Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The Tor Project helps journalists and whistleblowers go online without leaving a trace
- Knight Foundation diversifies its journalism investments again with its new Prototype Fund
- Watchup wants to be a “Hulu for news junkies” on your iPad
- Signalnoi.se mines social media for real-time analytics for news
| The Tor Project helps journalists and whistleblowers go online without leaving a trace Posted: 19 Jun 2012 12:07 PM PDT
Originally built in a U.S. Naval laboratory as a way to protect government communications, Tor has grown into a wide-reaching project that helps individuals stay anonymous online. With an infusion of Knight News Challenge funds announced today, Tor will establish a multi-lingual help desk so that people using the software around the world can get instant assistance any time. Tor’s software is free to download, and it works by distributing online transactions across the Internet so determining a person’s location based on his or her activity online is impossible. The project aims to empower anyone who wants control over his or her online footprints, but the journalistic value of such a tool is huge: Whistleblowers and tipsters can protect their identities, and journalists can publish without giving away their location in countries where governments would retaliate against them. Countries using Tor the most, according to daily metrics, are the United States, Germany, Iran, Italy, France and Spain. But Tor Executive Director Andrew Lewman says Tor has users “in every country in the world that has an Internet connection, except maybe North Korea.” Tor will also use Knight News Challenge funds to enhance Tails, an operating system that lives on a preconfigured USB stick so that there’s no trace on the local system once the USB is unplugged. (Check out other Tor projects here.) It means journalists have the ability to publish discretely and anonymously, and without a laptop. “You go into an Internet cafe, plug in the USB stick, and the computer will boot off the USB stick,” Lewman told me. “Then you have an anonymous operating system. There’s an email client. There’s a web browser. There are graphics and video editing tools, audio editing tools. So to take the extreme example: you are in — pick a country, pick a city, anywhere — and you witness a riot. You want to upload the video so it doesn’t get tied back to you. You don’t want the retribution but you want the video out there. Put down 20 bucks for an hour at the computer, upload your video, send it to YouTube or whatever, unplug the USB, and there’s no trace.” Lewman says the goal is to use News Challenge funds “to make it much easier for journalists, who in some cases aren’t the most tech savvy, and also end up sometimes putting their sources at risk.” But “the vast majority” of people using Tor are citizens who may simply want to stop advertisers from following them around the web. The example he gives is of a person who is searching “pancreatic cancer,” after finding out a friend has been diagnosed. “Maybe you don’t care so much until you start tying that to your other search results,” Lewman said. “All the ads start changing to ‘Do you have cancer?’ More disturbing is when you go to CVS or Walgreens, and those sites will start [to feature cancer-related ads based on your Google search.] That is generally where it starts to get creepy. ‘I just want to be anonymous for five minutes to look up how to help my friend with pancreatic cancer.’” It’s an issue that he says people are just beginning to think about now — especially in the context of sites like Facebook that attract advertisers with personal data that people opt to share. The team at Tor spends its days thinking about what the web will look like half a decade from now, and what that will mean for the ways people share and obtain information. “We think about the world five years from now,” Lewman said. “We want to have answers for when people want fully identified digital DNA.” Lewman says when he thinks about what he wants for the digital future, it’s not technology or software that comes to mind. “The tool I’d like to have is actually freedom of speech and internet privacy enshrined and enforced,” he said. “I myself would be much more loyal to companies if they wold trust and honor my wishes with my data. I imagine a lot of other people feel the same way… They start out by saying we love you, we’ll cherish your data, but by page 16, paragraph five, it’s ‘We’ll sell your data to anybody possible, and you cannot opt out.’” |
| Knight Foundation diversifies its journalism investments again with its new Prototype Fund Posted: 19 Jun 2012 11:23 AM PDT
According to Michael Maness, Knight’s vice president for journalism and innovation, grants from the fund will be up to $50,000 and cover a period between 60 to 120 days. The foundation has already awarded two projects: the University of Nebraska’s drone journalism experiment and a sentiment analysis research tool from the Jefferson Institute. “This is based on us being as iterative and nimble as possible,” Maness said. In the past year, the Knight Foundation has been working to transform the way it invests in journalism and community information. First came the the Knight Enterprise Fund, an arm of the foundation that works as a venture capital fund, investing in for-profit companies. Then, earlier this year, they announced changes to the News Challenge, breaking the contest into three shorter rounds. Maness said the tweaks to the News Challenge produced more focused applications from groups working on a finite development schedule. (And, combining the two, two of the News Challenge winners announced this week are being funded through the Enterprise Fund as venture capital. And, full disclosure, Knight is a funder of the Nieman Journalism Lab.) It all adds up to two words: speed and agility. Knight wants to be able to invest in a project regardless of whether it’s coming out of a nonprofit or an established company. And it wants to do so quickly, inspired by agile development and moving frequently to learn what works and what doesn’t. “One of the things in this space is we traditionally had people get larger sets of grants: they build the thing and that’s it,” Maness told me. “They didn’t bake in the notion of changing or shifting their business.” The idea now, he said, is to be more iterative and encourage a kind of continuous development process. At the same time, they want projects that have the ability to adapt to changes in technology and journalism. The Prototype Fund is a quick, direct route for people looking for just enough money to turn an idea into a beta. (The application’s just a basic web form.) After examining previous projects they’ve invested in, Knight found that the first versions of many were built at a cost between $15,000-$25,000. Maness said he imagines the lighter process will appeal to student entrepreneurs looking to build an early demo, or to journalists with an idea for a news tool whose company doesn’t have the resources to experiment. Because of the (relatively) small dollar amount, the risks are lower, he said. Maness said they expect some projects may not develop further out of the prototype stage. But the hope is that lessons from those failures can create a kind of “salvage yard of ideas.” Ideally, Maness said, the prototypes, win or lose, would become part of Knight’s network and give future entrepreneurs something to build on. “We think it will be a great pipeline for us to learn what is in the field,” Maness said. |
| Watchup wants to be a “Hulu for news junkies” on your iPad Posted: 19 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT
Watchup is an iPad app that lets users curate their own newscasts. Pick 10 stories from 10 channels, then lean back with your morning coffee and watch as the stories roll past without user intervention. Channels cover topics like finance, technology, breaking news, business, and other news categories. The app comes preloaded with 10 channels, but users will be able to customize from a list of about 40 total. CEO Adriano Farano says his goal is to make it easy for news junkies to catch up with video news at peak iPad use times, in the morning and evening, without having to jump back and forth between different apps or websites. Essentially, the goal is to have quality video find the consumer rather than making users seek it out in multiple places. Here’s a quick demo from the Watchup website: So where do these quality videos come from? Watchup is working on lining up news partners, but at launch they’re relying mainly on the vast video seas of YouTube, where lots of newsrooms are already posting their content. “We basically have The Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, PBS — all the major news channels are there,” Farano told me. “We are talking to some publishers whose content is not available through YouTube for some reason, and usually they’re extremely interested to partner with us. The initial lineup will be mainly from YouTube.” Watchup aims to be a solution for people who feel “lost” amid the endless stream of videos on YouTube, and want a simpler experience. (“It’s so easy that even your grandmother can get it,” Farano says.) Users can develop a single playlist in one place for a watching experience that’s more personalized than TV and more “lean back” than clicking around online. “The whole experience is about bringing down the discovery point to just a few seconds,” he said. Farano says Watchup plans to generate revenue from pre-roll ads that will air before videos, and the plan is to give news organizations a cut. The trick will be to create an interface that’s appealing enough to users that they’ll abandon engrained habits and be willing to watch ads that they might otherwise be able to avoid. Farano argues it’s also an ideal solution for news organizations like The Wall Street Journal that find they can’t produce enough video to meet advertising demand. “You are selling out your inventory,” Farano said. “You have a problem. You have advertisers but you don’t have enough to sell them, so the way we come into the game is we say, ‘Hey, we are a Hulu for news junkies…Give us your ads and we share the revenue.” Watchup’s Knight News Challenge funding will come as a venture capital investment instead of as a grant; the amount of the funding was not disclosed. |
| Signalnoi.se mines social media for real-time analytics for news Posted: 19 Jun 2012 07:08 AM PDT
What drives an online journalist crazy? Not knowing why a story failed to get good traffic. What’s worse? Wondering why a similar story from a competitor seemed to set the Internet on fire. It’s a common scenario in a competitive media world where attention, as measured through pageviews and social mentions, can be a barometer of success. The standard analytics most companies use only measure their own traffic. Signalnoi.se wants to broaden that by providing journalists with a real-time social engagement tracker that can compare you and your peers. A winner in the 2012 Knight News Challenge, Signalnoi.se will use data from Facebook and Twitter to help newsrooms track the life of stories, find trends, and shape coverage decisions. The project was created by Mohamed Nanabhay, former head of online for Al Jazeera English, and Haroon Meer, the founder of Thinkst. Signalnoi.se is receiving Knight’s money as a venture capital investment of undisclosed size rather than as a grant; the company plans to use the funding to build out the tool and prepare it for use in newsrooms. Nanabhay said the idea for Signalnoi.se began in January 2011 as the Arab Spring was in its early stages. Al Jazeera English had just published extensive reporting on leaked documents covering a decade of negotiations between Israel and Palestine. The Palestine Papers was a tentpole investigation; they played it big, with a large presence on the website and on the air. “On the 25th of January, we were investing all these resources into putting out this story — we thought it would be the biggest story of the year for us,” Nanabhay said. “But I noticed in real time, because of Chartbeat, the audience was attracted to the Egypt story.” As a result, Nanabhay reconfigured the Al Jazeera English homepage by promoting stories on Egypt. As Al Jazeera English covered the rest of the Arab Spring, a similar pattern of homepage adjustments played out.
What Signalnoi.se does is build a formal process to treat social media as an indicator of audience interest. The system can monitor and graph stories for a news site and several of its competitors — be they geographic or thematic — over a period time that can range from minutes to hours and weeks. Stories are given a score that factors in tweets and Facebook likes, comments, and shares. Since Signalnoi.se leverages data from pre-existing social platforms, it fit well with the networks theme that was emphasized in this round of the News Challenge. “Ultimately, what we really want to do is bring social clarity into newsrooms and give journalists clarity,” he said. “You’ve got all these disparate social networks, all this activity going on. But I think a lot of analytics tools out there are not easy for journalists to use.” The use of analytics has changed both the business and editorial side of journalism. Things like unique visitors, time-on-site and clickthru rates are factors when deciding the architecture of a news site. Signalnoi.se is entering a space where tools like Chartbeat and Omniture are already part of a newsroom. The thing that might set Signalnoi.se apart is the ability to track competitors numbers against your own. When Al Jazeera English is onto the same story as the BBC, the Guardian, and CNN, editors at AJE would be able to track their competitors to see when they published and how their stories spread over time. Signalnoi.se would also allow media companies to see which topics and people are trending. While social mentions may not be the perfect weapon for journalism counterintelligence, it could provide newsrooms with information to better position their work to reach more eyeballs.
Of course, editors have to be willing to use analytics in making decisions, and that can be a tricky question for some news outlets. Nanabhay said he understands the fear of giving the audience power over story planning, the fear of chasing pageviews, where Justin Bieber gets more prominence than Syria, he said. Analytics, and Signalnoi.se in particular, are not meant to replace editors, but instead to help them understand their audience and the ways news moves online. The editor’s prerogative remains intact, it’s just aided by more information, Nanabhay said. “We just want to close that loop between the audience and journalists,” Nanabhay said. Image by Altemark used under a Creative Commons license. |
The Knight Foundation is broadening its funding mechanisms again with the addition of the 
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As Nanabhay sees it, Signalnoi.se can supply additional information to influence editorial decisions — and at a finer grain than simply following Google search trends. It would also provide a method to explain why older stories unexpectedly find new life. “We’re in a time when newsroom budgets are stretched — most newsrooms I know are under-resourced,” he said. “Just knowing where the audience is going can help those editors use their resources better.”| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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