Rabu, 08 Januari 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

American journalists, it’s time to apply for a Nieman Fellowship

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 12:45 PM PST

With the winter cold, you’re probably going to be spending some quality time indoors this week. Which makes it a great time to work on your application to join the next class of Nieman Fellows.

If you’re not familiar: The Nieman Fellowships have, for three-quarters of a century, brought talented journalists to Harvard for a year of study. These days, it’s 24 journalists (half Americans, half from the rest of the world) who have proposed a course of study and explained why both they and journalism more broadly would benefit from their spending time here.

I came to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow in 2007, and in the years since I’ve seen nearly 200 great journalists grow their brains, explore new areas of knowledge, and deepen their capacity to do great work. It’s really a tremendous experience.

If you’re an American citizen, the deadline to apply is coming up — January 31, to be precise. (If you’re not a U.S. citizen, sorry, your deadline was back in December — but see the exception below.)

You can read much more about the fellowship on the Nieman Foundation website: the program at a glance, eligibility information, what we pay, types of fellowships, and maybe most practically, how to apply. But another way to get a handle on the fellowship is simply to read the bios of our current class of fellows. They’re a very impressive group, but I’d also wager that a lot of people reading this could imagine themselves in their number.

What does applying entail? Again, read the full details, but the basics are a personal statement, a proposed course of study, some samples of your work, and some recommendations. If you have any questions about the fellowship itself, I'm happy to answer questions. (If you have specific questions about the application process and requirements, best to reach out to our fellowship administrator John Breen.)

One other note: January 31 is also the deadline to apply for a Nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism Innovation.

The Nieman-Berkman Fellowship is a lot like the regular Nieman Fellowship, with a few key differences:

— Applicants must propose a course of study or project specifically relating to journalism innovation. (Proposals for the regular Nieman can, of course, focus on journalism innovation too! It’s just a requirement for the Nieman-Berkman.)

— It’s actually two fellowships in one: a full Nieman Fellowship and a full Berkman Fellowship. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is a premier center for the study of technology and its impact on the world. You get to be an integral part of both communities, which is an enormous privilege.

— It’s open to a wider group of applicants. While the Nieman Fellowship is open only to full-time journalists (including freelancers), the Nieman-Berkman Fellowship is also open to people who work in fields that support journalism — including the technology, business, and academic worlds.

— It’s open to both U.S. and international applicants. (That’s the exception I mentioned above — it’s not too late to apply for a Nieman-Berkman if you’re not an American citizen.)

Much more about the Nieman-Berkman here.

Making government spending data more legible

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 11:02 AM PST

Data from the U.S. Treasury is available to the public but hard to access and harder to understand. Lucky for us journalists, csv soundsystem (reference), a hacker-journalist collective from NYC, built Treasury.IO, which downloads government files every day, scrapes them, parses the data, and creates usable databases. Today, Source has a look at how the program works and what you can do with it.

Treasury.IO has opened the door for various visualizations and analyses:

— Time used the data to power a tracker of daily government cash holdings during the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis.

— Reuters used Treasury.IO to analyze federal payroll data for a story on the effect of the shutdown on federal employees' wallets.

— Al Jazeera America tapped Sunlight Foundation's Capitol Words API and Treasury.IO to make a chart which matches up mentions of the "debt ceiling" in Congress with shifts in the debt ceiling to show the issue's politicization over time.

— On our sample queries page, we provide information on how to write the queries to produce these and other analyses.

Still seem like a lot of work? No problem. These news nerds also built a Twitter bot that analyzes and tweets bite-sized bits of information about government spending.

This works by submitting specific queries to our API and formatting the results as text (see the code here). You can follow @TreasuryIO on Twitter to get daily mini-analyses, such as this:

Vice News wants to take documentary-style storytelling to hot spots around the globe

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 07:56 AM PST

If there’s a mantra for the team behind Vice News, it might be: Go where the story takes you. The soon-to-launch news channel from Vice is designed for the type of journalist who wants to strap a camera to her back and jump head first into a conflict zone. That’s already taken Vice reporters to places like Sudan, Syria, and the Central African Republic, to report on violence inside the country’s borders. When Vice News goes live later this winter, look for a lot more of that.

“We’re basically going to play to our strengths, which has been that longer-form documentary video,” said Vice News editor-in-chief Jason Mojica. “We’re going to be increasing the volume of that significantly.”

Over the past few months, Vice has expanded its editorial staff to more than 100, with people working in 34 offices around the world as well as other remote locations. The plan is to officially launch a mobile-friendly Vice News site to compliment the Vice News channel on YouTube. “This is the next logical place to play and space to create,” said Eddy Moretti, Vice’s chief creative officer. “It’s this organic thing. We didn’t start thinking we would launch a news channel one day.”

Vice — which started 20 years ago as a Montreal magazine — has made a name for itself in recent years through its documentary-style videos that take viewers into stories and parts of the world they may not know well. With the expansion of Vice News, the company plans to build on the existing work they’ve done in video and, well, go bigger.

The operation was the beneficiary of a warm glow of journalism enthusiasm this fall after word got out the company planned to beef up its journalism, expanding into new areas of coverage and hiring new people. It’s a familiar storyline in the world of media: Upstart company (Al Jazeera America, BuzzFeed, the list goes on) has money to invest in news, which attracts the attention of journalists like a school of fish after the next meal. Like the companies that preceded them, Vice promises an approach to journalism that is outside the norm. The trailer for the forthcoming news channel gives a clear look at what Vice is interested in: unrest, conflict, revolution, persecution.

Vice isn’t building entirely from scratch. From its magazine roots, Vice has branched out over the years in writing and video to build blogs around music, fashion, and technology. In a way, news is just another vertical in the mix. The ambitions for news are big, Mojica tells me: They want people to come to Vice for deep reporting on topics like the environment, national security, health, and money. “I think where we want to live is in a part of the healthy news diet, the food pyramid of news,” he said. “Read The New York Times and come to our site, or vice versa.”

It’s news with a voice, but also news that spends time on a subject. One thing they’ve learned from the videos produced so far, is that audiences will take time on a subject if you find the right connection, Mojica said. “It’s important for the site to be a place where you can come everyday to find out what’s happening in the world that affects your life,” he said. That said, don’t expect Vice to chase the general interest stories you might see elsewhere. The goal, he said, is to focus on the storytelling they do better than anyone else: “I don’t think we’re going to serve ourselves or our audience if we try to be all things to all people.”

Vice grabbed headlines with its look into life in North Korea (with the help of Dennis Rodman, last seem screaming on CNN this morning) and its chase (and ensuing fiasco) through Central America with fugitive millionaire John McAfee.

The Vice editorial plan is big on video, the revenue whale nearly every major online news organization is chasing — either documentary-style stories or live coverage from events as they happen. It’s a mix of of-the-moment and delayed. That’s part of the reason Vice is staffing up, bringing on editors, reporters, videographers to help shape the areas that will be covered, as well as figuring out the right metabolism for the operation.

Mojica told me they’re looking for people with skills on both sides of the camera, from backgrounds that could be professional or YouTube-honed. The key, he said, is that they are driven: “Vice is not a place for people who need to be told what to do,” he said. “It’s for people with big things they want to achieve. We can empower them and make that happen.”

Vice raised $70 million this year by selling a 5 percent equity stake to 21st Century Fox. That investment earned it some notice for valuing the company at $1.4 billion — less than two weeks after The Washington Post had been sold to Jeff Bezos for a mere $250 million. (Interesting that Vice falls on the entertainment side, not the news side, of the News Corp split.) The company also struck deals with CNN, to feature Vice content on CNN.com, and HBO, which airs a half-hour show produced by the company.

Part of the interest in the company comes from its appeal to younger audiences. Mojica said Vice’s internal metrics show its audience is indeed young. Part of the appeal of Vice is because many of those telling stories are young themselves, he said. But identifying with Vice is also about the voice and tone of the work, Moretti told me. Vice approaches stories at a ground level, and reporters often inject plenty of their personality into the work. What really connects with audiences, Moretti said, is taking a story beyond the length and depth of typical TV or newspaper stories. “In a weird way, what they’re looking for is a level of empathy within the reporting, so that it’s not just a series of metrics,” Moretti said.

What works, Moretti said, is going beyond the clip and soundbite-centric storytelling found on most broadcast news. Despite what conventional wisdom might say, Moretti says young viewers want more than 60-second clips. It’s video’s ability to be immersive and narrative that lets Vice connect with audiences, he said: “It’s slowing down the flow, the speed at which the news comes now,” he said.

Vice now spans print, digital, and TV, not to mention advertising, with Virtue, the company’s in-house creative agency. That’s a lot of tentacles operating at the same time. Mojica said that also offers plenty of lessons for the new news division to learn from. While they plan to build a mobile-friendly site for Vice News, Mojica said the aim is to offer video and other reporting in as many venues as possible. While some people watch on their laptops or phones, others, like Mojica, are fans of streaming video over connected devices like Apple TV. “I think our general attitude towards method of delivery has helped us, in that we’ve always been agnostic and focused on content rather than get hung up on platform,” Mojica said.

Mojica, who has had stints working for Al Jazeera and 60 Minutes, thinks the appetite for news and information has never been stronger. The channels for getting news, and the way people consume them, are what’s changing, he said. “All of us love to complain on the state of journalism. And now it’s time to put up or shut up,” Mojica said. “I consider it the biggest challenge of my life, and one that I’m really looking forward to.”
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