Kamis, 30 Januari 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

A free guide to verifying that weird thing on Twitter

Posted: 29 Jan 2014 05:02 PM PST

New from the European Journalism Centre: Verification Handbook, a new, free guidebook for separating tweet wheat from tweet chaff, edited by one-man truth squad Craig Silverman.

Whether it is debunking images of 'street sharks' during Hurricane Sandy, or determining the veracity of videos that depict human rights abuses, reporting the right information is critical in shaping responses from the public and relief workers as a crisis unfolds.

By providing the exact methods needed to validate information, photos and videos shared by the crowd, the Verification Handbook forms an essential component of any organisation's disaster preparedness plan.

Street sharks are kinda fun, though. As Craig writes:

This handbook offers lots of tools and some technical advice — but the most important pieces are non-technical. It's about a mindset, about asking questions when others don't, and maintaining skepticism when something looks true, or is more attractive if true.

It's also about practice. Do the work of verification day after day and you'll hone your skills, and your sense. Do it with colleagues in a defined process, and you'll all achieve a better result — faster.

Breaking News gives a heads up with editor’s notes

Posted: 29 Jan 2014 12:40 PM PST

Editor’s note: This is a story about editor’s notes.

The team at Breaking News has been tinkering with how to deliver information to readers more effectively on mobile devices. Late last year, its compelling new iteration on its mobile app gave readers the option of customizing what news and alerts are most interesting to them (more Syria, less Miley — or vice versa).

Now they’re giving readers a glimpse into how the Breaking News magic happens. They’re launching something they call editor’s notes, which are granular alerts about news in progress or what the editors are working on. If unconfirmed reports are bubbling up about an event, or if the newsroom is making a change in programming, the notes are a subtle way to tell readers “just thought you should know.”

As Breaking News cofounder Cory Bergman writes:

Editor's notes offer context surrounding a breaking story, advisories of upcoming events, unique sources we're seeing and warnings about potential misinformation circulating in social media. It's essential guidance from our experienced team of journalists to help you quickly navigate the increasingly noisy world of breaking news.

The newsonomics of why everyone seems to be starting a news site

Posted: 29 Jan 2014 12:23 PM PST

You’d think the new digital printing presses were minting money.

Just within the last month, all kinds of details have emerged about the construction of new, digital, high-quality-aiming national news organizations. What may seem like a gold rush is really something else, but the reasons underlying the great movement — and it’s only January! — are worth examining.

New. We love the word, with its shiny imaginative possibilities. New news companies — now that’s really exciting to many of us. Let’s first count the five most noteworthy recent plays:

  • Project X, the Ezra Klein/Melissa Bell/Matt Yglesias/Dylan Matthews site building on Wonkblog (“Digital Native Ezra Klein Finds Post-Post Voice”), got Vox Media’s Jim Bankoff’s nod — a nod worth, we believe, close to $10 million in order to “build on” a new news company to the Vox portfolio.
  • Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight has already added 15 journalists, with more to be hired as he blows fuller life into the analytical data work he pioneered at The New York Times.
  • Still in something close to stealth mode, Pierre Omidyar has named his Glenn Greenwald/Eric Bates/Bill Gannon/Jay Rosen new news company First Look Media, and begun laying out the game plan in a short video.

    Omidyar’s potential investment stretch into the stratosphere, from $50 million to $250 million. Showing an understanding of what any modern news company now requires in addition to journalists, Omidyar makes a point of hiring technologists, data analysts, and visual designers.

  • On New Year’s Day, Recode launched. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg transplanted their AllThingsD staff of 15 smoothly, finding a new home with support from NBC Universal, a company willing to fund the re-startup. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, AllThingsD’s former home, reinvested to fund a replacement tech-coverage staff, launching its own new WSJ.D.
  • As 2013 wound to a close, Time Warner Cable added Al Jazeera America to its lineup in New York City; watch anchor John Seigenthaler gamely defend its uneasy-to-swallow branding (and logo) against the wiles of Stephen Colbert.

    AJA put 900 journalists to work in the middle of last year.

Count it out, and that’s over a thousand journalists: well-paid jobs for many veteran reporters and editors, paid to do the kind of journalism they mostly want to do. Sure, we’ll continue to see lots of of tech-led “news” startups, like Jason Calcanis’ reborn Inside.com, which promises to seize the opportunity of mobile curation, while promising “to build the world’s best news product…but we want to do that without any journalists…We want to be the starting point, not the destination. We don’t do any original journalism and we’re never going to.” There’s room for such companies (though as Peter Kafka asks, how many of them do we need?) — but I hope news-producing companies can finally master the curation art on their own. That way, curatorial business success will help pay more journalists.

Let’s be clear: The biggest bets here are funded by funny money. I don’t mean that it’s laughable — just that it’s money that’s not intended, as most investments are, to make more money.

Pierre Omidyar is spending a small part of his eBay fortune to double down on the kind of revelatory journalism that Greenwald and Co. have generated out of the Snowden files, though early indications are that he intends First Look to be a general news site. The government of Qatar refills the budgets of the wider Al Jazeera Network with its inexhaustible pipeline of oil revenues. Yet even if the motivation of those two funders differ from those of NBC, ESPN, and Vox, they’re all seizing a moment in digital news history.

Even those funded by the for-profits don’t stand much of a chance to be big moneymakers. At the national level, the digital ad competition is intense. While there will be $40 billion in national digital advertising, programmatic buying and downward pricing pressures are accruing to the favor of the big guys, especially Google and Facebook. While companies that pay $75,000 to $125,000 salaries to journalists can offset much of that cost, there’s no hockey stick of revenue growth and precious little profit. Consider that The Huffington Post, the now-grandmother of news startups, is still operating at less than $100 million in annual ad revenues and flirting with profitability, as the stay-or-split saga of Tim and Arianna rolls on. It is considered the most successful non-legacy news company of the last half-decade.

As Jason Calcanis knows so well, paying journalists will weigh down the financials of any news business, and when the main support for that business is advertising, break-even becomes the three- to five-year goal.

So what’s the motivation here for NBC Universal, ESPN, and Vox? They vary, of course. NBC, after new rounds of digital-exec shuffles and purchases that didn’t pan out, seeks to up its digital content game, after having done a deal with GlobalPost last year. FiveThirtyEight may be housed at ESPN — a brilliant pioneer (great WSJ piece on its innovation) in next-stage moneymaking — but sister ABC News can also be a big beneficiary of the content edge Silver may bring. Vox’s sports/food/tech optimize-the-digital business smarts are among the best in the business, though the kind of wonkier work Klein and colleagues do likely won’t take off the way Vox’s other sites have. (For those wanting to go deeper on the Klein/Silver sweepstakes, Politico’s Dylan Byers faces the two off well.)

The price of entry is what’s key in this new business. No printing presses or broadcast pipes. At this moment, the world has conspired to make relatively cheap entry — at $25 million or less — quite possible. It’s also possible to project a new credibility for such new products: Digital audiences have become accustomed to taking new brands seriously, seemingly overnight.

The newsonomics here are fairly straightforward. It’s not simple, but it’s still far easier to launch new stuff than it was even five years ago. Here’s why:

  • Free-agent talent. Journalists are more mobile than ever. People now bring along their own audiences. Just look at the Twitter followings and some of those in the news. Nate Silver: 653,000. Ezra Klein: 422,000. Glenn Greenwald: 326,000. Matt Yglesias: 100,000. Digital access and social sharing mean that both twentysomethings and veteran voices can develop big followings in a short time. A case has been made that The New York Times has been bleeding talent, losing people like Silver, David Pogue and Matt Bai — but a case can also be made that it is replenishing just as quickly. The Journal’s new personal tech columnist Joanna Stern provides a smart, updated and humorous take on LG’s G Flex phone here), beginning to identify an answer to the post-Mossberg question. Slate, which has developed lots of real talents, will find new talent as well. (Farhad Manjoo may be this year’s poster child for mobility — from Slate to The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times, all since September.)

    In the old days, superior regional talent, like that of The Miami Herald’s legendary Sunday magazine, would migrate to The Washington Post and stay there. Now, people come, people go. The movement that we’ve seen growing over the past several years will only increase as legacy and startup news companies compete and journalists balance the massive traffic, brand support, and stability the old brands offer against to the allure of the new and of building their own brand and products. Companies like The Washington Post and the Times now must weigh how much to invest in retention versus development — what I’ve called “the Pujols effect” when the Times saw Pogue move on to Yahoo.

  • Foundational technology only gets better and cheaper. Digital-only content management systems get the content out on all platforms with far fewer people and keystrokes. Ad automation and optimization maximizes revenue with fewer staff. Social sharing tools magnify voice for virtual pennies. NBC Universal, ESPN, and Vox can all extend their content and sales systems to serve their new properties, leveraging the digital technology investments they’ve already made.
  • Business models are maturing. New publishers are finding enough niches to largely pay smaller-but-expanding staffs of journalists — if they can create large enough audiences. They are also seeing that native advertising, well done by BuzzFeed and Atlantic Media, for instance, offers a way to compete with programmatic advertising. Premium (Politico Pro) and events (Business Insider) strategies are giving the new publishers the sense they don’t have to wholly rely on advertising.
  • Time. The financial pressures on the legacy companies, newspaper and magazine, are unrelenting: Short-term profit expectations, ongoing debt service, the need to maintain burdensome legacy costs even as legacy revenues tumble. The new funders provide not just money, but time. Jeff Bezos gave a one-word answer to what he offers the Post when asked on his first newsroom visit: “Runway.” No new news digital company is break-even or profitable early on; with luck, at the three- to five-year mark, it may get there. Time is as important as money — though it’s money, of course, that creates the time.

Photo by Anne used under a Creative Commons license.

Inside Inside: The new mobile app could use a little consistency

Posted: 29 Jan 2014 07:00 AM PST

After two days with the betas of Inside the app and Inside.com, it’s safe to say the new mobile news aggregator has a lot of potential and its fair share of launch flaws.

inside-logoOn the plus side, the Inside formula — 300 characters, 40 words, 10 facts per update, designed to meet founder Jason Calacanis’ own idea of how he wants his news — is scannable and works most of the time, enabling easy grazing and quick consumption. (See my Q&A with Calacanis about the ideas behind Inside.)

The deck-of-cards-like UX — which layers stories in a topic behind swipeable screens that can be pulled from the deck or added back — is slick. The original source for each story is clear and accessible. The actions for each story is limited to thumbs up or thumbs down, comment, and share. The nav bar (at the bottom in the app, on the left in the browser) is equally uncluttered and constant: My Feed, Top News, All Updates, Topics, Profile. Follow or unfollow for topics is one click.

I haven’t used it long enough to be sure how well the customizations works. Using thumbs down eventually should lead to a topic being blocked; thumbs up will help it learn what I like. Calacanis says email alerts and possibly an email roundup could be be coming, which would add to the value for some of us.

jason-calacanis-ccBut does it solve any problems for a user? Calacanis wants it to reduce the noise of getting the news. If a user is willing to rely on Inside to get just enough news on a story — not all breaking reports or complete aggregation — it will probably be sufficient most of the time. I’ve been trying Yahoo News Digest, which most days is too stripped down for me to feel like it’s hitting the high notes I want in terms of story selection. Unlike Yahoo News Digest, Inside is producing updates as they happen, which means it has to have realtime currency.

Inside’s “all topic” stream can be overwhelming, but the Top News feed — a curation of curations — takes it down to a manageable what-I-need-to-know-now roar. The lead items as I write Tuesday are about the minimum wage, the State of the Union, Ukraine abolishing anti-protest laws, and Apple’s drop in share price. Clicking on “all” shows that there have been four updates since I last checked; those include the Pro Bowl’s TV ratings, an explanation about why there are four Republican SOTU responses, and jaywalking in New York — probably more than sufficient for the average user who just wants to keep up.

Some of the flaws stem from the founder’s definition of a lean startup launching with a minimum viable product. To me, in-app topic search is a minimum requirement; to Calacanis, it’s something that can be added later. In the browser version, the user can play a newfangled version of “Pin the Topic” by adding any possible keyword after Inside.com in the browser nav bar, then following if a topic is found. The topics are listed alphabetically without even a way to hop from letter to letter. In the app, unlike the browser, there’s no quick way to look for a topic. At one point, I started adding topics to follow the browser just so I could see them in the app.

An almost informal approach to information architecture is another example. Part of Inside’s charm is the simple, limited tagging — three categories per entry — and the curator’s ability to create a wide variety of macro and micro categories. But the mix of curators (Calacanis won’t say how many freelance curators are producing Inside) and the different ways a curator might approach a story can make it difficult for a user to get all the related stories.

For instance, the uproar over Grantland’s Dr. V story produced myriad posts and news stories. So far, I’ve found two references on Inside, and neither links to the other. One, to a Jezebel story, is tagged for “golf” and “YouTube” but not “Grantland” or “ESPN.” (Its also a flawed synopsis. Terse is good, but the curators have to nail the details.) The ESPN ombudsman’s response is tagged for the latter two plus “media.” Neither is tagged for “LGBT” or “transgender” — a huge gap. With the right tags, the stories would show up in the right places in the deck of cards. Another example: “Edward Snowden” isn’t always cross-referenced with “NSA.”

Adding hierarchy will complicate matters a bit but ultimately make it more useful, as topics can be narrowed down and connected less randomly.

The website will show all topics but is only truly functional if you log in; it’s usable, but the optimal way to use Inside is as an app. The iPhone app is live, as is a BlackBerry version (yes, odd, but it’s courtesy of a paid partnership); Android is in the pipeline but not submitted to Google Play yet. Plans call for Windows Phone to follow.

For now, the only way to sign up for Inside is through the app; the web process is stuck in a beta waiting-list loop that collects email addresses and redirects to Calacanis.com. But the app cleared the iPhone store when it was supposed to, which puts it ahead of some other launches.

The combination of the Inside brand, Calacanis, and publicity will get it a fair number of first-look users. Delivering on the promise and achieving some curating consistency will be key to keeping them coming back.

Photo of Jason Calacanis by Christopher Michel used under a Creative Commons license.
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