Rabu, 18 Desember 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The rise of the fluid beat structure

Posted: 17 Dec 2013 07:18 AM PST

A favorite editor of mine used to say that you can tell a news organization’s values by what it chooses not to cover.

I always liked that, especially as it applies to news judgment in a content-choked digital world. We have access to oceans of information online. For any news organization to produce meaningful journalism, it must figure out how to elevate its work above the rest of the riffraff retweeting the same things, broadcasting the same livestreams, and quoting the same press releases.

LaFranceMug_250This sort of differentiation has everything to do with clearly defined values. Not the Journalism 101 stuff like your newsroom’s commitment to accuracy and fairness — the trickier existential question of what makes your newsroom yours and how your reporters demonstrate your organization’s values through their work. I think a lot of newsrooms assume they have an answer to these questions when they actually don’t. (A good place to start if you’re not sure which camp you’re in: “What does my newsroom do better than any other newsroom?”)

In 2014, I believe we’ll see more news organizations experiment with fluid beat structures. Reporters will organize their coverage around sets of evolving ideas rather than fixed places or topics. (Quartz is the go-to example of a site that’s rethinking traditional beats along these lines. More on that in a minute.) Fluid beats will help organizations reach niche and sometimes overlapping audiences that aren’t necessarily linked by the kinds of geographic or demographic ties that once defined a pre-Internet daily’s audience. Social distribution will continue to play a major role for newsrooms cultivating and interacting with these new and engaged audiences.

Now that we all have publishing power, the mechanisms by which we share information are increasingly dictated by networked structures rather than institutional ones. And now that publishing has changed, production — including beat reporting — shouldn’t just mirror institutional structures of the past either.

Designing beats around abstract ideas is a departure for beat reporters who are accustomed to focusing on specialized topics or specific regions. C.W. Anderson explained in a piece for the Lab a year ago that journalism’s old-school beat structure amounts to “institutional homophily,” which is “just a fancy way of saying that organizations charged with interacting with large bureaucracies often become bureaucracies themselves, because it makes the interaction easier.”

Covering a bureaucracy by turning into one? Zzzzz. No wonder so many people skip all those very serious and very important public affairs stories city hall reporters write. But part of why some of those kinds of stories can seem boring today is because they’re framed in ways that made sense for newspapers 20 years ago but have become antiquated today. I’m not advocating for doing away with shoe-leather city hall reporters. I was one; I loved that beat. But I also think news organizations hoping to captivate curious and globally-minded readers need to restructure beats to reflect all of the boundaries — geographic, temporal, spatial — that have evaporated in the past 20 years of journalism.

Creating a fluid beat structure doesn’t mean you’re ignoring influential bureaucracies. It just means you’re rethinking the flow of information in a way that reflects new behaviors. Today we navigate linked networks of continuous news and information rather than diving into and out of closed systems.

Ideas and the battle for what’s real

So how do we create beats that reflect this new reality? Ideas-based beats are a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric.

Here’s how Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky put it in their 2012 paper about post-industrial journalism: “What a journalist did in the industrial age was defined by the product: a headline writer, a reporter, a desk editor, a columnist, an editor. As deadlines melt, and we are in an age where the story as the ‘atomic value of news’ is in question, what journalists do all day is more defined by the requirements of the unfolding events and the audiences consuming them.” We look for credible sources who can tell us not just what happened but what’s real, an idea that calls to mind something MIT’s Judith Donath said to me in a conversation a while back: “One of the things we see a lot now is sort of like constant war between authenticity and co-opting the appearance of authenticity…We live in a world that operates in information. You’re not out foraging for berries. You’re foraging for what is actually real, what’s authentic.”

So when readers follow individual journalists from one brand to the next — the Nate Silvers and Glenn Greenwalds of the world, for instance — it’s often because those individuals produce compelling work backed by clear value systems. This doesn’t necessarily mean strong opinions, but it must at least entail basic ideas that frame the journalist’s work. This kind of framing is essential in a more fluid and abstract beat structure.

In other words, a reporter ought to have to have an explicitly defined driving principle for each iteration of her beat — a premise to clarify the decision to cover any given story in the first place and help determine whom to interview and what questions to ask. Every beat reporter should be able to easily answer the question: “Why is this the idea at the center of your reporting?” Or, in Quartz’s parlance: “Why are you obsessed with this?”

At Quartz, reporters have “obsessions” that change over time rather than fixed beats. The site’s global news editor, Gideon Lichfield, characterized the approach succinctly in a blog post last year: “Beats provide an institutional structure. Obsessions are a more human one.” Quartz’s approach to obsessions hasn’t resulted in coverage that amounts to a new or different kind of journalism, but the strategy clearly influences how Quartz works. Its morning newsletter is the perfect example of how Quartz prioritizes being human over being institutional — Quartz tells you what news you missed while you were sleeping, and what you should look for in the day to come. The more bureaucratic Washington Post, for example, has an email that spits out headlines organized by sections of the paper.

So what might a fluid beat structure actually look like in practice?

Let’s say my beat is “transparency.” That’s pretty abstract and unwieldy by itself. So to make sense of it, my premise — this driving principle, this value system that informs all of my journalistic work about transparency — might be something like: The public has a right to scrutinize influential gatekeepers who handle public money, personal data, and access to pivotal information. My job would be to track how that premise holds up in the real world, the extent to which there are exceptions, where and why it gets murky, and so on.

Would I naturally gravitate toward the same topics and places in my coverage the way old-school beat reporters do? Sure. I’d probably still cover some of the same kinds of stories you might find in politics or business sections. But I would organize my reporting around a compelling idea rather than trying to extract compelling ideas from distinct places or things.

This new structure better lends itself to high-impact reporting. A reporter who covers “transparency” instead of just “media” or just “campaign finance,” for example, is poised to find connections and patterns that exist in the world but otherwise aren’t typically reported — or even identified. That reporter is then well positioned to be a trusted guide on any number of stories related to transparency issues.

Considering Greenwald’s role in the new news organization Pierre Omidyar is founding, it makes sense that Omidyar also tapped NYU media thinker Jay Rosen for the $250-million-backed venture. Rosen has long advocated that journalists be upfront about some of their perspectives and values. He has also written in detail about we might reinvent beats for the networked world. The two ideas go hand-in-hand and in many ways reflect how Greenwald already operates as a journalist. I expect this new company to shake up conventions about how beats are designed and in turn how newsrooms are organized — beyond what Quartz has done — when it launches in 2014.

Once you get used to the idea of dreaming up abstract beats, it’s hard to stop. Imagine a news organization where reporters have beats like longevity, the changing oceans, preservation, the future, representation, global borders, worst-case scenarios, authenticity, etc., etc., etc. I asked my friend Mimi Schiffman, a videographer at CNN.com, what beat she’d choose along these line and she had an answer right away: “invisible fences,” an exploration of the boundaries in life that separate us and make life harder or easier for different groups of people.

Just imagine having a beat not tethered to a physical place or set topic, but an abstract and ever-changing linked set of ideas that you get to explore in real-time with other curious people.

The options are endless. And that’s kind of the point.

Adrienne LaFrance, a former staff writer for Nieman Lab, is a reporter and writer based in Washington, D.C.

Data reaches the optimization loop

Posted: 17 Dec 2013 07:17 AM PST

As software eats the world, it consumes value chains and makes markets more efficient. It also leaves behind data, an artifact that speeds up the consumption by more software. 2014 will be the year that forces of data reshape journalism.

hassan-hodgesBill Schmarzo wrote about big data maturity as a five-step process where data is first used for basic monitoring, then enables deeper insights into performance. From there, connecting loops between data and automated action enable optimized businesses. The optimization loop that removes humans is what the world is inching ever closer to. From self-driving cars to Facebook feeds to automated trading, software is making decisions based on the data created by other software. News is part of these loops, providing both the ingredients for other people’s loops, and for our own products.

The first place data starts to matter is with internal decision making. Data lets us see what content is working and what content is not. The more data gets injected into business processes, the faster the system moves, creating a desire for more data. Once an organization gets data, it never goes back.

The power of data comes from the connections it makes to other data. The CAR space has been a side project in many newsrooms, and is increasingly moving into automated Twitter bots and alerts. Data connections are key here, and the more data connections that feed into the all-consuming software, the more these outputs matter. The more these things matter, the more they move into a central focus of an organization.

These connections are also showing up on the advertiser side. The rise of iPad-based point-of-sale systems is a bigger deal than simply swiping the same card on a different box. Many of these systems are platforms for more software — software that creates and consumes data about your transactions and behaviors. That data changes the way customers who advertise with media companies operate, and also create opportunities and/or threats as those loops point back to advertising.

Content consumption tools such as Zite and Prismatic gather data about users to provide personalized selections of articles tailored for mobile. Meanwhile, Circa is working to transform the structure of articles to match the mobile medium by breaking articles into individual updates. How long until these forces combine and algorithms recommend just listicle items 3, 10, and 13-19?

In this emerging data-looped world, where algorithms shuffle content through the tubes, the initial consumer of content is increasingly not human. The consumer is software, and software’s favorite food is data. These forces converging in 2014 will push content to look more like data and data to look more like content. It’s up to us to make sure content still makes a difference in our world.

Going back to the maturity model, the next two steps after optimization are very encouraging: creation of new monetization channels and complete transformation of business models. We’ll save those for the 2015 predictions, assuming SkyNet does not become self-aware. I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

Hassan Hodges is director of innovation for the MLive Media Group and a former cartographer.

A beautiful experience all the way down

Posted: 17 Dec 2013 07:17 AM PST

These last few weeks of 2013 are likely to see a bombardment of attractively designed stories intended to evoke an emotional response, tugging at our sentimental holiday hearts. Following Snow Fall’s lead, they will employ a combination of photography, video, and interactive elements that, taken together, provide a complete and compelling tale. Some will just be good character studies, while the best of them will hint at larger societal ills and imply their own predictions about the future. The very best will linger in your mind long after you’ve read them.

mandy-brownNow that the novelty of Snow Fall has gratefully faded, we can move on to the task of understanding what makes these stories work (or not work) and how we can continue to evolve the medium. I have just one wish for the following year: Let’s not neglect the basics.

Lovingly designed and crafted stories are wonderful to experience, of course. But no story should depend upon the presence of videos and other interactive elements; stripped of all styles and embeds, a story should remain readable and compelling on its own.

Put another way: While our designs are more sophisticated, they are, as ever, progressive enhancements on top of a story that must be able to survive without them. Responsive web design is one component of that discipline, but it isn’t enough. We have to assume that most of our readers are just as likely to arrive via an older Android device on an Edge network as they are via the latest Macbook Air connected to Google Fiber. Page weight and loading time matter. (Want a better metric for attention-short mobile readers? To hell with reading time: Tell them how much money it will cost to download.)

Often the best option is to provide (or at least facilitate, via good markup that cooperates with the various read-later services) a version of a story that’s just the text. As it happens, that has some happy additional benefits, too: it’s more likely to be accessible to readers of different abilities, and it won’t exclude readers from parts of the world where bandwidth is either hard to get or expensive.

That is, in our enthusiasm for expanding what we can do on the web, let’s not forget what makes it better than other mediums: the potential to reach anyone, anywhere, regardless of their abilities or wealth. Our designs cannot be beautiful if they are not also universal — crafted to reach a maximum variety of people.

The next Snow Falls will reach even further than our desks and pockets: to our televisions and glasses and the dashboards on our self-driving cars, and to a growing population of people coming online for the very first time. And what they need, more than skillfully executed scrolling effects and image fades, is news about the world. Let’s not neglect them.

Mandy Brown is the cofounder and CEO of Editorially, a new platform for collaborative writing and editing.

Breaking audio out of radio’s boundaries

Posted: 17 Dec 2013 07:17 AM PST

What do I think 2014 will bring for the future of news?

You can detect the near-term future in what we can see with our own eyes right now. When I was an editor at The New York Times, I gradually watched the newspapers on my morning train commute give way to smartphones and tablets. The opportunities that created were vast (viz The Times’s digital subscriptions and incredible interactives), but so was the new competition (viz Fruit Ninja and Candy Crush, as well as The Guardian and Mail Online).

jim-schachterNow that I’m a public radio suit, vice president for news at WNYC, what I can see is that every other person — or more, maybe — is commuting with earbuds in. The competition is abundant (viz Robin Thicke or last night’s episode of Homeland), yet the opportunity for those of us who tell our stories in audio form is just as real.

So I predict that what you’ll be seeing in 2014 is that forward-thinking radio news organizations will be making an all-out assault on the earbud-wearing masses. You can call that a “mobile-first audio strategy”; I’m sure there are PowerPoint slides out there somewhere that do. But what it means is that our news reports and stories increasingly will be produced and packaged in forms divorced from the formats dictated by a radio clock.

Big audiences still want to listen to an hour of Morning Edition or All Things Considered, but a whole other big audience wants to hear news stories and talk-show segments as standalone reports: in our app or some other audio app, directly in their Twitter feed, in playlists of their own creation or playlists generated by an algorithm that takes into account their listening habits. That means that, as producers, we will need to create new formats and develop new workflows so that our reporting quickly — and satisfyingly — reaches listeners who don't already listen to us on the radio or download our podcasts, like On the Media or New Tech City.

I guess I’m predicting more work for me and my colleagues. But I’m also predicting bigger audiences than ever for high-quality audio journalism.

Jim Schachter is vice president of news at WNYC in New York.

A new beacon for local advertising revenue

Posted: 17 Dec 2013 07:17 AM PST

Believe it or not, Apple may have let local media back in the race for advertising dollars in 2014.

For incumbent news publishers, 2013 felt a lot like 2012. Print advertising declined, and online did not grow fast enough. Pew’s State of the Media 2013 put the ratio at about 15 print dollars lost for every 1 print dollar gained.

damon-kiesowAs the mobile tipping point approaches, the old strategies will increasingly flounder. Display ads worked in print because readers understand a mass medium when they see it: one daily edition, one set of broadly-targeted ads. The clickthrough rates were horrible, but it was the best we could do. Online, an endless supply of inventory and a general lack of personal relevance both devalued advertising and made readers less likely to click. On smartphones, where personalization is a core experience, the problem is much worse.

Unfortunately, while “native advertising” reached buzzword status this year, simply creating new ad units is a shell game. Readers and retailers alike will continue their indifference until we find a way to make “advertising” work for them again.

Enter iBeacons, one of Apple’s least-hyped product releases of 2013 — which almost overnight created a potential new revenue model for advertising in 2014. The keys to its potential are location, connectivity, payment, ubiquity, and eyeballs.

On smartphones, GPS and wifi work together to help locate your position. Unfortunately, GPS doesn’t work well indoors (say, in a shopping mall), and wifi alone is not particularly precise.

Apple’s iBeacons (let’s just call them beacons) use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chips that are relatively cheap and (when deployed correctly) can pinpoint a customer’s location inside a store down to a specific aisle and product. Each beacon contains a unique ID that it broadcasts, searching for nearby devices. Once your phone recognizes a beacon’s signal any number of actions can be triggered including push alerts or product-specific interactions within an app.

As a customer approaches the cash register, the beacon-enabled phone could transition into a payment platform. The merchant’s point-of-sale system would recognize the customer’s identity, prompt for authentication, and process the charges – perhaps via a stored credit card, iTunes, or Google Wallet.

Wait, Google Wallet? Yes, despite the iBranding, this is not a proprietary Apple technology. Based on Bluetooth 4.0, the underlying standard is available on dozens of Android phones from Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG as well as all recent iOS devices. That means there are currently hundreds of millions of consumers already beacon-enabled.

Apple has already begun rolling out the beacons in its retail stores. And, mobile app developer ShopKick is using the technology in a test with Macy’s in New York City and San Francisco. The catch is, to participate in those trials customers need to have the Apple App Store or the ShopKick ShopBeacon app respectively, installed on their phones.

As new merchants join the fray, they will be faced with a dilemma: build a beacon-friendly app, aggregate their services under an umbrella such as ShopBeacon, or do both. Customers have a similar dilemma. Which apps do they need, and how many will they install? Is the limit five, ten, or far fewer?

This is where local media enter the picture. Consider this scenario: A local restaurant chain buys a banner ad in a local news outlet’s native app. Readers browsing the news would see the ad — an offer for 30 percent off of lunch. A click credits the discount to their beacon account in the app.

As the week goes on, the ad could gently nudge the reader in-app or provide a geo-fenced alert to remind them of the lunch discount. After arriving for lunch, the app would recognize the restaurant’s beacons and provide an easy link to an online menu or list of specials.

On the way out, the app would access the bill, apply the 30 percent discount, and ask for confirmation to process the charges.

The fact is, none of those steps are particularly new or technically difficult. That scenario has been the Holy Grail for hyperlocal advertising (and companies from Groupon to LevelUp) for years. But BLE technology is the technology that might finally let it all happen.

For local media, the question is: What is our potential advantage? Apple, Amazon, and Google are fighting it out to be your digital wallet. Square and PayPal want to replace current point-of-sale systems. And every major retailer already has a native app.

But local media still has the local eyeballs, both on the web and in native apps. And those apps carry local advertising.

Some of the pieces to make this work are still missing. Under this model, banner ads would probably be sold at a low CPM, and the revenue would be made on clicks or transactions. And tying together payments and discounts at the point of sale might take some work. But our success in this arena is predicated on reaching local consumers — not in which wallet they eventually pay with. Kind of like what the old model used to look like.

Apple has once again short-circuited an entire industry (say goodbye to NFC for payments) and started a land grab to connect the realms of digital advertising and physical transactions. And the race will be won or lost in 2014.

Damon Kiesow is a senior product manager at The Boston Globe where he helps develop new mobile apps and websites for Boston.com.

Even if it’s fake, it’s real

Posted: 17 Dec 2013 07:17 AM PST

A couple years ago, my friend Michael Sippey coined the brilliant phrase “Even if it’s fake, it’s real.” He was referring to a possibly-faked Google Street View image making the rounds of an in-progress childbirth. Sippey explains that, regardless of where the truth lies (and there are four distinct potential outcomes, not just two), it doesn’t affect the entertainment value of the image and that we should embrace this new uncertainty.

matt-haugheyAbout a year ago, the Manti Te’o story began to break. The mainstream coverage mostly focused on the catfishing angle of it and painted him an innocent victim, while scrappier sources like Deadspin produced subplots involving friends who may or may not have been involved, their prior criminal activities, and the possibility of this being a coverup for homosexuality in a repressive religion, among many possibilities. To this day, I don’t feel like we know or will ever know where the absolute truth lies in the story.

Over the past few months, I’ve seen an increase in stories that seem outrageous on first read, spread like wildfire, days later get dubbed a hoax, and eventually, with additional information, end up in some sort of ethical gray area between the boundaries of truth and fiction. There’s the famous twerking video hoax reveal of Jimmy Kimmel, the never-ending story of Andy Kaufman’s death, the anti-gay waiter tip hoax (or not), Slate accusing Buzzfeed of not fact-checking the Awful First Class Passenger story hoax, and just recently the telemarketing robot that might be fake — but with additional digging no one is really sure, so it’s tough to say.

I consider myself media savvy, with decades of sniffing out the truth for my own edification and running a news-savvy community of over 60,000 users, and still I find myself feeling duped, confused, but also strangely mildly entertained at the same time. The rise of the 24-hour news cycle and the stresses on news departments to post the latest attention grab are combining with the churn of rumors and tips coming out of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit (plus the emotional twists of Upworthy and BuzzFeed) to make unbelievable stories a near daily occurrence, with fact-checking falling a bit by the wayside.

The natural reaction is to harden, to move beyond mere skepticism towards defaulting to distrust (without going overboard to humorlessly cynical). Yet at the same time, these strings of stories are offering increasingly complex outcomes amid layers of truth and untruth that only get uncovered in bits over time. In the end, they spark important conversations about important topics, and those conversations don’t feel lessened if and when an original story gets undermined.

In 2014, I see no decrease in this trend. I imagine this pattern of stories — spread through social media into the mainstream, dubbed hoaxes, then finally dubbed more complicated than that — will start to become a fairly common part of the news cycle. At the same time, I don’t see myself grappling with hoax fatigue: Instead, I’m starting to appreciate the spectacle and pattern of this new flavor of breaking news and realizing in the end: Even if it’s fake, it’s real.

(That Street View birth? It was a fake.)

Matt Haughey created Metafilter, one of the web's earliest community weblogs, and a number of other sites.
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