Sabtu, 21 September 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

“Is there Still a Place for Public Service Television? Effects of the Changing Economics of Broadcasting”

Posted: 20 Sep 2013 10:47 AM PDT

It’s a new report from the essential Reuters Institute at Oxford, which leads the way in cross-national media studies today. PDF here. The big question is what’s the role of public television — PBS, BBC, CBC, NHK, and so on — in a world where media options are more numerous than ever? One noteworthy, if short, chapter is Joshua Gans’ “Television Wants to be Shared”:

My recent book Information Wants to be Shared (2012) puts forward the hypothesis that allowing consumers to share information easily can be an important feature of business models for content provision. The reasons are twofold. First, information, as an economic good, has a non-rival characteristic, meaning that the costs of producing information are independent of, and often much greater than, the costs of distributing it. This is certainly true of broadcasting where the size of the audience does not impact on the cost of providing programming. From an economic perspective, what this implies is that it is efficient for information, once produced, to be widely disseminated and that we should look for ways for all users to contribute towards the cost of producing that information. That widespread dissemination and voluntary choice to contribute to information funding can conflict is a challenge that does not diminish the aim here.

With seven times the audience it had in 2008, 4chan undertakes a rare rules update

Posted: 20 Sep 2013 10:13 AM PDT

Citing overcrowding caused by the addition of close to 20 million users in five years, 4chan announced that they’ll be updating some of the rules around posting and membership for the first time in quite a while.

Rules around anonymous online conversation are not a simple architecture, however. Matt Buchanan recalled for us recently the spectacular decline of Digg after a redesign that caused users to turn on each other, and eventually, the system.

In seeking to avoid a similar demise while also reining in perceived declining quality of conversation, 4chan founder Christopher Poole writes that anonymity, and how to use it, is a central concern.

4chan’s gift of anonymity offers us something not often found on today’s Web—the opportunity to speak our mind and share ideas and be judged for the content of what we write rather than who we are. For a long time, this resulted in an environment unlike any other, one that fostered and rewarded creativity and experimentation. However these days, many posters use this precious gift as a license to say and do whatever they’d like, often to the detriment of the board. Using 4chan should be enjoyable—but your enjoyment of the site shouldn’t come at the expense of your fellow 4channers.

Poole goes on to detail changes to content discovery, including infinite scroll, cataloging and search, as well as new rules for moderation and other site specifics.

Laura Amico: From Homicide Watch to education, testing a new kind of structured journalism

Posted: 20 Sep 2013 09:19 AM PDT

The question started almost as soon as Homicide Watch D.C. launched. “Can you do this with education?” editor after editor asked.

This week, after three years of focusing on violent crime, I am thrilled to be able to say: Yes, we are doing this with education.

In partnership with Boston public radio station WBUR and with funding from the Knight and Boston foundations, Glass Eye Media is launching an education vertical, focusing on reform initiatives in Massachusetts K-12 schools.

Learning Lab, as it will be known, will probe classroom and school experiments — examining the effects of reforms like a longer school day, tablets in schools, project-based learning, or different professional development programs for educators.

Learning Lab will give policymakers tools to measure the impact of these initiatives and to hear from parents about other intended or unintended outcomes. It will connect policymakers, parents, teachers, administrators, and researchers in a structured and safe place to discuss and collaborate on efforts to improve education in Massachusetts.

For me, this exciting project caps three years — as of tomorrow — of hard work building a new model of community storytelling.

Homicide Watch D.C. launched quietly on September 21, 2010. With little more than an idea — that there was a better way to serve the D.C. community’s needs for meaningful data and community-driven news of violent crime — Chris Amico and I built a service that was quickly embraced. More than winning awards, Homicide Watch D.C. won the respect — and hearts — of our community. We did it by pairing good reporting with data and storytelling in an open notebook format. Using a process I call “narrative data,” we pulled facts from reporting into a database and then used those facts to tell stories, asking and answering questions about what is usual and unusual, fact-checking quickly, finding where discrepancies lie, and looking forward by asking what happens next.

Much more than the work of a single reporter and programmer, the project invited the community in by opening up our work as much as possible. This transparency helped D.C. residents — and others — see what information was missing and help fill in those holes.

Homicide Watch D.C. was a project in what Reg Chua calls “structured journalism.” This, I truly believe, is what set Homicide Watch D.C. apart from all other murder blogs, homicide maps, and similar projects. It is also what has helped us build partnerships to bring the idea nationwide, launching sites with the Trentonian in New Jersey, the Sun-Times in Chicago, University of Colorado Boulder, WBUR and Northeastern University (launching soon).

Learning Lab is my first big leap back into work after spending the past year at Harvard studying journalism innovation as an inaugural Nieman-Berkman Fellow. The study time prepared me for this move, giving me space to think about what made Homicide Watch D.C. work and manage plans for our business growth. It also provided me with invaluable mentors who have helped shape me as a manager, a business owner, and a journalist.

And so, at the end of my fellowship, when John Davidow at WBUR asked what I wanted to work on next, the answer was easy: “Let’s do this with education.”

Learning Lab likely won’t look much like Homicide Watch, but the same principles — building foundational knowledge, creating tools for the community to interact with the reporting, and setting a space for community conversation at the center — will create the structure for meaningful coverage of Massachusetts’ significant education reform efforts.

The expansion of the narrative data concept from violent crime to education is a significant one, and Learning Lab offers Chris and me an opportunity to further test our theories about innovative news structures, this time within an existing news organization. Our goal is to turn daily reporting into structured, reusable data. This means we will be able to see how any given reform initiative fits into the larger picture of education in the Commonwealth, and it means we can ask questions of our data. It means we won’t lose information, and we’ll be able to provide the public with access to source documents, data, and tools to increase visibility and transparency of specific reform efforts and experiments.

We’ve found that Homicide Watch — and projects like it — work best with a small, dedicated and interdisciplinary team that can focus on reporting, engagement and building the right platform. So that’s where we’ll start. And as we build we will work to find ways to make individual reporters more effective in the work they are already doing. We believe the right tools make good reporters more powerful. And powerful reporters are at the heart of informed, engaged and active communities. This is the space where Homicide Watch succeeds. And it is where Learning Lab will thrive, too.

Laura Amico is CEO of Glass Eye Media, a media consultancy and software group providing narrative-data services to newsrooms. She was a 2012-13 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation at Harvard.

Photo of Boston Latin School classroom circa 1892-1893 via Boston Public Library.

This Week in Review: The breaking news errors continue, and media shield law skepticism

Posted: 20 Sep 2013 07:19 AM PDT

The Navy Yard and breaking-news errors: The U.S. had another mass shooting this week, this time in the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. There was a good deal of quality journalism done in the shooting’s wake, but in what’s become a pretty common theme, the story about the news coverage of the situation centered on its errors in reporting breaking news. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon has a good, quick summary of the news media’s sins in the case, which included several news organizations naming the wrong suspect, and live-tweeting the police scanner.

The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reported on the dangers of relying on initial reports and scanner traffic, quoting one longtime reporter as observing, “We've gotten into a situation where the media's standard operating procedure has become report first, confirm second and correct third.” Slate’s Will Oremus said that while journalists shouldn’t simply wait until information is confirmed by police to report it, they should be especially wary of naming names, as opposed to more tangential details.

You could sense a lot of the weariness of these errors in commentary about the Navy Yard story: Poynter’s Craig Silverman wrote a wryly generic column linking to the numerous posts he’s written in these situations in the past, noting that we nod our heads and pass along the “better to be right than first” advice, but keep getting it wrong when these stories arise.

Gawker’s Tom Scocca told people to just ignore breaking news in tragedies because it’s so consistently wrong. “Those alarming yet tedious hours between something horrible happening and anyone figuring out what it was — forget about it, unless you’re in the vicinity,” he wrote. Circa’s Anthony De Rosa lamented journalists’ addiction to anonymous sources in these cases, but wondered if errors that resulted are really chipping away at the public’s trust like they should.

Reddit, whose members had created such a stir with their efforts to identify the Boston Marathon bombers, quickly shut down a section dedicated to finding the Navy Yard shooters because it violated the site’s ban on posting personal information. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM broke down what both traditional media and crowdsourced media can add to reporting in breaking-news situations, urging professional journalists to make more use of crowdsourced sources like Reddit in an effort to improve information and avoid errors.

shield-law-cc

Media shield law blowback: The efforts to create a national U.S. media shield law allowing journalists the legal right not to disclose their anonymous sources cleared a big hurdle late last week, with a bill passing the Senate Judiciary Committee. But several critics expressed their wariness this week that the bill would actually curb journalists’ protections.

A strong article by Steven Nelson of U.S. News & World Report lays out the range of objections: The bill wouldn’t protect against the government’s surveillance of journalists in leak investigations, it would open the door for the courts to limit journalists’ rights, and it would allow the government to engage in the unconstitutional and anachronistic act of defining who is and isn’t a journalist.

Much of the discussion about the bill has centered on that last point. Free Press’ Josh Stearns and Mathew Ingram of paidContent both criticized the government’s creation of two tiers of journalists in the bill, one automatically protected and one subject to judges’ discretion. Both argued that, as Stearns wrote, “the bill could be greatly strengthened and simplified by defining journalism as an act, a process that anyone can participate in, instead of a profession limited to a few practitioners.”

Blogger Dave Winer made a similar point, arguing that “we should be trying to expand the realm of people empowered to inform us about what our elected representatives are doing with the power we invest in them.” The Online News Association, meanwhile, issued its qualified support of the bill’s definition of journalists, calling it “broad and forward-thinking.”

Reuters LogoReuters knocks out Next: Reuters killed its ambitious plan for a remade consumer-oriented website called Next this week, with Reuters CEO Andrew Rashbass saying in a memo that it’s “a long way from achieving either commercial viability or strategic success.” Reuters will build its web plans going forward around its current site. For some background on what Next was supposed to be, check out Capital New York’s feature on it from January and the Lab’s piece on the unveiling of its preview in May.

Matthew Zeitlin of BuzzFeed has all the inside details about why the project died, focusing on two main factors: 1) It was intended as a way to improve Reuters’ brand perception, rather than to make money, and the CEO got tired of throwing money at it; and 2) the massive technical challenge of overhauling the site simply couldn’t be overcome in anything resembling a timely manner. The Lab’s Justin Ellis put Next in a broader context, framing it as part of newswires’ halting efforts to shift from strictly business-to-business products to public-facing news organizations.

Reading roundup: There were few big stories this week, but lots of smaller ones. Here’s a few to keep your eye on:

— After months of rumors that a split was imminent, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, co-editors of the popular tech site All Things Digital, announced they would leave News Corp.-owned Dow Jones, which has owned their site since it launched. (Mossberg will also leave his post as tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, also part of Dow Jones.) It looks like Dow Jones will keep the All Things Digital name and look for a buyer or partner, while Swisher and Mossberg will launch a new tech site and events business that could be valued at $30 million to $40 million.

— A few notes on the ongoing NSA surveillance story: A U.S. federal judge ordered the Justice Department to declassify a set of secret court rulings about the surveillance program, noting that Edward Snowden’s leaks had sparked an important public debate on the program. GigaOM examined the security industry in turmoil as a result of the latest revelations about the NSA getting around encryption measures, and the Columbia Journalism Review outlined encryption basics for journalists. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wondered why Time magazine hasn’t done much with the Snowden leaks.

— Notes on the war in Syria: A Pew poll this week found that the new Al Jazeera America is covering the conflict much like its peers in American cable news, which is quite a bit more hawkish than the U.S. public. Reuters’ Jack Shafer wrote about how the chemical attacks in Syria triggered American journalism’s “alarm” function. And On The Media and BuzzFeed highlighted the freelancers and women, respectively, reporting from Syria.

— NPR announced a voluntary buyout program intended to cut 10 percent of its 840-person staff in an attempt to balance its budget by 2015. It also named California businessman and NPR board member Paul Haaga Jr. as its interim CEO, after the departure of Gary Knell to National Geographic.

— The U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced that it would be looking more closely at native advertising, and The New York Times’ David Carr explored the potential problems it might cause. Blogger Andrew Sullivan echoed his concerns.

— Finally, the Lab’s Ken Doctor provided a useful primer on news organizations’ forays into the events business — what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how to do it well.

Photo of D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier by AP/Susan Walsh. Photo of shield by Dave Pearson used under a Creative Commons license.
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