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Jumat, 30 November 2012
journalism - Google News: Seni Ukir Buah dan Sayuran ala Nyoman Sungada - Liputan6.com
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| John Keane: The new muckrakers are challenging democratic institutions — in a good way Posted: 29 Nov 2012 09:13 AM PST Editor’s note: John Keane is a professor of politics at the University of Sydney in Australia; he studies the ongoing evolution of democracy. Here, in a piece taken from the terrific Australian academia-meets-journalism site The Conversation, Keane examines the impact that the new generation of digitally savvy, intensely networked, online muckrakers is having on our perceptions of democracy.
Vaxevanis began by exposing the huge kickbacks on weapons contracts allegedly pocketed by a former defence minister, who is now behind bars, awaiting trial. Hot Doc then implicated the central bank of Greece in shorting the country’s debt by local speculators. It tracked the issuing of large unsecured loans (known locally as thalassodaneia) by private banks. Last month brought its biggest and most controversial scoop: the publication of a list of 2,000 rich and powerful Greeks with funds stashed in Swiss bank accounts. Hot Doc sales and online hits rocketed. Vaxevanis was arrested. Cold-shouldered by mainstream media, he was pelted with abuse, targeted by assassins and accused by state authorities of violating privacy laws and “turning the country into a coliseum.” Vaxevanis remained defiant. “We’ll continue doing our job,” he said, “and that is to uncover everything that others wish to hide.” Earlier this month, he was vindicated by an Athens court. A judge ruled that he’d acted for the public good. Events then took a macabre turn: the Athens public prosecutor’s office announced his re-trial in a higher level misdemeanour court. If convicted, he could suffer a two-year prison sentence. Brave Kostas Vaxevanis belongs to the age of monitory democracy. He’s a new muckraker, an exemplar of a distinctively 21st-century style of political writing. To describe him this way is to give new meaning to a charming old Americanism, an earthy neologism from the late nineteenth century, when muckraking referred to journalism committed to the cause of publicly exposing arbitrary power.
Our media-saturated age of monitory democracy is reviving and transforming muckraking in this old sense. New muckrakers like Kostas Vaxevanis put their finger on a perennial problem for which democracy is a solution: the power of elites always thrives on secrecy, silence and invisibility. Gathering behind closed doors and deciding things in peace and private quiet is their speciality. Little wonder then that in media-saturated societies, to put things paradoxically, muckrakers ensure that unexpected “leaks” and revelations become predictably commonplace. Despite his neglect of the shaping effects of communications media, the French philosopher Alain Badiou is right: everyday life is constantly ruptured by mediated “events.” They pose challenges to both the licit and the illicit. It is not just that stuff happens; muckrakers ensure that shit happens. Muckraking becomes rife. There are moments when it even feels as if the whole world is run by rogues.
Muckraking is a controversial practice, certainly, but there’s no doubt it has definite political effects on the old institutions of representative democracy. Public disaffection with official “politics” has much to do with the practise of muckraking under conditions of communicative abundance. In recent decades, much survey evidence suggests that citizens in many established democracies, although they strongly identify with democratic ideals, have grown more distrustful of politicians, doubtful about governing institutions, and disillusioned with leaders in the public sector. Politicians are sitting ducks. The limited media presence and media vulnerability of parliaments is striking. Despite efforts at harnessing new digital media, parties have been left flat-footed. They neither own nor control their media outlets and they’ve lost much of the astonishing energy displayed at the end of the 19th century by political parties, such as Germany’s SPD, which at the time was the greatest political party machine on the face of the earth, in no small measure because it powerfully championed literacy and was a leading publisher of books, pamphlets and newspapers in its own right. The net effect is that under conditions of communicative abundance the core institutions of representative democracy have become easy targets of rough riding. Think for a moment about any current public controversy that attracts widespread attention: muckraked news and disputes about its wider public significance typically begin outside the formal machinery of representative democracy. The messages become memes quickly relayed by many power-scrutinising organisations, large, medium and small. They often hit their target, sometimes from long distances, often by means of boomerang effects. In the media-saturated world of communicative abundance, that kind of latticed or networked pattern of circulating controversial messages is typical, not exceptional. It produces constant feedback effects: unpredictably non-linear links between inputs and outputs.
Who or what drives the new muckraking? The temptations and abuses of power by oligarchs, certainly. The criminal obscenities, hypocrisies and political stupidities of those responsible for the deep crisis of parliamentary democracy in Greece and the wider Atlantic region, no doubt. The decline of parties and representative politics and strengthening democratic sensibilities against arbitrary power also play their part. But of critical importance is the advent of communicative abundance. Just as the old muckrakers took advantage of advertising-driven mass production and circulation of newspapers, so the new muckrakers are learning fast how to use digital networks for political ends. The new muckraking isn’t the effect of new media alone, as believers in the magical powers of technology suppose. Individuals, groups, networks and whole organisations make muckraking happen. Yet buried within the infrastructures of communicative abundance are technical features that enable muckrakers to do their work of publicly scrutinising power, much more efficiently and effectively than at any moment in the history of democracy. From the end of the 1960s, a communications revolution has been unfolding. It’s by no means finished. Product and process innovations have been happening in virtually every field of an increasingly commercialised media. Technical factors, such as electronic memory, tighter channel spacing, new frequency allocation, direct satellite broadcasting, digital tuning and advanced compression techniques, have made a huge difference. Yet within the infrastructure of communicative abundance there’s something more important, more special: its distributed networks. In contrast, say, to centralised state-run broadcasting systems of the past, the spider’s web linkages among many different nodes within a distributed network make them intrinsically more resistant to centralised control. The network is structured by the logic of packet switching: information flows are broken into bytes, then pass through many points en route to their destination, where they are re-assembled as messages. If they meet resistance at any point within the system of nodes then the information flows are simply diverted automatically, re-routed in the direction of their intended destination. It is this packet-switched and networked character of media-saturated societies that makes them so prone to dissonance. Some observers (Giovanni Navarria is among them) claim that a new understanding of power as “mutually shared weakness” is needed for making sense of the impact of networks on the distribution of power within any given political order. Their point is that those who exercise power over others are subject constantly to muckraking and its unforeseen setbacks, reversals and revolts. Manipulation and bossing and bullying of the powerless become difficult. The powerless readily find the networked communicative means through which to take their revenge on the powerful. The consequence: power disputes follow unexpected pathways and reach surprising destinations that have unexpected outcomes. Navarria and others have a point. Innovations such as the South Korean site OhmyNews, UK Uncut, California Watch and Mediapart (a Paris-based watchdog staffed by a number of veteran French newspaper and news agency journalists) help radically alter the ecology of public affairs reporting and commentary. The new dot.org muckrakers don’t simply give voice to the voiceless. Their aggressive muckraking triggers echo effects which spell deep trouble for conventional understandings of journalism.
The days of journalism proud of its commitment to the sober principle that “comment is free, but facts are sacred” (that was the phrase coined in 1921 by the Manchester Guardian’s long-time editor C.P. Scott) are over. References to fact-based “objectivity,” an ideal that was born of the age of representative democracy, are equally implausible. Talk of “fairness” (a criterion of good journalism famously championed by Hubert Beuve-Méry, the founder and first editor of Le Monde) is also becoming questionable. In place of the rituals of “objectivity” and “fairness” we see the rise of adversarial and “gotcha” styles of journalism, forms of writing that are driven not just by ratings, sales and hits, but by the will to expose wrongdoing. Muckraking sometimes comes in highly professional form, as at London’s The Guardian, which played a decisive role in the phone-hacking scandal that hit News Corporation in mid-2011. In other contexts, muckraking equals biting political satire, of the deadly kind popularised in India by STAR’s weekly show Poll Khol, which uses a comedian anchorman, an animated monkey, news clips and Bollywood soundtracks (the programme title is translated as “open election” but is actually drawn from a popular Hindi metaphor which means “revealing the hidden story”). Thanks to the new muckraking, rough riding of the powerful happens — on a scale never before witnessed. Contrary to the pessimists and purists, democratic politics is not withering away. In matters of who gets what, when and how, thanks to the new muckrakers, nothing is ever settled, or straightforward. Our great grandparents would find the whole process astonishing in its democratic intensity. There seems to be no end of scandals. There are even times when so-called “-gate” scandals, like earthquakes, rumble beneath the feet of whole governments. Skeptics say that muckraking has gone too far, that it breeds distrust and disaffection, that it’s poisoning the spirit of democracy. The case of Kostas Vaxevanis, his refusal to let Greek democracy die, shows that kind of objection is both premature and out of touch. On balance, all things considered, muckraking has always been a good and necessary thing for democracy. It’s now becoming a life-and-death imperative. We’re living in confused times when the political dirty business of dragging arbitrary power from behind curtains of secrecy is fundamentally important. “Greece is ruled by a small group of politicians, businesspeople and journalists with the same interests,” Vaxevanis said recently. In a Twitter post, he noted the consequence: “While society demands disclosure, they cover up.” He’s right, and his point is surely relevant not just for Greece, but for democratic countries otherwise as different as Japan, India, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The disease of dysfunctional democracy is spreading. The gaps between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, are widening. Public disaffection with politicians and parties flourishes. Cynicism grows. Dropping out is becoming common. Worst of all, where all this leads is becoming ever less clear. Political drift is the new norm. Watch out, citizens.  John Keane is director of the newly-founded Institute for Democracy and Human Rights (IDHR) and professor of politics at the University of Sydney and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). His most recent book, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), was short-listed for the 2010 Non-Fiction Prime Minister’s Literary Award. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.  |
| The newsonomics of going deeper Posted: 29 Nov 2012 06:54 AM PST The news industry appears to be having another one of its Admiral Stockdale moments. Who am I? Why am I here? From Columbia’s “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present” report (“A new Columbia report examines the disrupted news universe”) to information overload, the basic roles of what news companies should do for readers and citizens seem once again at issue. Without debating that here, let me point to one answer very much in formation: Go deeper.
Going deeper means many things, from national investigative reporting to hyperlocal community info. Increasingly, it will be sports and features and entertainment as well. What I’m particularly intrigued about is how technology is rapidly improving the trade’s ability to go deeper — and to go deeper faster and cheaper. (A couple of decades ago in Portland, I recall seeing a housepainter’s business card. At each of its four corners was a single word: Faster, Cheaper, Better, Sooner. I always thought that had universal application.) You’ve read about some of this, with the “Robots Ate My Newspaper” headlines this summer as the Journatic faked-bylines scandal fueled popular dismay. Well beyond the headlines lies a bigger movement. It’s not quite a computer-generated revolution, though technology aids, assists, and adjusts our thinking as to what’s possible. As we look at a few of the data points in the newsonomics of going deeper, let’s remember why this is important. First: Readers are fast becoming the primary revenue source for newspapers (“The newsonomics of majority reader revenue”). Second: We live in an age of way too much. People want context, not more content. Third: Creating content is too expensive. In the age of low-cost aggregation and low-cost user- and citizen-generated content, any way of reducing editorial labor costs or maximizing productivity to produce good, differentiating news content is a necessity. Fourth: It’s a business differentiator for all media — TV, newspapers, and more — in a world of too much. Hearst Television News VP Candy Altman makes the last point succinctly: “The only way to differentiate yourself in this fragmented world is through the best content. We have some very strong investigative units in our company, but investigative reporting tools can and should be used in all of our reporting.” Consequently, Hearst TV teamed up with Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) on four regional workshops focused on techniques for using data mining in investigative reporting. Hearst isn’t the only local broadcaster upping its game. The 10 NBC-owned local news stations, in major markets from L.A. to New York, have doubled the number of their editors, reporters, and shooters devoted to investigative work in a single year; they now include 62 staffers. About a third of them attended a multi-day IRE workshop as well. (A recent Dallas-Fort Worth story led to the Fort Worth police department banning its officers themselves from texting while driving, which reporting showed had led to 15 accidents.) Further, Gannett and McClatchy are other news companies that have invested in more investigative training for their staffs. Another sure indicator is IRE’s own membership rolls. A veteran trade group, IRE membership had suffered along with the industry. With about 5,000 members in 2005, it was down to 3,400 in 2009. Now it’s back in the vicinity of 4,300, says Mark Horvit, IRE executive director. As importantly, the kind of technology-aided work IRE is focusing on is morphing. IRE’s conferences and data training sessions are focusing beyond traditional technique. Investigative journalists have long focused on existing databases, government and otherwise, “mining” that “structured data” (already in fields or categories). That work continues. What’s growing rapidly is the figuring out how to get at unstructured data; that’s where the “pioneering” work is being done, says Horvit. Emails, legislative bills, government bureau and courts documents, press releases; you name it. Stuff in unstructured prose. “It’s a higher degree of math difficulty, to be sure,” says Chase Davis, director of technology at the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). Yet his data team of four and high dozens, if not hundreds of journalists across the country are now applying machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and document clustering to their work. All those terms have specific meanings, and there is yet more jargon that all makes sense to its practitioners. For the rest of us, it’s important to understand this: Well-programmed technology can do a lot of journalistic heavy lifting. In part, all the technological innovation simply lets smart journalists ask better questions and get a faster result. It both allows journalists to get questions they know they’d like to answer — and goes a step beyond. Getting at unstructured data opens inquiry to lots of content previously beyond reach. Machine learning, says Davis, “allows datasets to tell you their stories. You don’t have to be limited by your own experience.” For instance, analyzing a congressman’s emails may yield patterns of contacts journalists didn’t even know to ask about. Doing an algorithmic dive into campaign records, as IRE and CIR did using Kaggle (which turned data science into sport, as amateurs could take on statistical wizards), produced all kinds of trends in campaign finance that journalists hadn’t yet considered. ProPublica’s Message Machine unearthed facts about how 2012 political targeting was really working, after first using crowdsourcing to gather many of the presidential campaign pitches citizens were receiving. Jeff Larson, a ProPublica news apps developer — who well straddles the line between journalist and techie — said the nonprofit then reverse-engineered the emails, using both machine learning and NLP to find patterns, make sense and produce stories on the changed nature of presidential marketing. (Former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz gives a good overview of the Obama campaign’s huge data advantage, and how it was built; note how far behind that campaign the U.S. news industry finds itself in smartly targeting.) This pioneering work “opens up fantastic new avenues for looking for trends, for finding the hidden story,” says IRE’s Horvit. “You can stare at a spreadsheet ’til your eyes pop out. If you use software intelligently [with structured content], it pulls out the story for you. If you can develop software — and they are — that deals with large amounts of text, you get that quantum leap.” High-minded issues of national public impact — campaign spending, Big Pharma’s payments to doctors, national security (a Center for Public Integrity focus area) — are one hot area here. Another is at another end of the spectrum: local and hyperlocal news and information. Journatic CEO Brian Timpone is in the forefront of the work and the thinking here. Put aside whatever you think about the company’s byline scandal and focus on what Journatic does. Timpone talks about becoming the “Bloomberg of Local.” Timpone’s vision is to sweep up all kinds of local information that has only haphazardly rolled into newspapers over the years. For starters, that’s school notes, book club information, parish reports, real estate listings, PTA and library newsletters — times 100. In a community of of 30,000 people, Timpone notes, there may be 750 organizations — and they all generate information. That’s the kind of work Journatic does with both Tribune (example: Newport News local) and Hearst (example: Ultimate Katy). The process is an orderly one. Identify the sources of the needed local info, and get the flow of it started through outreach. Then, collect and “clean” the data, so that it is readable; Journatic’s use of offshore labor is involved here. Then, it’s structured, “breaking it into datapoints,” with editors and algorithm writers in the U.S. doing that work, says Timpone. Part of that work is creating “metrics on top of the data,” looking for newsy patterns. Yes, it’s about real estate and prep sports, but it can also be purposed beyond that, in ways that sound like the work the national investigative organizations are doing. Timpone says Journatic can answer the question: “Which people in the 19th Ward in Chicago donate the most per capita to political campaigns, using property tax values as an indicator of wealth?” In Houston alone, working with the Houston Chronicle, Journatic has received more than a million emails from community groups within the past three years, each offering some kind of community information. Timpone makes the point that it’s not just the receiving, cleaning up, and routinizing of the data in the emails; it’s about learning about those emails and their senders over time. If a church sends a weekly email, with community information, the system learns about those submitting info. “We know how to treat it next time,” which makes a big cost difference to high-throughput Journatic. “Processing time is a big deal to us.” Another early player, Narrative Science, after making early waves in the local news space, seems today more focused on retail and financial markets. Make no mistake: The techniques we’re talking about here are roiling many other industries as business intelligence gets a complete makeover, due to data mining. Then there are the many in-between uses. My fellow former and current features editors will find fertile ground in machine learning. One reason I know that is that Silicon Valley software companies are already talking about how to mine content to produce automated Top 10 lists — from newspaper and many other sources. Yes, Top 10 lists, a staple of feature sections and monthly magazines forever. Such thinking buttresses another Timpone point: Why rely on the memory of an individual reporter or editor, when you can have trained algorithms search though deep databases of content to produce all kinds of content, including such Top 10s as top vacation spots, schools, parks, beloved local musicians, and much more? It’s a new age, one with great potential to go deeper, broader, and smarter. With new tech assists, we may have new antidotes for journalism that can be too shallow, too narrow, and too dumb.  |
The spirit and institutions of Greek democracy are dying, but who really cares? Kostas Vaxevanis does. His name merits global attention because during the past year 
Most people have today forgotten writers like Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Jacob Riis. Their condescension by posterity is shameful. For the muckrakers, true to their name, took advantage of the widening circulation of newspapers, magazines and books made possible by advertising, and by cheaper, mass production and distribution methods, to offer sensational public exposés of grimy governmental corruption and waste, business fraud, and social deprivation. Among my favourites from this period was the Pennsylvania-born journalist Nellie Bly. She did something daring and dangerous: for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World, Bly faked insanity to publish an undercover exposé of a woman’s lunatic asylum. Other muckrakers openly challenged political bosses and corporate fat cats. They questioned industrial progress at any price. The muckrakers took on profiteering, deception, low standards of public health and safety. They complained about child labour, prostitution and alcohol. They called for an end to city slums. They poured scorn on legislators, portraying them as pawns of industrialists and financiers, as corrupters of the principle that representatives should serve all of their constituents, not just the rich and powerful.
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Kamis, 29 November 2012
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| Atavist begins offering in-app subscriptions to its stories Posted: 28 Nov 2012 11:36 AM PST
Starting today, readers can sign up for a three-month subscription for $6.99 through The Atavist app, which will give customers access to newly released multimedia stories as well as material from its archives. You may note that we called the company “Atavist,” not The Atavist, the name it debuted under in 2011. There’s been a split in nomenclature: The company is now just Atavist. The publication/app/marketplace/producer-of-narrative-stories is The Atavist. Actually, The Atavist in their styling, like a magazine. It’s a nice external marker of the company’s shift into being a technology platform that happens to publish stories, rather than a publisher of stories that happens to have some technology. Atavist’s website refers to The Atavist as “our flagship publishing arm — built on our own platform.” Atavist is basing its future on blurring the lines between being a publisher and a technology maker. They partner with authors to produce stories packed with multimedia, while selling their technology to allow other publishers to produce the stories on their own. But subscriptions are a kind of old school idea, and getting a subscription to The Atavist is different than a subscription to Sports Illustrated or The Washington Post. What you get when you sign up with The Atavist is a brand — not a daily news source, not stories on a particular subject area, not even a consistent masthead of writers. Atavist CEO Evan Ratliff told me it’s about capturing readers who are drawn to a new kind of immersive, engaging, narrative journalism. “We suspect that a good portion of our readers just like this kind of work. People come to us on Kindle, or in-app, or are interested in one title,” he said. Ratliff said The Atavist has reached a point where they have a somewhat regular publishing schedule, which, combined with access to their archives, could be a good incentive to subscribe. Just as with the individual stories The Atavist sells, subscriptions are available as an in-app purchase in its apps. Authors will still get a cut, even if subscribers aren’t paying for a specific story; at the end of each month, subscription money will be divvied up based on the number of downloads for each individual author. The company has published 18 original stories so far, and is releasing a new title today, “Agent Zapata” by Mary Cuddehe, which looks into the killing of Jaime Zapata, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent killed by a drug cartel in Mexico. The company, which received a round of venture funding earlier this year from people like Google’s Eric Schmidt, generates revenue off sales of titles as well as the Atavist publishing platform, which counts TED and The Paris Review as clients. Subscriptions would add to that a more consistent flow of dollars, thanks to Apple’s automatic renewal system. “It’s an ongoing source of revenue, opposed to selling each title individually, which we’ve been successful at,” Ratliff said. “But why not do both?” Subscriptions have been on the company’s radar for some time. Ratliff told me subscription functionality was also built into the Atavist platform to allow other publishers the ability to sell subscriptions to their work. TED Books, for example, gives readers the choice of $14.99 for a three-month subscription, or $2.99 for individual books. Ratliff said offering subscriptions fits into their larger idea about providing access to this new breed of stories in whatever shape or form readers want. That means creating stories that can cross between iBooks, Kindle, and Nook, but also changing up delivery options. “I think our philosophy has been that we don’t really care how we reach the reader — we just want to reach readers,” he said. “We have stories to tell and we want to find the readers.”  |
| Citizen news: A democratic addition to political journalism Posted: 28 Nov 2012 07:00 AM PST Editor’s note: Herbert Gans is one of America’s preeminent sociologists, and some of his most notable work has come in examining the American news industry. His seminal 1979 book Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time was born out of years spent in newsrooms, watching how the never-ending flood of human activity was distilled into the news. Here he argues for a new area of emphasis in political reporting for a democratic society — what he calls citizen news. Journalism and the news media are supposed to be a bulwark for democracy. But through their history, they have more often served as messengers for the high-level public officials whose actions and pronouncements they report regularly. Political news has not paid much attention to the citizenry. True, citizens — like the 127 million Americans who voted this month, and the approximately 100 million who didn’t — may not always seem particularly newsworthy. But even so, political journalism should figure out how to add what I’m calling citizen news to what it delivers to audiences. More important, citizen news ought to become a standard category in the news and be visible enough to show the role that citizens play in democracy. Citizens may not make news very often — showing up only in poll numbers and vote totals — but the category should be available when they do. Perhaps the mere existence of the category will even turn them into more frequent newsmakers. What’s needed are stories about what citizens are doing directly and indirectly in the political process. Or, to put it more broadly: what they, politicians, and political institutions do with, to, and against each other, at all levels of government. Journalism and the citizenryThe political news delivered by the major news media is mostly top-down; it is made by and flows from high-level public officials to an audience whose citizen role is usually ignored. Conversely, these media rarely send news from the bottom up. To be sure, journalists are not primarily responsible: American politics has never given citizens much to do other than vote every couple of years. Since most citizens play no other regular role in politics, they have never been particularly interested in political news — which is one reason why day-to-day political news has always been so top-down. In addition, journalists are not very helpful to citizens. They supply what they perceive to be newsworthy facts as well as authoritative opinions, but citizens must draw their own conclusions. They receive little analytic help to understand how American politics, the political economy, and for that matter, the American economy, work. Kinds of citizen newsWhat I’m calling citizen news would take three forms. One is about citizen political activities in general — and thus not necessarily only about partisan ones. This would include stories about local community meetings, including what goes on behind the scenes. Whatever other contact citizens have with politics and government is citizen news too — for example, experiences at motor vehicle bureaus, welfare agencies, and the tax assessor’s office. Where do politicians and citizens lunch together? News from there is citizen news. Citizen inactivity is also a story, especially when people are expected to be active. News about nonvoters is particularly important, because their failure to vote affects elections and thus what elected officials can and cannot do. A second form of citizen news should report what elected and appointed public officials are doing and not doing for citizens. With whom do they and their staffs meet, and with whom do they not? Whose requests and demands do they respond to and whose do they ignore? These are all newsworthy subjects. So are meetings of lesser-known elected and appointed boards, and those that go on in the mayor’s, city manager’s, governor’s, and other offices. Citizens should also know more about who is invited to the Oval Office. Even routine meetings and gatherings may make important or interesting news for some citizens. Citizen news should be especially interested in the governmental agencies that supply the public services essential to everyday life. Federal agencies should not be newsworthy only at times of natural disaster. Local reporters should cover the sanitation department, police stations, and firehouses, and agencies with inspection duties — especially in poor and rich neighborhoods where services may be out of the ordinary. The routine activities of public bureaucracies may seem cut and dried — except when they are not. What goes on between meetings or behind the scenes will sometimes turn up news that citizens need to know. Citizens are affected by more than public agencies; journalists should be reporting on the activities of lobbies and lobbyists wherever they work, including at the local level. The activities of corporate lobbies affect the citizenry, but so do citizen lobbies, such as those looking out for senior citizens, veterans, and poor people. Citizen news should pay particular attention to the likely effects on citizens of decisions public officials make or participate in making. Determining these effects is difficult, especially when they vary for different sectors of the citizenry, but who may benefit and who might be hurt by public decision making is vital citizen news. A related story is which citizens public officials keep in mind, ignore, and forget about when they make budget and other important decisions. Poor people and library patrons are almost always the first victims when city budgets must be cut, but the whys and wherefores of this pattern are rarely covered. Stories about the victims of such decisions at the state and federal level should be yet more newsworthy. Even if the economy lacks a citizenry, citizens should have access to economic news relevant to their concerns. Economic powerholders often make more significant decisions, with more widespread and serious effects, than politicians do. Citizen news should therefore end journalism’s tradition of covering government continuously but the economy only sporadically, leaving it to business journalists when it is relevant to their beat. The third form is citizen-relevant service news: whatever journalists find out that serves, hurts, or is otherwise relevant to people’s lives. Journalists assigned to citizen service news should report regularly on the quality of public services, whether these are supplied by government agencies or by publicly subsidized agencies. They now cover instances of corruption but they do not often report instances of incompetence and other failings. Shouldn’t citizens know which hospitals provide the best nursing care, or which government branch offices have the shortest waiting lines? And now that newspapers no longer make big money from classified ads, they or other news media can more freely report on who is hiring and laying off workers. Possibilities and problems“Citizen” is a deceptive and slippery term, and I use it here almost as a synonym for political civilian or resident. It covers everyone — including felons, immigrants who will become citizens, and undocumented ones who perhaps will not. Even the president of the local electric company and the head of a multinational corporation are citizens, although they are more likely to be newsworthy in their business leadership roles than as citizens. Citizens have different positions in the economic, social, and other hierarchies. They pursue different and often conflicting interests. Consequently, citizen news often deals with the same conflict, competition, and struggle as other political news. Unfortunately, citizen news rarely makes headlines. It is also, on its own, unlikely to attract sizeable audiences or free spending advertisers, and therefore may not be a money making enterprise. And because citizens are not full-time political actors, citizen news will probably never generate enough stories, ongoing or otherwise, to fill vast amounts of empty time or space. It may be no more than a weekly or fortnightly page in a newspaper, or a weekly half hour program on radio or television. The likeliest platforms are to be found on the web, and citizen news websites are probably the best way to begin. In the longer run, citizen news should be a regular category on the websites that might eventually replace printed newspapers and television news programs. Citizen news will not be easy to cover. Citizens and their organizations rarely have spokespersons or other functionaries to generate news coverage or help reporters. Citizen news may thus require more legwork than other political news. But since citizens are not professional politicians, beginning journalists, supervised stringers, and even experienced amateurs — the so-called citizen journalists — can probably do a goodly share of the reporting. The practices of current objective or balanced reporting could be applied; in theory at least, reporters do not have to take sides. Objective reporting designed to minimize angering anyone may be more difficult, citizens being more thin-skinned than professional politicians. However, citizens may want reporting that offers opinions and takes sides; it could even attract larger news audiences. Thus, commentary might have to be added to citizen news fare. Some citizen news might end up in partisan formats, or in forms that cater to different genders, classes, and races. In any case, citizen news can only flourish if it transcends — and violates — the pieties of civic reporting. ConclusionFor now, citizen news is an idea for discussion: whether and how it can be initiated and how it can survive. If it is worth trying, experiments with various kinds and formats of citizen news are in order to determine what is of most significance to the major sectors of citizens and what will attract an audience. The experiments must also determine whether citizens can, in fact, be regular newsmakers and whether the three kinds of citizen news I have outlined will be sufficiently newsworthy. Perhaps foundations can fund such experiments and journalism schools can carry them out and evaluate them. However, citizen news may not be a feasible project until citizens need to take a more active interest in political news. Such a possibility is not out of the question in the future, particularly if some current economic trends persist. If rates of unemployment and underemployment should remain high and economic growth low, government eventually may have to take a more direct and active role in assuring people’s economic survival. In that case, they will need more information from and about government than they do now — and citizen news might quickly become newsworthy. Herbert J. Gans is Robert S. Lynd Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of, among other books, Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (1979/2004), one of the most important sociological accounts of how journalists do their work, and Democracy and the News (2003). Photo by Mark Sardella used under a Creative Commons license.  |
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Nieman Journalism Lab
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| What kinds of local stories drive engagement? The results of an NPR Facebook experiment Posted: 27 Nov 2012 11:24 AM PST Editor’s note: In February, our friends at NPR Digital Services told you about an experiment they were trying to localize content on the network’s Facebook page, which has a massive 2.5 million fans. Today, NPR’s Eric Athas and Teresa Gorman are sharing some findings from that experiment. When you come across a story about your town, city, or state, what makes you want to share it? That’s a question we’ve been asking here at NPR Digital Services. There are hints about what causes sharing — we know emotion and positivity play roles. We know the headline can make or break a story’s potential. But we want to know specifically about local content. What is it about certain local stories that make them more social than others? To answer this, we conducted a study to define what types of local content cause the most sharing and engagement. BackgroundEarlier this year we told you about an experiment where we geotargeted local content on the NPR Facebook page. In that experiment, we posted stories created by Seattle member station KPLU. We geotargeted that content so that only people in Seattle could see it on their Facebook News Feeds. We measured success using this metric: Of the unique people who see each post, what percentage like it, share it, or comment on it? We found that the geotargeted posts were six times more successful than posts that were shared to the global NPR Facebook following. The experiment helped KPLU earn record site traffic and confirmed that the NPR Facebook following is eager to engage with and share local content. In July, we expanded our project. We are now geotargeting content from five member stations in five different regions — KQED in San Francisco, KUT in Austin, WBUR in Boston, KPCC in Southern California, and still KPLU in Seattle. Since expanding, we’ve found continued (and often greater) success from all five stations. Geotargeted stories continue to register a high success rate and gain an average of 223 combined likes, shares, and comments per post. But early on in the project, we noticed something that’s probably familiar to any news organization with a Facebook page — certain stories took off, accumulating hundreds of shares, likes, and comments on Facebook and jolting the Chartbeat meter. Other stories fell flat. So rather than geotargeting just any news story that a station creates, we are selective and calculated with the types of local stories we post. Content must have compelling headlines. It must be locally relevant and meaningful. And locals should be likely to share it, like it, and comment on it. The editors with whom we’re working closely with at KPLU, KQED, KUT, WBUR, and KPCC are terrific at identifying and creating content that meets these standards. But…what does that actually look like? What types of content will locals be more likely to engage with on Facebook? That brings us to our study, which aims to answer those questions and pinpoint the kinds of content that locals are compelled to share, like and comment on. We looked at every story we geotargeted during the months of July, August, and September 2012, focusing on the ones that the localized NPR Facebook following liked, shared, and commented on at a high rate. From this group of successful stories, we identified similarities which allowed us to create nine distinct content categories. We then dissected each successful story to decide which category it fell into. To identify a story’s category, we asked a series of questions. Why did people share this story? What reaction did people have when they shared it? What is the story actually delivering to people — an explanation, a video, a hard news story? We repeated this exercise several times for each piece of content until we were confident placing it into a category. Before we get to the results, we should point out a few things. First, we aren’t implying that the nine types of content below are the only kinds of content that exist or matter. Rather, we’re articulating data-backed trends we discovered in an analysis of content geotargeted to four cities (KPCC joined the project after the measurement period) over a span of three months. Finally, as you look at examples, you might notice that there is overlap. Some stories fit into multiple categories. We placed stories into categories based on their primary defining characteristics. Here are the 9 types of local stories that cause engagement: Place ExplainersEvery city has traits, quirks, and habits that are begging to be dissected. These characteristics are well known to locals, but no one ever stops to explain why they even exist in the first place. Place Explainers investigate, answer, and explain these questions. In our project, KPLU tipped us off to this content type with its I Wonder Why…? series, which explores the “endearing, odd, even irritating” attributes of the Pacific Northwest. For example, why does Seattle have so few kids and so many dogs? A story by KQED pointed out the 26 signs you’re in Silicon Valley and a KUT piece listed what draws people to Austin and what drives them away. Crowd PleasersWe all love to brag every once in awhile about the area we call home. Crowd Pleasers zero in on that feeling of pride. These stories provide an opportunity to celebrate everything from beautiful weather in the Pacific Northwest to the athletic prowess of California athletes who won 93 Olympic gold medals. When Austin was ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek as the eighth-best city in the country, Austinites cheered on Facebook with comments such as “Yaaay!! GO Austin!” and “Whether Austin ranks 1st or 100th, I still love living here :)” That’s exactly the type of reaction you’ll get from Crowd Pleasers. Curiosity StimulatorsYou know those stories you come across that you can’t turn down? The ones that have you hooked at the headline? Curiosity Stimulators get that a lot. It’s the type of story that captures a geeky and quirky side of a city. And after people click through and read a Curiosity Stimulator, they often feel compelled to share it because they get the sensation of stumbling upon a local gem. The Curiosity Stimulator is a 4,000-pound spider-robot named Stompy. It’s a woman who married a corporation. It’s the discovery of a hidden video game city. News ExplainersEvent-based stories chronicle the news of a city. This bill was passed. This person was hired. That person was fired. News Explainers make sense of the news. Rather than just telling you what happened, News Explainers dissect why or how it happened. For example, here’s what people in Washington should consider before possessing legal marijuana. Now that Austin has declared support for same-sex marriage, here’s what happens next. Here’s why it’s been unusually chilly in San Francisco. Leading up to the 2012 election, ballot question guides such as this one by KQED were perfect examples of News Explainers. They took complex local topics and made sense of them for people. Major Breaking NewsCities are saturated with everyday news stories such as traffic jams and fires. But Major Breaking News has a much bigger impact on a city or a region. Massive storms are an easy example of this because they tend to make life difficult for entire regions. But Major Breaking News doesn’t happen often — a few examples from this project include the coffeeshop shooting in Seattle, Hurricane Sandy, and the approval of legal recreational marijuana and same-sex marriage in Washington. Feel-Good SmilersThink “awww,” think “awesome,” think “hilarious.” Most of all, think positive: this category is made up of happy stories. A Feel-Good Smiler is a 10-year-old girl who convinced Jamba Juice to stop using foam cups. It’s the birth of an animal that locals love (Seattleites, apparently, are obsessed with orcas). It’s a nighttime Austin marriage proposal that found its way to Reddit. And is there anything more feel-good than warm cookies delivered by bicycle to your door? Humor, which tends to make people feel good, also plays a role in Feel-Good Smiler content. Cue Seattle’s Colonel Meow. Topical BuzzersA Topical Buzzer is the story of the moment that everyone’s talking about locally. When the Space Shuttle Endeavor flies overhead, a Topical Buzzer shows you photos of it. When the mayor of Boston writes an epic memo to Chick-fil-A, a Topical Buzzer tells you about it. When Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis serve coffee at a local cafe (and mobs of locals pack the streets to catch a glimpse), a Topical Buzzer rides the viral coattails of the story. The key to deploying a Topical Buzzer on your site: knowing when something is beginning to buzz. Provocative ControversiesHave you ever come across a story about your city and you could feel your blood beginning to boil? That’s usually what happens when people encounter a Provocative Controversy — they get ticked off and highly opinionated. In Washington, when state officials killed a pack of wolves, locals had a lot to say about it. KQED’s story about the California State Parks Department sitting on a $54 million surplus for 12 years has dozens of comments. In Boston, a story about a doctor refusing obese patients elicited Facebook comments such as “SOOOO ANGRY !!!!” and “Shame on them.” Awe-Inspiring Visuals“Whoa…” You know that feeling? It’s the feeling you get when you see a killer whale catching air in Puget Sound. When you’re spooked by the images of a 75-year-old L.A. hotel wing. When you look into the cold dark eyes of sharks swimming in Cape Cod. When you’re haunted by a people-less time-lapse of Seattle. We already know people like to gaze at beautiful images. People love to goggle at beautiful images of their city. Awe-Inspiring Visuals capture that wonderment through photos and videos. Graphic by Russ Gossett. Cross-posted from the NPR Digital Services blog.  |
| “Post-Industrial Journalism”: A new Columbia report examines the disrupted news universe Posted: 27 Nov 2012 09:31 AM PST
It’s good! It aims to bring together a variety of threads around where news is headed — at the levels of the individual journalist, the legacy news organization, and the startup — and paint a picture of the forces pushing adaptation on each. It’s a less prescriptive document than its spiritual predecessor, Len Downie and Michael Schudson’s 2009 report “The Reconstruction of American Journalism”; as the authors state in their introduction:
Chris, Emily, and Clay do a really great job of drawing on a broad range of examples to draw what, to me, seem like smart conclusions on where we’re headed. You should read it! But just in case you don’t have time for the full 122-page report, I’ve pulled out some of the passages I found the most interesting — a few of which I’ll comment on or quibble with. If there’s one overarching critique I’d make of the report (admittedly, after a single quick read), it’s that its focus on the practices of journalists creates a blind spot when dealing with the practices of the audience. That, of course, is a natural byproduct of the fact a report can’t focus on everything, and it makes sense that journalism educators would want to focus on the production end of journalism. But for me, the most interesting developments of 2012 have been shifts in news consumption — the reframing of the article, the rebundling of the news package, and the reflowing of news into new delivery mechanisms. Aggregators and platform builders are getting smarter and more attuned to the ways people want to get news. The report doesn’t use the words iPad, tablet, Android, or smartphone — all of which are key to the redefinition how news gets consumed. The word “mobile” does appears a handful of times, but only in passing. These shifts on the consumption end, driven primarily by the adoption of new devices and platforms, are already having big implications on news production, and they’re only going to grow. (It’s also the sector where capital is flowing these days.) News organizations and journalists need to be in that battle. More about that below. Page 2
Adjusting to No. 4 — the reality that change was coming, like it or not, and the status quo wouldn’t work — was, I think, the hardest for news companies to appreciate. We live in a world where Media General’s CEO could say that it wasn’t until spring 2011 “that we realized the world had changed.” Bubbles can be entrancing places. Page 5
Page 6
It’s worth pointing out that The New Yorker, which operated at a loss for many years, shifted to generating small profits in the David Remnick era. Elite publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times have generally fared better than their middlebrow peers in the Internet era — their quality and unique value proposition stands out amidst the newfound mass of media. Page 8
I understand that last point, but I think reality is a little more nuanced. The chance that someone was reading news sites in both St. Louis and San Luis Obispo is near zero. There is functionally no competition between them. If you’re approaching the story by searching Google News after the fact then, sure, it looks like massive duplication. But if you look at it as a reader who has some sense of loyalty to the paper in San Luis Obispo — and loyalty in this case doesn’t mean warm fuzzies; it just means you’ve found it a useful place to get news — having that wire story on its site does add value. It eliminates discovery cost for your reader; it promotes the value of your site as an editorial filter; it gives you something to put an ad next to. Of course, that’s all subject to a cost-benefit analysis — maybe the wire service costs too much money, or maybe the process of getting that wire story on your site is inefficient and wastes a web producer’s time. But the nichification of media shouldn’t ignore the fact that most people don’t have the kind of high-intensity media diet that I (and, I’d wager, Chris, Emily, and Clay) have. Most people don’t have RSS readers with hundreds of feeds; most go to only a few news sites a day, if that; most use social media for purposes other than news filtering. For those more casual news consumers, some duplication is likely welcome — and a decent business strategy for certain kinds of news organizations. Page 15
Page 16
Co-sign. (It’s amazing how many future-of-news conferences end up being discussions about the Times and NPR — because the kind of people who attend those conferences tend to be Times readers and NPR listeners.) Page 23
That second paragraph, especially, is a really important message. Reading even a decent newspaper over a long-enough span of time makes it clear how narrow the channels of reporter interest can be — and how limiting their source networks can be. Page 28
This comes in a section where the authors detail the strengths of various kinds of journalistic actors, including “What Journalists Do Better” (than machines and social media). The key advantages of human journalists: accountability, efficiency, originality, and — most intriguingly — charisma. Page 44
Broadly true, although I’d argue that the role of editors is changing more than it’s losing value. It’s more about aggregation and curation — the old wire editor job — and less about being another step on the stairway to a story’s publication. As news organizations narrow into niches, the value of a talented editor guiding story selection increases. And as news organizations start integrating the work of non-journalists more, the ability of a good editor to slap copy into shape and turn raw material into something recognizably journalistic is key. Look at The Huffington Post’s masthead — I count at least 184 people with the title of editor. Those people aren’t doing the same job a city editor did in 1997, to be sure, but the professional frame lives on. Page 47
Page 50
This is where the broad literature around change management comes in — a field journalism hasn’t historically spent much time engaging with. Institutions are hard to change. It’s also where Clay Christensen and disruption theory come in. His work is pretty gloomy about the prospects of large incumbents adapting successfully — but there are examples to follow. Page 53
In this section of the report, the authors get at what news institutions do well: leverage (to get information and reach audiences), symbolic capital (to provoke engagement by the powerful), continuity (to survive the loss of individuals), and slack (to respond to the news needs of the day). Page 59
Included here because it’s the closest thing to smack talk in the report. Page 66
From talking with people who run many of those successful startups (particularly the nonprofits), I know how much time they spend dealing with people calling for advice. It’s worth noting that The Hub, funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and now run by the Investigative News Network, is an attempt to perform this information-sharing role for “community-based and nonprofit” outlets. Page 71
Another place I’d quibble: Lots of people want that summary of the entire day. People like me and this report’s authors (and, I’d wager, you, dear Lab reader) enjoy the iterative hunt for information — living on Twitter, watching our browser history grow like kudzu. And because the digital tools of the past decade have enabled our lifestyle like nothing ever before, it’s easy to think that our path will be the path for everyone else — that we’re just the early adopters and everyone else is playing catch-up. But not everyone wants to do what we do. And that’s fine! I honestly believe that the single biggest journalistic opportunity for news organizations out there now is to find ways to bring order to information madness — to do a better job of summarization and curation and highlighting and compacting and repackaging. Why doesn’t The New York Times do a good job of giving me a readable-in-10-minutes summary of what happened today each evening? Why aren’t there better algorithms to let me know what stories I can confidently ignore? Why can’t I easily ask The Washington Post “Give me five longer pieces from this week — it’s Saturday and I’ve got some time to spend with my Kindle”? This is the space that products like Summly, Circa, and Evening Edition are trying to address, and it’s an area I worry news companies (old and new) are going to miss out on. Page 72
Agreed. Partnerships often take much more energy to manage than news organizations expect. (They’re actually an excellent argument for the classic newsroom structure, where collaboration can happen under a single roof and a single management hierarchy.) Page 75
One of the more interesting bits of theory in the study: distributed responsibility for democratic accountability. Good section. Page 83
Also true. Journalists who complain about how stupid their publishers’ decisions are may well be right — but there’s not exactly a long list of newspapers for whom the Internet has been of business benefit. These were issues far bigger than any one company. Page 89
For me, the great unlearned lesson of The Huffington Post is that its approach is available for the taking. Its brand of aggregation-plus-comment has become the norm in the online-native news-org world, but traditional companies have been remarkably hesitant to steal its tricks. Page 96
True for the all-subjects piece, but I think there are good counterexamples to the idea that doing long, medium, and short is hard. Look at the Vox Media sites like The Verge and SB Nation, for instance: They’re built on a mix of long-form features, short aggregation pieces, liveblogging, video where appropriate, and a variety of story types. It’s stock and flow: The longer stuff adds prestige and brand to the shorter stuff, and the shorter stuff brings audience and vibrancy to the longer stuff. Once you’ve narrowed into a niche, I think there’s plenty of room for variation in modes. Page 100
Amen. This is part of what Duke’s Jay Hamilton has been arguing: that one response to lower revenues is to lower the cost of doing journalism. And clean, accessible government data (and better public records laws) are a great way to do that. Page 105
This is worth repeating: If you think things are strange and chaotic now, just wait until 2013. Or 2016. Or 2020. There will eventually be a re-institutionalization in reader habits, in platforms, and in corporate structure — but the number of voices will only continue to rise. (Hence my belief that news companies should be investing more effort into building products that aim to focus that cacophony.) Page 108
Fragmentation all around. Page 111
See our series on journalism schools for more on that. Page 115
Easier said than done! “Our overall recommendation to people with terrible diseases: Don’t die!” Disclosure: While I had nothing to do with the report itself, I was one of about 20 people who met for two days in April at Columbia to provide input to Chris, Emily, and Clay on their thinking. And the report says nice things about Nieman Lab on page 45.  |
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