Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Stock and flow in 18th-century Paris: The longstanding art of smartly curating content
- The newsonomics of measuring the real impact of news
- From Nieman Reports: Detecting threads of Chinese government propaganda over time
- Is Japan’s public NHK losing journalistic independence?
- Want to add a little GIF to your life? Pop might be the app for you
| Stock and flow in 18th-century Paris: The longstanding art of smartly curating content Posted: 13 Feb 2014 09:34 AM PST The last year or so has seen an intriguing renewal of a genre from the early years of the Internet: the email newsletter. A couple of months ago Alexis Madrigal described this development as a natural and healthy response to a never-ending and increasingly vast stream of online data: “My newsletter is finite (always less than 600 words) and it comes once a day. It has edges. You can finish it.” Madrigal also draws on a metaphor created by Robin Sloan, who has a newsletter of his own, and who sees online life as comprised of stock and flow: Stock is “the durable stuff,” accumulated and consolidated knowledge, while flow is what steadily, or overwhelmingly, comes to you through your email and Twitter and Facebook and RSS. But only if the flow is manageable can the best of it be converted into stock. Newsletters, in Madrigal’s reading of the situation, filter the flow and as it were pre-convert it to stock. Or at least make it readier to be converted.
In 1753, Grimm began to write and edit La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, a newsletter about cultural events that was meant to supplement and when necessary correct official news sources, which were subject to rigorous censorship. The situation was not as bad as it might have been, thanks to the fact that for many years the chief censor was Malesherbes, who knew most of the philosophes and supported them in every way possible. (Without Malesherbes to clear the way the great Encyclopédie would surely never have been published. Incidentaly, we owe another debt to Malesherbes: he was the great-grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville.) Still, there were things one dared not say for fear of offending some powerful person connected with the court of the ancien régime, some person Malesherbes couldn’t protect you from, so Grimm made sure that his newsletters were copied — by hand, interestingly: Grimm used amanuenses rather than printing presses — and distributed from outside France, i.e., beyond the reach of the censors. La Correspondance was a curious combination of journalism, learned instruction, and gossip column. Grimm would summarize recent works of philosophy or literature or social criticism and then describe how those works were being received by le monde (and even occasionally le demimonde). He commissioned Diderot to attend the annual art exhibition at the Paris Salon and write up his responses to what he saw — which Diderot did at great length and with vivid acuity: These became the most celebrated contributions to La Correspondance. Grimm became very skilled at recruiting guest writers who understood disciplines he didn’t know well or who wrote from social locations he couldn’t get access to. Moreover, as I have learned from Yoni Appelbaum, the historian Paule Jansen has discovered that Grimm also functioned as a filter and aggregator: Much of the content of the Correspondance previously appeared in other journals. For the first twenty years of La Correspondance, Grimm ran the newsletter himself and was its chief contributor, but then he turned it over to his secretary, who kept it going (in a diminished state) until 1790, when the Revolution made it impossible to continue. Perhaps the most interesting point to make about La Correspondance is this: It never had, nor did Grimm ever want, a large subscriber base. Grimm’s interest was in what John Milton called a “fit audience, though few” — but Grimm defined fitness by social standing. He counted among his subscribers Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and several other European kings, princes, and aristocrats. Their interest in the newsletter seems to have been both personal — wanting to be “in the know” about the goings-on in Paris, the cultural capital of their world — but also politically self-interested, since some of the French thinkers took rather extreme political positions which, in the nature of things, were likely to spread to the intellectuals of the rest of Europe.
Alan Jacobs is a distinguished professor of the humanities in the honors program at Baylor University and author of, among other books, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. This piece originally ran on his blog, Text Patterns. Engraving of Friedrich Melchior von Grimm by Louis Carrogis Carmontelle. |
| The newsonomics of measuring the real impact of news Posted: 13 Feb 2014 09:20 AM PST Hello there! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Tweet Button. What if you could tap me and unlock a brand new source of funding for startup news sources of all kinds? What if, even better, you the reader could tap that money loose with a single click? That’s the delightfully simple conceit behind a little widget, Impaq.me, you may have seen popping up as you traverse the news web. It’s social. It’s viral. It uses OPM (Other People’s Money) — and maybe a little bit of your own. It makes a new case to funders and maybe commercial sponsors. And it spits out metrics around the clock. It aims to be a convergence widget, acting on that now-aging idea that our attention is as important as our wallet. Consider it a new digital Swiss Army knife for the attention economy. It’s impossible to tell how much of an impact Impaq.me may have. It’s still in its second round of testing at six of the U.S.’s most successful independent nonprofit startups — MinnPost, Center for Investigative Reporting, The Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego, ProPublica, and the Center for Public Integrity — but as in all things digital, timing is everything. And that timing seems right.
Third, funders of news sites, especially Knight and other lead foundations, are looking for harder evidence of the value generated by their early grants. Millions have been poured into creating new news sites. Now they’re asking: What has our funding really done? Within that big question, Impaq.me is only one of several new attempts to demonstrably measure real impact in new ways. We’ll take a brief look at those impact initiatives below. Impaq.me started in September 2012, when Kevin Davis had a dream and got up at 2 a.m. to write it down. The next morning, he looked at his notes and realized the idea was worth pursuing. As luck would have it, Davis is CEO of the Investigative News Network; his day job is figuring out how to grow and sustain 92 independent news startups around the United States, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that his dreams were similarly occupied. Since then, Davis has gotten funding to develop the idea, built out the first prototype, raised additional money — and signed over the pending patent to INN itself. In total, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation has supported the effort with $200,000 in funding. “I’m trying to do frictionless support,” says Davis. “Social sharing of stories is meaningful.” He notes that social sharing is much more popular for those under 35, who also have weaker news brand allegiance. That makes this strategy an audience strategy as well as a fundraising one. In Davis’ dream and in early reality, the Impaq.me widget and program seeks to connect up these three points: generating new revenue for news sites; multiplying and measuring engagement; and harnessing social in new ways to directly make the funding/sharing link. It’s using social to directly generate money — a trick that even Upworthy, with its massive audience, hasn’t yet mastered. (Upworthy is now working on its own content marketing-oriented business model.) Take a look at the Impaq.me widget, as deployed on the Center for Investigative Reporting site this week:  Its message is clear in the top red banner: “Share and The Woolley Fund Will Donate $1″. (The Woolley name may be familiar; Buzz Woolley has been a founding and continuing supporter of Voice of San Diego.) Then, if readers use one of the share tools within the red frame, a dollar contribution is added. The widget manages to serve several audiences:
We all like counters, and seeing that $4,984, we feel like we’re pitching in. (The site reached its $5,000 goal last night.) “Everyone has the same reaction when they see it: ‘Well, that makes sense,’” says Dick McPherson of Impaq.me. McPherson has spent decades raising money for public broadcasting, and now works as a fundraising consultant for CIR, through his company McPherson Advisor. For him, Impaq.me is a unique twist on crowdfunding. He believes it could help deliver a new “middle market” of donors — say $1,000 to $10,000 — who may be spurred to donate, given the recognition and the psychological pull of the widget. Given how new it is, the model offers more questions than answers at this point. Likely the biggest: Is this really new money being generated? Or is it switch money — funds that foundations would have given anyway, only distributed differently? Davis is acutely aware of that question, of course, and believes Impaq.me will generate new money, as well as additional money from current funders. Why? For one reason, nonprofit news sites might be able to go to commercial sponsors — not just foundations — who want to gain the branding recognition. In addition, the widget generates sharing data. Funders can actually see how much the stories they’ve funded are being both read (from traditional pageview metrics) and thought valuable enough by readers to be passed along to someone else. That share number is one number that may tell funders that their money is well placed, and that additional funding will be well used. In fact, in a earlier test of Impaq.me, with nine smaller sites hosted by INN (The Lens, Oklahoma Watch, IowaWatch, C-HIT, Raleigh Public Record, Pine Tree Watchdog, SIRF, Midwest Center, and Aspen Journalism), the number of shares per story increased on all but one site. The latest round of tests, currently underway at those six larger sites, will yield more data, as each has gotten $5,000 to be earned through shares. Here’s what’s been learned so far:
If Impaq.me is all about impact and money, then it’s got good company. There are at least two other noteworthy impact-measuring projects going on.
Chalkbeat will be rolling out the latest version of MORI next week. While it’s not (yet, at least) available for others, the lessons and intent of it — and of CIR’s Impact Tracker — are clear and useful to anyone in the business of producing meaningful journalism. Photo of a fresh impact crater on Mars by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. |
| From Nieman Reports: Detecting threads of Chinese government propaganda over time Posted: 13 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST Editor’s note: The new issue of our sister publication Nieman Reports is out and online. There’s a lot of great reading in there on a variety of subjects, but the primary focus is on the state of journalism in China, with a number of terrific reports from both Chinese journalists and foreign correspondents posted there. This week, we’ll be sharing excerpts from some of those stories that would be of the most interest to Nieman Lab readers. Here, Qian Gang, former deputy managing editor of Southern Weekly and co-director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, writes about how simple search tools can open up new perspectives on Chinese media history.
It was 1991 before I used a computer for the first time. We called this "giving up the pen," which simply meant you exchanged your pen for a keyboard and mouse. It was around that time too that I heard about an ambitious project to carry out computerized analysis on the "Dream of the Red Chamber," a work of classical Chinese literature. The idea was to arrive at different speech patterns among various characters in the novel by mapping the frequency of different types of utterances. Ten years later, in 2001, I was serving as the deputy managing editor of Southern Weekly, a relatively young commercial newspaper that had carved out a reputation as a more freewheeling publication. That year, unfortunately, a number of our reports fell afoul of Communist Party censors. After I was removed as editor, I accepted an invitation for a fellowship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, just over the border. It was in Hong Kong that I stumbled across complete historical archives on disc of the Party's official People's Daily and the People's Liberation Army Daily. I was quickly obsessed. I used the archives to hone my search skills, analyzing coverage in these two papers before and during the Cultural Revolution. The result was a full-length paper called, "The Emergence and Transformation of Red Political Terms." This experience was entirely new. In the past, relying purely on manual analysis, it had been virtually impossible to accurately determine how phrases like "Mao Zedong Thought" or "dictatorship of the proletariat" — terms that had had a deep impact on the course of the Cultural Revolution — had been used over time. Now, computer technology made it possible to enter a simple keyword and arrive at these results almost instantly. All at once, the numbers hidden within a sea of language revealed themselves. Keep reading at Nieman Reports » |
| Is Japan’s public NHK losing journalistic independence? Posted: 13 Feb 2014 06:30 AM PST One significant difference between the American news ecosystem and many of its counterparts around the world is the much smaller role played by state-funded media. NPR and PBS are a drop in the bucket compared to the U.K.’s BBC, Canada’s CBC, or Australia’s ABC.
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| Want to add a little GIF to your life? Pop might be the app for you Posted: 13 Feb 2014 05:59 AM PST The people behind Zeega are taking their mashup sensibilities into the world of mobile with Pop, a new iPhone app released today that lets users smash together the world in front of them and the World Wide Web. Pop is equal parts social and visual storytelling. Users create a Pop by snapping a photo or taking a short video, then combining their media with a GIF. (Similar to how the company is named Zeega and has a product named Zeega, in Pop you make and share a Pop. That’s right, you Pop-Pop.) When viewing a Pop, the photo or video is shown until you press on it, when the underlying GIF is revealed. The effect is a little like playing with a pop-up book you control with a tap of your finger. What’s made in Pop is mostly shared in Pop, but users can also share their creations with the outside world by tweeting, texting, or emailing a link. (Non-mobile users will have to settle for clicking and holding their cursor in place of a finger.) The app itself is similar in design and spirit to Vine, but instead of sharing six-second videos, you can express yourself through a bacon-Putin sandwich. Pop clearly shares some of the same DNA as Zeega itself, which let people remix the web by sampling videos, photos, GIFs, and audio into a new kind of digital presentation. (Zeega originally launched down the street from us here in Cambridge before the team moved out west; it won a Knight News Challenge grant in 2011.) But Pop simplifies the process, both by removing the vast majority of Zeega’s functionality and by the nature of making it mobile-first. “There’s a hunger to be able to create in the moment,” said Jesse Shapins, cofounder of Zeega and Pop. “There’s a unique power that mobile technology gives us today to record in the moment as well as be connected to the Internet.” Creating the app with mobile remixing and viewing in mind means you have to play within the limits of what is capable on a smartphone, Shapins said. Those limits, similar to the constraints that define products like Twitter, Vine, or Snapchat, are what ultimately make the apps accessible and durable, Shapins said. “We realized if we said ‘Let’s make Zeega on a phone,’ to meet that principle, we would have to change it dramatically,” Shapins said.
Where Zeega was open-ended and offered the breadth of the web, Pop is limited by a number of factors: You only get two media elements, you have to use your phone’s camera, and you get to play with a limited supply of GIFs. The GIFs in this case are supplied by Giphy, and the selection is a constantly changing mix of GIFs that are timely or trending, Shapins said. “From the beginning, we wanted to make the best experience that’s possible within the app, but also open and accessible to the web,” he said. The thread that connects Zeega and Pop is finding ways to express yourself through technology with some creativity, Shapins said. But the similarities between the two start to break from there. The company and the idea evolved over the years, from its funding from Knight and later from Matter, the media accelerator. Zeega found some success partnering with NowThis News — which used it for oddball day-in-review roundups — and being used for things like the Association for Independents in Radio’s Localore project. In particular, the project with AIR showcased Zeega’s potential as a newsroom tool that journalists could deploy for finding new ways to tell stories. But as the company shifted its focus to develop new products like Pop, some journalists were concerned about the support available for reporters using Zeega. While Zeega attracted a small audience of journalists, creatives, and the tech-inclined, Shapins said usage levels could be inconsistent at times. Zeega will continue to live on as the company further develops Pop, Shapins told me. “A challenge we saw was many people of that nature would come, fall in love with the platform for a moment, but not necessarily tie it into their daily life,” he said. The decision to change course came during Zeega’s time at Matter, where Shapins, along with co-founders Kara Oehler and James Burns, began re-evaluating and testing their original product. The decision to go mobile was influenced by the growing audience on smartphones and other devices, Shapins said. Zeega, as they had built it, was more oriented towards the world of laptops. “We saw and witnessed an interest from people to create things that maybe have a characteristic of Zeega while they are out in the world,” he said. Corey Ford, managing partner for Matter, said that coming into the accelerator, there was dissonance between what Zeega wanted to do and what the team had actually created. “They came in with a great vision, but an overly complex, bloated product in the original Zeega,” he said. But Ford said they moved quickly into reinvention, after taking advice from some of the consultants and participants at Matter to focus on mobile. “You always want to think of the context you’re designing for, and the thing about what they’re trying to do, it’s not an unlikely hypothesis to say [users] would be starting on their phone,” Ford said. Ford said he has high hopes for Pop because of the amount of time the team put into user testing and rapid prototyping during the accelerator. Of course, the next big obstacle is attracting a user base for the app. “I’m just really proud of how successfully they were able to navigate what I call the drunken walk of the entrepreneur,’” said Ford. That walk, Ford explained, is the kind of winding, unplanned, and possibly precarious way entrepreneurs make discoveries on the way to building a product. “Entrepreneurship is a discovery process — it’s not about coming up with some perfect plan and executing on that plan,” he said. |
Whether they know it or not, today’s newsletter-makers are following an interesting historical precedent: Their great model is 
I became a journalist in 1979. Back in those days, two basic skills were required of any journalist: reporting and writing. Three decades later, in an era of dramatic technological changes, these basic skills alone are no longer sufficient. Journalists now require a third basic skill: They must learn how to mine important facts and trends from the mountains of information all around them.
One other major outlet that doesn’t get as much attention here is Japan’s 
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