Nieman Journalism Lab |
- With Knight funding, Solutions Journalism Network wants to grow reporting on positive results in health reporting
- The New York Times’ R&D Lab is building a quantified-self, semantic-analysis tool to track web browsing
- What makes people contribute to Wikipedia?
| Posted: 14 Jan 2014 02:00 PM PST
With $180,000 in new funding from the Knight Foundation — as part of the latest round of the Knight News Challenge, announced moments ago — the Solutions Journalism Network will work to apply its framework to health care reporting. With the money, the Solutions Journalism Network will collaborate with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to provide reporters with data on promising solutions to health problems. In total, Knight awarded $2.2 million to seven health-related projects in this round of the News Challenge, which focused on health data and information.
The funding from Knight will go toward scanning the available research on health to find instances of positive deviance within the data. They’re calling the project Positive Deviance Journalism, and the goal is to uncover places where people are finding results fighting community health issues and have reporters apply that knowledge in covering similar problems in their area, said Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network. For example, a reporter in a city that has had mixed results increasing the physical activity in school-aged kids could use the network to identify places that have had better results with similar programs. With better information, a reporter could write a story that focuses on providing more concrete answers to those health problems, Rosenberg said. In addition to the funding from Knight, the Solutions Journalism Network also received $122,000 from the California HealthCare Foundation. That funding will be used with a specific focus on reporting on health initiatives in California. The money from the News Challenge will go towards hiring an additional researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to help analyze data for the project, Rosenberg told me. The funding will also support newsroom training, she said — they’re currently reaching out to news organizations to form partnerships. Rosenberg said newsrooms will benefit by letting reporters have access to information they were unaware existed. “Any problem you have is shared by other cities and someone is responding to it better than other people,” Rosenberg said. The Solutions Journalism Network was launched last year by Rosenberg and several other journalists to provide a framework for reporting and writing stories that put forward answers to community problems instead of more questions. Rosenberg writes the Fixes column in The New York Times with Solutions Journalism Network cofounder David Bornstein. The overall mission of the network is to give “credible responses to social problems.” It’s a concept many journalists would say is integral to their work, Rosenberg said. The difficulty often comes in how stories are pitched and reported out. Some reporters might be resistant to the idea of offering solutions because it feels too close to making personal judgments, she said. No journalist wants to look foolish or gullible in their reporting by offering solutions that might not work, said Rosenberg. One way to get past those fears is through the use of data to bolster reporting. More broadly, Rosenberg said journalists will have to find ways to make offering solutions a regular part of their work. “Part of our mission should be reporting on how people are responding to problems with the same degree we report on the problems themselves,” Rosenberg said. This latest News Challenge comes as Knight is re-evaluating how it funds journalism innovation. (Full disclosure: Nieman Lab is also a Knight grantee, though not through the News Challenge.) Knight commits $5 million to the challenge each year, and in 2012 the foundation re-tooled the contest into smaller, focused events. Last summer, Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen told attendees at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: "It may be finished. It may be that, as a device for doing something, it may be that we've gone as far as we can take it." According to Knight spokeswoman Anusha Alikhan, another round of the News Challenge will take place this year, but the format of the contest is still undetermined. Here are all this round’s other winners, which stray farther from traditional definitions of “news” than past cycles of the contest have — we spoke with Knight’s Michael Maness last year about that broadened territory.
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| Posted: 14 Jan 2014 11:06 AM PST
A version of that vision is what Noah Feehan and others in The New York Times’ R&D Lab is working on with a new system called Curriculum. It started as an in-house browser extension he and Jer Thorp built last year called Semex, which monitored your browsing and, by semantically analyzing the web pages you visit, rendered it as a series of themes. Semex
The “now what” was to shift Semex from your own web browsing to a shared environment — to move it from Quantified Self to Quantified Everybody, you might say.
You could think of it as a natural progression from something like Fuego, which tracks what URLs are being shared in a given community on Twitter. Rather than analyzing what people are sharing, Curriculum analyzes what people are reading. There’s a lot that I love about this idea. It matches up with something Heidi Moore and I (and others) were tweeting about last fall: You don’t need me to tell you the potential privacy problems of something like this. If this sort of tool were actually used in a newsroom, I imagine its most immediate impact would be to send lots of people scurrying to their phones when they don’t want their colleagues virtually reading over their shoulder. (A few too many fantasy baseball topics showing up in the newsroom feed might lead to a trip to HR, one imagines.) I’d have to think it would take a special kind of work environment for people to find this sort of thing tolerable — it’d be a nightmare in most newsrooms. But that very real issue aside, there’s a ton of potential with this line of thinking. Journalists learn so much information every day — and so little of it ends up anywhere other than their heads. With business models in flux, finding new ways to generate more value out of the expertise of journalists is critical. My thinking about that question has focused on more ways for that information to reach audiences, via niche blogging, social media, events, and other routes: But Curriculum raises the interesting point that that information can be of great value just by spreading it further within the same news organization. Feehan:
When asked on Twitter whether any of Curriculum might be made publicly available, Feehan replied: |
| What makes people contribute to Wikipedia? Posted: 14 Jan 2014 07:00 AM PST Interesting presentation from Jerome Hergueux down the street at the Berkman Center. He studies peer production — “a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome” — through the lens of Wikipedia.
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The new grantees cover a wide range of areas, including crisis counseling for youth, tracking prescription drug abuse, and a health information aggregator. The winners were announced today at the 
Let’s say you work in a modern digital newsroom. Your colleagues are looking at interesting stuff online all day long — reading stimulating news stories, searching down rabbit holes you’ve never thought of. There are probably connections between what the reporter five desks down from you is looking for and what you already know — or vice versa. Wouldn’t it be useful if you could somehow gather up that all that knowledge-questing and turn it into a kind of intraoffice intel? | 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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