Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Lessons from the Motor City: What New Orleans might expect when the printing presses slow
- Would you buy a .boston domain from The Boston Globe?
- Beyond the crime scene: We need new and better models for crime reporting
| Lessons from the Motor City: What New Orleans might expect when the printing presses slow Posted: 13 Jun 2012 03:25 PM PDT
DETROIT — It was exactly the kind of story you want a newspaper for: In 2008, Detroit Free Press reporters uncovered a trove of incriminating text messages that ultimately led to the resignation and jailing of the city’s charismatic young mayor. It earned the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. Win a Pulitzer and you’ve got a guaranteed path to the next morning’s front page, your picture staring up from all your readers’ porches, a couple bottles of champagne in the background. But by the time the Free Press’ Pulitzer was announced in April 2009, the paper had cut back home delivery to only three days a week. Since Tuesday wasn’t one of those days, readers had to head to a gas station or supermarket to see the traditional celebration pics in print. “Unfortunately, when I won my Pulitzer, I wasn’t able to see it on my doorstep,” M.L. Elrick, one of the reporters on the story, told me. “It was a non-delivery day. Universally, we’re disappointed that the paper isn’t delivered seven days a week.” American newspapers are caught in a bind. They still earn the vast majority of their revenue — around 80 percent — from their print editions. Print ads sell for higher rates; print readers spend more time with the product and make it part of their daily routine. But newspapers are also aware that their attachment to print makes it harder to be fully, natively digital, to respond to audience needs and market opportunities with the agility an online-only outlet can. Those printing presses cost money to own and run; those delivery trucks take a lot of gas. Print is at once newspapers’ most important asset and their greatest albatross. In 2009, the Freep and its jointly operated partner the Detroit News tried to navigate that bind by continuing to print seven days a week, but only deliver the paper to subscribers on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays. (The Freep has the only Sunday paper in the deal.) Now, a thousand miles south, another paper is preparing to go a step further: In New Orleans, the Times-Picayune will cut print down to three days this fall. Papers in Alabama, Canada, and Oregon are all cutting out days. What happens to a newspaper when it’s no longer a daily front-porch habit? And what happens to a city? One thing that happens is that a new market is born: people who want home delivery that the newspapers won’t provide for them. Free Press editor and publisher Paul Anger says that before the reduction, delivery trucks were driving the equivalent of “to the moon and back” each week. Scrapping the majority of Detroit Media Partnership’s home delivery schedule meant that Detroit’s two metro dailies were cutting hundreds of thousands of miles of transport-related costs each week — not to mention the paper-and-ink savings from not having to print nearly as many newspapers. But for some, that delivery job simply shifted from unionized drivers to a small army of retirees, housewives, and others who started their own ad hoc paper routes on non-delivery days. Long-time Detroit media commentator Jack Lessenberry, a former editor at the News, is one of those customers: He pays a woman in his neighborhood 50 cents above the $1 newsstand price to get the paper delivered on the days the newspaper won’t. He gets billed every three months for the service. The newspapers took notice of the fact that people were buying papers in bulk from area gas stations to deliver to their neighbors. So about two years ago, the company formalized its relationship with contractors and starting offering them wholesale batches of papers. The papers now have 82 carriers under contract in 132 Zip codes, with about 15,000 people still getting daily delivery of either paper from independent contractors who set the price. So in a sense, rather than being eliminated, home delivery has more been outsourced, four days a week and on a much smaller scale. What have been the cost savings? Anger declined to put a precise number on it. The papers’ September 2011 publisher’s statement says that the Free Press’ Monday-to-Friday print circulation is just over 138,000. But that average hides a big gap between delivery and non-delivery days: about 80,000 Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday versus about 225,000 on Thursday and Friday. In other words, around 145,000 people in the Detroit area care enough about the paper to get home or office delivery — but don’t hunt down a print copy the other four days a week. (Some of that gap is made up by digital replica editions.)
Talking about it. But what about doing it? Anger says that the digital effort that was promised as a result of delivery changes has been successful. In addition to rolling out new iPhone and iPad apps last month. Free Press reporters are encouraged to engage with readers on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and to experiment with platforms like Storify — one reporter told me that three separate social media training sessions were scheduled for last week. The newspapers are also working to modernize their approach to advertising. Rich Harshbarger, vice president of consumer marketing and communications for Detroit Media Partnership, emphasized that online ad revenue has grown by “double digits” since the delivery change. (Of course, online ad revenue is growing rapidly in lots of places.) But print advertising is still what pays the bills. Predictably, advertisers have gravitated toward editions of the Free Press that are still delivered to homes. Thursday, Friday, and Sunday were already the most popular days for advertisers, and that’s why those days were selected for print delivery, Harshbarger told me. “Before the conversion where the delivery model changed, we were at maybe 77 percent of all ad dollars fell on those three days,” Harshbarger said. “Our hope was to get that to 80 percent. Now I think we’re at 95, 96 percent.” Could the Free Press have survived without cutting back on delivery days? After a slight wince and a full seven-second pause, Anger said: “That’s a question we didn’t want to answer — I’ll tell you that.” Instead, he says the Detroit Media Partnership relied on extensive research and the belief that Detroit would rally around the struggling newspaper despite changes that meant breaking readers’ morning rituals with the paper. “We involved them in our reasoning and the challenges, and I really think that people looked at what we doing and said, ‘You know what, we cannot be without the Free Press,’” Anger said. “People in Detroit have been through a lot. They’ve seen that it doesn’t do any good to panic. They’ve seen tough times, and they’ve seen better times. They love Detroit. They identify with Detroit. They root for Detroit. And they’re adaptable. They have a lot of grit. There’s a feeling that, if you’re in Detroit, we’re in this together. I think that that’s a little bit of a more of a emotional explanation but I really believe that. I really do believe that.” It’s easy to draw connections between Detroit and New Orleans. Both have seen better times financially; both have contributed greatly to American culture; both are great news towns. But the Times-Picayune and the Detroit papers are in different situations, even if they’ve both walked away from print in strategic ways. For one, Detroit’s metro area is still more than three times larger than New Orleans’, and it still has two newspapers. Harshbarger says there’s another difference. Already, he says, the Times-Picayune made an enormous miscalculation by keeping staffers out of the loop, allowing them to hear about their paper’s restructuring first from The New York Times’ David Carr, who broke the story, rather than from their supervisors. That’s not how things went down in Detroit, he said. “There were about 200 employees from the Detroit News, from the Free Press, and the JOA partnership that knew about what we were going to announce in the December press conference, and it never leaked,” Harshbarger said. “That’s how much buy-in and support we had from our employees. I mean, especially with newsrooms, right? I think that understanding that the employees are having this announcement in New Orleans, and they’re hearing it from a third-party media outlet — that couldn’t have been more different.” But the biggest difference is that New Orleans won’t publish a physical paper on non-delivery days, whereas Detroit still publishes papers seven days a week. Yet some media observers in Michigan, including at least one Free Press reporter, think daily printing won’t be around too much longer. “Very soon, sooner than most people expect, we’ll only publish on Sunday,” Elrick, the Pulitzer winner, told me. “We’re still losing money. I think they were smart to do a lot of research. I think they were smart to communicate to people what they were doing and why. But there’s no question that they did this because there was no better alternative. To my mind, this was cutting off your arm so you can get out from under the boulder. This was not, ‘I’ll be so much faster and lighter with one arm.’ Anybody who’s telling you that is full of baloney.” Anger insists that the delivery change has been “extremely successful,” but that doesn’t mean things are bright. Weekday circulation continues to drop — nearly 6 percent between March 2011 and March 2012. (And as lovely as Anger’s description of Detroit’s moxie may be, a pragmatist might point out that it took all of Detroit’s grit, passion, and loyalty — plus billions of dollars in federal aid — to resuscitate the auto industry.) “Well, we’re not immuned to industry trends,” Anger says when asked about the circulation drop. That was obvious on a walk around the newsroom. A large section of one of the two floors that the Free Press occupies is now deserted — the newspaper has cut about 30 percent of its editorial staff since 2005, bringing the current count to about 200 people, Anger said. (The editorial staff is slightly smaller at the Detroit News, according to its publisher.) Even the areas of the Free Press newsroom that are still occupied were hushed, dimly lit and largely empty on a recent Tuesday afternoon. Bobbleheads perched around cubicles easily outnumbered reporters in the room. “We have some morale problems,” Elrick said. “We’ve endured layoffs, and we took substantial paycuts, and at a higher rate than most of our managers. I must say with some chagrin that I think our staff is resigned to the notion that we’re only going to deliver on limited days. The only reason this was accepted with anything short of vocal consternation is because there are more sheep in newsroom than there ever have been, and also that people were convinced that [there was a choice between] fewer home-delivery days or fewer people on staff.” Elrick calls the desire to have more bodies in the newsroom than papers delivered to readers a “very selfish perspective, and a very human perspective,” and he says without hesitation that it was a disservice to the newspaper’s loyal readers. “Those people who still read us, they’re very disappointed that they don’t get it on a daily basis anymore,” Elrick said. “They miss the paper. So do I.” What’s worse is the idea that people might not actually miss it. The disruption to daily home delivery may have made readers realize that they don’t need the Freep or the News any day of the week. Once a habit is broken, is relevance the next to go? Charles Eisendrath, director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, puts it bluntly: “They do not matter,” he told me. “They’ve been fading for a long time. The decision to get rid of half of your [delivery] schedule accelerated the rate by two. What advertisers think is, ‘This isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t carry any influence.’ What readers think is, ‘There’s nothing in this.’” (For what it’s worth, The New York Times last week quoted a marketing spokesman for Ford Motor Company as having said that “print frequency of a local paper is not a major concern for a company like Ford, as there are so many different channels to reach consumers now." But that’s also a marker of how much more competition there is for ad dollars than there used to be.) Eisendrath says what’s happening at the Times-Picayune reminds him of the auto industry in Detroit just before it imploded. “I see the Times-Picayune as two things: Same old mistake made by a company that’s already made the mistake,” Eisendrath said. “And it’s a privately held company, so you don’t really know, but they say they’re doing okay. Maybe. It’s like General Motors saying, ‘We’re doing okay.’ They said the same old thing. ‘We’re making money — why should we change? Why shouldn’t we take a few more dollars out of the minivan?’ And the answer was because of the Japanese, that’s why. Well, we don’t have ‘the Japanese’ in journalism — but we do have entrepreneurs, and that’s going to be just fine. The survivors will be forced to get better.” At the Detroit Public Library, a trio of long-time librarians told me they haven’t noticed any increased demand for the paper on non-delivery days. Attendants at a couple of local gas stations shared similar anecdotal evidence. If more people are heading out to buy the paper on days it doesn’t get delivered, some of the people selling (or lending) it haven’t noticed. But the Free Press and the Detroit News are still visible around the city: There are bright newspaper boxes on corners, and at one intersection, across the street from a bus stop, there’s a billboard with both papers’ logos and, in big black letters, “Time to engage” — presumably, a slogan meant for the digital age. The papers’ own audience data shows shrinking attention from Detroiters. In its March 2009 publisher’s statement, the Freep and News reported a print market reach of 38.1 percent on Sundays, 28.3 percent on weekdays, and 51.7 percent over seven days. By September 2011, those numbers had dropped to 34.1 percent, 17.8 percent, and 43.4 percent, respectively. Even adding in digital, total combined audience reach (print plus web, over seven days) dropped from 55 percent to 48.8 percent. (The same numbers for the Times-Picayune increased slightly, from 64.6 percent to 64.9 percent.) The e-replica editions of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News both seem to be popular, ranking in the top five among large daily newspapers in 2010, according to Pew. However, subscriptions to the paper automatically include the replica editions, so those rankings don’t accurately reflect the number of people actually accessing e-replicas. Harshbarger says about 20,000 readers use the e-replica editions on non-delivery days. The Free Press’ Anger points to the success of the paper’s e-replica as proof that older readers are willing to change their habits.
“I think it’s worked out great,” said Jonathan Wolman, the News’ editor and publisher. “You know, would you rather have a home delivery seven days a week? Yes, and for a certain slice of our readership we’ve been able to reintroduce seven-day home delivery in certain neighborhoods where there’s a critical mass that the carriers choose.” But media critic Lessenberry maintains that Detroit’s two dailies have done little but alienate an already dwindling base of loyal subscribers. “The older you are, the more faithful a newspaper reader you are, and the less likely you are to read a paper on the Internet,” Lessenberry said. “What they’re doing is outraging their best customers. It seems newspapers are trying very hard to produce newspapers for people who don’t want to read them. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anybody else who would say this model worked in Detroit.” In one sense, the success or failure of the Detroit experiment could be judged be the fact that it continues. In late 2008, when the plan was announced — in the depths of a terrible recession, in a city on the ropes — few would have been shocked if told that, three years later, Detroit would be down to one newspaper, “daily” or not. The auto industry’s troubles made the newspapers’ seem small. The 2010 Census showed that Detroit’s population had plummeted, losing a quarter of its residents in a decade — the equivalent of one person every 22 minutes. “The city is shrinking about as fast as the newspapers are,” Eisendrath said. Instead, both papers are still churning. Where will the Free Press be in 10 years? When asked, Elrick’s default is humor: “Our editor will be Ted Williams’ frozen head, news will be delivered through a portal in the back of your neck, and people will drive around in DeLoreans fueled by banana peels.” But when he gets serious, Elrick says he expects big changes within five years, and sees the end of print as inevitable. “I dread that day, but that day is coming,” Elrick said. “If we’re lucky, that day comes before we’re out of business. Despite all the pitfalls, and the uncertainty, and a lot of the unhappiness, this newsroom continues to be very committed, and takes a lot of pride in being the best group of journalists in Michigan. A lot of my colleagues worry about what’s going to come next. I always say we’ve got these great jobs. We should do them until we can’t.” On Tuesday, in New Orleans, 201 Times-Picayune employees were told their jobs were disappearing. In the newsroom, 84 — about half the staff — got the news. On Tuesday, in Detroit, Paul Anger presided over a staff meeting and told Freep employees that — as much as he views the three-day-delivery strategy as a success — there would need to be more layoffs and that the cuts “won’t be tiny.” “This is all I can tell you: We had a staff meeting, and I talked about some budget reductions that we’re going to have to make,” Anger said when reached Tuesday afternoon. “The model has been very successful. There are industry trends and changing priorities. The model is not affected by that. The model is the model, and the industry trends and challenges that all of us face are a different story.” |
| Would you buy a .boston domain from The Boston Globe? Posted: 13 Jun 2012 11:48 AM PDT
The Globe is among a number of organizations that are vying for a new series of web suffixes like .yoga, .android, .hockey and .kindle. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the group responsible for deciding who gets to run these new domains, released its list of more than 1,900 applications today. On that long list of tech companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google), retailers (Walmart), and companies of unknown provenance (lots of them) was the Globe, which wants to own .boston. If the Globe is successful — and it’s the only entity seeking .boston; nine are going after .book — it would have the ability to sell domain names like (say) niemanlab.boston or redsox.boston. In its application, it says it would reserve certain addresses like (police.boston, mayor.boston, visit.boston) for the city and offer “a reduced rate” to community groups. (No details on pricing.) For some businesses on the ICANN list, securing a TLD — top-level domain — is a defensive move to protect the brand (i.e., it’s in Amazon’s interest to secure .kindle). But for the Globe, the move is a mix of local boosterism and the eternal quest for revenue. If you’re a Boston company looking to get fancy with its web extension (gillette.boston? newbalance.boston?), the Globe would be the place to go. That’s important because ownership of .boston won’t come cheap: An approved application costs a non-insignificant $185,000. (The Globe would contract out to OpenRegistry to run the back end.) When I spoke with Jeff Moriarty, vice president for digital products at the Globe, he said .boston domains would be an extension of the Globe’s mission to provide news and information for the city. “We’re really trying to think about ways we can make this .boston domain something that is good for the community, good for business, and really organize the local web in a new way,” he said. Because they’re applying for a geographic domain the Globe had to ask (and was given) permission from the city. As they wrote in the application:
In a statement, Boston Globe publisher Chris Mayer said: “The Boston Globe sees the new domain extensions as a great opportunity to organize and promote Web sites for our innovative city and is pleased to have the endorsement of the City of Boston for this application. In the coming months, The Boston Globe and the City of Boston will release more details about our plans to manage the .boston Top Level Domain for the benefit of our city, its businesses, organizations and residents.” If the application is approved, Moriarty told me the Globe would work with local groups interested in managing sites like northend.boston or dorchester.boston. “Town-name.boston or neighborhood name.boston — those are things we would look to work with communities on but wouldn’t operate,” he said. “It’s obviously important for a business like ours to look for new opportunities and new ways to serve the community and businesses,” he said. “This is an opportunity to represent both.” The Globe appears to be the only American newspaper to seek a TLD, but it’s not the only media company to submit an application to ICANN. Others include The Guardian (.gdn, .guardian, .guardianmedia), AOL (.aol, .patch), Sky (.sky) and CBS (.cbs, .showtime). (None of the applicants for .news seem to be news companies; no one bothered with .journalism.) Newspaper companies are trying to find new ways to make money outside of advertising and circulation, and acting as a domain registrar could be a viable new source of revenue. That, of course, hinges on whether there are people interested in having a .boston site. “It is different from what newspapers and media companies have done,” Moriarty said. “But we’re always looking for new opportunities,” Moriarty said. There’s reason for some healthy skepticism there: Names tied to a city weren’t a big trend in the other ICANN registrants. (No one registered .chicago, .seattle, .dallas, .houston, .atlanta, .philly, or .denver. The City of New York is seeking .nyc.) And previous new TLDs haven’t exactly caught on — have you been to a .pro, .aero, or .coop domain lately? Large companies, in the name of brand protection, have often been willing to spend to buy up microsoft.everything or nike.everything. It’s unclear whether they’ll keep doing that in a world with almost 2,000 new TLDs. And the pricy quest for the perfect domain name has gotten less important in an age of Google search and URL shorteners. Moriarty told me the Globe had plans for a number of .boston domains of its own: something like news.boston could be a possibility or, “something like common.boston that would be a forum or wiki of some kind.” But beyond that they would be open for business to any company (within reason) looking to take the extra step beyond .com. “You could see different destinations depending on how these new extensions take hold,” he said. Of course, I had to ask whether they would apply it to either of their main news sites, which already suffer from a certain amount of brand confusion. “I don’t see Boston.boston, necessarily,” Moriarty said. |
| Beyond the crime scene: We need new and better models for crime reporting Posted: 13 Jun 2012 09:50 AM PDT
The classic crime beat, dating from at least the mid 19th century, is evolving. It has to evolve. There are good reasons to believe that the routines of “traditional” crime coverage produce a journalism that just isn’t as good as it needs to be. We need to try something new. These changes start with the spot story: the routine, straightforward “this just happened” report. The police and the courts have always been the primary sources for such stories, but the authorities are increasingly publishing their reports and documents directly. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of evidence that existing coverage has failed to give an accurate picture of the state of crime and punishment in the public mind — nor do traditional story forms provide a good place to talk about crime, its aftermath, and possible solutions. Fortunately, a number of people and organizations are pioneering new approaches to crime reporting. Their techniques are based on comprehensiveness, extensive use of data, new story forms, and — in the most drastic departure from the traditional routine — deciding not to visit the crime scene. The crime story under pressureThe police have always been the key source for the crime beat, a.k.a the cops beat. You can see this in much crime coverage: Take a look at this homicide spot story versus this police press release. (No disrespect to the story’s author — don’t hate the player, hate the game.) But in recent years, there has been a massive increase in police resources devoted to communicating with the public. In many places, officials talk to the public using social media and put crime data, press releases, and court documents online — a prime example of sources going direct. The routines of professional journalism evolved long before the Internet, when one could assume that it was hard for people to find out about a crime without the journalist (and there was no way to link to online resources). If that’s no longer the case, shouldn’t these routines change? Put another way, what does a reporter bring to crime reporting, beyond simply telling people that something happened? This was my question on Twitter last week, which touched off an intense discussion among my journalist peers, captured here (and included at the bottom of this piece). It produced a number of good answers. One of the participants in that discussion was former crime reporter (and current Boston Globe newsroom developer) Andy Boyle. We talked afterward about what can be gained by visiting the crime scene yourself. “I’ve been able to get information that wasn’t in the press release,” he said. “You can actually get a richer, more developed story.” A journalist can discover things that the cops missed. Boyle recalls a specific incident where Tampa police initially labelled the shooting of Derek Anderson “drug-related,” but neighbors insisted that Anderson wasn’t involved with drugs. Boyle called in this tip and his editors incorporated it into the online story. While he was still at the crime scene, the detectives returned. “I could hear them talking to other people and they’re like, ‘Yeah, there’s a story that went up online, so they sent us back out here to talk to more people,’” said Boyle. “It appeared to them, initially, this was a drug-related crime, when it turns out this guy had beef with Derek Anderson on the basketball court, so he shot him.” Audio: An interview with Andy Boyle on what a crime reporter does. Beyond individual incidents, several people on Twitter pointed out that “trend” or interpretive stories are important. The statistics may be public, but do we really want to leave it to the police to speak frankly about longer term patterns in crime? There are also issues with the crime data itself, in how crimes are counted or reported. Our online discussion surfaced numerous examples of journalists discovering that official statistics were flawed or cooked, as in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York. More generally, it’s the journalist’s job to hold the police accountable in light of their sweeping powers, as in this eloquent story about fighting for public acces to Baltimore police records. But trend stories and police department accountability are not the bread and butter of crime reporting. Exceptional cases like Boyle’s aside, I’d argue that paying professional journalists to produce the classic “this just happened” crime spot story is a lot less valuable than it used to be. The question becomes even sharper when one considers it in terms of opportunity cost. Clearly, a reporter can produce a better crime story if they visit the crime scene themselves and write the story in their own words. But is it still worth assigning someone to do this, instead of any other story they could be reporting? Moreover, even individually accurate stories can, over time, add up to the wrong impression. The public perception problemPolling shows that most Americans believe that violent crime is increasing, and have believed this for several decades, yet nationwide violent crime rates have been decreasing steadily since the mid-1990s. This singular fact, more than any other, makes me believe there is something very wrong with the way we cover crime. Here are the charts, from Gallup:
Why is this? What makes a person believe that crime is going up or down? One answer is that — as experimental psychology research has consistently shown — people tend to reason from examples. When thinking about crime (or most other things), we naturally call to mind specific notable incidents. We don’t think about overall rates, or compare the statistics to last year or to other life risks. By this standard, journalism naturally produces a highly skewed report of crime because journalism reports on the most heinous crimes. In Chicago in 1987, fewer than a third of 684 homicides were reported in the daily papers. In Los Angeles County from 1990 to 1994, it was 2782 out of 9442 (29 percent). In national papers in England and Wales 1993 to 1996, it was 1,066 of 2,685 (40 percent). Smaller places often have a higher coverage rate, such as 163 out of 223 (73 percent) in the Baltimore Sun in 2010. But even then, there is a severe skew: generally, these studies have found that a crime is more likely to be covered, or more likely to be covered prominently, if the victim is young, female, white, and/or rich, or if the killing is particularly gruesome or involves multiple victims or sex. Moreover, homicides command a disproportionate amount of coverage. Something in the range of 70-90 percent of crimes are property crimes, but coverage is dominated by violent crime. White-collar crime is also drastically undercovered, especially on TV news. Coverage is also much more likely if the victim was a random stranger, even though in actuality the majority of victims know the perpetrator. This is all rather dismal. One group of researchers concludes:
To some extent, this is to be expected, because the most sensational crimes — the ones everybody wants to talk about — are by definition rare. As the adage has it, “Man Bites Dog” is news, “Dog Bites Man” isn’t. Unfortunately, because we tend to think in examples rather than statistics, the novelty criterion for news gives precisely the wrong impression in the case of crime reporting. Data for 100 percent coverageOne simple possible answer to this selective misrepresentation problem is simply to report all crimes. That’s not possible in the traditional model because of time constraints (and, for print, space constraints.) But as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has suggested, trying to cover all of something is a great way to force innovation in news. So, data: All police departments collect crime statistics, and many now put them online. Sometimes these are inconvenient PDFs, but increasingly police departments are producing machine-readable feeds that can power maps and other types of analyses. The standout example here is the Los Angeles Times’ crime map, a project spearheaded by newsroom developer Ben Welsh. The Times’ map displays crimes for your neighborhood, and even generates automated alerts for unusual spikes in a particular type of incident. It wasn’t a trivial matter to produce this map, because we’re still in the early stages of open government data — different agencies use different systems and formats, and data quality varies widely. The Times had to work with both the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to obtain all of the necessary data in suitably formatted feeds. Even then, after the launch of the site, the Times discovered that the official data contained major omissions and errors (since fixed). The result is a comprehensive view that individual stories cannot deliver. No one has to tell a user looking at these maps that property crime is much more common than more sensational violent crimes. With color-coded incidents, anyone can see this at a glance.
Crime data can be used for maps, personalized alerts, and trend analysis. It’s even possible to have a computer automatically write text stories from data, as Narrative Science does for sports and business. This may not make for great stories (yet?) but that’s not the point here. Algorithmic techniques “can take a little bit of the burden off, so you actually can dive deeper and do bigger stories, while still trying to do some of the bread and butter stuff that you’re doing,” said Boyle. Homicide Watch D.C. pioneers a new wayHomicide Watch D.C. also takes the “cover 100 percent” mantra, but relies as heavily on Internet-era story forms as it does on data. Just two (very busy) people cover every homicide in the metropolitan D.C. area “from crime to conviction.” (The site’s motto: “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.”) There were 105 homicide incidents in D.C. in 2011. Site editor Laura Amico was a “very traditional” police reporter before moving to D.C. and growing frustrated with existing crime coverage. She calls the Homicide Watch process “structured, data-driven beat reporting…it was very publicly available who homicides were happening to, where, when, and what the outcomes of those homicides were through the courts process.” But there was no place where all of this information was tied together. She asked: If a police reporter made all of the information that they had gathered in the course of their reporting available to the public, what would that look like? In a big departure from her previous reporting work, neither Laura Amico nor husband Chris Amico ever visit a crime scene. Instead, they rely on official releases, social media traffic (often faster than official channels, and always carefully verified), remote interviews, documents, and data feeds. They’ve even been able to determine a victim’s name by looking at the search terms that led people to their site. All of this information is compiled into a single page for each victim and for each suspect. Audio: Laura Amico explains how Homicide Watch DC differs from traditional crime reporting. Collecting such complete data allows all kinds of journalistically interesting analyses. Aside from their exhaustive year-in-review coverage of homicide and criminal justice trends (how they did it) the Amicos are able to hold the police department accountable with data. “When the chief of police says ‘I solve most murders in under a week,’ I can check it,” said Chris Amico. He can also check statements like “most homicides are drug-related” and challenge stereotypes such as the idea that most murders happen in Southeast DC (not true; Northeast had more in 2011). “This idea of having data that backs your beat is somewhat foreign to a lot of journalists, but at this point, I think it’s the only way to do it,” he said. The model seems effective and replicable, and Homicide Watch is looking to license their reporting platform. (Laura Amico will be coming to Harvard this fall as a Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation.) But more than data, these pages have become a community resource, with friends and relatives discussing cases and remembering victims long after the crime. We have a human need to talk about tragedy, a need that traditional crime reporting does not always fill. Can crime coverage help reduce crime?I want to end by grasping for the limits of what journalism can do for society. In a fascinating piece of experimental research, Renita Coleman and Esther Thorson explore a “public health” model for crime reporting. Rather than throwing up our hands and saying that criminals are irresponsible or crazy, can we isolate and address societal “risk factors”?
Coleman and Thorson suggest a very specific change to crime coverage: add “contextual and statistical information about the type of crime portrayed in the story.” In their experiments, this change succeeded in getting people to “become more critical of society’s role in crime and violence” and less likely to adopt “fatalist” attitudes such as “there’s nothing that anyone could have done to prevent this.” Shifts in attitude are not a decrease in violence, and journalism alone will not solve the problem of crime. But it might be able to get people to believe that something can be done — and, perhaps, in the model of solution journalism, point to promising directions. |
“Some people thought we were nuts,” Anger told me. “But whether you’re in Detroit, or New Orleans, or elsewhere, you have to emphasize the opportunities. The opportunity here is to break away from a very narrow publishing model that emphasizes print. That’s not where the business is going, it’s not where the market is going, and it’s not where our readers are going. Yes, print is still extremely important. But there’s a whole other lot of opportunity out there, digital-related, that’s really our future. So you have to keep talking about that.”
“Do some people still prefer the crinkle of the paper with their morning coffee? Yes,” Anger said. “Have a lot people moved to tablets, and are blown away by the experience there? Yes. And some of those are former I-love-the-crinkle people.”
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