Rabu, 23 Januari 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

For The New York Times, redesigns happen in print, too

Posted: 22 Jan 2013 12:42 PM PST

If you picked up a print copy of The New York Times today — you do remember print, right? where newspapers still make most of their money? — you would have seen a little note from the editor on the first page of the Science Times section:

Science Times has a new design and an array of features to reflect the growing role of science, medicine and health in the news and society. Among them are The Week, a review of science news and a look ahead; and AskWell, in which journalists and experts answer readers' health questions. We welcome comments on the changes, which can be e-mailed to scitimes@nytimes.com.

It’s part of a larger, subtle print redesign for the Times’ features pages, with newly designed sections being rolled out each day from now until Sunday. The sections were created in the 1970s under Abe Rosenthal and haven’t undergone a full redesign since then. But unlike with some newsprint reboots, the Times wouldn’t mind if you didn’t notice the change.

“It’s not meant to shake anybody up or be dramatically different,” design director Tom Bodkin told me. “I think it’s just a little tighter and smarter. If you look closely, there are a lot of differences, but it doesn’t jump out at you. I didn’t want it to not look like The New York Times anymore.”

He’d probably be happy, then, that the mere handful of Twitter mentions about the new section as of this writing come from people who work for the Times. Science editor Jennifer Kingson linked to her new column, which is a buffet of science-news briefs meant to “highlight the week's developments in health and science news and glance at what's ahead.”

It’s a print feature that feels webby in this curation-heavy era of retweeting and reblogging, but it’s also true that aggregation has deep roots in print. For his part, Bodkin’s most excited about a new grid-design infrastructure that will anchor content and help balance the tension between continuity and variety. The grid — four equal columns and one narrow one that can be used to separate elements — will mean that design differences among features sections are deliberate rather than arbitrary, something that hasn’t always been the case as the feature sections have evolved in recent decades.

“It very elegantly does two things that in some ways could seem contradictory but they’re not at all,” Bodkin said. “I think there’s a big brand benefit and a strength you achieve from all of these sections having this same foundation. At the same time, you want the sections to have their own individual identities. That should grow out of the content of each section, not from arbitrarily applied differences.”

The grid design is like “a rhythm with an offbeat,” Bodkin says, a way to separate different kinds of storytelling. That includes bringing to print more content that’s native to the web. Well, once strictly a NYTimes.com blog, is now a self-contained pull-out spread dedicated to personal health. Vows has also been retooled as a standalone package for Sunday Styles.

“Certainly we have begun, even before the redesign, to do some reverse publishing of material that’s on the website that we think would be of interest to everyone,” Bodkin said. “The redesign certainly allows for that and to some degree accentuates that, in that we’ve created tools to kind of better separate straight narrative from other non-narrative forms, which we have always used but use more of now. Those other forms of storytelling appear quite a bit online. In that sense, it maybe reflects trends that are not just online, but looking for varied ways to tell stories.”

Because Bodkin heads up the entire New York Times art department — that includes print and digital — a print redesign is inherently wrapped up in the paper’s ongoing online redesign process. That’s evident in matching typography online and in print, but it’s also true from a development sense. “The two products are constantly speaking to each other and we want them to reflect each other,” Bodkin says. It’s also clear he sees the print redesign as serving a distinct audience of readers.

“People that are reading the newspaper are reading the newspaper and — particularly the subscribers who are paying a significant amount of money for this newspaper — have made a choice,” he said. “They want to continue reading the newspaper and certainly not switch to digital only.”

(I promised Bodkin I’d include a shout-out to his team: “The design was executed primarily by Kelly Doe with the assistance of Cathy Gilmore-Barnes and Matt Tanzer.“)

Is it real? Witness builds an app to verify user-submitted content

Posted: 22 Jan 2013 10:44 AM PST

By now, it’s a familiar cycle: An amazing image is discovered — and then proven to be fake.

Whether it’s photos of flooding during Hurricane Sandy, or videos of eagles stealing babies, it’s not always easy to detect fakery. And when you think of the number of videos and photos produced by our phones each day, it can be problematic for news organizations trying to deal with submissions from readers.

The human rights organization Witness is developing a new app that aims to make it easier to verify the authenticity of video, photos, or audio created and shared from mobile devices. Witness is partnering with The Guardian Project to build the app with $320,000 in funding from Knight Foundation. The InformaCam app, one of several winners in the mobile round of the Knight News Challenge, would bring metadata to the forefront, allowing journalists, human rights organizations, and others to better identify the origins of a photo or video.

“InformaCam is our way to respond to this question of media authentication and model some solutions we hope people will adopt,” said Sam Gregory, program director for Witness.

Video is at the heart of what Witness does, encouraging people around the world to document human rights abuses in their community. (Witness also collaborated with The Guardian Project on a project that might be thought of as the flip side of InformaCam: ObscuraCam, a camera app that allows users to quickly conceal the identity of people in a photo by pixelating faces and removing metadata.)

The spread of smartphones and other devices with capable of shooting photos and videos has been a boon to human rights campaigns, but it’s also brought along new sets of problems. Whether someone is shooting video on the streets of Syria, Burma, or Libya, the question remains: Is it real? It’s a concern groups like Witness share with many media organizations that now rely on submitted video to amplify their journalism.

An alpha of the app is currently available for Android. InformaCam works like the camera software now available on most phones, allowing users to shoot photos or video within the app. But as you shoot, the app collects metadata that it will bundle and encrypt with your photo or video — including generating an encryption key based on the camera’s pattern of sensor noise, which is unique to each camera. At the moment they’re still three to six months away from a pilot, Gregory told me.

Gregory told me the InformaCam app creates a kind of watermark for video or photo content coming from a device and pair that with time, location, and other types of metadata. Most smartphones already contain plenty of identifying information that people collect throughout their day. InformaCam taps into the passive sensors in your phone to provide backing data for photos.

“The first part of the Knight grant will help us work out how InformaCam addresses the challenges of how do you gather as much contextualizing data about a photo or video,” he said.

Unlocking those sensors is one half of the problem — the other is creating methods to confirm metadata and establish a kind of chain-of-custody for a video. In other words, how can you create a system to show whether someone — whether a government censor or another interested party — tampered with a video after it was shot?

With upheaval in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia in recent years, raw video produced on mobile phones has become a way for citizens to share what is happening on the streets of their community. But Gregory said InformaCam has a wide range of potential uses outside of covering protests or potential war crimes — everything from shooting a natural disasters to documenting household damage for insurance claims.

The important thing to keep in mind, Gregory said, is that the software will not be a perfect solution. InformaCam, he said, should be used in the context of other information to make a judgment. “It won’t prove everything is true,” he said. “But, given the volume of media, you can make it easier for people to distinguish what is verifiable and help step up that ladder.”

Andrew Donohue: How to redesign the beat for engagement, impact, and accountability

Posted: 22 Jan 2013 06:57 AM PST

We wanted to cover city council elections at Voice of San Diego. But not like they’d always been done: Talk to the candidates. Print up what they had to say. Wait for a debate to happen or a campaign finance report to be filed.

Instead of going to the candidates and talking to them about their agendas, we flipped it. We made a public call: We’re coming to your neighborhood. Show us what needs fixing. We then sent a reporter into each district for one week. The reporters did ride-alongs with locals, quizzed residents, and found out what city-level issues mattered to them.

People loved it. They drove us all around their communities to point out the tangible problems that needed fixing.

We wrote about those community needs. Then, we took that residents’ agenda back to the candidates and asked what they would do to address it.

The approach sparked a series of revelations that have reshaped how I look at the fundamental choices we make as journalists. It turns out our coverage for years had been focused on things that didn’t seem to matter all that much to even active San Diego residents. However well intentioned and important we felt our coverage of issues like a pension crisis, a convention center expansion, and a new Chargers stadium were, residents never once mentioned them as top priorities.

What did matter to residents? Things like transit, infrastructure, parks, and development. A promised bus route that never came. A park that never got built. A broken drain that’d become a rubbage dump.

Perhaps that’s all obvious, but damn it was powerful. People loved it. They drove us all around their communities to point out the tangible problems that needed fixing. We immediately had a stronger connection with San Diego’s neighborhoods.

Now, those other city hall issues need scrutiny too. Otherwise the public pays the price for bad deals. And we need to uncover the problems that residents don’t even know exist. Still, our goal was to engage the highest number of San Diegans — something our donation-based business model depended on. If their needs aren’t reflected by a publication, how loyal to that publication will they ever be?

Our starting point had often been the obvious and vocal agendas — whether they were those of politicians or of interest groups like the hoteliers or the pro football team. There was an agenda we’d been missing.

Recently, we’ve seen wonderfully civic-minded calls for increased attention by the media to a citizens agenda and to solutions journalism. Those calls, and my city council anecdote, highlight a problem with our current structure of how we as journalists often do and see stories: It’s one-dimensional. We tell the story we find.

There’s a step before and a step after the traditional story, however, that could add important dimensions to our work at a time when the users, and not advertisers, are increasingly being asked to pay for a larger share of public-service journalism by both nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Here’s how it could work, in three clearly marked stages.

Step 1: Finding the needs and the story

As we did with the city council coverage, throw the story open and begin a public, documented exploration of the community’s needs. Then decide on what story should be the top priority. Attack it.

Step 2: The traditional story or series

This is the step that already exists. No need to explain any further.

Step 3: Push for fixes

When the story’s done, you begin with a new mandate. If no clear answers exist, create them. Release a five-step plan for how they get fixed. Become a part of the resolution.

Keep in mind: This won’t work for every beat or investigation. Maybe not even most. But I think it can work for many — especially local stories.

Here’s some more meat on steps 1 and 3.

Step 1: A public need-finding journey

Let’s say, for the sake of illustration, we’ve decided to dedicate a reporter to public-service journalism on neighborhood development in San Diego.

We throw it open to the public: We want to investigate neighborhood development in San Diego. What are the biggest city-level issues impacting you? What are your community’s biggest needs? The reporter then embeds in neighborhoods across the city to spend time with residents.

We host simple meetups or open-mic nights in each neighborhood. We run design thinking bootcamps to get residents in each community to go out and find their neighbor’s needs and engineer solutions.

Then there’s the old-fashioned way: comments and emails, coffees and lunches with sources. Everyone you meet and interact with gets put in a simple database so they can be pinged to contribute as the endeavor unfolds, creating a powerful and engaged crowd.

The site OpenFile.ca (now on hiatus) offers another twist. There, residents submit documents, photos, and videos on a neighborhood problem they have and invite their circles to contribute to the file. Then editors decide whether to put a reporter on the story.

This isn’t just beat-building though. It’s content. It’s a series of dispatches from the neighborhoods detailing the biggest needs in the community. You can highlight what’s working, and what issues are universal across all neighborhoods. They become a living part of a news organization’s website, a list that can be updated and checked off as progress gets made. Or, even better, it is the news organization’s website — a small staff running a story-specific platform dedicated solely to this storyline, à la Syria Deeply.)

Public journalism has been done with success in the past. And now it’s urgent. We need residents to pay directly for public service journalism, either through nonprofit donations or subscriptions. They’re going to be more likely to contribute if they see you in your community working on the things most tangible to them.

After the reporter has catalogued the community’s needs, it’s time to chose a big wicked problem to dive deep into and investigate.

Step 3: Pushing for fixes

Come on, let’s admit it: We all want our big stories to spark change. We’re excited as hell when they do and mad as hell when they don’t. We’re just not that honest about it publicly. We often drop a big story and then just wait for people to react. Hope a politician calls for an audit. Hope that an advocate issues a scathing press release. Hope, in our heart of hearts, that a district attorney launches an investigation.

I know I’ve often finished a story and secretly hoped someone would call me and ask me what to do next. I know reporters who’ve wanted to write unsigned editorials laying out where to go next after their big story.

Isn’t there a way we can avoid becoming political but stay true to the spirit of this story that we’ve decided is terribly important? We know the issue well. We’ve earned authority.

Let’s focus on detailing or even crafting potential resolutions. Let’s offer clear examples of fixes or systems that have worked elsewhere. But go beyond that: Let’s put on the pressure. After all, many of us don’t have that editorial board lurking behind us like we did at newspapers, waiting to pounce on our stories and push for change.

If you don’t know what the fix is, then that means there’s more reporting to be done. Who should specifically be held to account? Is it incompetence, or corruption, or just a lack of priorities? We can’t just drop problems off at the community’s doorstep and run away.

You could lead a problem-solving team. You could convene a group of people of very different backgrounds and design a fix. And what if there’s an expiration date? You have a start, a middle and an end — like a documentary. Throughout, there’d be explainers to help people who haven’t been following along since the start catch-up.

So let’s say you just have two years to tackle all these wicked problems. At the end of two years, you can detail all the change. But what if you haven’t gotten any change? Imagine the reckoning we’d have to do as journalists if we had a deadline for our reporting to impact change and that change hadn’t happened.

I’ve spent a lot of time on some stories that didn’t do much of anything. What if I’d been forced at the end to acknowledge that and diagnose why? First, I’d be forced to explain to users why city hall didn’t do anything. Second, it could be a great accountability mechanism for me too. Why did all this time you spent on this story lead to nothing? What did you do wrong?

Perhaps we’d be less likely to always fall back on the softest of notions, that our reporting “increased community conversation.”

To be sure, there’d be plenty of landmines and potential problems. But we’ve rethought so much about journalism in the last few years — like the very basics of our business models and how we present and distribute our stories. Perhaps it’s time now to rethink how we go about putting those stories together.

Andrew Donohue is a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University and former editor of Voice of San Diego.

Photo by Niclas used under a Creative Commons license.
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