Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Building on the Snowden effect
- This Week in Review: A judge deals the NSA a blow, and breaking down Patch’s fatal flaws
- The future of news is anticipation
- Connecting the dots
- Fire the consultants
- Day-old news won’t cut it in print anymore
- More math
- Getting closer to the global newsroom
- The year we get smart about social media
- Latin American change will come from startups
- Mobile-first design
| Building on the Snowden effect Posted: 20 Dec 2013 09:23 AM PST On Friday morning, Dec. 20, three major news organizations published the latest revelations in the surveillance scandal that held the world’s attention throughout 2013. In articles posted by The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel, we learned that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ had been spying on a variety people and organizations that had no plausible connection to terrorism — confirmation that our surveillance targets had included, among others, business and economic interests.
The Snowden revelations are a classic example of journalistic critical mass. The journalists covering them have used the documents to identify and amplify an issue of such importance and scope that it doesn’t flame up and out in the manner of most stories. Rather, this one has gained weight in the public sphere as time goes on, in what Jay Rosen aptly calls the “Snowden Effect.” In 2014 and beyond, journalists should be inspired by the Snowden effect. They should focus more on critical mass — how to achieve it and how to sustain it. If journalism is to matter, we can’t just raise big topics. We have to spread them, and then sustain them. It used to be that the daily newspaper — whether a national daily like the Times or a community paper — could do this simply by putting a story on Page 1. TV news broadcasts and programs like 60 Minutes (back when when they did actual journalism) could also put things on the public agenda. But in a world of increasingly fragmented media creation, critical mass is more difficult. Social networks — viral marketing — can help. It isn’t enough, however, except in the rarest of circumstances, and it can go badly wrong (see Kony), though it can help. Achieving genuine critical mass obliges journalists to rethink old traditions, especially competitive ones. “Exclusives” can be counterproductive if they lead other journalists to ignore or downplay the news, whether out of jealousy or inability to get the confirming source material for their own coverage. The NSA revelations were different because the journalists who received the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, gave some of them to a variety of news organizations. And at least one of those news organizations, The Guardian (disclosure: I write a weekly column for its U.S. website), further shared what it had, in part to prevent U.K. authorities from shutting down the coverage. Moreover, the journalists and organizations have paced themselves in revealing new information every week or two, in a drumbeat that reveals one stunning piece of news after another. This nearly unprecedented level of cooperation has turned a multimedia, multi-organization journalistic epic. It’s almost like a great weekly TV show, where we look forward to the latest installment, expecting a new twist in each episode. Journalists will increasingly recognize the value of collaboration and cooperation — and of shedding their old “not invented here” attitudes. They’ll understand that bringing vital information to the public is, in part, a campaign and not just an act of publishing. We’ll be campaigning to get people’s attention. We’ll be keeping the heat on the bad guys, and celebrating the things that work, enthusiastically if not relentlessly. This won’t be only for national and global issues. At the local level, critical mass will be even harder to achieve, perhaps, given the way local newspapers have withered and the way local TV “news” is mostly a cynical, crime-driven exercise. Local information providers of all kinds, including bloggers, Facebook page managers and others who care about their communities, will share what they know, and will leverage traditional methods of organizing to get the public to focus on things that matter. Of all the things we’re losing in the crumbling of traditional media institutions, critical mass would be the most difficult to replace if we don’t re-imagine what’s possible and re-think our approach. The Snowden effect — and the journalists who’ve made it possible — show what can happen when we do. Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. |
| This Week in Review: A judge deals the NSA a blow, and breaking down Patch’s fatal flaws Posted: 20 Dec 2013 07:00 AM PST A legal blow to NSA spying: After months of criticism and protests, the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance program received a more formal blow this week with a ruling by a federal judge that the program appears to violate the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. The program has been ruled constitutional numerous times by judges in the U.S.’ secret surveillance court, but this was the first time a federal judge outside that court has ruled against it.
Gregory Ferenstein of TechCrunch threw some cold water on the excitement, saying that nothing significant is likely to happen to the program as a result of this ruling, and any meaningful ruling will have to come from the Supreme Court. On the other hand, Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress said the key to this ruling was that the technology of surveillance has so thoroughly changed that the 1970s-era judicial precedent doesn’t apply anymore. And Wired’s David Kravets said this ruling recognizes Snowden as a whistleblower, rather than a traitor. Meanwhile, a presidentially appointed panel recommended significant limits to the program, calling for a third party to hold the data with the government only able to access it through a court order. As Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson noted, the panel’s report repeatedly asserted the privacy rights of foreigners as well. President Obama also met with tech executives, but gave them no commitment to limit government surveillance of web traffic. Elsewhere, Snowden sent a letter to Brazil in which he expressed a desire to help the country counter NSA surveillance, but noted that he cannot speak freely about it until a country gives him permanent asylum. Journalist Glenn Greenwald said, however, that Snowden is not renewing his request for asylum in Brazil (which is currently pending). CNN initially misreported that Snowden was offering to help Brazil spy on the U.S., earning condemnation from Greenwald and others. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick objected to the characterization that Snowden was offering some sort of help-for-asylum quid pro quo. The Washington Post’s Max Fisher said Snowden’s letter to Brazil doesn’t easily fit either the hero or traitor narrative, and his colleague Andrea Peterson wondered whether Snowden’s consecutive statements mean he’s seeking public attention for a particular reason.
60 Minutes’ NSA flattery: CBS News’ 60 Minutes touted a big story on the NSA surveillance beat when it got exclusive access to NSA officials to talk to them about their mass surveillance programs and Edward Snowden’s leaks. The story did contain one bit of pertinent news — that the NSA is considering granting Snowden amnesty in exchange for the return of its documents, a trial balloon that Reuters’ Jack Shafer examined more closely. The piece’s reporter, John Miller, explained an behind-the-scenes interview with 60 Minutes that he didn’t want the story to be a puff piece. As it turned out, in the eyes of most every media critic who watched it, that’s exactly what he produced. The Wire’s Sara Morrison laid out a good, basic summary of the puffiness of the piece, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt highlighted a few elements: zero difficult questions, no NSA critics in the piece, unchecked ad hominem attacks against Snowden. As Esquire’s Ben Collins pointed out, some of those details about Snowden were eerily personal. At The Guardian, Spencer Ackerman refuted several of the claims the NSA made in the piece, while Kevin Gosztola of FireDogLake focused on Miller’s own history in surveillance and law enforcement. Indeed, a few hours after the report aired, The New York Post’s Richard Johnson reported that Miller was planning to leave CBS to return to the New York Police Department. The Nation’s Greg Mitchell called the report evidence that 60 Minutes’ decline is nearly complete, and J.K. Trotter of Gawker made the same point, arguing that the show’s accomplishments “can only be described in the past tense.” “Nothing is forever,” Trotter wrote. “It's time to tear it down and build something new.” Timothy Karr of Free Press didn’t go quite as far, but said 60 Minutes really needs an ombudsman. Forbes’ Andy Greenwald, meanwhile, produced a sort of alternative picture of Snowden to the NSA’s, based on a former NSA staffer who called him “a genius among geniuses.”
Lessons from Patch’s demise: The New York Times’ David Carr reported this week that Patch, the massive hyperlocal news network founded by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and owned since 2009 by AOL, is finally dying. AOL executives pushed back with an internal memo that contended that Patch is not being shut down, but that AOL continues to shop for partners to offload Patch sites onto. As Carr noted, Patch’s struggles have been well documented over the past several years, and it announced large-scale layoffs and closings just a few months ago. Several people outlined lessons to take away from Patch’s long, slow demise, with the one unifying critique being Patch’s fast, haphazard growth, which Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici called its fatal error. CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis also said Patch adhered too closely to an old-media ad model and was too centralized. Likewise, Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center said Patch didn’t do enough local advertising, and wasn’t local or independent enough in its reporting. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan also argued that Patch didn’t think enough about how to beat out local newspapers for readers and local ad dollars. Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle said the scaling problem meant AOL never should have bought Patch in the first place. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom said the problem isn’t that Patch scaled too quickly, but that it scaled at all. Hyperlocal journalism, he said “has never been a big business, and arguably never will be,” fueled instead by the passion of the small businesses or individuals who do it. Wired’s Ryan Tate pointed to several companies built around locally based ideas that are having to push beyond local media to keep revenues up, but The Washington Post’s Timothy B. Lee talked to a local blogger who said hyperlocal news there is alive and well. PandoDaily’s Adam Penenberg lamented that we ever thought hyperlocal news would save journalism in the first place. News orgs end suppression of a CIA story: A story on a missing American in Iran that broke late last week raised questions about media-state relations and holding stories at the government’s request. The AP reported last week that Robert Levinson, who has been missing in Iran since 2007, was not there on private business as the CIA has claimed, but was instead working for the CIA. The White House condemned the AP as being “highly irresponsible” for publishing the report, but the AP also noted that it held the story for three years at the government’s request. A U.S. Senator also said he urged the AP not to run the story. The AP’s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, explained why it was publishing the story, arguing that it was important accountability journalism, and it’s impossible to know whether the story will put Levinson at risk. The New York Times, which ran with the story a day after the AP did, also said it had held the story for six years, and ABC News said it had known, too. Gawker’s J.K. Trotter looked back at the two news organizations‘ past coverage of the story, noting that it contained assertions that the organizations knew were false. “It's one thing for a news outlet to keep secrets at the request of the government, or in order to keep someone safe. It's another thing to affirmatively and knowingly spread lies,” he wrote. Reading roundup: A few other stories and pieces of commentary to surface this week: — Aaron Kushner, the owner and publisher of the Orange County Register, announced plans to launch a new daily newspaper in Los Angeles called the Los Angeles Register early next year. Kushner gave The New York Times a few more details, including that the paper will be based on libertarian political principles, and media analyst Ken Doctor offered a thorough analysis of the move. — The new Pierre Omidyar/Glenn Greenwald news organization has a name: First Look Media. As adviser Jay Rosen reports, it’s also getting its first $50 million from Omidyar, and will consist of both for-profit and nonprofit entities. — The year-in-review posts are starting to trickle in, starting with Poynter’s annual collection of errors and corrections, headlined by 60 Minutes’ Benghazi story as its “error of the year.” The Lab ran its own mammoth series of predictions for 2014, with 36 contributors and counting. There’s enough good stuff there to spend a couple of hours reading through, but a few of my favorites were Adrienne LaFrance on rethinking beats, Raju Narisetti’s suggestions for recapturing the news brand, and Lauren Rabaino’s piece on contextual journalism. — A few more pieces of the ongoing discussion on viral content: Slashdot’s Nick Kolakowski on Upworthy’s formula and its reliance on Facebook, CBC Radio and the Lab’s Joshua Benton on BuzzFeed’s viral verification (also reported in detail at Politico), and Matt Haughey’s prediction here at the Lab of viral hoaxes becoming a more normal and accepted part of the news cycle. — EveryBlock is reportedly back from the dead. The data-based hyperlocal news site is being revived by Comcast, which owned it when it was shut down earlier this year, according to Chicago Grid. — Finally, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 211 journalists were jailed for their work around the world this year, the second-worst year on record. |
| The future of news is anticipation Posted: 20 Dec 2013 06:28 AM PST One of the most important trends going into 2014 is the wave of sophisticated algorithms and processes that will forever change how journalism is both created and consumed. They are inherently social, but not in the way you may think. And they rely on the vast repositories of data we generate each time we connect, whether that’s searching Google for a restaurant, wishing friends happy birthday on Facebook, or posting an in-line annotation on Medium.
In the case of Google Now, if you’ve been searching Google for information about the new movie Inside Llewyn Davis and then ask it “Where is it playing?” Google Now assumes you want to know the nearest movie theater, times, and perhaps even directions on how to get there from where you’re standing. MindMeld offers something even more exciting. When users are connected, it listens in and begins to populate its dashboard with contextual information to help you have a more informed conversation. So if you’re talking with a friend about Llewyn Davis, MindMeld will automatically show history about the 1960s folk scene, the cast, directors, details about the soundtrack, reviews and more. In the hands of journalists, these and the other emergent anticipatory computing applications can be harnessed as powerful reporters’ assistants. Google Now can query calendars, traffic, weather, and news to deliver just the right information at the right time. Example: It might see that there’s heavy traffic along your route and alert you to leave seven minutes earlier than you normally would. MindMeld has the power to deliver contextual content to reporters as they’re conducting an interview. Suddenly that usual last question “Is there anything else I should ask you?” seems irrelevant while using MindMeld, since it would have already unearthed ambient information you might have missed during the conversation. If apps can anticipate our next thoughts, then algorithms should allow for two interesting possibilities in 2014: predicting breaking news and delivering highly personalized content to each consumer. Already, social feeds can be mined and crunched to show crises as they start to erupt. This is especially obvious during sporting events, when fans tend to post sentiment, then photos or videos of fights and eventually the details of large brawls after games. Some companies, such as IBM, have been harnessing big data along with artificial intelligence and machine learning to infer changes in the real world. This isn’t about predicting the news a few days from now — it’s about seeing a breaking news event just as it’s about to unfold. News organizations have long hoped for meaningful personalization — the more directly a news product can be tailored for each individual, the more likely she’ll be to stay with that brand and to use it over and over. Personalization experiments have failed at numerous big media brands, but it’s because the approach has always been too rudimentary. Users would tick a few interests, like “sports” and “world news,” and depending on how well the backend system was programmed, stories that kind-of sort-of fit into those categories would be delivered. Selecting a few broad categories never allows for nuances in geography, taste, or even our changing interests as we have fresh ideas and encounter new people. Our interests are temporal, as is the news cycle. But those two don’t always align perfectly. If you think about it, the exciting promise of Google Now and MindMeld is in the ability to anticipate what content might interest us next. It eviscerates the need for related content, since ostensibly all of the content we’d be delivered is relatable only to each one of us individually. As a result, news organizations have thrilling opportunities in the months ahead to supercharge the reporting process and to personalize content in ways we have never seen before. The future of news is anticipatory. Amy Webb is the founder of Webbmedia Group, a digital strategy agency, and cofounder of Spark Camp. |
| Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST One of the most popular new games of 2013 was an addictive mobile app called Dots: A Game About Connecting from Betaworks. It’s deceptively simple: a white board full of evenly spaced colored dots worth points when connected in a short amount of time. You can play instantly without reading the rules, or you can get immersive and obsessively strategic. You can play against yourself or against an expanding universe. You can play for free or you can buy ways to improve your game — but the choice is up to each player: earn your way to advancement or pay for it.
For the media in 2014, connecting the dots has to be more than a game. We have to connect the fragments of information that flood the zone daily. We have to connect with our communities. We have to connect with each other. Connecting informationWe have never had this much access to information or so much ability to discover, create, and share. Making it meaningful, discoverable, and truly accessible is simultaneously the media’s toughest challenge and greatest opportunity. I can hear at least one of you now pointing out that the toughest challenge is making it pay. Fair point, but unless we can do those three things, we can’t do that either. In 2014, connecting the information dots:
Connecting with our communitiesWe’ve also never had a time in the modern news era when it was so easy to connect with our users or to create communities that stretch beyond physical proximity. When we can have or facilitate real conversations, it raises the value of what we do. When we get useful feedback, it makes what we do better. That same ease of connection comes with a heavy price when it’s used to spread vitriol instead of honest debate. When people who brag about being great husbands/wives/students or good fill-in-the-religion have zero compunction tossing personal insults at strangers or casting slurs that would get them punched at a bar, trying to carry on that conversation can be exhausting, draining, and frustrating. This isn’t a new problem, but the same rise of social media that gives us more ways to reach out and be reached also makes it easier to spread the worst. A number of news organizations have shut the doors to comments, citing limited resources, poor tools, or low returns on the investment. Understandable. Unfortunate. Open mic is too costly when it creates an environment no one wants to share; shutting off the valve either takes the steam out completely or sends it another location. Journalism can’t afford either of those options. On the plus side, we have Nick Denton, who sees connecting the people who come to Gawker Media as the publishing company’s future. His version of that future is the discussion platform Kinja, which gives users their own blogs and the same tools of engagement as Gawker’s editors to create and manage discussions. True, Gawker discussions aren’t for the faint-hearted, but the communities and the sites are usually in sync. We can’t legislate civility. We can’t force people to comment. But in 2014, we need more Dentons looking for a solution and fewer shut-off valves. Connecting with each otherSometimes the wheel needs to be reinvented. Sometimes the inability to communicate or the comfort of living in a bubble means the wheel will be reinvented constantly by lots of different people, whether it needs it or not. Sometimes attacking the same problem separately (as individuals, teams, or groups) results in major improvements — and sometimes it’s simply a waste of time and resources. After watching or being part of discussions at ONA’s recent conference and News Foo to create journalism tools for breaking news, I left convinced that we have some serious firepower to throw at problems — and that, far too often, we have no idea if those problems already have good solutions in play elsewhere that could be used, adapted or improved upon. In 2014, we can do a better job of connecting with each other, sharing the tools that are out there and working on the problems yet to be solved in ways that make the most of our limited resources. Staci D. Kramer is the former editor of paidContent and now blogs at Trust But Verify. |
| Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST Call me stupid, but I think journalism is a exciting way to change the world. But in order to do that these days, we need to favor change and promote disruptive innovation within the news and information ecosystem — and start thinking way outside the box.
I still have the same questions you probably do too: How can we fund journalism and make it profitable? How can we best do journalism in the digital era, embracing new tools, formats, and business models while bringing technologists to the table? How can we build interdisciplinary teams with new workflows, and job definitions? How can we use the massive amounts of data out there to ask the right questions and get the right answers? Here are some of my predictions for what we’ll learn about those questions in 2014.
To broaden the perspectives, here are predictions from other journalists from Spain and Latin America.
Andrés Azócar, digital chief, Canal13 (Chile): “Latin America has so far been more or less immune to the severe crisis that is affecting the media in Europe and the U.S. Protected by growing economies and lower levels of connectivity in the first world, the media until now successfully overcome the financial cataclysm. Even in recent years managed to historical earnings, as was the case of Chile in 2011.
Miguel Paz is, among other things, founder and CEO of Poderopedia, a Knight News Challenge winner. |
| Day-old news won’t cut it in print anymore Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST If you asked me what are the three main challenges of any newspaper company today, my answer would be:
All of them are unavoidable. The first one must be led by owners, CEOs, and publishers. The second one needs the understanding and full support of top editors and general managers. And the third one, the most crucial one, the participation and involvement of all journalists. Bosses can rule on vision, strategy, integration, and media architecture — but only with all your journalists aboard your company will be able to develop new editorial models. Why? Because most of your editors, writers, reporters, and visual journalists came to your company when the print newspaper had an editorial model that for centuries nobody challenged. Newspaper newsrooms were, and always will be, the “core” of our news business. They were the best to find, select, write, edit, and design news and stories that your readers couldn’t find anywhere else. For this reason, we presented ourselves as “newspapers of record.” Something that, today, we aren’t anymore. As The New York Times says: “We don’t record the news. We find the news.” A training manual for new Financial Times journalists is very clear on this point: “News reporters do two things. They find the news and they write news. The first is hugely more important.” In the past, every 24 hours, our newsrooms were able to produce a print newspaper with exclusive content, and readers needed to pay for our daily selection of the most relevant and interesting news and stories of the day before. But that model has crashed. It’s dead and doesn’t work anymore. “Yesterday’s newspapers” are worthless. Our readers today get almost all their news in real time: news, opinions, and yes, instant analysis. So they don’t need us anymore — unless we are able to produce a 100 percent different, compact, and compelling new print product. They’re drinking news from the firehose and what they are requesting from us is the “day after” newspaper. A newspaper for well informed readers, not the ignorant. A newspaper for new audiences fed 24/7 by new digital media outlets. A newspaper for new communities able to share news, opinions, and comments in social media networks. A newspaper that breaks the news online and on other realtime platforms. A newspaper that produces multimedia packages on the spot. A newspaper that has iPad and tablet editions, early in the morning, at lunch time, and in the evening. Yes, this is cannibalization at its best and its worst. For all these reasons, if we don’t change the editorial model, our print product becomes just a compilation of old news, known stories, and heard comments. Dead bodies. Forensic journalism. Outdated content that nobody needs, nobody will pay for, deserted by advertisers that will realize that we are losing ground, not having anything new, unique, and necessary to buy our print paper. The answer to all these challenges is, again, what we at Innovation call the “day after” newspaper. A post-news, post-television, post-radio, post-online, and post-social media paper. A newspaper with a daily briefing with the last 24 hours’ news presented in a very compact and creative way, plus more and more exclusive and unique stories produced by entrepreneurial journalism. A newspaper with more whys than whats. A newspaper with smart and provocative news analysis. A newspaper covering new lifestyle and social trends. A newspaper full of reliable advice. A newspaper with briefings and explainers. A newspaper with just the most relevant “cover stories” of the day. Listen to Chris Hughes, the Facebook cofounder: “We believe that there must remain space for journalism that takes time to produce and demands a longer attention span-writing that is at once nourishing and entertaining.” This must be, he says, “vigorous contextual journalism.” A newspaper that will excel at database journalism and fact-checking. A newspaper with enlightening infographics, amazing photo essays, and unique illustrations. A newspaper full of surprises. A collector’s paper, full of what I call caviar journalism. Of course, this new editorial model will require new newsroom management workflows. A newsroom that works 24/7 in two different speeds and paths: a fast-cooking digital newsroom and a slow-cooking print newsroom. Both of them working in an integrated and collaborative way — interacting with readers, audiences and communities in a non-stop process where the “article” is no longer the final output, replaced by a succession of different formats and reporting styles. This requires a new generation of content management systems, a multitasking newsroom, and planning, planning, planning. It is a great opportunity to develop explanatory journalism, strategic journalism, precision journalism, and anticipatory journalism. Journalisms that cannot be done on deadline. In this new model, planning is a must. Perhaps 80 percent of the “day after” newspaper must be planed at least with two weeks in advance. More than 20 years ago, I was invited by USA Today’s graphics director Richard Curtis to attend one weekly lunch with the editors of the four main sections of the paper (News, Money, Sports, and Life) where each presented the five cover stories planned one week in advance. Their experience, they told us, showed that 90 percent of the time the pre-selected stories would be published — with big breaking news of course taking priority where necessary. A few years ago Bill Keller, then The New York Times’ executive editor, said that “stories about how we live often outweigh stories about what happened yesterday. We think it’s okay to include in our front-page portfolio something that is fun, human, or just wonderfully written. It’s part science, part art, with a little serendipity.” He added:
These practices are not all new. In part, it’s doing daily what news magazines were doing weekly. And keep in mind that many successful weekend newspapers have done this for decades. These editions excel on unique, entrepreneurial journalism. Our own experience running newspaper workshops shows that journalists are ready to master this new editorial model, and that they have enough creativity and experience to transform their papers. What they need is time to think, discuss, and create — plus some training and new talent. Juan Antonio Giner is president and founder of Innovation Media Consulting Group. |
| Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST Demystifying geeky newsI’m deliberately starting with a forecaster’s defensive tactic in predicting that the revelations from Edward Snowden’s document trove will continue well into 2014. Perhaps to the point of numbed response, we will learn more about government security and spying versus citizen rights and privacy. There are more documents with painful PowerPoint design choices to come.
Newsroom geeks have been instrumental in decoding the NSA story thus far. So too for corporate hacking and industrial espionage stories, as well as Bitcoin, cyberwarfare issues, and dark-web technologies. Mounting privacy and security concerns have journalists adopting encrypted communications and storage, often with guidance from the newsroom geeks because the barrier to entry is fairly high. Where does this all lead? Functional paranoia. People’s interest in the workings of common web technologies continues to grow as we all learn more about consumer privacy violations (governmental or criminal). Non-programming web citizens are increasingly curious and concerned about the technologies under the hood of their browsers. Pairing that curiosity — and a genuine need to know — with relevant news exposés (like Snowden’s documents) and scandals (like HealthCare.gov) is a notable opportunity for geeky journalism to truly improve tech literacy on a number of fronts. Another way in which news geeks can play a direct role in 2014′s important stories is in application design. Not our own apps, though of course we’ll build those as well. I see the upcoming midterm elections as a scrimmage for voter-targeting technologies expected in 2016′s campaigning. Building on reporting about the mismatched battle of Orca and Narwhal — the 2012 campaign names for their get-out-the-vote apps, if you recall — technology success and failure resonates with readers, speaking to web literacy and sophistication (or sophistry, depending on your viewpoint). Campaign technology may be seen as a very small intersection of geek and wonk. Yet I’m sure 2014 will see many tightly targeted messages elude our spam filters and ad-blindness. 2012 campaign fundraising emails triggered quite a lot of curiosity (amid the irritation) about the how-to of their niche targeting. Hopefully your newsroom’s politics/campaign-finance nerds are chomping at the bit like my own colleagues. A mobile World CupThis is also cop-out of oracular effort: Mobile will be massive and the World Cup in Rio will be an international mobile high-water mark. Whatever your personal degree of interest in fútbol, I enjoy the quadrennial reminder that the world can set aside everything but trash-talking to focus on the World Cup. South Africa’s 2010 World Cup was big enough in America to surprise those who track mobile usage numbers. Expect Rio to have Rio-style gigantic charts. And with decent overlap between Rio and America’s daylight hours, U.S. mobile and online statistics should be fascinating. We’ll have a warmup to Rio in the form of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Thankfully there’s no calendar overlap between it and World Cup to make the Internet strive for regrettable portmanteaus as we did for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah. More math for everybodyI look forward to seeing and learning a lot more math and stats in the coming year. 2012-13 marked a heightened interest in statistical literacy across the news industry as a whole. Driven by FiveThirtyEight’s steadiness in the 2012 presidential election headwinds, today we seem to ask more questions about finding the best algorithm, model, or statistic. This extends to how we track and analyze news-reading audiences. Although sabermetric-style models could end up being the far side of the pendulum’s path compared to well-trod metrics like pageviews, I believe the complexity fits better. 2014 will see us discussing smarter subscriber vs. cost modeling when measuring the year’s new products and tweaks to industry paywalls. Looking at the industry overall for 2014, we now have reflexive habits from Wall Street for judging every move of Facebook, Twitter, and their audiences. Stock price fluctuations operate as a very visible (often volatile) metric for those companies’ efforts to keep and increase their audience’s attention. You may find it myopic or disconnected. Or both. However, market reactions attributed as public sentiment is a thing. (I’d love to predict 2014 is the year we elect to not cite Facebook’s stock price as a verdict on each design tweak — but that’s not going to happen.) Predicting 2014 business prospects for Twitter and Facebook requires actual chops in business forecasting that I do not have. However, I do believe we’ll see enhancements and experiments in showing more news in both platforms, with each company hoping to holding audience attention and “mature” with their consumption habits. (The “maturing” audience angle may be the most interesting of all.) Tiff Fehr is a web developer in the Interactive News group at The New York Times. |
| Getting closer to the global newsroom Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST The boom in the viral-friendly packaging of news stories — aping BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and their peers — will cease to be a profitable approach as a few players lap the field. Publishers will have to differentiate by catering a product to their audience: more and better research, more thoughtful content strategy, and more experimentation and progress in the CMS space. This will manifest itself in at least the following three ways:
I would say we’re at two percent of the Internet’s potential when it comes to a true meritocracy around the flow (and financial success) of the most valuable and quality work. If all of the above happen in the next few years, we’ll be at three percent. David Jacobs is CEO of 29th Street Publishing. |
| The year we get smart about social media Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST It’s become standard for journalists to turn to social media at times of breaking news. The raw, unfiltered stream of information can provide the first images of a dramatic event, such as the video of a bloodied suspect in the Woolwich killing this year.
The time is now to get smarter about social media. In breaking news situations, events are in constant motion. Facts are in flux and reporting is messy. The process of sorting fact from fiction tended to happen in newsrooms, as reporters and editors assessed the veracity of the information coming in. 2014 will lay to rest any discussion of where social media fits into the news. As Boston illustrated, people want to talk about the news and share what they know or think they know. They want to be part of the news. The marathon bombing were a stark example of how gathering, verifying, and reporting the news happens in public. The process of journalism — sourcing, filtering, contesting, and confirming information — takes place through exchanges on the network, as journalists try to be heard among the voices from law enforcement, emergency services, witnesses to the event, and those across the world reacting to the news. The soul-searching in the media after Boston points to how journalists need to get smarter about social media in 2014. Some of the worst errors come from reporters making assumptions and jumping to conclusions. Some of the early confusion in the hunt for the bombers resulted from some news outlets talking of a suspect in custody while others talked about an arrest. In the rush to be first, mistakes will happen. The painful lesson here is to be careful to place new information in context, acknowledging the source and its reliability. Expect more media organizations to acknowledge mistakes more quickly and correct the error more openly. Expect journalists to be more precise in their reporting, being clear about what you know but also about what they don't know. Reporters are not trained to talk about the holes in their reporting. But in a stream of constant updates, adding notes of caution can have much value. If there was one thing Boston told us, it is that exchanges on social media are not the equivalent of publication. It is information in flux. The conversations on Reddit were ongoing discussions where contributors collectively tried to figure out what happened and who was responsible. While some rushed to judgement, others urged caution. In 2014, expect journalists to be more careful about sourcing information from such discussion boards. Going forward, journalists are learning that rather than dismissing the chatter on social media, there is more value in engaging with it and seeking to channel the conversation unfolding online. Alfred Hermida is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. |
| Latin American change will come from startups Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST Journalism has to become smart. That means journalists have to understand the Internet, which is about understanding data: data about readers, trend data, contextual data, semantic data, all of it with the same goal: finding intelligent ways to approach news, the audience, and money.
This year, we studied a dozen successful media outlets that understood well how to generate traffic and online engagement. Some of their ideas will be implemented in Media Factory, the first news accelerator for Latin America, which will drive the growth of new media outlets in Latin America. Here are some of the concepts that we found: Predict and detect: Traditional media have tried to predict what readers will find interesting through their own long-term experience. A variety of platforms and technologies can predict those interests more accurately. Newsrooms should integrate these tools into the workflows of editors and journalists to better understand the context in which they move and how to generate traffic. Measurement is king: At least in Latin America, journalists are used to sitting in an office — when we have a job — and writing on the basis of ideas and discussions with colleagues or editors. Once our work is published, we lose interest in it. Outlets better at generating traffic and making decisions are obsessed with metrics: search strategies, pageviews, reading time, sharing trends. Understanding our proper audience will be disruptive at a time when the media has mostly left demographic analysis to social networks. Always be a startup: It’s necessary for editors to be willing to change their workflow, their subjects, and the way they approach the product — to integrate software developers and design into content production. A new generation of journalists/developers is arriving, learning to use data to make decisions that can improve the quality of content, and understand that creating content is an investment. Augment reality: Set up the newsroom in a way that the content management systems can communicate with the outside world — or other internal worlds — to increase the reality of journalistic content, through tools like semantic data, geolocation, automated data extraction, direct access to photographic services, and new digital sources detection. Add value: The work of interactive journalism enables value-added editorial content and establishes a relationship with readers that has generated systematic increases in traffic and credibility. En español: El periodismo tiene que volverse inteligente. Eso significa que los periodistas tienen que entender internet, que es sobre entender a los datos: datos sobre lso lectores, datos sobre tendencias, datos contextuales, data semántica, todo con el mismo objetivo: encontrar formas inteligentes de acercarse a las noticias, las audiencias y el dinero. Los medios deberán cambiar su forma de trabajar, su flujo de trabajo y su relación con Internet. Si en Estados Unidos ese concepto todavía pertenece a un pequeño puñado de publicaciones digitales, en América latina estamos en los prolegómenos de una revolución que tal vez nunca pase en medios tradicionales. Lo más probable es que la innovación pase fuera de los grandes elefantes del periodismo y que estos compren o terminen siendo comprados. Así que esta opinión es más sobre lo que debería pasar en el periodismo el año que viene y no tanto sobre lo que esperamos que pase en medios históricos. Sin embargo, este año estuvimos estudiando una decena de medios exitosos que han entendido cómo generar tráfico y participación de la audiencia en Internet. Algunas de estas ideas vamos a implementarlas en la Media Factory, primera aceleradora de medios para América latina donde vamos a impulsar el crecimiento de medios periodísticos en América latina. Estos son algunos de los conceptos a los que llegamos: Predecir y detectar: los medios tradicionales han predecido sobre intereses posibles de sus espectadores de manera “natural” y sobre la base de sus propios intereses. Actualmente, diversas plataformas y tecnologías permiten predecir con más exactitud lo que puede llegar a ocurrir en un evento determinado. Preparar las redacciones para trabajar sobre lo que se sabe que va a ocurrir e integrar esas herramientas al flujo de trabajo para que editores y periodistas puedan comprender el contexto en el que se mueven, y cómo sumarse al tráfico. Medir: al menos en América latina, los periodistas estamos acostumbrados a sentarnos en una oficina -cuando conseguimos un trabajo- y a escribir sobre una base de ideas, discusiones con colegas o editores. Por lo general, no tenemos ningún tipo de relación con lo que pasa con nuestro trabajo una vez que es publicado. Los medios que mejor tráfico generan y que mejor pueden tomar decisiones al respecto son aquellos obsesionados con las métricas: searchs, vistas, tiempo de lectura, share. Entender la audiencia propia será un valor disruptivo en una época en que los medios le dejaron a las redes sociales el análisis de la demografía. Modificar: es necesario preparar las redacciones para que estén dispuestas a cambiar su flujo de trabajo, su temática y su manera de acercarse al producto. Integrar equipos de desarrollo, diseño y producción de contenido. Saber leer las métricas para tomar decisiones que mejore la calidad del contenido y entender que crear contenido es una inversión que debe convertirse en algún tipo de retribución. Aumentar la realidad: preparar las redacciones para que los cms puedan comunicarse con el mundo exterior o con otros mundos internos para aumentar la realidad del contenido periodístico: web semántica, geolocalización de textos, extracción automática de datos, acceso directo a servicios fotográficos, conexión con sistemas ontológicos, análisis de hechos de forma automática, detección de nuevas fuentes en el ruido digital Agregar valor: el trabajo del periodismo interactivo permite generar valor agregado al contenido editorial y establece una relación con los lectores que ha logrado generar sistemáticos incrementos de tráfico y credibilidad de los navegantes. En un mundo en el que los gobiernos y las corporaciones liberan cada vez más información aquellas redacciones que adopten equipos interactivos estarán más preparadas para quedarse con la recurrencia de tráfico. Hasta el momento, ninguno de los principales equipos de noticias interactivas han dejado de crecer. Mariano Blejman is a Knight International Journalism Fellow at the International Center For Journalists and managing partner at media startup accelerator Media Factory. |
| Posted: 19 Dec 2013 11:17 PM PST Just one thought. No pontificating.
Michelle Johnson is a professor at Boston University and a former editor at The Boston Globe. |
The stories were all based on the same documents, leaked earlier in the year to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. And they were yet another shoe dropping in a saga that shows no signs of dwindling public attention. If the governments running this massive surveillance dragnet were hoping the issue would fade away, they are surely now understanding that it won’t happen anytime soon.
The New York Times 
This past year, we saw the first anticipatory computing opportunities in 
The game launched on iOS in May and had a million users within days. Now also on Android, it passed 
This is something I’ve been working towards as hard as possible for several years: as a Knight Fellow at the 
Gumersindo Lafuente, former online director, El País (Spain): “For journalism, Google will lose influence; Facebook and above all Twitter, especially from mobile devices, will rise. In more advanced countries, access to information via PC will collapse, with growth only in tablets and smartphones. Paywalls will expand, but with disappointing results.”
Darío Gallo, deputy editor of Clarín.com (Argentina): “Mobile-focused newsrooms will start to be born. We will pass from the age of responsive design to the era of responsive content. The process of permanent adaptation will continue.”
“But in recent years, the trend has begun to change. Competition from Google and Facebook (regardless of country, accounting for 50 percent or more of the market), the tyranny of the agencies, and the low yields of traditional display ads force the media to reorganize their sales areas and point to native advertising and video, which have higher CPMs. The feeling that the crisis is yet to come will become stronger. 2014 will be harder for the media in Latin America, but still — the worst is yet to come.”
Rodrigo Guaiquil, COO, AmericaEconomia.com (Chile): “I think newsrooms will begin to worry about multiplatform user experience. They will change the design of their sites to adopt the flat design of iOS 7 applications, so that they will be able to offer a more consistent experience on desktop, mobile, and tablet. Thus they will move away from the traditional front-page style of a daily paper and become more flexible and adaptable, navigable, touchable, clickable. They will take as reference sites like 
Gabriel Pasquini, founder and director, El Puercoespín (Argentina): “In the past few years, there have been several attempts (some successful) to charge users for content. This alternative is increasingly being considered by small- and medium-sized publications outside of the United States, where advertising revenue is (and will be) definitely scarce and insufficient, and crowdfunding is being seen more and more as the ideal (or sole) source of funding. But the tools to collect money from the crowd are still quite primitive outside of the U.S. (and to some extent, even in the U.S.). My prediction is that in the next two years, we will see the development of new tools which will change not just how to offer content but how to relate with our communities/readers. The search for money — more specifically, money from the crowd — will make us rethink ourselves and what we do once again.”
Ongoing legal pressure by various governments on press freedoms regarding the leaked material will only add to the angles we’ll follow in 2014. Efforts like secure dropboxes for whistleblowers tied to news organizations may bring in their own stories, if public confidence is there. And don’t forget there is a 
But the past year was also marked by a backlash against the use of material on social media, fuelled by the rumours, speculation and falsehood circulating following the Boston Marathon bombings in April.
News media must change their editorial workflows and their relationship with Internet. If that concept in the United States still belongs to a small handful of digital-native publications, in Latin America, we are on the eve of a revolution that may never go through traditional media. Chances are that innovation will happen outside of the big elephants of journalism and that they will end up being sold… or who knows. So consider this piece to be more about what should happen in journalism next year and not so much about what we expect to happen in the region’s traditional media outlets.
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