Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2014 07:30 AM PST Editor’s note: There's a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist’s Resource, that’s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they spend their time examining the new academic literature in media, social science, and other fields, summarizing the high points and giving you a point of entry. Here, John Wihbey sums up the top papers in digital media and journalism this month. The academic community is out of the gates this new year with some intriguing findings — from the limits of funding stories through micropayments to the importance of social media for people’s news diets. Many big thoughts, some data-driven takeaways and a whole lot more are below. If you’re just joining us, our “best of” of 2013 is here; and the 2012 year-end review is here. Hope you’ll tweet suggestions this year to @JournoResource if you know of a good study. “Crowd-Funded Journalism”: From George Washington University and the University of Southern California, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Nikki Usher and Lian Jian. The researchers examine a database of story projects crowdfunded through Spot.Us, a nonprofit news platform that allows for ideas to be funded by micropayments. Usher and Jian set out to establish patterns of funding preferences and how these affected the stories produced. The data they examined included the 234 pitches approved by editors, 102 stories produced, and 10,227 donations, as well as both reporter data about their qualifications and internal surveys with the donors. It turns out that “compared to reporters, consumers favor stories that would provide them with practical guidance for daily living (e.g., public health or city infrastructure), as opposed to stories from which they gain a general awareness of the world (e.g., government and politics).” Surprisingly, Usher and Jian found that “reporters with less experience working with traditional news organizations tended to be more successful in raising funds from the crowd.” The researchers conclude that crowd-funding may have a mixed future. It can be successful, and some public affairs stories do get supported; but this method of funding typically supports one kind of news: “This result seems to justify some scholars’ concern that if consumers, who are well known to prefer non-public affairs news, play an important role in news production, coverage of general public affairs news would decrease.” “Industries in Turmoil: Driving Transformation During Periods of Disruption”: From Rutgers and the University of Southern California, published in Communication Research. By Matthew S. Weber and Peter R. Monge. Examining 487 newspapers over the period 1997 to 2007, the study establishes an association between newsroom adoption of hyperlinking and organizational disruption. Essentially, the practice of hyperlinking to outside content, which many news organizations were slow to embrace, serves as a proxy for progress on digital strategy. Weber and Monge crawled the relevant news sites through the Internet Archive and did some interviews for qualitative context. As a measure of disruption, they looked at Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, which showed that, over that period, there were 905 changes in editors, 467 changes in publisher, and 92 changes in ownership. (A sample of these was checked, and it was determined that only 13 percent were due to retirements or planned departures.) The scholars note that they use “changes in management or ownership as an indication of major organizational disruption; this is not directly a failure, but is likely to indicate a change in direction.” In any case, the researchers conclude that “organizations that adopted the most aggressive hyperlinking strategies significantly reduced their likelihood of failure. Results for less aggressive strategies were not nearly as strong, further emphasizing the results of this finding.” “The Relative Importance of Social Media for Accessing, Finding and Engaging with News”: From Roskilde University, Denmark, published in Digital Journalism. By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Kim Christian Schrøder. The study analyzes data from the 2013 Reuters Digital News Survey of media consumers in eight countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (Samples in each country ranged from about 1,000 to 2,000 persons.) Nielsen and Schrøder conclude that “social media at this point still play a relatively limited role as sources of news — less widely used and less important than printed newspapers in all eight countries; that they in some cases play a somewhat larger role as a way of finding news; and that only a minority use them to engage in more participatory forms of news use like sharing, commenting on, or publishing their own stories.” U.S.-specific data points include: 27 percent of online news users said social media was their most important source of news, though among 18- to 24-year-olds that figure was 45 percent; in terms of finding news online, 20 percent of Americans surveyed said news websites were the most important, while 33 percent said social media and 30 percent cited search engines. Nielsen and Schrøder note that “Germany and Japan have relatively low levels of social media use for news purposes, Italy, Spain, and to some extent the United States have higher levels, and Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom lie somewhere in between.” The broader takeaway here regarding the importance of social media: “It is simply that sometimes both academic and public discussions of their relative importance for contemporary media users suggest that the glass is full to the brim when in fact the data suggest more of a glass-half-full–half-empty situation.” “Reciprocal Journalism: A Concept of Mutual Exchange between Journalists and Audiences”: Study from the University of Minnesota, the University of Utah, and the University of Texas at Austin, published in Journalism Practice. By Seth C. Lewis, Avery E. Holton, and Mark Coddington. (Pre-print open version here.) This study sketches out a new theory that is something like “audience engagement 3.0,” or “participation plus.” The specific coinage here, “reciprocal journalism,” seeks to advance the endless discussion among journalism circles about community engagement and go even a step further. Despite its more democratic feel, participatory journalism as we know it is still mostly one-way: serving the news organization’s needs more so than the audience’s. Lewis, Holton, and Coddington focus on how Twitter, Facebook, and other social media can facilitate more reciprocal forms of journalism, whether directly (e.g., journalists exchanging tweets with followers one-to-one), indirectly (e.g., journalists returning favors not to particular individuals but to their communities as a whole, by encouraging discussion around certain hashtags), or sustained (e.g., journalists creating Facebook community pages where audiences can expect longer-lasting exchanges of goodwill among journalists and audiences). This means journalists seeing their role as quasi-organizers of democracy, or “community-builders who can forge connections with and among community members by establishing patterns of reciprocal exchange.” Ultimately, the authors argue, “reciprocal journalism” isn’t describing some entirely new kind of journalism, but rather “points to the unrealized potential for a participatory journalism that has mutual benefit in mind, that is not merely fashioned to suit a news organization’s interests but also takes citizens’ concerns to heart.” “Syria’s Socially Mediated Civil War”: From George Washington University and American University, published by the United States Institute of Peace. By Marc Lynch, Deen Freelon and Sean Aday. This paper provides important notes of skepticism for discourse around the issue of social media and its role in conflict zones. It moves past many of the preliminary research findings with respect to the early stages of the Arab Spring. Lynch, Freelon, and Aday analyze patterns of Twitter conversation, looking at how information flows around certain hashtags and key users or “hubs.” They conclude that looking at patterns of English-language tweets is increasingly insufficient, as the Arabic-language Twitterverse grows more complex. Their findings should prompt everyone to be cautious about definitive claims regarding influence and trends. The researchers state that “social media create a dangerous illusion of unmediated information flows,” as “key curation hubs within networks may now play a gatekeeping role as powerful as that of television producers and newspaper editors.” Other key points in the report include: “We need to study more carefully the extent to which the network insularity we observe allows videos or messages to be ‘narrowcast’ online — that is, jihadist messages in Arabic reach one audience and moderate messages in English reach another.” Further, “Journalists and analysts must think more carefully about how to correct for the systematic over or underrepresentation of particular viewpoints or data and how to check online information against offline developments.” “The Great Equalizer? Patterns of Social Media Use and Youth Political Engagement in Three Advanced Democracies”: From the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Sydney and University of York, published in Information, Communication & Society. By Michael Xenos, Ariadne Vromen and Brian D. Loader. The study provides some reasons for optimism on two long-standing worries: Both political disengagement among youth and patterns of political inequality. The authors look at dynamics in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Xenos, Vromen, and Loader oversaw original survey research in the three countries, totaling 3,685 people ages 16 to 29 — 1,241 in the U.S., 1,216 in Australia, and 1,228 in Britain. Respondents were asked about social media usage as well as acts of civic and political engagement (but not voting). The researchers state that the analysis “offers the most comprehensive study of social media use and political engagement among contemporary youth to date.” Their findings are striking: “[W]e find a strong, significant, and robust positive relationship between social media use and political engagement.” Further, it appears that socioeconomic status (SES) — which scholars have long known is a big predictor of civic/political engagement — appears to be a less powerful factor with this generation: “Stated plainly, our results suggest that if one were seeking an efficient single indicator of political engagement among young people in the countries studied here, social media use would appear to be as good as, or better than, SES.” The scholars don’t get into the exact “why,” or causal explanations. And they concede that their measurements of social media use and engagement are more “broadly cast than most others used in the [prior scholarly] literature.” “Discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion”: From American University, published in New Media & Society. By Deen Freelon. The paper looks at how the platform design of Twitter and comment threads of news sites influences how political discussions unfold. Freelon analyzes data around certain hot-button issues — climate change, immigration, gays in the military — during 2010; the Washington Post and Seattle Times sites were used as representative samples. He finds that people use different political expression styles in different online spaces across issues: For example, Twitter leans toward a more “communitarian” style, with users making more frequent group appeals and calls to action; by contrast, news site comments lean more “liberal individualist,” with less replying to others and more insults, although there were lots of reasons given for arguments and questions asked across ideological lines — in essence, news comments had both reasoned debate and incivility in the same space. Overall, the data provide “robust evidence that the common features in each space are facilitating particular patterns of communication norms.” Related: Another recent study specifically on comment threads, “Virtuous or Vitriolic: The effect of anonymity on civility in online newspaper reader comment boards,” finds that “there is a dramatic improvement in the level of civility in online conversations when anonymity is removed.” The research, by Arthur D. Santana of the University of Houston, was published in Journalism Practice. “Multitasking on a Single Device: Arousal and the Frequency, Anticipation, and Prediction of Switching Between Media Content on a Computer”: From Stanford University, published in Journal of Communication. By Leo Yeykelis, James J. Cummings, and Byron Reeves. The study looks at multitasking from a slightly different angle than many prior studies do — namely, the toggling between content on just one device (as opposed to multiple device usage). The researchers experimented on 12 undergraduates using their personal laptop in a natural setting, generating “396,000 data points equaling 110 hours of moment-by-moment changes in switching and arousal over 10 hours during a normal weekday.” Arousal was measured by “skin conductance levels” determined through wrist censors, which measure activation levels through the sympathetic nervous system. Yeykelis, Cummings, and Reeves determine that, on average, subjects switched content every 19 seconds — faster than expected based on prior literature. In fact, “One-fifth of all content was viewed for 5 seconds or less, with 75 percent viewed for less than a minute.” Email and Facebook took up a quarter of all subjects’ time online. Further, they “discovered that people have an anticipatory arousal spike 12 seconds before switching to [other] content.” The findings, the authors suggest, give some support both to those who argue the positives of multitasking and those who focus on the negatives. “The Emergence of a Freedom of Information Movement: Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party, and Iceland”: From the University of Washington, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Jessica L. Beyer. Global rhetoric around freedom of information is “becoming increasingly similar across sites” worldwide, this paper says. Beyer reviews activist sites and movements over the period 2007-2011 to look for converging patterns. “The idea of ‘freedom of information’ expressed online,” she writes, “appears to be a cross-national online norm of freedom of information that is related to, but also often in conflict with, domestic legal practices.” This is playing out even as intellectual property rights advocates and government security concerns are being asserted and pushing back. Beyer notes that the “ability of groups such as Anonymous to channel the power of like-minded, but not tech savvy, allies is increasing. Whatever the future of this newly forming ‘freedom of information’ movement, its emergence from the online world offers evidence for the power of the Internet and online communities in shaping participants’ political beliefs and actions. Young people online are willing to mobilize on behalf of abstract rights claims, and that willingness spreads quickly across the social spaces online.” Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license. |
| This Week in Review: Parsing Ezra Klein’s new project, and a mobile news aggregation rush Posted: 31 Jan 2014 06:30 AM PST What Project X might mean: Ezra Klein officially said goodbye to The Washington Post last weekend and announced his move to Vox Media, the company that runs The Verge, SB Nation, Polygon, and Curbed, among others. Meanwhile, the Post’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth, defended the paper’s decision to turn down Klein’s proposal, saying it wasn’t guaranteed to be profitable and would have been a distraction, and noting that Bezos wasn’t involved in the decision. The Post also announced it would be hiring for a new data-driven journalism site as part of a broader expansion that includes a numerous other new hires and several revamped sections. Klein’s description of his new site was vague, but touched on the need to add more context, education, and explanation to news. Vox CEO Jim Bankoff talked to CNN’s Brian Stelter and Ad Age’s Tim Peterson about the business side of the venture with relatively few details, though he said reports of a $10 million investment are “way high.” Klein gave a few more hints in a Q&A with BuzzFeed — it’s not going to just be a bigger version of his Post site Wonkblog. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said it’s fine that there doesn’t seem to be much structure yet to Klein’s new project, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis voiced his excitement at the prospect of Klein specializing in the “explainer” form of news. The Post’s Matt McFarland was also intrigued by the idea, outlined in a job description for the new site, of building “the world's first hybrid news site/encyclopedia,” wondering why those two forms couldn’t be rejoined. Mark Potts, a former Post staffer, noted that the Post kicked around an idea for that kind of hybrid back in the late ’90s. In a perceptive column, The New York Times’ David Carr saw Klein’s move as an indicator that digital publishing has come into its own, rather than serving as an additional platform for traditional media. “In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man.” He followed that up with a look at a few varieties of the new breeds of digital media operations. Likewise, media analyst Ken Doctor explained what seems distinct about the form of digital journalism Klein is embarking on, and here at the Lab laid out the economic reasons it’s becoming easier to start a new site. NYU’s Jay Rosen argued that Klein is leaving the Post’s supply-side logic to start something based on the “keep me informed” logic of the demand side. The New Yorker’s George Packer was skeptical of the distinctiveness and quality of this new brand of digital journalism as Carr explained it, but BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel said that many media critics like Packer are missing the fact that tech isn’t just a smokescreen or accessory for a venture like Klein’s, but “the difference between a successful new media venture and a flop.” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman pointed out that we don’t know if Vox’s ad-based business model can translate from niches like sports and tech to the drier topic of public policy. Jack Shafer of Reuters also raised some cautions about the venture, arguing that with low costs of entry and a fluid talent pool, it’s not very well protected from competition.
At the Lab, Staci Kramer has all the details on Inside in a thorough interview with Calacanis. The app is built around updates of 300 characters — about as much as can fit on the typical smartphone screen — summarizing a single source (with a link) on a news story. The updates will be human-written by a full-time staff of 15 and a crew of freelancers, and Calacanis stressed the value of human judgment in finding high-quality sources of original reporting and summarizing them intelligently. The app has enough money from the sunsetting Mahalo to run without ads for the first two years, but when it does add them, it’ll most likely go the native-ad route. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram highlighted a few of these points, and talked to Inside editor Gabriel Snyder (formerly of Gawker and The Atlantic’s Wire) about the opportunity in mobile news that “feels akin to 2002 and the web, when everyone knew the web was going to be huge but it wasn't clear how people would get the news.” The Verge’s Nathan Ingraham described the app’s mechanics and pointed out that Inside faces the aggregation conundrum of saving people time but also delivering clicks to their sources. Kramer also reviewed the app, calling it promising but inconsistent, particularly in its organization. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland noticed the word “curate” in Inside’s App Store description and explored the aversion that Inside, Circa, and other news reading services have to calling what they do “aggregation.” Kirkland argued that it’s time to reclaim aggregation as a term: “Aggregation isn't always bad, but automatically framing unoriginal reporting as curation helps these news middlemen avoid debate about whether we should be troubled by their methods.” Facebook’s Paper is on the other end of the aggregation spectrum from Inside: It’s an automated and human-selected feed of news and content from your Facebook friends and the loads of the public content that organizations post on Facebook. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn looked at the app’s interface, concluding that its more relaxed feel “stands in direct opposition to the high-volume, high-noise vertical feeds we’re used to on Twitter and Facebook.” Josh Constine of TechCrunch argued that Paper’s combination of content selection through editors, automation, and your friends leads to a strong sense of serendipity, and Recode’s Mike Isaac said the app taps into a broader network of discovery than the standard Facebook experience. Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff noted that Facebook still isn’t creating its own content here. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, noted that the market for social reading apps is becoming packed, and Facebook runs the risk of Paper feeling “like a tabloid stapled together from items they've already seen in their news feed.” Reading roundup: A few other stories that grabbed some attention this week: — This week’s U.S. National Security Agency surveillance happenings: The Obama administration reached an agreement with tech companies allowing them to disclose some vague information about the number of user data requests they get from the government; it was an improvement over the current information blackout, but many privacy advocates still aren’t too pleased. The NSA was also reported to be using “leaky” smartphone apps, like Google Maps and Angry Birds, to collect user information, and U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper obliquely referred to journalists as leaker Edward Snowden’s “accomplices.” — CNN announced a partnership with Twitter and the social analytics company Dataminr that will allow it to spot breaking news stories on Twitter more quickly and efficiently. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram explained why it makes sense on Twitter’s end, and Alex Weprin of Capital New York explained what’s in it for CNN.
— A growing backlash against the preoccupation with longform journalism crystallized a bit last weekend in a New York Times column by Jonathan Mahler using the failings of Grantland’s Dr. V story to critique the fetishization of longform. Instapaper founder Marco Arment explained why he eschewed the longform push to focus on substance rather than length per se. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith broke down the backlash and explored some of the differences between longform done well and done poorly.
— Finally a few resources and pieces to think on: Poynter’s Craig Silverman released a handbook for verifying digital content, particularly in breaking-news situations; NYU’s Jay Rosen gave some thoughts on how a networked beat structure might be built; and at Journalism.co.uk, Alastair Reid wondered if journalists are properly equipped to handle the massive amounts of data being released by organizations and governments around the world. |
— The other shoe dropped at Patch, where new owner Hale Global had AOL | You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |