Nieman Journalism Lab |
- News as a dynamic, living conversation
- The drone age is here, and so are the lawyers
- Better location data = better witnesses to news
- Becoming more agile
- Lost in the gloom, an entrepreneurship boom
- The year to eradicate impostor syndrome
- BuzzFeed talks about its approach to viral verification
- Oneflare pops up again when it comes to spammy SEO
- Scooped by code
- Gaps and bridges
- A spotlight, not a truth machine
- Wearable tech creeps into the mainstream
- Loosen the newsroom’s chokehold on the brand
| News as a dynamic, living conversation Posted: 16 Dec 2013 12:35 PM PST Twitter: It’s a combination newsroom, water cooler, stock ticker, and gossip mill, and still utterly addictive to journalists. Among its many other benefits, Twitter has crystallized a certain realization for me about the future of news: the increasing tendency of a set group of talented writers to coalesce around a given topic. Last year’s predictions hovered around this phenomenon, but didn’t quite address it: Michael Maness spoke of “creating a specific community around the narrative,” leading to “narrow and deep coverage over broad and shallow reporting”; Heidi Moore, of “teams of researchers” who would “think about how to contextualize, present, illustrate, and spread key information, whether it happened that day or not.” These communities now appear to be springing up by themselves rather than in response to managerial imperatives; the members of any given group are liable to work for competing organizations. But however it comes to pass, the “news story” is every day becoming more like a dynamic, living conversation than a series of discrete, disjointed, atomized points of view.
One writer referring to the work of another is nothing new, obviously. But the ease and speed with which we can access one another’s work means that the process of synthesizing results has improved quite a lot. It’s now common to find references and links to very recent work by two or three or ten colleagues in a single piece about events taking place in a day’s time; this has only been possible for the last fifteen years or so, and less than that, in practical terms. It’s taking a long time for editors and publishers to figure out how and when to make use of these tools, for example, deciding how much to permit readers to roam away from their own editorial content. But even so, we’ve already grown quite used to “a news story” as a wealth of tightly focused, hyperlinked information, all decocted for us into an easily sharable, easily readable form that we can read on the train or in a cafe as easily as at the office. The next step, I think, is that taking in the news will mean finding out exactly who’s writing it — who the posse is, who really knows the score, right now — and giving us the ability to follow that person or group of people very easily. In addition to having access to general information via a daily paper, whether online or off, we’ll also be able to follow a gang of writers on those narrow topics dearest to our hearts as readers: the Affordable Care Act, or stem cell research, or fracking and the environment. Maybe what I should really say is that I’m willing to pay for that service right now. Maria Bustillos is a writer and critic living in Los Angeles and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker’s Page-Turner, The Awl, and other outlets. |
| The drone age is here, and so are the lawyers Posted: 16 Dec 2013 12:35 PM PST Earlier this month, the BBC broadcast a story shot entirely on a drone. Not one second of imagery in the minute-long report from a massive protest in Thailand was from the ground. Not one human being touched the camera while it recorded. Even the closing shot of the reporter ending the story was shot from the drone as it slowly descended into the crowd where the reporter stood, dutifully informing the viewer of just how big the protests were. Welcome to the Drone Age of Journalism.
This future will be particularly unevenly distributed because of a patchwork of laws that ban commercial drones (U.S.), heavily restrict them (U.K.) or are bordering on quite liberal with them (Australia). But make no mistake — that won’t stop it. It isn’t stopping it now. The technology exists to be able to do really compelling things with drones and visual media. Fewer and fewer people are letting barely enforced and increasingly untenable aviation regulations stop them from taking advantage. Governments from nations to townships are going to be considering, passing, regretting, defending, and tinkering with laws regarding unmanned aerial vehicles in the next year and in the years afterward. From place to place, the rules will be different. And that inequality will open doors for news organizations to get into the game in much bigger numbers. But this is not my prediction. That’s too easy. Any idiot with 10 minutes and a Google search can make that prediction. My prediction: 2014 will be Zero Hour for drone lawsuits. Unproven technology? Unsettled and ill-defined areas of law? A complete lack of time-tested practices and regulations? It’s everything a creative lawyer with a deep-pocketed and angry client could ever want. Looking right at you, paparazzi. The seeds are already in the ground for this. There are a smattering of reports from around the world that by the grace of small miracles alone haven’t already resulted in significant lawsuits. There’s the story of someone crashing a small camera drone in midtown Manhattan nearly hitting someone. There’s the cell phone video of a hexacopter suddenly crashing into the stands at a running-of-the-bulls event in suburban Virginia. And there’s the paparazzo getting busted in Switzerland trying to use a drone to film Tina Turner’s wedding. It doesn’t take an Oracle of Great Sight to see where this is going. It’s a matter of time — and I think that time is 2014 — until a paparazzo with no training and a drone bought off the Internet crashes into a very pretty face. It won’t be malicious. They’ll just lose control. Or they won’t understand that the blinking red light means land now because your battery is going to die. Or the wind will pick up. Or another paparazzo will slap the controller out of their hand so their competitor doesn’t get the shot. And that pretty person in that movie everyone loved is going to need a different kind of plastic surgery. And that whooshing sound you hear will be legislators at every level rushing to create terrible, reactive, and free-press-hostile laws to make sure it never happens again. Never mind that existing areas of law already cover most of the issues involved. But no one gets re-elected making minor tweaks to shore up existing statutes. The fact is, paparazzi already view lawsuits and arrests and busted cameras and car accidents as the cost of doing business. Why should it be different when it comes to drones and aviation authority regulators? In the U.S., the one fine the Federal Aviation Administration has issued to a drone operator was $10,000. For exclusive shots of certain celebrities, prices are easily double, triple, and more than that. Do you want these photos, glossy magazine editor? The fine is rolled into the price. That means there’s little regulatory impediment. There are some criminal laws that could come into play, but they’re untested in the U.S. when it comes to First Amendment principles and have never been used in conjunction with drones. So criminal prosecution, at least right now, might not be a deterrent. So what’s left is a generic and easily ignored sense of liability that would kick in if something went wrong. If you’re too arrogant to believe something will go wrong, or if the financial incentives are so high that you’re willing to take the risk, there’s nothing to stop you from getting paid for drone captured celebrity photos. I believe that there’s a tremendous opportunity for responsible users of drone technology to do some really amazing and societally beneficial things. I think responsible journalists using strong ethical and legal reasoning for their actions will lead the way on the integration of drones into our lives. I am realistically optimistic for widespread use of drones in society. But do not think the path to that Drone Age is going to be completely smooth. And I fear the first pothole in the road comes in 2014. And it might be a doozy. Matt Waite is a professor of practice at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, teaching reporting and digital product development. Previously, he was the principal developer of PolitiFact. |
| Better location data = better witnesses to news Posted: 16 Dec 2013 12:35 PM PST If you are standing in front of a plane crash wearing a torn pilot’s uniform, reporters would be justified in asking you questions about what happened. If you tweet about being onboard or seeing the plane come down, it’s extremely hard to know whether or not to believe you, because it’s so hard to know if you’re actually there. In 2014, expect both technology and attitudes to shift to make determining proximity to news events far, far easier.
We don’t know how to deal with that — mostly because we’ve proven to be relatively bad at verifying authenticity in the face of a culture that seems weirdly amused by tricking the press. If we’re better able to tell where witnesses are, that job becomes easier. There are two ways to identify when and if someone on social media was close to a news event. They can post visual or auditory media from nearby. Or their posts can be tagged with a location. In 2014, those tools will expand (thanks to ad sales teams), but so will the readiness of users to share location information in the first place. In an essay at Business Insider earlier this month, the site’s executive editor, Joe Weisenthal, indicated that his preferred engine for surfacing details about news events was Instagram. His argument, in brief:
What they purport to see in front of their eyes isn’t necessarily accurate. But it’s much easier to fact-check a photo than a sentence. That’s one of Weisenthal’s point, but the benefits of Instagram go further. Visual news searching didn’t originate with Instagram. For years, YouTube has been an essential tool for reporters looking to find visual information about an event quickly. But Instagram has two massive advantages over YouTube. For one, the clips are shorter — and therefore have a lower barrier to entry and quicker time to upload. And two, Instagram puts location information front and center. It’s baked into the product. This was often one of the reasons that people suspected that Facebook found Instagram appealing as an acquisition target: Instagram moved geolocating to the background. Facebook’s stumbling Places tool put the onus on users to identify where they were. Instagram treats that data as icing to sharing a picture or video, and quietly makes location-sharing opt-out. Weisenthal’s right. That’s much better than YouTube. Facebook wants location data because it wants to give you the right ads. That’s certainly a large reason why Twitter is putting a new emphasis on location, rolling out a tool to show nearby tweets. (Which will provide the tool’s apparent name: “Nearby.”) It’s actually a fascinating idea: extending your social network from friends and family (Facebook) to people you choose to learn from (Twitter) to people in the same place as you (“Nearby”). If one of those nearby tweets is was promoted by a coffee place that has a discount for Twitter users, great. But imagine a Twitter in which every tweet is geotagged. Instagram search would pale in comparison. Twitter just needs to make it work. Twitter has allowed users to tag their tweets with a geocoded location for some time. When the feature was first introduced in 2009, the company, like Facebook with Places, tried to encourage adoption with only mixed results. The tool isn’t tricky, but very few people, even in the media, use it. If Nearby can expand that adoption, it helps Twitter’s bottom line. And, obviously, it helps those looking to validate tweets from a particular location. One reason the company might feel more optimistic about its second stab at expanding geolocation is that — thanks in part to tools like Instagram — people are beginning to feel more comfortable using location data on their phones. It’s only been five years since the media was suddenly inundated with eyewitnesses, but it’s only been about that long that the witnesses have had network-linked computers in their pockets. We’re getting more comfortable with that. Maturing. Pew Internet’s most recent report suggests that only 30 percent of Americans have automatic location-sharing turned on for social posts, and three-quarters use some geolocating tools on their mobile devices. But phones already have tools to trigger reminders or alerts based on location, something IFTTT is expanding with proximity triggers, using your phone’s location to create a rudimentary sort of RFID-simulator. Understanding the phone as a location-based tool isn’t insignificant. Get smart developers expanding how that understanding is applied, and suddenly you have an ad hoc witness verification system. Geolocated tweets. More Instagrams. An instantaneously identifiable and near-instantaneously confirmable pool of witnesses. AOL’s Patch stumbled in part because it tried to spread reporters across the country to report from the scene. But the reporters are already there, if you can find ones you can trust. In 2014, it seems likely that this will get easier. Philip Bump is a staff writer at The Wire, née The Atlantic Wire. |
| Posted: 16 Dec 2013 12:35 PM PST I admit it: My media consumption has perhaps been at an all-time low this past year. That’s not because incredible work hasn’t been made and made ridiculously, easily accessible. It’s just that at the end of very long days and longer weeks, the thought at jumping online to see what everyone else has been making, too, has for whatever reason, not been the most compelling thought. Sleep (and watching Breaking Bad) have been. Thus, rather than grasping to identify a pattern or trend for which I’ve only glimpsed shadows, I’m going to hit you with two kinds of predictions: the ones I really hope will transpire and micro-predictions I know for sure will. The hopeful predictions (a.k.a. please steal these ideas and do them)
The pretty-sure-thing micro-predictions
Jennifer Brandel is senior producer of WBEZ’s Curious City, which she created in 2012 after being chosen as one of 10 productions to form the Localore initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio. |
| Lost in the gloom, an entrepreneurship boom Posted: 16 Dec 2013 12:35 PM PST Even as revenue-strapped news outlets continue to cut staff, we need to celebrate in 2014 a new reality: Media entrepreneurship is at an all-time high.
The Investigative News Network (INN) counts more than 90 members. The new Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers association has attracted more than 100 members just in its first year. Some of this growth has been by acquisition, some by adding new products, some by internal expansion and some via new launches. Vox Media, for one, counted 85 employees in 2011 and had expanded to some 300 by earlier this year — and that was before it acquired Curbed, Eater, and Racked. Politico lists some 180 employees on its website plus another 26 at its newly purchased Capital New York. The Huffington Post identifies 317 employees online — not counting operations outside the U.S. Likewise, Buzzfeed says it has more than 300 staffers. And that’s just for starters. The Qatar-owned Al Jazeera America launched here four months ago. The three-year-old RT America, the first Russian English-language news channel, has become one of the most-watched foreign news channels in the United States. The Guardian U.S. launched its New York-based online operation a little over two years ago, finding fertile grounds for expansion here. We saw some important media-entrepreneurship milestones this year; more will come next year. All will have a ripple effect on redefining news, reconsidering news conventions, validating new players, and re-imagining news distribution. Consider the possibilities of some of these 2013 mileposts.
One of my many hats is journalism educator, teaching mid-career professionals who have ideas for media startups. Of the 12 in this year’s MA in Media Entrepreneurship cohort group, only two hailed from journalism. Others came from Siemens, NASA, private schools, nonprofits, and advertising. They all have very focused ideas for “jobs to be done” (in disruptive guru Clay Christensen-speak). They are not necessarily journalism jobs, but they are definitely media jobs, anchored in the digital information space. So for 2014, let’s stop the handwringing about losses in legacy journalism and work on creating and growing the next acts in media. Jan Schaffer is executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and entrepreneur-in-residence at the American University School of Communication. |
| The year to eradicate impostor syndrome Posted: 16 Dec 2013 12:34 PM PST I lost track of the number of conversations this year that set off the impostor syndrome alarm bell in my brain. At first, I thought people were just being modest. But it soon became clear that people were reluctant to recognize in themselves the same traits that awed them in other people. This dynamic holds people back while also overtaxing the limited number of anointed experts. And 2014 is going to be another busy year: Olympics, elections, World Cup. In order for the journalism-tech community to continue to grow and do incredible work, we must shake off the specter of impostor syndrome.
As more people grapple with impostor syndrome publicly, it brings transparency to the process of how someone gets to be regarded as an expert. How even experts ask questions. How those experts often want to share what they know — not just with other experts, but with anyone interested in learning. Twitter is a great way to watch those conversations unfold. In 2014, we’ll all need to challenge ourselves to more publicly share and document not just how we deal with insecurity, but how we build our skills, networks, and confidence. Band together. Until this year, I didn’t fully understand how networking functions as a critical welcoming and support structure in this community. I found this out principally through joining the Tech Lady Mafia. At first I was intimidated: How could I offer anything useful or compete with these amazing women? But over time, I started to realize that TLMers were awesome in their own individual ways that not only did not detract from each other, but actually bolstered one another. I then got to put the power of the network — the people I met, the tips I learned — to work in publicizing the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship. This year we had a four-fold increase in female applicants, which I attribute in large part to recognizing the power of these existing networks to help people deal with their reservations and reach for big opportunities. I look forward to TLM continuing to grow in 2014 and to seeing other similar public and semi-private networks flourish. Reach out. There’s a quiet confidence that comes from not just being good at what you do, but also being respected by your peers. This year, we’ve seen some great work from conference organizers to include speakers of diverse backgrounds, and efforts like that are important to dismantling impostor syndrome. Consciously including new faces and voices in conferences, publications, and invitations to lead and teach demonstrates that expertise exists within all of us. Tools like the OpenGenderTracker also help increase awareness of how limited our existing networks may be, and what we can do to ensure that the people we spend the most time reading are representative of the wider communities we live and work in. From NICAR to Nieman Lab, opportunities abound to herald the work of everyone in this community. And 2014 will have plenty of ‘em. Impostor syndrome is something many of us have been struggling with individually. But it’s also something we need to contend with as a community. 2014 is our chance to talk openly, build connections, and foster new leaders who will have the confidence to create projects that are only little sparks of an idea now, but will someday become the next project-turned-verb. Erika Owens is community manager of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. |
| BuzzFeed talks about its approach to viral verification Posted: 16 Dec 2013 11:19 AM PST CBC Radio’s Day 6 had a 14-minute story this weekend on the recent hubbub around hoaxes and viral media. (You may have seen the Times story on similar ground.) The hook here is the Elan Gale jerks-on-a-plane hoax.
I think this is such a fascinating area; it really gets at how the game-of-Telephone credibility chain works online. Something happens on social media; that gets aggregated on a BuzzFeed/Mashable/etc.; that then gets linked by the Times and CBC and other “respectable” media. Those outlets probably wouldn’t grab that sort of stuff from social media directly, but the viral-media middlemen do the job of packaging that makes it worth a link from the older guard. Media outlets have picked up stories from other media outlets for ages, in part because the fact that The Other Guy wrote about it lends it some credibility; it’s unclear how that standard should change when The Other Guy can have very different ideas about verification. It’s also interesting to think about what we really mean by “verification” here. In the radio piece, host Bambury slaps Tozzi and the CBC guy on the wrist for not doing more to “verify” Gale’s story. Talking to him on the phone or by email are thrown out as possible ways to do that. But how would that have helped? Gale was committed to lying in public here. It was a hoax! Much of what we talk about as “verification” of online media is really more like “increasing our estimation of the chances this is correct by 15 percent or so.” Again, that’s not completely new — much old-fashioned reporting isn’t really true “verification” either — but that phrasing encourages a very black/white view of online media. One final point: Hoaxes are really hard to prevent. (Go read Joey Skaggs’ Wikipedia page for evidence.) If people are willing to fake documents and lie about facts — and it’s a story that isn’t of major importance — fake stories are going to get through. And if anything, a lot of hoaxes can get outed more quickly when millions more people have the ability to publish their skepticism online. Hoaxs are interesting to think about, but they’re also a bit of an edge case. When it comes to truth and knowledge and the Internet, there are bigger issues at play than whether Elan Gale was doing Twitter performance art. |
| Oneflare pops up again when it comes to spammy SEO Posted: 16 Dec 2013 10:31 AM PST This piece by Brendan O’Connor at The Awl notes the boomlet in requests by spammers to unspam the websites they’ve spammily spammed. To summarize: Some on the scummier side of the SEO business filled up the web’s comment sections with links to their clients in an attempt to game Google. Google changed its policies and made those old links, in some cases, harmful to a site’s prominence in search. So now the spammers (or their successors) are left trying to clean up a mess of their own creation.
In the comments, Danny Sullivan has a useful corrective to some problems with the article — as he notes, this attempt to clean up the spammy mess has been going on for a while now, thanks to some past Google policy changes — but the real reason I’m linking is this section:
Oneflare! Recent readers will know that Oneflare, an Australian startup, is the company that purchased the expired domain name of the Online Journalism Review (OJR.org) and turned it into a spamblog, stealing OJR’s archives and lifting the logos of USC and USC Annenberg in order to make it seem legit. Eventually, after my stories ran, Oneflare apologized, blamed it on a black-hat SEO consultant they’d hired, and donated the domain back to USC. And hey, good on them for that. But this would indicate Oneflare got deeper into the search-gaming sphere than I knew about. On October 20, the company apparently knew enough about what had been done in its name to go on a link-cleaning spree. But as of November 1, OJR.org hadn’t yet been turned into a spamblog. That only happened sometime later that month. (I noticed it on the 15th, but it may have been up for a few days before then.) So Oneflare built the OJR spamblog after it had already started sending out “we screwed up, please undo the SEO damage for us” emails to websites. If you’re curious, this appears to be the Nick Chernih mentioned; his Twitter bio says he’s an “Aspiring SEO-er from Sydney,” and his feed has links related to link-spamming: |
| Posted: 16 Dec 2013 06:49 AM PST In 2014, you will be scooped by a reporter who knows how to program. Yes, you. Not the reporter a few cubes over. Not that guy you went to j-school with. You.
You can be a good journalist without being able to do lots of things. But every skill you don’t have leaves a whole class of stories out of your reach. And data stories are usually the ones that are hiding in plain sight. Scraping websites, cleaning data, and querying Excel-breaking data sets are enormously useful ways to get great stories. If you don’t know how to write software to help you acquire and analyze data, there will always be a limit to the size of stories you can get by yourself. And that’s a limit that somebody who competes with you won’t have. Here are some great stories from the last 12 months by programmer/journalists that any of us would have been proud to have written:
You probably haven’t gotten beaten by a journo-nerd yet. Your luck may hold out for a while. But somewhere out there is a recent j-school grad who’s just started covering your beat. She’s raw, and she has no rolodex. When she talks to sources, her voice shakes and she doesn’t ask all the questions she should. But she studied Python and statistics, and she can use OpenRefine and PostgreSQL, so she’s faster than you. And she’s about to publish something you thought nobody but you knew about. You won’t know she’s coming. You’ll never hear her footsteps because you aren’t reading the email lists where she asks her question about how to parse XML from the agency you’ve been bird-dogging for years. You won’t hear from your sources that she’s calling around, because she already knows what they know and she’s gonna call them only when it’s too late for you. You may feel like leaving programming to the professionals. But your next great story is locked away inside a data set. Why let somebody else get it first? Scott Klein is senior editor of news applications at ProPublica and co-founder of DocumentCloud. |
| Posted: 16 Dec 2013 06:49 AM PST 2013 was a great year of experiments — expanding styles of reporting, making engaging and beautiful articles, and infusing new frames of thinking — but 2014 will be when newsrooms apply what they learned more broadly, to their whole organization.
And there's much to explore. Ambient interfaces will begin to appear as data trickles into watches, televisions, clocks, cars — but with new affordances. While smartphones and tablets are deeply personal and interactive, these new devices sit in communal space, in the background: How do you design something that accepts minimal input but is aware of its environment? What does glanceable information look like? The security implications of the Snowden leaks on reporters will sink in. Precautions formerly developed for foreign investigative journalism will be more common. "Cellphone-proofing" and disconnected computers will form air-gaps to hold important sensitive documents; two-factor authentication and encrypting internal network traffic will make intrusions to the newsroom more difficult. Lastly, a personal wish for more collaboration with those that share our values. Museums, libraries, archives, and other public institutions make natural allies, as they begin to build new tools and practices that mirror our own. Institution-making is a messy process, but it doesn't have to be a lonely one. Allen Tan is an editorial designer for The New York Times. He is the assistant editor at Contents, a content strategy magazine, and previously at Codex, a journal of typography. |
| A spotlight, not a truth machine Posted: 16 Dec 2013 06:49 AM PST Of the ten biggest news stories of 2014, seven will be broken by newspapers or wire services with editorial staffs of more than 100; one by a smaller “legacy” newspaper; one by a radio or TV news organization; and one by an online-only news operation founded in 2004 or after. In discussions about journalism and its future, that tenth story will be the focal point of discussion and most of the nine other stories will barely be mentioned.
People like me will remind data enthusiasts that journalism is about stories, not data. Data are vital resources, but someone has to apply intelligence, art, and ardor to them to make them a matter of public interest. And then, I hope, someone will also notice that journalism is neither all about data nor all about stories. It is also “Heavy rain expected tomorrow” or “Mandela dead at 95″ — the former related to data but not data, the latter implying a story (as every obituary does, as every life does) but not a story. It is a news “item,” and very useful to millions of people as advice, as notice, as guidance, as admonition, as recipe — but not a story. And it is also essential to what we mean by news. Michael Schudson is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of a number of books, including Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, and Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press. |
| Wearable tech creeps into the mainstream Posted: 16 Dec 2013 06:48 AM PST For some time, we’ve been waiting for the “Internet of Things” to arrive in full force. We’re told it’s really happening this year. Connected refrigerators that know if it’s snowing outside have always sounded interesting, I guess, but it was never clear to me what problem they were solving.
I’m not suggesting that every newsroom start 2014 by prioritizing the development of a Galaxy Gear app. It is still early days, and there is no denying that Google Glass and the current crop of smart watches still appeal to a small audience — mainly tech-savvy men with a fair amount of disposable income. But if you think about how dependent everyone has become on their smartphones — and the habits and behaviors that have developed as a result of this addiction — there are things about the way we interact with our phones and one another that are ripe for improvement. The fact that you can’t walk down the sidewalk without bumping into people looking at their phones, or go to a restaurant without seeing people on their phones all around you, is not necessarily an awesome byproduct of technological innovation. (I plead guilty to both offenses.) Our dependence on these devices for everything from news to social interaction to shopping to directions is so powerful that there is a need to distill the most vital information and bring it closer to the body, reducing the need to look at our phones all the time. That’s how I think about smartwatches and the problem they’re solving. It’s not that everyone has a burning desire for their watches to be smarter. And reading long articles on your wrist or through Google Glass doesn’t seem appealing either. That’s not what this is about. It’s the merging of the wearable devices with the phone that offers exciting possibilities. For example, the latest version of the Fitbit, the Force, has a screen for tracking fitness stats in real time so you don’t have to look at your phone for that information. The wristband is also integrated with iOS 7 so that it vibrates when you get a phone call. The Pebble watch takes this further. This review of how iOS 7 notifications work on the Pebble does a good job of explaining how it is solving the problem of information and alert overload on the phone. So as functions of the phone shift to the wrist or to eyewear, that opens up the possibility for news organizations to deliver customizable nuggets of information to these devices. The new alerts in the Breaking News app, and the way you have a sense of both how frequent and how invasive the alerts are likely to be, offer a hint of the possibilities of this level of customization. In the realm of video, a startup called Watchup is experimenting with personalized newscasts for Google Glass. You can begin to imagine the possibilities, especially for media companies with giant databases of information. The key will be personalization that is super-simple. And then there are cool possibilities for innovative storytelling. I recently saw Project 2×1, a Kickstarter-funded short documentary film that was shot in part using Google Glass. Could the filmmakers have achieved almost the same effect without using wearable technology? Sure. But there was a nice intimacy to some of the shots. You have to think there is potential there for some interesting storytelling and user-generated projects, as taking video becomes as easy as saying “OK glass, record a video.” Smart journalists should experiment now, because at least one of these devices will move out of the geeks-only realm before we know it. Fiona Spruill is the former editor of emerging platforms at The New York Times. |
| Loosen the newsroom’s chokehold on the brand Posted: 16 Dec 2013 06:48 AM PST Any American editor will proudly tell you that the newsroom — and especially The Editor — is the sole custodian of the news(paper) brand, the true keeper of what the masthead is really meant to represent.
There is a good reason for this unchallenged, even if incongruous, reality. For decades, when newspaper ad departments were essentially order-takers, simply “booking” ads and incoming revenue, all that a news brand — such as The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or The Washington Post — stood for, was entirely the journalism, which until very recently was merely the physical newspaper. There was little need to “extend” the brand, to find new ways to use the masthead’s name — and more critically, the news brand’s relationship to customers — to generate other revenue. Over time, the editor and the newsroom’s grip on what the brand is, what it should be and also what it couldn’t be, became embedded in the very foundation of the Church and State demarcation. A fait accompli, if you will. Just how has this “newsroom owning the brand” manifested itself in most mainstream American newsrooms? In 2013 alone, we saw:
Now, wishfully, let us fast forward into 2014. If publishers are to build sustainable business models through a combination of advertising dollars, reader revenue, and smart adjacent businesses, then one of the biggest stumbling blocks will be this prevailing, meek public acceptance of the newsroom’s primary ownership of the brand by those in product, advertising, circulation, marketing, public relations, and indeed by many publishers. Just because a news “brand” was almost never leveraged for anything other than journalism for decades doesn’t entitle a newsroom to its veto-proof card, especially when such power currently comes without real accountability to help sustain the brand, not just the brand’s perceived reputation but also its financial health. Don’t get me wrong. The complaints that editors — and many journalists — express, often mostly in private, about their “business” side — they don’t read or understand the product; they can’t seem to sell what news does well but always want something new; they only care about closing an ad buy and not about readers — aren’t entirely made up, even if they are way overdone. But for the news brand to succeed and a publishing house to find sustainable business models for journalism (usually the single largest expense for a publisher), the brand has to be co-owned: by those who create journalism, those who can turn that journalism into a product, those who try and monetize that product, and those who support and promote that entire package. Editors, by virtue of their critical role as maestros of journalism, will always be first among equals in any publishing house that values honest, independent journalism. Still, the privileged status a newsroom enjoys ought to come with accountability and a responsibility to help sustain both journalism and the business of journalism. For 2014, here are six specific suggestions for publishers to help loosen the newsroom’s default chokehold on the news brand, and try to more formally connect daily acts of journalism to the long-term business of funding that journalism:
Nothing can be worse for a news brand than no longer being able to afford to pay for and publish what actually created an enduring brand. Constricting revenue sources and opportunities without actual evidence of negative brand impact has been a self-inflicted problem stemming from newsroom brand ownership that is not shared by key stakeholders. When it comes to digital, there is a collective amnesia, which goes against our industry’s experience, about how journalism and advertising, when designed to work well together, works best for our customers — audiences and advertisers alike. The revenue generating departments of a news brand, which have either become complacent or diffident in a digital world where potential clients have endless alternatives to the often single news brands being pitched, can’t use their lack of brand ownership as the excuse to not innovate on behalf of the news brand. Publishers have simply been too afraid to hold newsrooms accountable for their lack of cooperation around both creating and integrating innovative revenue-generating opportunities for the very news brand that everyone actually has a vested interest in preserving. Here is hoping that in 2014, the news industry will find a good answer to this long-ignored question of who should own the news brand. Raju Narisetti is senior vice president for strategy at News Corp. |
I follow a number of these groups. For example, for Bitcoin, I follow 
In the next year, you’re going to see more news outlets like the BBC develop their own dedicated drone units, with specialists who know what they’re doing with a flying robot and a camera. You will see photographers, film companies, documentarians, and anyone else trying to tell stories using drones for their work. 
In the media’s defense, it’s only been about five years since the number of potential witnesses to a news event became nearly infinite. When something happened somewhere in 2008, there was a local team who would head to the scene, interview and filter witnesses, and report back. In more remote locations, maybe a national network would be there within 24 hours. Those things still exist, but the timeframe has collapsed. Deadlines once drove news reporting; now, the deadline is often the moment something happens, and witnesses to a news event are almost always available instantaneously on social media. 
Once-fledgling startups now count their employees in the 100s. International news players see enough U.S. market promise to open operations here. Startup accelerators are nurturing scores of ideas for media “jobs to be done.” Journalism schools are designing media entrepreneurship programs to meet growing demand. 
Speak up. To start, we need to admit we have an impostor syndrome problem. Knight-Mozilla Fellow Noah Veltman 
I show up near the end of the piece, but the reason I’m linking is that it features an extended exchange with BuzzFeed’s 
Sure, 
There are great benefits from having sibling projects — a submarine that can go dark and operate with great latitude, acting in tandem with a battleship, bringing massive amounts of firepower to bear once it points in the right direction. What's learned from experimentation gets fed back, gets easier and cheaper to do, and raises the bar for future experiments.
Another prominent topic in discussions about journalism will concern a tremendously important issue — Issue X — that explodes upon the scene and generates endless commentary about “why the media failed to cover Issue X.” The answer will be what it has been since Walter Lippmann got it right 90 years ago: Journalism is not a truth machine but a searchlight that picks up aspects of reality that obtrude upon the world at a moment when the searchlight hits upon that location. If, by chance, the searchlight passes by that part of the globe before the big moment, and an astute reporter writes about disturbing trends that might lead to an Issue X disaster, few will notice at the time or recall the story later.
Some of the people and companies working on wearable technology, however, are tackling interesting problems, and I predict we’ll see at least one of these products move into the mainstream in 2014. As that happens, there will be opportunities for news organizations to be a part of this movement. They can do so by thinking creatively about how to deliver highly personalized news and information and by experimenting with new and perhaps more intimate ways to tell stories using these devices.
And if you ask anyone on the business side at most American publishing houses — especially in the advertising/sales department — you will likely hear a grudging acknowledgment of this odd reality, an admission that the newsroom does have the final, veto-proof say on the vast majority of issues involving the use of the brand.| 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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