with only a bra and underwear. It was one of the site’s main highlights.
Mazotte:Did that promote the development of newsgames for the publishing house?
di Giacomo:The beginning of newsgames at Abril was already planned. The Núcleo Jovem section at Abril (which includes the magazines Superinteressante, Mundo Estranho, Guia do Estudante, and Recreio) had already been a leader in infographics for a long time — the magazines always received awards in Brazil and abroad in that field — so we already had the know-how in visual content. We didn’t know we were doing newsgames, that term wasn’t used. We created infographics, digital magazines, games, and videos. Each brand at Abril had its own policy and different incentives for those things. At Núcleo Jovem there was that incentive; in 2008, the editor for that section was Rafael Kenski, who was a pioneer in Brazil for Alternate Reality Games (ARG), a type of role-playing game (RPG) based on real life. He was responsible for the first newsgame at Superinteressante, named "CSI – ciência contra o crime,” which put the player in the role of a forensic cop that demonstrated different investigative methods. It was linked with the cover of the October 2008 edition and was all based on investigative journalism. Kenski thought he was creating a new genre because we still didn’t know about products in other countries.
Mazotte: And when did the term began to be used in Brazil?
di Giacomo: In Brazil, 2007 seemed to be the year that the newsgame format started. That was when, outside of our department, [Brazilian media outlets] G1 and Estadão began to experiment with games. After "CSI,” we made “Jogo da Máfia,” in 2009, and reporter André Deak wrote a review about it and used the term newsgames. In other words, during the first games we thought we had invented the wheel, only to discover later that other newsgames had already been made.
Mazotte: How were those first games developed?
di Giacomo: In that time, our team had programmers, designers, and journalists. The programmers used Flash, so we didn’t have a database and gamers’ information couldn’t be saved. That meant the game needed to be relatively simple in order to complete in one session. Players couldn’t return and continue later. On our team we took care of the journalistic part, the testing, and we also thought about the mechanics of the game. Whether it is a question-and-answer game, buy-or-sell game, or some other game. The design was on us.
Mazotte: Is there a difference in the testing process of a newsgame?
di Giacomo: In testing proper there’s no difference. But the way you need to think about the material changes a lot. They are two parallel things, one is traditional testing, which is the same, and the other is the need to think about the mechanics of the game, think about the game design. When you’re building a game, the reporter needs to bring many visual references and should be thinking about images related to the theme in order to recreate the scene. So I would say the big difference is that focus on what will be illustrated.
Mazotte: Outside of the Núcleo Jovem products, a pioneer in the format, how have newsgames advanced in Brazil?
di Giacomo: I have seen some advances from big companies as well as independent ones. At the big companies, the best year was 2011, when Estadão, Globo and RBS also created great newsgames. In 2013, the magazine Contigo! launched a social game called “Cidade de Famosos” (City of Famous People), which had some traits of newsgames I created a list of Brazilian newsgames. Of the indie games I would cite “Game Diferenciado” and “Zangief Kid,” which are more like cartoon games that satirize true events.
Mazotte: What’s important in producing a newsgame?
di Giacomo: First you need to think about when it’s worth creating a game. Is the story I want to tell best told through a game, a post, or an infographic? If I wanted to explain how to avoid catching swine flu, for example, I would never do it in a game. Will making a game facilitate understanding of information? That is the starting point. To make a newsgame, you have to ask two questions: Does the game inform? If it doesn’t, it’s only a game. Does the game entertain? If not, it’s only journalism. It’s also necessary to have references. A person who wants to work with a newsgame has to play games, either through a tablet, cell phone or some other platform, or, at least, research them. So one tip is to play a lot and create an ample repertoire. Another thing is to know the theories that already exist. In the United States, Ian Bogost in his book Newsgames: Journalism at play discusses newsgames and their mechanics. For larger platforms, it is important to have integrated multimedia teams. A journalist needs to understand a bit about programming and design in order to be part of the team.
Mazotte: Who do you follow in the world of newsgames?
di Giacomo: I have more idols in the world of games and infographics than in newsgames, because, even abroad, the format is still very new. One of the most well-known people is Ian Bogost, who is among the biggest theorists of newsgames. He popularized the term and was one of the first to experiment with the format. Another is Gonzalo Frasca from Uruguay. In the area of infographics and visual journalism, I would point to Luiz Iria, a Brazilian and one of the best in the world, also [Spanish visual journalist] Alberto Cairo, and [Brazilian game developer] Fabiano Onça. Finally, David Cage, of Quantic Dream, who makes very intelligent games and is taking it to a more mature world.
Mazotte:What has been the response to the games developed by Abril?
di Giacomo: The games vary differently. My experience is that our publication is not necessarily made for avid gamers, but for people who are interested in the topics those games are about and their playability. Filosofighters, for example, is a game that brings the teachings of some of the foremost philosophers into a wrestling ring. It had 150,000 visits in the first 45 days. It was a top 10 of the semester. Even today it has to be one of the top 50 most visited sections of Superinteressante. We had another real simple game called “BBB: Paredão da Personalidade” which was the second most visited section of the site year. Later we did a game called “Corrida eleitoral,” which caused a bit of controversy.

filofighters1

Mazotte: Can newsgames also be a good format for smaller media outlets?
di Giacomo:The difficulty with working with newsgames in independent journalism is the cost. This type of work requires a multimedia team that not every small outlet has. That’s the reason we see a lot of video on independent sites, but still not a lot of games and infographics. But it’s a format with a lot of potential, not only because it can bring more attention — with its enormous simulation power and involvement with the audience — but also to diversify the content and add value to brands. Games are powerful tools, especially for denunciations. There are some interesting examples, such as the game denouncing the civil war in Sudan, and one about narcotrafficking in Mexico.
Mazotte: Have you thought of ways to make this format profitable?
di Giacomo: I think the simple fact of being a new format already gives it value and brings in new audiences. That happened at Superinteressante. Many sponsors began to seek the magazine to promote their own game-like ads on its site. So newsgames will help consolidate a digital image that brings publicity.

We also had an experience with charging for content when we tested social games. At the end of September 2011 Superinteressante launched its first game for Facebook, "Quiz City", in which the player constructs a city and sees it grow while responding to questions about general knowledge. In that game we created a system of micro-payments in which the user bought credits on Facebook or subscribed to the magazine to win tokens and continue playing. Few people invested while they played. Our intention was not to make an addictive game that tested people’s vanity, like other pay games do, but it was still interesting. We also need to think about whether this is the best way to monetize newsgames. Zynga, one of the best social pay games company, is in crisis, and I would not bet on that path. You end up not prioritizing the information and the best playability of the game. We still need to test. We’re still at the beginning.

Summer Reading 2013: “The Last Editor: How I Saved The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency” by Jim Bellows (2002)

Posted: 09 Aug 2013 10:00 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection.

These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013.

The Last Editor: How I Saved The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency by Jim Bellows

Google Books
Amazon

Jim Bellows, the famed editor of the The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Star, and The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, took pride in running second-place newspapers. There he was in a position to encourage bold, literary writing, and have some fun at the expense of the papers he refers to in the title of this book, his 2002 memoir.

Toward the book’s end, he writes about the experience of working on news at Prodigy, the pre-web dialup network that bridged BBSes and the Internet we know today. Bellows took some lessons with him from his newspaper days, including the idea to attract people to his network with celebrity experts — not unlike today’s discussions of the rise of personal franchise sites within news organizations, from Nate Silver to Ezra Klein.

There was a problem. CBS was the news partner at Prodigy; IBM was the technical partner, and Sears was the marketing partner. But when Larry Tisch bought CBS he opted out of Prodigy. With CBS gone, the most knowledgeable communications people were gone too. IBM and Sears had no media experience and their executives had little respect for news. They thought of it as fillers between the ads…So against these corporate walls, breaking news fought an uphill battle.

Then I developed what seemed to me a promising idea. I felt that there not only had to be a personality to this whole thing, but there had to be personalities involved in it.

If you wanted to lose ten ugly pounds, what could beat asking Jane Fonda? If you were wondering about the meaning of the last scene in Casablanca, who better to query than Gene Siskel? If you wanted to ask about presidential policy, how about asking Bob Novak or Jack Germond? Asking them directly, on your computer. And getting a personal answer.

I thought: Let’s get all the areas we want to keep people informed about, whether it’s food or finances or relationships, and let’s get the best people not only to write a short tip on the subject matter once a week, but also to answer questions from our subscribers. What could be more exciting than that in luring people to our service?

Basically, I was trying to create for Prodigy a group of star columnists, very much as I had done in the world of newspapers.

Summer Reading 2013: “The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril” by Len Downie and Bob Kaiser (2002)

Posted: 09 Aug 2013 09:00 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection.

These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013.

The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril by Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser

Google Books
Amazon

In The News About the News, Washington Post veterans Len Downie and Robert Kaiser focused on how to maintain professional journalistic standards in a media environment that is faster, cheaper, and more crowded than ever before. “Too much of what has been offered as news in recent years has been untrustworthy, irresponsible, misleading or incomplete,” they write in the introductory chapter, “News Matters.”

The history of new media is instructive: radio did not eliminate newspapers; talking movies did not destroy radio or newspapers; television did not obliterate radio, newspapers or movies. For nearly a century, Americans have made room for and taken advantage of new technologies without turning away from old ones that are still useful or fun.

And new technologies are just delivery devices. What might actually appear on those whiz-bang new reading devices of the future? And who will provide that content?

News does not grow on trees, and raw data is not the same as journalism. Some bits of data — ball scores, stock prices, weather conditions — are interesting in their own right, but most data and facts become useful to people only when they are organized, put into context, evaluated and digested. And of course much important information is not readily available but must be dug up by resourceful investigators called reporters.

Improving technology has already made more and more information available to each of us, and will continue to do so. But more is not necessarily better. We think that the more raw information available to each of us, the more consumers will need professional journalists to sort through it for them, find the wheat and reject the chaff, organize the important information in an easily digestible form, check to be sure it's accurate and display it in a way that reflects its importance. Journalists make sense of things — that is their function. A data-rich world, all interconnected by the Internet, will generate a great deal of confusing information that won't be useful until someone makes sense of it.

Summer Reading 2013: “The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations” by Larry Tye (1998)

Posted: 09 Aug 2013 08:00 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection.

These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013.

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations by Larry Tye

Google Books
Amazon

The Father of Spin is the first of six books by former Boston Globe reporter Larry Tye. He began writing it during his year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. The book is a biography of Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations.” (He is also, coincidentally, the father of the novelist Anne Bernays, who teaches fiction writing at the Nieman Foundation.)

Below, an excerpt that reflects how long ago the line between editorial content and advertising began to blur — a distinction that grows ever more important in a media environment edging into the world of sponsored content and “brand journalism.”

Guatemala was not Bernays’ first experience with foreign affairs.

That came just after the First World War when he was winding up his work with the Committee on Public Information, where he’d landed after being turned down for active duty. Carl Byoir, a colleague at the CPI, made his search easier by offering him $150 a week to help the Lithuanian National Council of the United States win American recognition of Lithuania, which had detached itself from Russia and formed a republic.

“I said, ‘Sure, I’d be glad to do it. What is it?’ He said, ‘Well, we’d like you to write stories justifying the validity of this little Baltic nation,” Bernays recalled more than fifty years later. “I thought of a new idea at the time, getting out what we called fillers for the newspapers — stories about four inches long. They were the same width of column as a newspaper. They were sent to papers throughout the country, and if the newspaper editor, the make up man, had to fill the gap, he could use them”…

He also tapped his time-tested technique of coming up with stories that appealed to the special interests of certain groups of Americans. He wrote about Lithuanian music for American music lovers and about Lithuanian theater for American theater buffs. He sought similar links for fans of sports and business, food, clothes and transportation. “Each story,” he explained, ” contained the message that Lithuania, the little republic on the Baltic, the bulwark against Bolshevism, was carrying on a fight for recognition in accord with the principle of self-determination laid down by President WIlson. This theme would appeal to Americans’ identification with liberty and freedom.

This Week in Review: Why Bezos is buying the Washington Post, and what’s next for it

Posted: 09 Aug 2013 07:00 AM PDT

Bezos buys The Post: This week’s announcement that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is buying The Washington Post was arguably the biggest and most surprising news in journalism in several years. Bezos bought the paper from its longtime owner, the Graham family, for $250 million (reportedly much more than it’s worth), moving the paper from a publicly traded company to private ownership. (Bezos is buying the paper personally; Amazon isn’t involved.) You can read Donald Graham’s memo on selling the paper, Bezos’ memo on buying it (praised extensively at Poynter), and reactions from Post staffers, including an open letter to Bezos from columnist Gene Weingarten.

A rather absurd number of people wrote substantial articles about the deal, and many of them were quite insightful. To try to present as much of it as possible without overwhelming you, I’ll break it down into a few broad questions (several of which are addressed adeptly in this Ken Doctor analysis):

— Why is Bezos buying The Post? Two main possibilities were suggested by several people. The first, articulated most thoroughly and persuasively by The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, was that Bezos sees the paper as a political tool — not necessarily to pursue an ideological agenda, but to protect Amazon’s interests in Washington. The Verge’s Greg Sandoval, Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici, and The New York Times’ Nick Wingfield and David Streitfeld also explored the interest Bezos and Amazon might have in gaining some political clout in Washington.

The second possibility is tied to the possible assets that The Post could provide to Amazon. Media analyst Alan Mutter was the leading proponent of this view, detailing some possible synergies at his own blog and in a Post piece, which The Post’s Lydia DePillis later expanded on. Business Insider’s Henry Blodget and Forbes’ Greg Satell also suggested common purposes between the two businesses, and The Post and Businessweek’s Brad Stone explored how Bezos’ Amazon management strategy might transfer over. Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder who made a similar purchase of The New Republic, said Bezos sees the value of The Post’s brand.

A few other suggestions about motivations and influence: The New Yorker’s Matt Buchanan put the purchase in the context of Bezos’ grand ambitions for humanity as a whole, and at the Lab, Tim Carmody suggested Bezos may see this as his legacy, something to pass onto his children. In a particularly perceptive piece, journalism professorMike Ananny argued at the Lab that Bezos’ influence should be best seen not in terms of brute force, but in infrastructure, calling us to “recast media ownership concerns in terms of infrastructure design.”

— Why might Bezos be good for The Post? Thanks in large part to Bezos’ history of reinventing (or overthrowing) the publishing and e-commerce industries, his purchase was met by many with a feeling of optimism about his ability to bring substantial innovation to The Post, as The Times reported. The Post’s Ezra Klein (noting some caveats) said he was “hopeful,” as did CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis. Among the reasons for optimism listed by PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy was that Bezos has a record of long-term thinking and “might actually have a plan.”

Reuters’ Jack Shafer and Slate’s Farhad Manjoo laid out that case for Bezos most persuasively, drawing on his record at Amazon. At CNN, Dan Sinker also made that case, focusing on Bezos’ remarkable work on Amazon Web Services. Others also hailed Bezos as a visionary in digitally oriented business: Former Post and Amazon staffer Bill Curry, former PolitiFact head Bill Adair, Digital First’s Steve Buttry, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, former FCCers Julian Genachowski and Steven Waldman, and former Post blogger Dan Froomkin, as well as Salon’s Andrew Leonard (with a heavy dose of snark). Wall Street Journal web veteran Jason Fry argued that with Bezos, “the Post has money and time to experiment and try to become something new. Which means it has a chance to survive.” And Ingram and Steve Outing gave Bezos some suggestions for reinventing The Post.

— Why might Bezos be bad for The Post? The most common objection to Bezos’ Post ownership was that while he did turn Amazon into a web behemoth, he did so by embodying “the faster-cheaper-further mindset that scratches away daily at our communal fabric,” as The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis put it. Reuters’ Felix Salmon made this point most thoroughly, arguing that this style doesn’t fit in newsrooms, where “greatness emerges mysteriously from the slack in the system.” The Guardian’s Emily Bell also issued a caution about Bezos’ efficiency as she argued that Bezos wouldn’t approach The Post as a philanthropist, and Post veteran and Columbia j-school dean Steve Coll worried that Amazon’s consumer data-driven approach might influence the paper too much (though he also expressed optimism about Bezos).

There were a few other concerns as well: Writer Corey Pein pointed to Bezos’ decision to kick WikiLeaks off Amazon’s web servers because of government pressure as evidence that he prioritizes his political good standing over free speech. BuzzFeed’s Benjamin Freed also argued that the switch to non-local ownership for The Post (Bezos lives in Washington State) is bad for local news in Washington, and MSNBC’s Timothy Noah made a similar point about the decline of local ownership more generally.

— Are we seeing a return to the newspaper baron model? With John Henry’s purchase of The Boston Globe a few days earlier (more on that later), several people saw this as a landmark in the onset of what the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum called it the “Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper-industry's collapse.” James Fallows of The Atlantic put it more hopefully, calling it a possible “re-invest[ment] in the infrastructure of our public intelligence.” Ken Doctor has a good explanation of why these billionaires might be doing this and what might result for the industry (less uniformity, higher highs, lower lows).

Like several others, The Post’s Matea Gold likened the purchases to the “newspaper baron” days of the 1800s and early 1900s, when publishing titans ran newspapers as their own personal empires. Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review tweaked that view a bit, noting that unlike those moguls, the new owners are titans in industries other than publishing, which results in less independence for their media properties. Slate’s Matthew Yglesias called this a return to family ownership after decades of profit-based public ownership, and similarly, David Von Drehle of Time said it marks the end of the cash-cow media monopoly era.

— What about the Grahams? As David Carr of The New York Times wrote, the sale is also the end of 80 years of Graham family ownership of one of America’s premier newspapers. At the Lab, Staci Kramer talked to Donald Graham about the decision to sell, and The New Yorker’s David Remnick reflected on the family and the paper’s decline, concluding, “Donald Graham's heart is broken.”

John Harris of Politico wrote that the Grahams’ sale “amounts to a confession: Beats us how to make this business work anymore.” In a thoughtful, personal open letter to Bezos, All Things D’s Kara Swisher (a former Post staffer) reflected on the Grahams and expressed her sadness that “these laudable and smart people could not seem to figure it out, and had to turn to a magical Internet wizard to do so.” She also offered some great thoughts on how to make a news organization work in the web world.

globe

A new local owner in Boston: In what was only the second-biggest newspaper purchase of the week, John Henry, a billionaire who is the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, agreed to buy The Boston Globe for $70 million from The New York Times Co. The Times bought The Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and had been trying to sell it for the past couple of years. Digital First’s Steve Buttry noted that the paper had lost 97% of its value over the past two decades, and The Globe published an in-depth profile of the man who will own it.

The two best analyses of the deal come from the Lab’s Ken Doctor and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds. Doctor pointed out that The Globe has already implemented the changes that new owners have often undertaken at other similar newspapers — an online paywall and a membership program — and examined the reasons the paper continues to underperform. Likewise, Edmonds said that Henry got a good deal on the paper, but that its high-quality, high-cost approach doesn’t make it “a candidate for a quick pivot.” Emerson College journalism professor Mark Leccese argued that Henry will be good for The Globe, and USA Today’s Rem Rieder noted that Henry’s buy marks a return to local ownership for the paper, though that’s not necessarily a salve.

One pressing question regarding the sale is over the conflict of interest involved with The Globe’s coverage of the Red Sox, one of the city’s most prominent local businesses. The Times’ Peter May provided some very background on the relationship between the two, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman called attention to what he called “the sports-industrial complex” and its entangled relationship to media companies, and Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy said the problem isn’t that the paper will go turn into Red Sox homers (it won’t) but that it’s in a lose-lose situation.

Shortly after the sale, three other potential buyers said their bids for the paper were higher than what Henry is paying. The most vocal of those was John Lynch, CEO of U-T San Diego, who accused the Times Co. of refusing to sell to his group, which has drawn criticism for its conservative political influence on U-T’s content. Kennedy examined the claims and the Times Co.’s response, concluding that it can probably claim it chose the bidder most likely to keep the paper stable into the future.

There were also questions (especially after The Post’s sale) about whether The Times itself would be the next big family-owned paper to be sold. The Post’s Paul Farhi and The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone and Eleazar Melendez raised the question, and while The Times’ Arthur Sulzberger Jr. issued a statement declaring that the paper isn’t for sale, Tom McGeveran of Capital New York parsed it to argue that a sale isn’t as unlikely as we might think.

patch

AOL growing, Patch shrinking: AOL made a couple of pieces of news in its quarterly earnings report this week, led by its purchase of the web video company Adap.TV for $405 million, the largest of the many purchases in CEO Tim Armstrong’s four-year tenure. Ad Week has some key questions about the deal. Second, as Street Fight’s Steven Jacobs and Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici reported, Armstrong said AOL would be seeking to sell, close, or find “partners” for 300 of the 900 sites in its hyperlocal news network. Only another 300 of those sites have a viable business model, Armstrong said.

Jim Romenesko also reported that Patch is expected to lay off employees — as many as 500 — today. Jeff Jarvis urged an alternative strategy — set up independent entrepreneurs to take over the sites, providing them with venture capital and training to build a network rather than owning it. “I don't want to see retrenchment of Patch give the naysayers as chance to nya-nya us,” he wrote.

newsweek

Reading roundup: Believe it or not, other stuff happened this week, too. Here’s a quick rundown:

— Another much less interesting sale this week: Newsweek (now a digital news org, not a magazine) was sold by The Daily Beast to IBT Media, a web news company that owns the International Business Times. As BuzzFeed noted, IBT has ties to controversial religious leader David Jang. Meanwhile, The New York Times went deep into the mess that was Tina Brown’s tenure as editor of Newsweek.

— Google introduced a tool that highlights in-depth articles in its searches. The Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan explained what’s behind it, and PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie and Jihii Jolly of the Future Journalism Project explained why they’re excited about the potential it has to highlight long-form journalism.

— PBS’ NewsHour announced it would be anchored starting this fall by two women, Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff. As The New York Times noted, it’s a milestone for women in journalism, particularly because the NewsHour was famously anchored by two men for decades.

— Finally, Free Press’ Josh Stearns and Chris Palmer wrote a great primer on the history of and prospects for a federal journalism shield law in the U.S., of which a current proposal remains in limbo in the Senate. It’s brief and quite useful.

Summer Reading 2013: “Getting the Connections Right: Public Journalism and the Troubles in the Press” by Jay Rosen (1996)

Posted: 09 Aug 2013 07:00 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection.

These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013.

Getting the Connections Right: Public Journalism and the Troubles in the Press by Jay Rosen

Google Books
Amazon

Getting the Connections Right is a distillation of Jay Rosen’s concept of public journalism, which “calls on the press to help revive civic life and improve public dialogue — and to fashion a coherent response to the deepening problems of our civic climate, most of which implicate journalists.” Written a few years before the future-of-journalism debates became heavily focused on the coming digital news revolution, the book is a look at the conversation about how to make the press more relevant, at a time when that discussion could still focus on print newspapers.

Rosen has said that his focus shifted from the public journalism movement around 2000 (more on that here), but to read his call for rethinking traditional divisions is to see how it is playing out today: the elimination of much of the journalist/blogger divide, the reporter/analyst divide, and in some cases the editorial/business divide.

This section of the book comes after a discussion of newspaper editors who choose not to vote, including the Washington Post’s Leonard Downie.

Not many journalists go to those lengths, but journalism in general shares Downie’s approach. It aims to remain properly detached. The industry’s ethical codes are concerned almost exclusively with getting the separations right. Consider how central the image of separation is in the mind of the American press:

- Editorial functions are separated from the business side.
- The news pages are separated from the opinion pages.
- Facts are separated from values.
- Those who make the news are separated from those who cover the news.
- Truth-telling must be separated from its consequences so that journalists can “tell it like it is.”
- The newspaper is separated from other institutions by its duty to report on them.
- One day is separated from another because news is what’s “new” today.
- A good journalists separates reality from rhetoric.
- One’s professional identity must be separated from one’s personal identity as a citizen.
- How one “feels” about something is separate from how one reports on it.
- The journalist’s mind is separate from the journalist’s soul.

But suppose that getting the separations right isn’t the central problem. This is what public journalism is saying: getting the connections right is the deeper challenge in journalism right now. “Getting the connections right” means all the connections: between news and opinion, between facts and values, between the editorial product and the business function, between the press and the political system, between the occupational and the spiritual crisis, and particularly between journalism and the public. Worry about the connections, and in time the needed separations will become clear. This is a difficult task, primarily because some distancing remains critically important. There is, finally, a difference between doing journalism and doing politics, between observation and action. There is a core value in “objectivity” that ought to be upheld, but, as Ed Fouhy observes, there is also “a sterile detachment from the life of the community” that needs to be overcome.
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