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Senin, 03 Desember 2012
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Minggu, 02 Desember 2012
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Sabtu, 01 Desember 2012
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Nieman Journalism Lab
Nieman Journalism Lab |
| This Week in Review: Leveson and British press freedom, and the paywall debate circles WaPo Posted: 30 Nov 2012 07:00 AM PST Does the British press need more regulation?: British judge Lord Justice Leveson wrapped up a yearlong investigation into the British press with the release yesterday of a 2,000-page report recommending, as The Guardian noted, the first statutory regulation of the British press since the 17th century. The Guardian has an interactive mini-version of the report, as well as a great explainer of why the investigation was launched and the background on its regulatory options. The investigation was launched in response to News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal that began at the now-defunct News of the World newspaper, and the report contains damning evaluations of the cultures of both News Corp. and the British press in general. Leveson called for the modification of the current Press Complaints Commission into an independent regulatory body modeled after the government broadcast regulator Ofcom, one that would be monitored by Ofcom itself to ensure its independence, though Leveson insisted the revamped body wouldn’t be a regulator. His model legislation would also include government protection of freedom of the press, a new libel and privacy tribunal to hear complaints instead of the courts, as well as a whistleblowing hotline and a “conscience clause” in journalist employment contracts allowing journalists the legal right to refuse orders they find morally objectionable without fear of repercussion. Now comes the political fight over whether these recommendations will be enacted. A bill will be introduced, but possibly just to show the plan wouldn’t work. There’s likely to be a hotly contested split in Parliament, and even Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg, don’t agree. Cameron expressed his deep reservations about a regulatory body, though Clegg gave his own speech to Parliament in favor of the new body. Many in the press joined Cameron (or are expected to join him) in opposition to Leveson’s proposals: The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the regulation recommendation, and here in the States, Michael Wolff called the report toothless on the News Corp. scandal, and Reuters’ Jack Shafer said the problem with Britain’s press is less with the press itself than the readers who sanction it. A New York Times editorial also condemned the proposed regulator, and Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici said Britain’s press can police itself. There was a second objection running strongly through reaction to the report: It created a distinction between print and web news and focused almost entirely on the former. A Guardian article explained several scholars’ concerns about Leveson’s contention that the web is an “ethical vacuum” distinct from print’s ethical standards, and paidContent’s Robert Andrews showed the contradictions on the subject in Leveson’s report. The Guardian’s Emily Bell contended that trying to craft a comprehensive press policy without any real reference to the web is futile, while POLIS’ Charlie Beckett countered that the report’s focus on newspapers doesn’t make it irrelevant. BBC scandal raises libel questions for Twitter, too: It wasn’t a focus of the Leveson report, but Britain’s other big media scandal spread into troubling new territory this week. After the BBC’s Newsnight program spiked a story about the broadcaster’s role in alleged widespread sexual abuse by a former host and also falsely accused a politician of sexual abuse himself, the BBC’s director general George Entwistle resigned earlier this month. He was replaced on Thanksgiving by Tony Hall, former BBC news director and chief executive of the Royal Opera House. The Guardian’s John Plunkett profiled Hall, and paidContent’s Robert Andrews encouraged him to continue the BBC’s digital news innovation. Two top BBC officials testifying before a parliamentary committee acknowledged massive errors in judgment by the BBC in the scandal, though they didn’t fault Entwistle specifically. The nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose journalist helped report the faulty story, disavowed any sort of editorial control over the piece. Meanwhile, as former BBC director general Mark Thompson went through his first couple of weeks as The New York Times Co.’s CEO, he also testified before a closed-door committee about the canceled internal Newsnight story. But last week, the scandal spread beyond news organizations to individual Twitter users. The politician falsely accused of child abuse, Lord Alistair McAlpine, reportedly intends to sue Twitter users who identified him in connection with the accusations (the BBC story didn’t, but provided plenty of clues). As The Guardian reported, he’s going after 20 “high-profile” Twitter users for libel damages, and The New York Times added that those with fewer than 500 followers who named him can settle by apologizing online, donating to charity. As The Times noted, others have sued Twitter users for libel before, but this case is probably unprecedented in its scope and prominence. The Economist wondered if there’s any legal difference between more personally oriented Twitter messages between friends and tweets that are broadcast to a large audience, and GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts compared U.S. and U.K. law regarding Twitter and libel. In the Financial Times, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain argued that the solution to spreading damaging falsehoods online lies in improving the technology, not pursuing legal action: “Technologies that greatly empower people to communicate with one another are transformative enough to cause injury. Their sharp edges can best be sanded by enlisting people of good faith to help correct the wrongs they may have inadvertently amplified.” Paywalls and the Post’s future: Here in the States, the biggest story continued to be the change at the top of The Washington Post, with The Boston Globe’s Martin Baron replacing Marcus Brauchli as the Post’s executive editor earlier this month. A few pieces took a closer look at what was causing the friction between Brauchli and publisher Katharine Weymouth: Post media critic Erik Wemple reported that the rift between Brauchli and Weymouth stemmed from the Post’s inability to turn growing web traffic into ad dollars. Even though traffic has steadily increased, the Post’s digital ad revenue actually dropped from 2010 to 2011. The New York Times’ David Carr pointed the finger squarely at Weymouth, faulting her for the paper’s strategy of local dominance and free-access, traffic-driven economics, rather than owning political news on the web and pushing to remain a top national publication. Several others disagreed with Carr’s assessment: Poynter’s Rick Edmonds said the Post is in better shape than Carr gives it credit for. The Washingtonian’s Harry Jaffe said Carr’s blame was misplaced and should have been directed at other Post execs and Brauchli, and former Washingtonian editor Jack Limpert said the Post’s local coverage has actually weakened, for which he blamed Brauchli. Stepping into this mess is Baron, who addressed the newsroom for the first time and received plenty of unsolicited advice about what to do with the paper. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Sara Morrison wondered if Baron will carry the Boston Globe’s two-site free/paid model over to the Post, while GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram urged him to go all in on the Post’s anti-paywall strategy and move further into open journalism. This prompted another round of the never-ending paywall debate, as Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review called Ingram’s “digital first” approach “bankrupt” and said the Post has no real choice but to adopt a paywall, writing, “even if the Post is able to rise to the industry standard, it will still lose. Digital ads are fine, but alone they are not enough when there is a honkingly obvious supplementary source of revenue available.” Ingram, PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy, and Rob O’Regan of eMedia Vitals all responded to Starkman with variations on the argument that paywalls are a short-term solution that can only buy newspapers some time without addressing the real long-term problems that plague the industry. At ReadWrite, Piano Media’s David Brauchli (Marcus’ brother) made the case for paywalls and righting newspapers’ “original sin” of not charging for content online, while Digital First’s Steve Buttry rounded up the argument and rebutted a few points from Brauchli’s piece and others from paywall proponents.
A money quote to give you a sense of the type points the report makes: “The presence of process is a bigger obstacle to change than the absence of money. … the entire purpose of institutional arrangements is actually to ingrain and rationalize standardized patterns of behavior — in other words, to make change hard.” Joshua Benton of the Lab pulled together a lot of these good excerpts and provided some smart commentary along with them. He also had one main critique — that the report doesn’t deal enough with changes in media consumption, especially mobile. Elsewhere, Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman highlighted the report’s new definition of journalism — going beyond the facts to provide translation and storytelling “between the crowd and the algorithm.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram endorsed the report and expressed a desire for it to go beyond preaching to the crowd, and also at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at ways news orgs are putting post-industrial journalism into practice by using data to go deeper into stories. And another useful report was issued this week, as well — J-Lab’s report on what works in networked journalism, with several vivid case studies. Reading roundup: Lots and lots of other interesting developments over the past two weeks. Here’s the quickest rundown I can give you: — CNN named former NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker its new president. The New York Times ran a good explanation of what Zucker brings to the job and what kind of situation he’ll step into, while Zucker himself said he wants to see more vibrancy at CNN. Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein praised Zucker as a choice who’s not afraid to shake things up, and The Times gave several ideas of possible directions for CNN. Several observers on Twitter talked about how to make one of those directions — turning CNN into fact-check central — work, and Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici suggested CNN focus on efficiency in informing viewers, just as Google focused on efficiency in search. — The recent violence between Israel and Hamas has settled into a ceasefire, but there have still been some ripples from the unique social media aspects of it. Tablet profiled the people behind the Israeli Defense Forces’ aggressive social media accounts, while the online clashes between Israel and Hamas led U.S. lawmakers to call for social media accounts of recognized terrorist groups to be banned, the moral implications of which The Next Web looked at. Meanwhile, The New York Times’ David Carr examined the disturbing practice of governments using war as a cover for attacking journalists. — The San Francisco Chronicle reported that TMZ had applied to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to operate a drone to track celebrities, though both TMZ and the FAA denied it had made that request. Forbes’ John McQuaid and NBC’s Helen Popkin looked at the possibilities and pitfalls of drone use for journalism, but meanwhile, another news organization actually did start a drone program — an NPR affiliate in Missouri. — Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study on media coverage of the last days of the U.S. presidential campaign that showed that partisan media became even more extreme as the election neared. Poynter and Mediaite published good summaries of the report. — The press release service PRWeb ran a fake press release announcing a Google acquisition that got picked up by numerous news outlets, prompting Search Engine Land to explain how PRWeb’s press releases get distributed so widely and often show up to Google as news articles. Reuters’ Jack Shafer said he’s not so concerned about the pranksters as the journalists who don’t question the real press releases they see every day. — Twitter briefly suspended the parody NYTOnIt account based on The New York Times’ request regarding trademark violation. The account was back up (with a new logo) after about 12 hours, but it was still down long enough for the Times to receive plenty of mocking, as well as an admonishment from Jeff Jarvis at The Guardian. — Finally, legendary sociologist Herbert Gans wrote a piece at the Lab calling for political journalists to embrace citizen news as a bottom-up form of journalism.  |
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Jumat, 30 November 2012
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Nieman Journalism Lab
Nieman Journalism Lab |
| 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
journalism - Google News: Media-Baru Tak Akan Matikan Profesi Jurnalis - Inilah.com
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journalism - Google News: Tumpukan Sampah di Kali Sunter Menanti Diangkut - Liputan6.com
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