Nieman Journalism Lab

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• Sure, journalists need to know digital tools, but they really need to know how to do digital research
• New Pew study: Where you live helps shape your news diet
• New York Times, Washington Post developers team up to create Open Elections database

Sure, journalists need to know digital tools, but they really need to know how to do digital research Posted: 26 Sep 2012 09:15 AM PDT Editor’s Note: It’s the start of the school year, which means students are returning to journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world? We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Here’s John Wihbey, managing editor of the Shorenstein Center research portal Journalist’s Resource, argues that journalism schools need to do a better job of training journalists to research and go deeper into their subjects. Anyone who’s been to j-school remembers the initial jitters — and the bundle of nerves — that came with heading out on assignments and to beats unknown in those dizzying first months. Journalism schools have generally been good at steadying those nerves, giving students the confidence to explore new neighborhoods and challenging issues, and to ask tough questions. Throw in some sharpened writing skills and storytelling techniques, and we walked out with that traditional toolkit ready to go in the old media world. But in a wired age, where knowledge on all topics is accumulating and proliferating, a new kind of fear should be persistent for journalists: Not knowing what you're talking about. Or put more practically, not doing your research. There is little excuse these days for being uninformed and caught unaware. Expectations are being raised all around us. “Looming in the background is this issue of rising knowledge, even as schools struggle to figure out how to embed deeper research content into their classrooms.” Scholar-bloggers (and a legion of wonky twittizens) are now out in force. Statistics and data can be quickly located and brought to bear on most topics. Government agencies are creating research-oriented apps and APIs and uploading data sets fairly regularly. Unlike a decade ago — when much of the world's deepest knowledge sat on dusty library shelves — targeted search engines and databases such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, PubMed, and the Social Science Research Network now make access to scholarship easy. One-fifth of all scholarship is "open access" (translation: no paywalls) and that trend is accelerating, according to the Peter Suber, director of Harvard’s Open Access Project. There's peril in not capitalizing on this flood of knowledge. Any smart group of readers will call you out on ignorance in the comment thread (or just deploy the #clueless hashtag) and then float away forever to other sites. At stake for journalists is this: having enough credibility with one's audience and being competent enough to convene readers/viewers who now have an overabundance of choices and alternatives. Otherwise, journalism loses its hard-won capacity to focus attention and define the contours of the public interest. In an overcrowded marketplace, it's ultimately about turning out the highest-value work on a given news topic. With the democratization of knowledge accelerating online, the bar is higher for young journalists. Outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and others, with their suites of specialized blogs, are already reflecting as much. At the same time, the great anxiety for many journalism schools — and their central debate — is about how to merge traditional reporting skills with new tech tools and modes of delivery. Looming in the background is this issue of rising knowledge, even as schools struggle to figure out how to embed deeper research content into their classrooms. In our networked, crowdsourced media environment, the value of basic "reporting" on events and issues is diminished. Deep context and added-value knowledge around news, however, will remain scarce commodities. At the AEJMC annual meeting in Chicago last month, many educators were indeed talking about a new imperative to use more scholarship within curricula. But how? The good news is that innovation, both in terms of tech tools and research capacity, can flourish in j-schools. The intellectual component — though complex at one level, involving fluency with numbers and with some academic concepts (think correlation) — can be broken down into a single mantra: make a “research review” a core habit for students. Even at the 200- or 300-level of undergraduate courses, students can get accustomed to using academic sites such as Google Scholar, survey-oriented sites such as the Pew Research Center, and paid repositories like Academic Search Premier. JSTOR is another example. Reporting on vacant lots and redevelopment? You might want to know about this study. Exploring dynamics of overbearing parents in schools? This one might be useful. Backgrounding a piece on tax breaks for businesses? Take a look here. A new baseball stadium? Catch this. A smart search through key databases can yield a wealth of such information on deadline, which can then be leveraged for coverage of news events. Journalism educators should press students to mine such knowledge and be as aggressive in its pursuit online as they are of leads in the real world. This is not to suggest there is always some perfect study or dataset to inform every one-off local story. Establishing the habit is the thing. The same analytical skills embedded in the research review habit will make for better questions, more rigorous scrutiny of assumptions, higher-level journalism. Scholars perform a literature review as they approach questions; most topics have been studied for decades. Why neglect all of that accumulated knowledge? Even within difficult disciplines, journalists can obtain a reasonable fluency — enough to be well informed, know the deeper debates within issues, and ask more penetrating questions when engaging with experts (and avoid all of those blind phone calls for quotes). For journalism schools, this means not segregating "research skills" in a single seminar. It means every j-school instructor emphasizing sophisticated web search skills, some knowledge of statistical concepts, a familiarity with research databases, and fostering the strong desire for a non-anecdotal, contextual understanding of things. For the many brilliant career journalists who are now working in academia, this is not that heavy a lift. But it requires rebalancing. It's all a matter of reorienting j-school time and energy. And it means turning back toward the wealth of resources within universities — the experts in economics, sociology, political science, and many other departments — while teaching students to engage with those disciplines in a distinctively journalistic way. How many journalism classes have ever, for instance, read an original academic paper from a scholar on campus and then had a vigorous conversation with that scholar? (The News21 initiatives have pioneered some of this cross-disciplinary work.) Journalism education should move a little closer to the academic research world, using its resources to elevate and distinguish the reporting profession again in our new, more competitive information marketplace. Journalist's Resource — from Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, where I work — is but one player in an emerging movement along these lines that comes out of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. We hope it grows. Across the nation's journalism schools, we're seeing huge steps in this direction already. All this comes at a crucial moment, when the profession's momentum can be recaptured. Imagine journalism that is as smart as the giant pool of available knowledge now online. Then imagine it brought to bear through new, more-personalized social streams and rendered through more engaging platforms and applications. If educators rise to the challenge of forging that future, journalism schools will have little to fear in the coming decades. Photo by David Michael Morris used under a Creative Commons license.

New Pew study: Where you live helps shape your news diet Posted: 26 Sep 2012 09:10 AM PDT Residents of cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas have distinctly different news consumption habits, according to a study out today from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project. Pew found that while those surveyed in different communities reported similarly high levels of interest about most of the same topics, their habits differ based on where they live. Some of the findings are intuitive — like how suburban residents, many of whom commute to work, are more likely than their urban counterparts to listen to the radio. Another example: Residents of large cities tend to be less interested in issues related to taxes, which could be because city-dwellers are likely to be younger and renters. Urban residents were also least likely to pay for a subscription to a local newspaper. Fewer than half of those surveyed in any type of community said they rely on a print newspaper. Across the board, residents track local news more than other kinds of news. Weather is the most popular kind of news, followed by breaking news and politics. Most residents in large cities, small cities, and rural areas reported relying on word-of-mouth for news. Suburban residents are more interested in national news than are residents of cities, small towns, and rural areas. Other distinguishing factors come down to choice: People generally want similar kinds of news and information, but they don’t always have access to the same news resources. Large-city dwellers and suburban residents, for example, are more likely to have multiple devices like tablets and smartphones. Here’s a look at how news habits differed by community, according to Pew’s survey of 2,251 adults in January (including 750 calls to cell phones): City dwellers More likely to get local news and information via a range of digital activities, including sharing and search Most likely to be active on Twitter and Facebook Tend to be much younger than residents of other communities, with one-third of residents under 30 years old Seek news from about four sources per week Most likely to rely on local TV news for crime, politics, traffic, weather, and breaking news coverage Least interest in news about taxes Likely to engage with news content by sharing it, commenting on it, etc. Likely to get news on mobile devices Least willing to pay for a local newspaper subscription Least likely to rely on print version of local paper Suburbanites Highest level of income and education compared with residents of other communities Most likely to be “plugged in” with home Internet, tablets, and smartphones Most likely to rely on radio Most willing to pay for a local newspaper subscription Seek news from about four sources per week More interested in news about arts and culture than those in other communities High interest in local news about restaurants, traffic, and taxes More likely to go online to get news on restaurants, businesses, and jobs Tend to look to TV news for weather and breaking news Most interested in national news, compared with other communities Likely to engage with news content by sharing it, commenting on it, etc. Small towns Tend to rely on traditional news platforms like television and newspapers Seek news from about three sources per week Looks to local paper for news on weather, crime, community events, schools, arts, taxes, housing, local government and social services Most likely to worry about demise of local newspaper Rural America Least technologically engaged compared with other communities Less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities — with taxes as an exception Tend to be much older than residents of other communities, with more than half of residents older than 50 Seek news from about three sources per week Tend to rely on newspapers and television for most areas of coverage More likely to solely use traditional news platforms to get information Less likely to say it’s easier to get local information now than it used to be Photo by Dennis Yang used under a Creative Commons license.

New York Times, Washington Post developers team up to create Open Elections database Posted: 26 Sep 2012 07:43 AM PDT Calling all data hounds! Senior developers from The New York Times and The Washington Post are looking for volunteers to help collect more than 10 years of federal elections data from each state. With their help — and $200,000 in Knight News Challenge funding — Serdar Tumgoren and Derek Willis are working on creating a free, comprehensive source of official U.S. election results. The goal is to end up with electoral data that can then be linked to different types of data sets — campaign finance, voter demographics, legislative histories, and so on — in ways that previously haven’t been possible on this scale. Tumgoren, of The Washington Post, says the idea for Open Elections came from “mutual frustration that there is no single, free source of data — and more importantly, nicely standardized data.” Soothing this frustration isn’t necessarily going to be pretty. The task of finding state elections data — at least some of which will be a godawful, inextricable mess — will require some “brute-forcing,” Tumgoren says. “If you look at Mississippi’s data, they make me not very happy — they make me sad, in fact,” Tumgoren said. “Just a sampling of a few states I randomly picked, they run the gambit from pretty good to oh-my-God-how-are-we-going-to-get-this-data.” Tumgoren estimates it will take about two years to get to where he wants Open Elections to be, but the entire process will be open to the public. As data comes in, the team will clean it up, put it in a standardized format, and share it. What that format will be is still up in the air — as are many of the details, which Tumgoren says they’ll have to figure out as they begin to get a better sense of the state of the data they’ll get. “There are going to be some states like Virginia that are wonderful and have very clean data,” Tumgoren said. “Other places — we don’t even know which ones yet — data is going to be less accessible because it’s not centralized or it’s in formats like image PDF.” For now, Open Elections is building the infrastructure to begin collecting and sorting data. As they recruit volunteers, they’ll be looking for people who can dig up U.S. Senate, House, presidential, and gubernatorial elections results from the past 10 years or so. “This is such a big project we’re limiting the scope initially,” Tumgoren said. “Governor, Senate, House, president: Whatever else we can get, we’re not going to turn our noses up at it.” While they may not be able to clean up, link, and standardize data from other races, Tumgoren says his team will still work to centralize it. “It’s just an untapped resource,” Tumgoren said. “The ability to do this is very limited right now. We almost don’t know what we don’t know. I have a vague sense of some of the questions I’d like to ask but I bet there are tons of journalists and developers who are going to think of things that never even occurred to me. The possibilities for so-called data mashups are limitless.” Photo by DonkeyHotey used under a Creative Commons license.

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Newspaper Death Watch

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As USA Today Turns 30, Columnists Write Its Obituary Posted: 26 Sep 2012 07:07 AM PDT USA Today First Edition, 1982 via Fast Horse blog As USA Today celebrates its 30th birthday, columnists are wondering it it’ll see 40. Or even 35. Writing in Editor & Publisher, John K. Hartman breaks down McPaper’s run into three stages. The first decade was growth and massive disruption, as USA Today challenged many of the industry’s assumptions about how and what people wanted to read. The second decade was prosperity, when USA Today became the most widely circulated newspaper in America and Gannett reaped the spoils of more than $1 billion in investment. The third decade was decline, marked by competitive surges by The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, changing reader habits and all the economic pressures that have hit the industry. Hartman offers 30 ideas to rejuvenate the national daily, but his list looks a bit forced. The situation “has all the makings of a death spiral,” he admits. We liked Alan Mutter’s analysis better. The Newsosaur recalls some of the innovations USA Today brought to the market beyond jump-less stories and “We’re Eating More Broccoli” infographics. Founder Al Neuharth astutely scoped out changes in the audience for newspapers before anyone else. He targeted the paper toward business travelers who were time-pressed, mostly male and equipped with expense accounts. Neuharth bet that airline deregulation, which had happened just four years earlier, would spur an explosion of air travel and a boom in the hospitality industry. Hotels are still the single largest distribution channel for USA Today. Gannett was successful in attracting upscale ads from airlines that were competing on amenities at the time, Mutter notes. Not so much today. Travel has become a cutthroat business, and business travelers now make decisions based more upon TripAdvisor reviews and price-comparison engines than on which airline has the best food. Sports coverage, which was long a USA Today strong point, has been co-opted by ESPN.com and other online channels for the rabid fan. Even USA Today‘s once-prominent full-page weather map is now an  artifact, thanks to smart phone apps. Mutter points to a more fundamental weakness in the business model: “Nearly two-thirds of its coast-to-coast circulation is built on free copies distributed by hotels and other businesses, meaning that barely more than a third of its readers actually think enough of the paper to pay for it.” Those who do pay have to fork over one dollar, which is far less than they pay for the Times or Journal. The fact that both those dailies are eating USA Today‘s lunch would indicate that price isn’t much of a factor for the dwindling ranks of newspaper buyers. Neither columnist holds out much hope for USA Today‘s long-term survival, and we have to admit the situation doesn’t look good. This is ironic in light of the fact that Gannett anticipated many of the changes in reading habits that other newspapers grudgingly adopted. While newspaper publishers may have hated USA Today, their reluctant move toward shorter stories, more graphics and full-color production probably staved off the industry’s decline by a few years. USA Today continues to resist the paywall trend, and its free website may be one of its few distinguishing features. However, the price of advertising is in long-term decline, and it’s hard to believe that free will be a virtue in a crowded market. Unfortunately, USA Today may have little choice. If more people are willing to pay $2.50 for a  copy of the Times or $2 for the Journal, then it’s hard to imagine that a paid website strategy will get much traction. USA Today arguably had more impact on American newspapers than any publication of the last 30 years. Sadly, it may be one of the earliest casualties. Ebyline Challenge Seeks a “100% Solution” A service that pairs freelancers with editors has teamed with Editor & Publisher to launch a $35,000 journalism contest called the Ebyline Challenge. The contest picks up on a post by Jay Rosen two years ago that asked readers to envision how they could cover 100% of a large topic using a combination of sources. This is basically an innovation contest. “First, come up with an idea for reporting on 100% of something….Fill out an entry form and tell us how you'd use freelancers to make your idea happen,” the contest page says. The 35 grand isn’t cash, but a one-year credit toward use of the Ebyline service. We like the idea in principle, but the focus on freelancers is too narrow. If you’re going to cover something 100% these days, your available resources should include blogs, tweets, people on the spot with phone cameras and community publishers, among others. That isn’t in Ebyline’s best interests, of course, but the option would open up opportunities for innovation. Not all journalism carries a price tag anymore.

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Nieman Journalism Lab

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Building a better sports bar: SB Nation redesigns its blog network Posted: 25 Sep 2012 10:45 AM PDT News website redesigns these days often hit on a few current trends: making them cleaner, more responsive, more touchable, more app-like. The sports network SB Nation has done all that with today’s design update, but with a unique challenge: trying to modernize the site will also unifying the look of more than 300 distinct sites. And they had to do it in a way that balances the needs of the fan communities of each site while giving the entire network a universal consistency. “One of the things we’re seeking to accomplish is to bring together the disparate SB Nation community to a more universal, consistent visual and editorial style, but maintain their individuality as well,” Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told me. SB Nation’s sites — all blogs focused on a specific team, market, league, or sport — were something of a pirate armada, each with its own look and voices unique to whatever strain of fandom was important to the writers and readers. The sites were succeeding individually, Bankoff said, but there was little that was connecting them, either from a design or a content standpoint. Today, the flagship site and its network share a more sparse, magazine-y look. Lead images play large across the page, with plenty of breathing room for text, not to mention the occasional animated GIF. Fan discussion gets prominent placement in a sidebar on each homepage. Comment sections also get a cleaner, more airy treatment. Stepping back, there are some clear influences from The Verge. Bankoff said they’ve learned a lot from SB Nation’s tech-focused sibling and plan to implement better live-news coverage on SB Nation, similar to The Verge. The sports blogs will also be getting into more longform writing. The Verge’s wider layout was an invitation to produce longer features, Bankoff said, and SB Nation will emulate that, offering current writers and freelancers a chance to go in-depth on a topic. “We learned a lot from what we were doing on The Verge and realized the audience already has plenty of stuff on web that is shorter and more digestible,” he said. The redesign also puts SB Nation on the side of responsive design, reflowing content to whatever size screen a reader is using. Mobile web is where readers eyeballs are, said Trei Brundrett, Vox Media’s vice president of product and technology: “The mobile web numbers just dwarfed the native app numbers. That made us think, What do readers want from us?” A responsive redesign can take some serious work; a responsive redesign of hundreds of sites at once takes even more. “Imagine taking the specific needs of each of these 300-plus sites and then layering that on top of the complexity of designing across multiple screen sizes,” Bankoff said. Chorus, Vox’s home-brewed content management system, allows for the integration of text, video, comments, and other user-generated work. Brundrett said the new layout lets each site use these tools better, but also lets sites share material more efficiently. Making better connections SB Nation is calling its new look SB United, which emphasizes the company’s ideal of bringing together all the sites under a common flag. (And matches up with soccer royalty.) One of the earliest steps in the redesign process was figuring out the right branding for each site, something that combined individual logos with a nod to the broader SB Nation family. Bankoff said one of the intentions of the new design is to encourage fans to find other sites they might be interested in. But sports fans tend to compartmentalize. As Brundrett put it, “We have a sports bar analogy: They all have their own sports bar. They decide how it’s going to be furnished, what kind of beer they’ll have, and what music is on the jukebox.” If you’re a fan of the New Orleans Saints (like Josh), what are the odds you also really want the latest on Michigan State basketball (Adrienne)? I may personally read about University of Missouri football and the Minnesota Vikings, but I may be in the minority. But no sports fan is an island. If you’re from Boston, you’re probably not just a Red Sox fan — you probably also like the Celts and Pats, and maybe BC or UMass. When a top college prospect heads to your team out of the draft, that’s another connection. When Anthony Davis goes from the University of Kentucky to the New Orleans Hornets, it makes sense that blogs like A Sea of Blue and At the Hive would coordinate on The Brow. As part of the redesign, SB Nation made updates to Chorus that will let site editors plan and share coverage more easily, Bankoff said. One tool lets editors pull together related content for a story package, while another allows editors to work across multiple sites to coordinate stories. For readers, Brundrett said, they’ve created a notification system that shows new stories on sites where they are a member. “These are opportunities for us to leverage the editorial power of our network to create packages that are compelling to consumers and syndicate those across the network,” Bankoff said. “The behavior is changing.” The move to the mobile web continues, and native apps haven’t kept up. Some don’t want to deal with Apple’s app store, but more are looking at their readership and finding shifting numbers. SB Nation readers track in ways you might expect: a steady climb in readership that spikes at lunch, subsides in the afternoon, and rises again in the evening, Brundrett said. But mobile has changed that: The trend is more steady and consistent throughout the day. Tablet readership, on the other hand, tends to spike on nights and weekends, he said. “It’s how our audience wants to interact with us. It’s just that simple; it’s what they want. The behavior is changing,” he said. This is why switching to an responsive design is a bet on the future for SB Nation as well as the rest of Vox; it’s probably a good bet that their forthcoming gaming site, Polygon, will be responsive as well. Brundrett said it represents a shift in the way media companies think about presentation and the needs of the reader. “It really is a mentality,” he said. “What it forces you to do, and this is hard, is to treat mobile and tablets as a first-class experience, and to really try and nail it.”

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Nieman Journalism Lab

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• Quartz: The new biz-news site is a technological and structural innovator, with only a few hiccups
• We print-tweeted the Online News Association conference
• Monday Q&A: Andrew McGill on Philly Rap Sheet, his automatic arrest-tracker
• Robert Hernandez: Reboot journalism school? Take control of your education instead
• Pop Up Archive is open-source software to help producers preserve sound, painlessly

Quartz: The new biz-news site is a technological and structural innovator, with only a few hiccups Posted: 24 Sep 2012 03:05 PM PDT Quartz, the new business news site from Atlantic Media, launched today. It’s one of the most high-profile launches the online news business has seen this year, and that’s because of what it promised: a tablet-first mindset; a digitally appropriate structure; an app-like interface; a new-world business model. I’m rooting for Quartz, both because I like to see news orgs innovate and succeed and because I know some of Quartz’s higher-ups. (Zach Seward, Quartz’ senior editor, was my first hire here at Nieman Lab back in 2008. And Kevin Delaney, the editor-in-chief, and I worked on the same college newspaper back in the 1990s.) I think it’s got a lot of promise — it feels of-the-moment and fresh in a way I haven’t seen in a new news site since The Verge debuted last year. But its ambitions also run up against some hard questions of how people consume news in 2012. Here’s my quick take on what Quartz offered on Day 1. Giving first-class status to web-native modes of discovery Quartz launched with a great dig at its competition, in Kevin’s letter to readers: Quartz is intended to embody the era in which we're creating it, like Wired in the 1990s, Rolling Stone in the 1960s, Fortune in the 1930s, and The Economist in the 1840s. Ouch! (Emphasis mine.) An interesting strategy: Take a field where gravitas and institutional standing rule and turn it on its head. But the important structural differences between Quartz and its peers aren’t about 2012 vs. 1843. They’re about 2012 vs. 1996 — roughly the time when the early traditional news organizations started going online. When newspapers moved to the web, they took their design metaphors with them. News site front pages err on the side of information density — stuffing a slew of headlines into a relatively small space — with editorial judgment guiding a story’s placement, which was an indicator of its importance or merit. (The important stuff got the bigger headlines and placement “above the fold,” as it were.) Quartz — born with around 20 years of web experience already behind us — doesn’t bring the same design ideas. So three views — Top, Latest, and Popular — are given first-class status in the left sidebar. News designers have long debated the merits of each view — think nytimes.com’s front page vs. Times Wire vs. the most emailed list. But giving those three options such prominence means Quartz is as close as any news site has come to becoming view-agnostic. (It’s also part of Quartz’s general positioning as app-like without being an app. Giving equal weight to multiple views is a natural in, say, a word processor or a spreadsheet. Switching is only a quick trip to the View menu away.) Beyond view agnosticism, Quartz feels 2012-born in other ways. Linking out also gets first-class status; aggregated posts that point readers off-site live alongside full articles, with roughly equal weight. It has a JSON-spitting API at launch, so if you don’t like its design, you could mash up an alternative without too much trouble. The great gift of a media startup in 2012 is the ability to leap over the cruftiness the industry has accumulated, and Quartz seems set on doing just that. App-like experiences are still a little buggy The downside of making that leap is that technology sometimes doesn’t keeping up with our ideas. Quartz at launch feels a bit janky; it relies so heavily on JavaScript and DOM manipulation that stories just won’t load properly on a low-end device without it. It apparently just won’t work in Internet Explorer, even the relatively modern IE8. While my inner web developer wants to stand and applaud undercutting a browser that’s caused nothing but pain to the industry, its users are still a healthy chunk of the web. Windows Phone and Android users are reporting problems, and on Twitter there seems to be a tension between the appealing flash of the new design, the mysteries of its user interaction layer, and the slowness of its code. It’s launch day, and some of that will be fixable. And over time, people get newer and faster devices who handle stressful scripts better than their predecessors. But even on new hardware and a modern browser — like my new iPad — it’s not quite as responsive and fluid as you’d like. Scrolling on a trackpad regularly sends you places you didn’t intend to go. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said that counting on HTML5 was the company’s biggest mistake on mobile platforms — that while building out native apps on a variety of platforms is a pain, it also provides a far smoother experience. I wonder if, once Quartz has a good idea of how its users are accessing the site, it’ll consider picking a few spots where native development makes sense. (There’s a reason that Java went from “Write once, run everywhere” in the minds of developers to “Write once, debug everywhere.”) Of course, what makes sense for Facebook won’t necessarily make sense for Quartz. Facebook is a destination and a platform. Quartz wouldn’t mind being either, but it knows a healthy chunk of its traffic will come from social platforms, which are good about dumping users into browsers and bad about dumping them into apps. (Being paywall-free, social spread promises to be one of Quartz’s big strengths.) Three other quick tech notes: I couldn’t get starred articles (sort of a read-later system) to work. Quartz intercepts “open in new tab” requests — command-clicking a link keeps you in the same tab. That’s app-like! But speaking only for myself, geez that’s enraging. The site’s built on WordPress VIP and is a pretty good advertisement for the open-source platform’s ability to build out unusual taxonomies and other CMS-like elements. Scrolling over picking Remember those newsprint design metaphors that got carried over to the web? Another was scannability — the idea that a good front page should pull in a healthy number of options and then ask the reader to choose among them. There’s a long-term trend away from that model and toward making the first choice for the reader. If you wanted to chart this geologically, you might mention: 1982: USA Today launches and becomes famous for mandating most stories on the front page be self-contained. 2009: The BBC News iPad app launches with a front page that isn’t a front page — it’s a menu of options on the left and a complete story on the right. The two panes interact with one another, but the key is that at launch, you’ve already got a full story staring back at you. 2012: Quartz launches with a lead story always displayed in full on the front page. Considering the number of people who view a news site’s front page and click nothing at all, there’s something appealing about throwing you right into a story. It’s a natural impact of the nichification of media. Quartz isn’t trying to present “All the news that’s fit to print” and leave the choice up to a diverse group of readers; it believes it knows its audience well enough to say “Start over here.” And when you’re done with that story, bam, here’s the next one. It’s not a risk-free strategy. That story had better be good, for one thing. And it does makes the site harder to scan; it’s disorienting to see only five story headlines on a screenful of my MacBook Air and have the page be so dominated by a single headline and image. And it plays into one of Quartz’s biggest problems, which is that its navigation can be confusing; we’re used to clicks leading to predictable actions, and Quartz disrupts some of that. But the scrolling stream — the river, as Dave Winer would call it — is the design metaphor of our media moment. It’s not just about Twitter or Facebook feeds; it’s a visualization of how we deal with information overload. Things appear at the top and disappear at the bottom. Instead of surveying a stack of piled-up options, it’s about ingesting content in a moment’s time. It’s the framing of the anti-archive, the promise that a story’s long-term life will come from social propagation instead of front-page placement. Even when the stream isn’t strictly chronological (as Quartz’s default view isn’t), it’s still about the passage of time. Two other thoughts: I admire the JavaScript magic invoked when you scroll that top story on the front page. Once you get past a certain point, the URL in your browser’s address bar changes to the URL of the story, not the qz.com front page. That makes it easier for someone to copy/paste the URL into an email or a tweet. Smart. And the same happens when your scrolling takes you from story to story in the stream. Interesting that the advertorial sponsor content — the site’s chief revenue model going forward — doesn’t show up when you’re scrolling from story to story. (It’s in the headline well on the left, but not in the actual space where the stories appear; sponsor content gets magically skipped over.) On one hand, that’s good if a big chunk of advertorial would annoy scrollers and drive them away. But on the other, the ability to inject those ads in a scroll interface is a big part of its appeal — putting paid readable messages right where people are reading. Oh yeah, the content While Quartz’s design cues and content structures are interesting to news nerds and web types, it’ll be the content that’ll ultimately determine how it’ll do. That’s hard to judge on Day 1, but the mix of content seems just as global as promised and nearly as high-end. (It’s so high-end it doesn’t allow comments. For Quartz’s desired audience, it’s probably welcome to soar above the ground-bound commenting riff-raff.) It’s also not above a little Atlantic-style clickbait now and then. As C.W. Anderson wrote here last week, Quartz is organizing its editorial capacity around what it calls “obsessions” rather than beats. That is an interesting idea, but it’s one that in practice is less of a big deal than some first thought. Chris (C.W.) writes that an obsessions model could help free reporting from an institutional structure (the cops beat, the courts beat, the schools beat, etc.) that influences which stories are told and why. True, but that’s also a bigger deal for a newspaper than for an operation like Quartz that has only about 20 staffers, yet claims as its coverage area something as amorphous and all-encompassing as global business. Of course they’re not going to tie up their reporters with the captain-of-industry equivalent of school board meetings — they’re going to pick their shots, as Businessweek or Fortune do. Remember Quartz is more a magazine than anything else: from staff size to parentage (Atlantic Media) to inspiration (see that list of magazines-in-their-age). Quartz’s list of “current obsessions” doesn’t sound all that far from what would be considered beats at other news orgs: the mobile web, the Euro crunch, startups. A few are bigger trends that are abstracted up half-a-layer: China’s slowdown (rather than the Chinese economy), low interest rates (rather than central banks), energy shocks (rather than energy policy). But I think it’s more of a slight evolution than a revolution. (I’d link to Quartz’s list of current obsessions, but the site’s giving me two different URLs for it, and both point to 404s. Live by JavaScript, die by JavaScript. It’s under “About.”) What I do like about the obsessions model is that obsessions are destined to be temporary and responsive to reality. (Newspapers rarely think: “Let’s stop covering courts for a while and really focus on artisanal bread for the next few months.”) In the site’s top topic navigation, temporary obsessions rank alongside permanent topics. The URL structures are even different; obsessions get “/on/” in the URL, while topics get /re/. The challenge Technical problems aside, Quartz has had a promising start. But it’s in an extremely competitive space and I still see a few questions. By being free, Quartz is a better match for the social web than its paywalled peers. But its user experience for a social reader — someone dipping in and dipping out — is slowed by its app-aspiring ways. Can it strike a balance between the two and build something that works for reading built around individual URLs and around something more immersive? Can a web-native platform achieve the same sort of prestige among elite business leaders that a print-native outlet can? The FT, The Economist, and others are going to defend their turf, and many of its competitors have editorial resources that far outstrip Quartz’s. They also look good sitting on a tray table in first class. How quickly can Quartz join that club? What will be its publishing pace? The Atlantic has remarkably (and profitably) managed the transition online by shifting from high-quality, not-so-frequent content (the print monthly) to really frequent and somewhat-more-mixed-bag-quality content (the various Atlantic websites, which churn out enormous amounts of content every day, some of it quite good, some of it only passable). How much does an online-native site that’s aiming for a high-end audience produce? What’s the right editorial rhythm? Can it really own a particular topic? The promise of building your work around “obsessions” is that you had better dominate them — or at the very least produce a ton of exclusive, high-value work around them. Quartz is trying to reach an audience of very busy people; can it be essential for them? And can its business model succeed? It has launch partners for the rest of this year in place. But for all the talk of an ad model built about sponsor content and not on banner ads, there were still plenty of display ads. Presumably future advertisers/content partners will be looking both to see raw numbers and strong evidence that Quartz has attracted the right crowd of readers. I wouldn’t advise betting against Kevin, Zach, and the other smart folks at Quartz. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps along the way.

We print-tweeted the Online News Association conference Posted: 24 Sep 2012 02:03 PM PDT You may have dipped into the fast-moving stream of #ONA12 tweets that came out of the Online News Association conference in San Francisco over the weekend. We wanted to mix things up a little, asking attendees to create physical tweets by jotting down thoughts, drawings, overheards, and other moments from the conference — then tweeting your #IRLtweets creations. Think of it as a slow tweet movement. Many thanks to those of you who joined in, and to everyone at ONA for getting us thinking. Here’s a sampling of what we all made: We also really dug some of the sketched notes that came out of the conference. Check out some from Susie Cagle: Plus some of Dan Carino’s sketches of the conference: As well as a few of Graham Clark’s session notes: What did we miss? We’d love to add your #IRLtweets from ONA to this collection.

Monday Q&A: Andrew McGill on Philly Rap Sheet, his automatic arrest-tracker Posted: 24 Sep 2012 10:28 AM PDT Crime reporters in Philly can thank Andrew McGill, who in his free time created a tool that scrapes docket sheets to produce a database of arrests in the city. The result: Philly Rap Sheet, a responsive-design site that auto-tracks recent arrests by charges, name, age, hometown, bail range, and arrest date. New arrests are posted every half-hour, and alerts send customized updates — email me whenever someone’s arrested for trespassing — straight to your inbox. It’s a small entry in the growing tradition of data-journalism innovation on the cops-and-courts beat — from chicagocrime.org to EveryBlock to Crime L.A. and many more. McGill made the site after having developed a non-public version of it for his newsroom at Allentown’s Morning Call. He took a reporting job at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in July, and is thinking about the next regional iteration of the site — and also grappling with some ethical questions related to it. I caught up with him at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco over the weekend. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited and condensed. Adrienne LaFrance: What made you want to build this? Andrew McGill: In my other life, I was a general assignment reporter, so I was picking up the news of the day and making sure there weren’t any arrests in my section of Pennsylvania. It was really annoying because you had to go to the district justices’ offices and look through the reports and spend time and gas to get there. Meanwhile, there’s this database the state has that lists all of the arrests, and there are all of these docket sheets — really good information — but it’s really hard to search by date. So you can’t really find out what the recent arrests are. If you know someone’s name you can get information, but you can’t really figure out the most recent things that happened. So what I did, to save myself time and effort, I made it so a script would query this database every half hour to see if there were any new records at all. I brute-forced it: If there were, it would notify me. I was thinking, “Hey, this would be a tool that would be really helpful to people in larger communities like Philadelphia,” where I’m from. I wanted to see if it would work in a big city or if it would overwhelm the system. And I was curious about exactly how many arrests there are a day. That’s sort of how it was born. Adrienne: So these are PDFs you have to deal with? McGill: Yeah, but the nice thing is the URLs are formulaic, so if you know the docket number, every time someone’s arrested, it goes up by one. So I query that URL and I always add one, two, three, four, five to it. So, yup, these things are PDFs. It pulls it off from the server, parses it, and converts it to text. It basically scrapes the fields I want. LaFrance: How did you decide on which fields to show? I know you list someone’s hometown, but you’re not putting up people’s home addresses for example. McGill: Well, that’s partially because the data doesn’t have it. It’s kind of strange what these docket sheets do and don’t have. They don’t have race. It does have date of birth, so at least you can see the age range. LaFrance: I was looking at the graph and saw you even got a few as old as 70-something. Those 22-year-olds are out of control, though. McGill: Oh, yeah. LaFrance: What other demographic fields are on your wish list? McGill: I really wish there was a specific address of crime. That’s really the motherlode. If you can say, “Okay, here’s a database of where all the crime in Pennsylvania happens,” that’s huge. LaFrance: So the docs you’re dealing with don’t even include arrest location? That kind of thing would typically be in the public arrest log at a police station, right? McGill: Nope, it does not. It has the arrest city. These records aren’t meant for reporters. They’re meant for courts people to look things up and follow the status of the case. Unfortunately, Philadelphia doesn’t really have an online system that has arrest data, so we have to rely on this state thing. LaFrance: It’s a clever workaround at least. Have you seen any newsworthy names pop up yet — a mayor’s aide or something? McGill: I don’t track it — it kind of does its thing. But I know people use it for news. Some friends of mine at the Inquirer use it. The Daily News, some folks monitor it there. Also the Police Advisory Commission monitors it. I don’t know if there’s been a notable political arrest. I know they’ve used it to track down recent murders. A lot of times, it’s kind of uncanny — these court clerks will have entered the arrest information before the person’s booked. It’s a secret path into the mind of the court system. I do know there was one time that someone called My Love was arrested at the airport. LaFrance: That’s a good little back-of-the-book news item. McGill: They did a blog post at the Inquirer on it. Here’s another one: Ken Jennings. LaFrance: The Jeopardy guy!? McGill: Well, a Ken Jennings was arrested. And Ken Jennings the Jeopardy guy tweeted and was like, “Guess I was arrested in Philadelphia,” and my traffic spiked a lot that day. It was not him, unfortunately. Well, not unfortunately, but if Ken Jennings wants to joke about Philly Rap Sheet, he can do that. That’s just fine. LaFrance: So what’s your vision for this thing? McGill: I don’t know. It’s tough. I want to add historical data. So I spent a little bit of money to get data back to around 2005, which is not that far back, but at least it’s historical data. I want to backload that in. But in terms of the next step, it’s tough to say. I want to get into a little bit more analytics. I think it’d be nice to add more realms of information to cross reference. I might look again at some things and see if I can pull some more data out of the existing sheets. Geography-wise, I do have what police district arrests are in, and I haven’t done a lot with that. So I want to try to start doing that, and maybe have a newsletter. Right now, I just have alerts. LaFrance: And as a reporter, those are so helpful, I’m sure. You can be tracking all the murders. McGill: That’s what I have set up for my alert. Unfortunately, it also pulls in attempted murder and stuff like that. I want to be able to get a summation newsletter out that you sign up for and say, “Okay, you’re in this neighborhood, and these crimes happened in your vicinity, and this is how it compared to last year,” and you would get this once a month or something. I don’t want to inundate people, but I think there’s room for a little more statistics pushing. LaFrance: And in your current newsroom, any plans to build something similar? McGill: I think the Post-Gazette probably would be interested in having something, and I don’t know if they’d want it to be open or not. LaFrance: Aww, why not? McGill: Well, I think it’s a powerful news reporting tool. And I think that it gives you an advantage over your competitors. In Philadelphia, I didn’t really have a dog in the fight. I didn’t live there at the time — I was in Allentown — so I was like, “Here’s a public resource everyone can use.” But now that I’m working for somebody, it would be to their advantage to keep it private. I haven’t really spoken to them — if I did something like that here — if they’d want it to be forward-facing or inward-facing. I think in terms of data being public, you want something to be out there. But in terms of news competition, you also want to keep your advantage. There’s one interesting issue that I’m wrestling with, and that’s keeping names associated with crimes when there’s the real fact that people get their crimes expunged. So I’ve gotten calls and I’ve gotten one cease-and-desist letter saying, “Listen, my records have been expunged. Take down my name.” LaFrance: Well, you don’t have to. It’s public record. McGill: I don’t. It is public record. It’s like saying, “Hey newspapers, you put my name in an article, you have to take that down.” So I’m not legally obligated — but in a social justice kind of way, I don’t want to screw someone’s career up if they were wrongfully arrested or charges were dropped. If they’re clear everywhere else, but they’re on Philly Rap Sheet and someone finds that and says, “We’re not going to hire you.” LaFrance: But how realistic is it for you to take the time to assess each claim of expungement? McGill: It’s not. Fortunately, the one in which I received the cease and desist letter, they forwarded me the expungement notice. So that was helpful. I believe it was true. LaFrance: Did you take that one down? McGill: I didn’t take the arrest down. I would never take down the crime itself, but I made it so the name is not published. It’s still in my database, but it’s private. What I’m considering — I talked to an expungement lawyer, and he really was concerned about this — I’m considering having it so after a month the names are no longer included on the records. So you could still have the breaking-news aspect, but after a month you wouldn’t be able to search by name. LaFrance: It’s hard. McGill: I want to be as neutral an arbitrator as I can. And people are usually pretty sensitive about having their names associated with crimes. And again, I don’t want to mess up anybody’s lives. If I have the power to do less harm, I want to. But I also understand people are using this database to look for specific people. So I’m trying to balance that with the chance that — the way the expungement lawyer explained it to me was that for a long time in Philadelphia, it was common practice in the District Attorney’s office to overcharge people. So if you were involved in a bar fight and you someone got hurt, you might get charged with attempted murder instead of drunk and disorderly. So on my site, you look like an attempted murderer. And I’m not going back and scanning thousands of docket sheets every month just to make sure nothing’s changed. I’m considering at least putting a link saying — I don’t know how to phrase it — but essentially, “If you had your record expunged, here’s a formal process to get in touch with me.”

Robert Hernandez: Reboot journalism school? Take control of your education instead Posted: 24 Sep 2012 08:00 AM PDT Editor’s Note: It’s the start of the school year, which means students are returning to journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world? We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Here’s Robert Hernandez, journalism professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, with ideas on how students can make the resources of the j-school, and the web, better work for them. “J-schools aren’t changing fast enough.” “J-schools need new blood in academia.” “J-schools need to be more like teaching hospitals.” All these are true, but… there are some people who don’t wait. Students, if you are waiting for the curriculum to be the cutting edge journalism that will guarantee you a high paying job, you are wasting your time. Yes, I said that. Because if you think a school’s curriculum or teaching structure determines your education, you are mistaken. That era is over. The era of textbooks being the authority is over. The era of professors having all the answers is over. The reality of our current era is disruption. And it’s extremely exciting. That means you can bypass the j-school debates and take control over your education by taking the most important step: Be actively involved in your education. This is even more important that deciding what school you’ll attend. Don’t wait for academia to determine what you need to know for modern journalism. Be proactive and find out by using digital media to help you learn those skills. Think DIY. Think horizontal loyalty. Think of ways to hijack your school’s assets to selfishly improve your skills. This means more than just attending the required classes. This means more work than is assigned. This means more than a letter grade or GPA. This means meeting and engaging with more than your classmates and professors at your school. This means using the power of the web and social media to augment your education and introduce yourself to more than just the curriculum outlined by your individual school. This means realizing that an older professor you have written off as “irrelevant” has so much more to teach you about life and journalism than you think. This means working weekends on projects you are passionate about with friends who share that passion. As you’ve heard time and time again, the journalism game has changed. So has the education game. And the biggest change is that you have the power to shape your own destiny — far more than just deciding which school you’ll attend. (Also, go to USC Annenberg.) When I taught my first Intro to Online class, I introduced my students to the term “Google it.” At first, they thought I didn’t know the answers and I was using the search engine to cover up my shortcomings. (For the record, I don’t have all the answers. And, yes, I do use the search engine to find some…usually many different answers to the same question.) But those who have truly embraced the web know what that simple phrase really means: Empower yourself. It’s the modern version of teaching someone how to fish. But why wait for someone to teach you how to fish when you can teach yourself? Since you are in an incredible learning environment, you can use the expertise and context from your j-school to make sure you are fishing correctly (and ethically). Make the effort — and it is extremely easy today — to find a diverse set of answers to your current question. OBLIGATORY NOTE: When exploring the web, be a smart information consumer and consider the source. There is bad info out there. There is occasionally an echo chamber. But there is gold for you to mine. Be a journalist and treat “Googling” as reporting. I know I’m stating the obvious, but there are always people who need a reminder. Teach yourself something new, like I taught myself CSS many years ago, and am now teaching myself JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and more today. (Here’s just a list of resources to start with: Codecademy, Learn Python The Hard Way, and The Bastards Book of Ruby.) Go crash/audit a class. And make sure some of them aren’t about journalism. Look, you can sit back with your arms folded expecting someone to teach you something, or you can do more. Go out and hunt for knowledge. And, while I said be selfish to find it, don’t be selfish in sharing it. Engage and educate your classmates, as well as your professors. But remember one more thing: You don’t have all the answers either. Photo by Jeroen Bennink used under a Creative Commons license.

Pop Up Archive is open-source software to help producers preserve sound, painlessly Posted: 24 Sep 2012 06:55 AM PDT Journalists, especially those who collect sound and pictures, are hoarders. To dump raw material onto a hard drive is effortless, thoughtless. To delete it — what if you need something again some day? — is harder. And to find that something again some day is, often, excruciating. Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith, winners of a $300,000 Knight News Challenge grant, are the creators of Pop Up Archive. They are building open-source software and partnering with the Internet Archive to streamline the entire workflow of a radio producer — from ingestion to cataloging to eventual distribution. “What’s closest to our heart is saving oral history. It’s actually easier to lose your material that’s digital than it is to lose something that was on a tape,” Smith told me. Data gets corrupted, or just lost. Thousands of files called 000001.WAV become meaningless to humans. Wootton and Smith have developed plugins for Omeka, the open-source archiving and publishing software. Once the user drops raw audio files onto an FTP site, she can tag those files in Omeka with rich metadata (record date, air date, location, interviewer, interviewee) using a web-based form. Their software normalizes the metadata using PBCore, an emerging standard in public media. (For example: Is it called a story, feature, or piece?) The user could also upload copies of the audio to the Internet Archive, which has agreed to host the files free of charge and forever, as well as SoundCloud. Wootton and Smith said their software is in alpha. Their first test case is The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, a pair of independent radio producers who have 30 years’ worth of tape, the last decade of it digital. “They are a relatively small shop that, like many in public media, survive largely on grants and private funding, private donors and…lack any sort of archivist or technologist on staff,” Wootton said, “and yet are looking — especially as their production workflow is increasingly digital — to refine, reuse, repackage content, collaborate with others.” The Kitchen Sisters’ stacks of filled-up hard drives amount to a “huge stew of dead media,” Silva says in a video promoting the project. “People call us and say, ‘Oh, you guys did that piece about the sonic memorial about 9/11, where is all that raw material? Where’s the original?” Wootton and Smith are working with The Kitchen Sisters to upload all of their raw material for a public archive. That could be a boon for projects such as Blank on Blank, which mines old interviews and forgotten footage for new radio stories. Wootton said she got interested in digital archiving as a student at Brown, where she led an effort to digitize the 120-year history of The Brown Daily Herald. She “saw these bound volumes of pages from 60 years ago just literally rotting on the shelves of the Brown library, and managed that project, did fundraising for that project, really enjoyed it — and was incredibly flustered by the fact that I didn’t understand a lot of the technology that they were using.” That’s the kind of person they hope to reach with Pop Up Archive: someone good at creating content but who isn’t a professional archivist. There’s one missing piece that would complete the perfect archive, of course: transcription. That would let people search through years of audio archives as though they were documents. Speech-to-text software is still too immature to translate audio into text on the cheap. PBS, for its part, is transcribing thousands of hours of video archives using a combination of advanced software and human editors. Amara, formerly Universal Subtitles, is a crowdsourced approach to transcription used by PBS NewsHour and others. Wootton said she hopes their project would one day harmonize with the Public Media Platform, a so-called “super API” that would link content from all public media producers and distributors (PBS, NPR, APM, PRI, PRX). That long-planned project so far has not gotten off the ground. The Knight grant will let the duo focus on the project full-time and, they hope, scale the project up to work for more producers and stations. Also on the team are researcher Christen Penny and software engineer Daniel Vizzini.

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