Selasa, 18 Maret 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

When robots help human journalists: “This post was created by an algorithm written by the author”

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 11:23 AM PDT

The East Coast woke up this morning to news that an earthquake had hit Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, folks woke up to…an actual earthquake. But who broke that story?

Indeed, Ken Schwencke, programmer and journalist at the Los Angeles Times, has been using a bot for more than a year to auto-report and publish newswire-type stories about earthquakes in California.

Schwenke continues to pursue the possibilities for robot reporting at the Times, even considering the possibility of having one bot talk to another.

New/s Disruptors wants to change the way we think about diversity, tech, and media

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 09:15 AM PDT

Sabrina Hersi Issa and Jeanne Brooks launched a new website over the weekend called New/s Disruptors. Here’s what they’ve said so far:

New/s Disruptors is a project dedicated to re-framing the narrative of digital disruption in the news industry using a human-centered, community-first approach. N/D will incorporate storytelling and aims to develop valuable audience insights for the journalism industry, develop curriculum and training materials and build a deeper connection between journalism, technology and the public.

Hersi Issa went on NPR’s Tell Me More over the weekend to officially announce the launch, and to talk about “why the majority of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are men, and how to encourage young women to consider coding and computer science careers.”

In a live tweet during the NPR show, she expanded a little bit on some of their motivations and plans:

In an email, Brooks wrote the first step for News Disruptors will be “listening sessions which will begin this summer, the output will be in the form of a digital periodical and events.”

Know which way the wind blows: Journalists need to think more critically about weather maps

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 08:30 AM PDT

Everybody’s talking about the weather.

Weather.com is exploding with content, from longform to short docs to clickbait. Gawker just started a weather blog called The Vane. BuzzFeed recently launched BuzzFeed Storm (“A weather wire for the social web”) and, with fewer than 300 tweets, already boasts four thousand followers. And, as Charlie Warzel reported in BuzzFeed last month, Slate and Mashable are also hiring meteorologists-cum-bloggers.

There are a lot of converging factors that make this the right moment for a digital meteorology explosion. On the one hand, weather is emotional — it affects everyone, and it affects everyone personally. Storms can be both frightening and beautiful, and tend to produce compelling images for the increasingly visual web. Those factors make weather stories ripe for sharing on social platforms.

On the other hand, weather is also quantifiable. We can predict, to an extent, what weather is going to come, and we can measure it — be it in wind speeds or inches of precipitation. It is, in other words, a data-rich field that’s getting richer all the time; as the tools of data journalism continue to advance and popularize, journalists will be able to tell an increasing number of different stories about the weather.

On top of that, we’re living in the age of climate change, which means weather events have all kinds of governmental and political repercussions.

Stephen Stirling is the data weather reporter for NJ.com and The Star Ledger. He says weather nerds are typically defined by their “fascination with the unpredictable.” Weather, both climatology and meteorology, is an addictive topic precisely because of its combination of predictability and mystery. He compares tracking the two in tandem to a man walking a dog. “The dog is going to go all over the place; the man is going to follow a trend,” he says.

jersey shore hurrican news
Journalists of the Jersey Shore: How a novice reporter built a news network from scratch
Stirling was a county reporter in New Jersey before he got training as a data reporter at NICAR a few years ago. “I’ve been a weather nerd my whole life,” he says. When management at the paper realized how much traffic weather stories were getting, he was happy to step up. After the wreckage to the state caused by hurricanes Irene and Sandy, Stirling says he saw a growing audience for weather coverage. “Stories about the weather get more traffic than Chris Christie,” he says.

Nerding out about the weather online has a long and hallowed history. “There’s an intense community of nerds who have been on the Internet, since it existed, talking about the weather,” Stirling says. Social platforms, as they tend to do, helped bring some of these nerds out of the darkness, and into the public eye. Consider one self-identified “16 year old AMATEUR Meteorologist who loves studying weather,” with 14,000 likes on Facebook, or Weatherboy Weather, established circa 1991, according to his profile, with 165,000 likes.

Big accounts like these help stories about weather make their way across the web, and drive traffic for publishers. But lately, Stirling and other weather writers have begun to notice a worrisome trend. As with all things on the Internet, lots of important context can be lost when tantalizing bits of information are flung from account to account. This can be especially problematic when that information comes in the form of forecast maps, which sometimes seem to portend dire straits — like, for example, massive, potentially dangerous amounts of snow.

Stirling wrote a series of stories about this issue in February with titles like, “Monster blizzard headed to NJ? Probably not, but social media may tell you otherwise,” “The mammoth NJ blizzard that never was and will not be,” and finally “The NJ blizzard that wasn’t: The anatomy of a social media misfire.”

An Accuweather meteorologist had posted a forecast map to Facebook that predicted up to 30 inches of snow in parts of New Jersey. Because of the way forecast models work, maps that predict big storms are actually very easy to make. “If you were to take any point in time during the winter, seven to ten days out, you can probably find one forecast model that will show a ginormous storm,” Stirling says.

bad-weather-predictions

The image — thanks to those big weather enthusiast accounts — went viral. Eventually, Gawker posted the picture as well (“NYC Will Get Either 3 or 30 Inches of Snow This Weekend”). The problem was, the map was…wrong. Eventually, the National Weather Service eventually had to release a statement regarding false rumors of a storm, something Stirling says they’ve almost never had to do before.

“The National Weather Service in New Jersey and New York were flooded with phone calls. Emergency managers in New Jersey were flooded with phone calls,” he says. “Everyone believed this monster blizzard was coming to New Jersey, even though it was never actually forecast.”

As digital mapmaking technologies and data analysis tools advance, it becomes easier for anyone to create official-looking forecast images that, in actuality, aren’t representative of reliable science. Without a meteorologist standing by to explain, people tend to assume the maps are showing something that’s true, rather than something that has a very limited statistical chance of possibly being true.

“The problems arise when someone produces a map with one of these tools that can be misleading to the public, which unfortunately happens far too often.  Sometimes it's an accidental misinterpretation, but increasingly, it's to draw attention to one's Facebook or Twitter page or even to just watch it spread undue panic,” wrote Stirling in an email.

The Vane (Gawker’s weather blog) recently published a post called, “The 5 Best Sites for Awesome Weather Graphics,” that highlighted the very websites that make producing these images so easy. Writes Gawker’s Dennis Mersereau of popular weather sites, “while a good portion of them are freaky conspiracy websites run by high schoolers with inexplicably large followings, there are some true gems that many weather enthusiasts have yet to discover.” The websites mentioned include MODIS Today, Twister Data, and WeatherBELL — the predictive modeling image generator that was used to make the viral hoax snowstorm image.

Stirling agrees that these websites contain both good and bad: “Data in and of itself isn't dangerous — it's what you do with it. These sites are great tools. MODIS, for example, has some absolutely beautiful imagery on it that I'd encourage anyone who likes to marvel at our planet to peruse,” he says. “The trick is getting the general public to understand what a trusted source is and what isn't.”

For journalists, it’s important to realize that there are a variety of compelling stories weather data can tell beyond apocalyptic predictions. Ian Livingston of The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang explored some of those other options during a panel discussion with Stirling at this year’s NICAR conference.

“They make some cool maps, but they also create high resolution imagery for every city, so you can basically rip these maps and post them without explanation,” says Livingston of the map generation sites. “As weather becomes more viral, we have to be really careful. Debunking stuff like this can be just as good as anything else.”

In February, instead of merely cut-and-pasting news of a tornado in Maryland, he used a GIS overlay to put into historical context, and found that it “was only the second reported in February in Maryland during the modern record which goes back to 1950.” He’s also found that snowfall total maps can be very popular. “People are obsessed with this ‘in my backyard’ idea of where snow has fallen, even after a storm,” he said.

Says Stirling, “The obvious weather story is: It’s fucking cold. But you’re not going to tell anybody anything they don’t know, because they’ve been outside today. But if you write that story, that it’s fucking cold, you can add context with data — how cold is it? You can articulate that fact, that this is exceptionally cold for this time of year in this region.”

In terms of debunking, Stirling says journalists can rely on experts, like the National Weather Service or academics. “If you look at something, and you see something going around that seems like bullshit, ask more about it before you go ahead and write about it.”

Image created via MODIS Today.

Busting some myths about getting nonprofit status for a news organization

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 07:57 AM PDT

The financial crisis and the attendant collapse of the newspaper business model led to the formation of a lot of new nonprofit news organizations, from big guns like ProPublica to lots of smaller local investigative reporting outfits. But it didn’t take long to figure out that the IRS was having trouble figuring out what to do with all these new applications for 501(c)(3) status. Delays grew from months to years (in the most extreme cases), and some were rejected outright.

But there’s been another shift recently: The IRS is speeding up and letting more news nonprofits through in a timely fashion. Yay! That doesn’t mean it’s suddenly become an dead-simple process to navigate, though.

Which is where our friends down the street at the Digital Media Law Project come in: They’ve just released a new set of guides and tools to help news orgs figure out if nonprofit status is right for them and, if so, how best to go about obtaining it:

None of these resources is intended to allow a journalism non-profit to go it alone; with all that has happened at the IRS, the agency process is too tangled for a news venture to expect success without professional assistance. These resources will help journalism ventures to better understand what the agency is looking for, so that they can adjust their operations properly and be prepared to work with an attorney.

The guide includes this nifty video that explains the state of play today — important viewing for anyone thinking about going down this path:

Q&A: Engin Önder and Zeynep Tufekci on 140journos and the state of journalism in Turkey

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 07:00 AM PDT

Engin Önder is not a journalist, and he’ll be the first to tell you that. (“No way,” he said, laughing, when I asked.) Instead, Önder, who cofounded the Turkish citizen journalism platform 140journos, considers himself a citizen acting journalistically to share information and spark discussions about political issues in Turkey.

“None of us on our team has any intention of being a journalist, and the way we practice stuff unconsciously already includes some of the teachings and principles of journalism,” he said. “And it’s better to explore this stuff without knowing the journalism principles, because it’s not a journalism project, actually — it’s a communication project. This is our communication proposal. None of us has to have a background in journalism to offer a method, a language of communication.”

Önder and his two cofounders were inspired to launch 140journos after a December 2011 incident when Turkish fighter jets killed civilians along the Turkey–Syria border, an event that went virtually uncovered by the professional media in Turkey. Önder had already cofounded the Institute of Creative Minds, which is dedicated to facilitating discussions in the public space. They saw the Internet as an extension as of that space and began posting updates from rallies, court hearings, and other events directly to their Twitter account, whose character limit is the source of the 140 in their name.

140journos gained notoriety among the Turkish media during a controversial trial that Önder livetweeted. The judge was not pleased that the trial was being tweeted, so he kicked credentialed media out of the courtroom. Önder, not credentialed, continued to tweet.

But 140journos really didn’t take off until last summer’s massive Gezi Park protests in Istanbul. Until then, 140journos really only used tweets generated by the group’s core members. But once the protests began in earnest, 140journos began receiving information from people on the ground in Gezi Park, Taksim Square, and elsewhere around Turkey. 140journos posted 401 tweets in May 2013; in June 2013, when the protests started, they posted 2,218.

With the influx of information from their followers, 140journos’ purpose shifted. “Our function has changed into curation, storytelling, and verifying,” Önder said. They now have a growing network of 300 or so contributors across Turkey who tweet information, photos, videos, and more at 140journos, which then sends it out to its audience of more than 40,000 Twitter followers. The core team has also grown to seven, so there is always somebody running their Twitter account and filtering the information coming in.

140journos is now slated to release a beta version of a mobile app this month, ahead of local elections on March 30. The app will allow users to submit geo-located photos and videos. The app will allow users to see the submitted content on a map that will also show local pharmacies, weather forecasts and other information. 140 Journos is also partnering with two groups of about 3,500 volunteers monitoring the upcoming local elections to test the app.

Önder and University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci spoke last week in an event we cosponsored at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. They discussed the role of citizen journalism in Turkey, censorship in the Turkish media, and what’s next for 140journos. What follows is an edited transcript of a group conversation after Önder’s presentation and a separate interview I conducted with the pair. One of the key questions raised: Is what 140journos does journalism?

Zeynep Tufekci: I’ll go with Jay Rosen’s definition: If you’re telling people who aren’t there about something that’s happening that’s a form of journalism. I’m less concerned about what the boundary is and more concerned about how we create a healthy civic sphere.
Question: There’s not a right answer or a wrong answer, but I’m sure many people doing something similar to 140journos would say that they’re a journalist.
Tufekci: Part of the case is the context in this country, that the journalists weren’t doing their job. It’s not something to aspire to. A journalist is what the editor tells them to do in Turkey — whereas here they’re explicitly defining themselves as not what the editor tells them to do. So if that’s how you define what a journalist is, then they’re not journalists.
Question: Is local media feeling any shame or any pressure from citizen media? Are you seeing any changes in behavior of Turkish television stations and newspapers, particularly after Gezi has been covered by citizen media?
Önder: The CEO of CNN Türk, Ferhat Boratav, underestimates citizen journalism. He probably sees it as a threat to their existence. I heard this in a personal conversation that he blames citizen journalism with providing misinformation, poisoning the public. So he’s very mad at citizen journalism.

But aside from this, among media workers, employees, there is a trend that they become pirates because they feel so ashamed. They have studied for this. They are professionals. They cover whatever is going on. They share it with the editor in the plaza, in the skyscraper, in the media holding, and the editor, who gets orders from the top, says we can’t publish this. They feel so ashamed about the existing situation in their profession, and they become pirate journalists.

There is a group of 10 very professional correspondents, working for big news channels in Turkey, who are our anonymous contributors. That makes me happy, and they are relieved because they are saying, “I’m getting paid, but my news is not published.” It’s so sad.

Tufekci: There has been a significant change since Gezi. Not in the sense that they’re on top of everything — but I’m seeing more actual news being carried live. In my read, it’s partly them, because if they hide it, everyone knows they’re hiding it. Their censorship is very visible. Also, people marched. People marched to these news stations and waved money at them and said, “We’ll pay you — just do your job.” I think they were a catalyst in that they made it clear what the censorship was, but it also became a movement. There was so much anger toward them that the line they have to walk has shifted. They can’t be as bad as they were before.

Yesterday on CNN Türk, they interviewed the father of the youth who was killed, which was a big deal. I can’t imagine him being on live TV a year ago — which is such a minor thing. It’s clearly news. But it’s shifted and I think you’re part of it.

Önder: There is some dust of courage in the mainstream media, but more importantly, citizens are more aware — and rather than marching to the headquarters of news channels, they just share what they see. It’s just more effective, in my opinion.
Tufekci: Also, in Gezi, just to corroborate, I’ve seen people show me their wounds from tear gas canisters. And I asked what happened, and they said, “Oh, I went to the front lines.” “Why did you go?” “So I could send a picture.” So people are taking risks sometimes to document events. They are not just chancing upon things. When they hear of something, they go. I have pictures of people’s leg gashes from citizen journalism.
Question: Have any professional journalists had any discussions about setting up more independent journalism operations?
ÖnderThere was excitement after Gezi, and all the attempts refer to the Gezi Park protests and the demand people expressed from the mainstream media about coverage. But I think this is a false inspiration. The ones who protested the attitude of news channels in front of their headquarters are plaza workers — white collar, and they protested at lunchtime. This isn’t so courageous. That’s why I think this is a false inspiration.

Gezi was a 15-day dream from different perspectives. We learned so much stuff, but still there is this lack of finance and people are in fear of starting something but then failing. They don’t want to fail. We are observing some attempts in our social circles — journalism professionals are discussing this. They’re sharing ideas with us and are asking if they can use our content in their platform to be created at some time. But generally there is no clear, sustainable plan. Getting inspiration from Gezi, in that sense, may be manipulative. But I have faith in Turkish alternative media if they focus in creating a media without any monetary basis.

Question: That alternative media is volunteer based?
Önder: All volunteer based. We are still making our livings from other electronic arts projects. We don’t make money out of this. I came here for a variety of purposes, but one of them is to meet our coder, who lives in New York. We have developed a beta version for a qualified citizen journalism app. Before the local elections at the end of this month, we will release a beta version for our regular content producers. We want them to test the product, and according to their feedback we will add more facilities. We have a big plan, but the first beta version is more primitive.
Question: Do you have plans to sell ads or monetize in any other way?
Önder: The first concern is to create content. I’m making my life from somewhere else. I want people to be aware, and we have created a brand for this somehow, and it’s time to make it more qualified. I don’t care about money so much. It took like two years to find the most appropriate coder, because they only think about how they can make money. But now our team is consisted of realistic and idealistic people and I’m so happy about this.
Question: Do you feel a sense of responsibility toward the people contributing? Aren’t they possibly entering dangerous situations?
Önder: They are not happy with the course of the country, and they think if they share what they see, it might matter. If I record police violence and it circulates on the web, it creates an awareness and people increase their voice to the government, to the police, to the unlawful acts.
Question: Is there more pressure or responsibility to verify the content coming in from your sources?
Önder: This is what we pay attention to the most. We are not journalists, but we are practicing one of the principles. We saw what misinformation could lead to. This is very scary. To get to the point we desire, we have to give correct information to the people following us. If we give correct information, they will understand each other better. That’s the criteria.

If we don’t know what to do about specific information, we ask if it goes toward our ultimate purpose of creating empathy between societies, between people, between communities in Turkey, between minorities and majorities. That’s the only self-interrogation that we carry out on every occasion.

Question: How do you anticipate the new Internet laws affecting your content and your ability to share information? And are you taking any preventative steps to make sure things don’t go awry if the government goes after you?
Önder: We have friends from the Pirate Party in Turkey, and they are giving us alternative ways to share the content. The most commonly known is VPN, but there is other stuff. But the point is that the law passed. Practically, we haven’t seen any effect yet. Once we see, I can say something. It can be interpreted in so many ways. The sentences in this awful law can be interpreted in many abusive ways. We haven’t seen any effect yet though.
Tufekci: They think they’re going to archive Twitter. We shall see what happens. It’s really, really murky, but this is something not secret — there’s a lot of suspicion that they’re offloading the Internet anyway, so mining Twitter is more of a means to legally prosecute people, which is different than having access to the data. The Internet backbone goes through the ministry, so they have the stuff, but it’s not always in a court-admissable form. The new law is about making the surveillance court-admissable and also making it the work of ISPs, because it is a huge infrastructure.
Önder: I don’t think we’re doing anything illegal. We are just sharing the content we see. Unlike Anonymous, we are not anonymous. We are in front of the public with our names. We give interviews. It takes like five seconds to find my house address on the Internet, probably. We are not hiding from anybody, and because of this content culture of sharing neutral information without any commentary, ministers are following us. Ministers of this conservative government are following us, because their channels are not covering the social issues.

Önder’s Berkman talk was not recorded, but he gave a similar talk recently at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Here’s a video of that discussion:

Photo of Engin Önder by Zeynep Tufekci.

In Brazil, a group of reporters is trying to build an independent platform for in-depth content

Posted: 17 Mar 2014 06:00 AM PDT

Editor’s note: This story was originally published at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

When journalists meet to talk about the future of the profession, the conversation often turns pessimistic: shrinking newsrooms and fewer spaces for in-depth reporting are some of the most common complaints. But some see the crisis in traditional journalism a source of opportunities. This vision brought together four Brazilian reporters and a French engineer around a project: Indie Journalism.

During a recent conversation on Google Hangouts — where Indie’s team members normally meet since they live in different cities — the group’s members shared their ultimate goal: to create a platform for both readers interested in long-form journalism and journalists interested in producing it. More than that, the site is betting on developing a new business model and a new kind of digital journalism product.

Breno Costa, a reporter with Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and one of the journalists behind the initiative, explained that it emerged as a response to the old model that has led newspapers to cut pages and reporters and produce fewer in-depth stories every day.

Costa, along with the three other journalists behind Indie — Andrei Netto, the Paris correspondent for Brazilian newspaper Estadão; Felipe Seligman, a Folha reporter in Brasilia; and Fernando Mello, also with Folha — have spent most of their careers at large print media outlets in Brazil. From the inside, they’ve been able to identify some areas for improvement.

“The crisis is knocking on our door, and we still haven’t seen the light at the end of the tunnel,” Netto says. “It’s up to us journalists to find our own way. I’m not saying newspapers are going to disappear — in fact, I think it’s not going to be that way. But the fact is that each media format has its strength, and it has become difficult for the large media outlets to invest in in-depth reporting because their structures were specifically designed to mainly deliver hard news.”

According to him, there aren’t enough journalism companies focusing exclusively in producing special reports and experimenting to find new relationships between different journalistic formats, like text, photo essays, and documentaries. That will be Indie’s mission, he said.

The platform will work as a digital newsroom for independent journalists to self-publish their investigations. Even though the team is not currently revealing specific details about the project, Breno said the stories will come from two sources: from journalists working at or invited by Indie, and from independent journalists who will self-publish their stories without requiring Indie’s approval. Still, he said, “we’re going to act like trustees to guarantee the quality of the publications.”

Netto summed up the initiative as a digital publisher that will seek to fill the need for high-quality narratives, following the examples of sites like The Atavist and Byliner in the U.S. and Mediapart in France.

The price of good stories

Indie expects reader payments to be the main source of income for the project. It will offer its readers a menu of different topics for in-depth investigations for them to choose and pay for. Seligman said that what motivated them to create Indie was in part their faith that good information will always have an audience and that journalists will continue to be its mediators: “We believe there are people who recognize the value of long investigations and are willing to pay a fair price for them, and we believe that we will attain this value. It is a bet based on what we have seen, but also on the future behavior of the users.”

In the beginning, the platform will not have a space for advertising. Mark Sangarne, the only non-journalist in the group and the person responsible for the group’s business plan, said that one possibility would be to add value to the stories using technology and a good digital marketing strategy: “We don’t know what the ideal business model will be for the journalism of the future, but we have a good idea on how to make Indie sustainable and we’re going to experiment.”

Besides the direct sale of stories, Indie will have a technology branch that will produce its own apps and a laboratory to finance innovations in journalism. The group is also considering the possibility of offering consulting services to companies that are looking for new digital products and making partnerships to share content with traditional media outlets.

To improve its visual skillset, Indie’s five founders invited to the team André Liohn, an award-winning Brazilian journalist who will be in charge of editing pictures, and Tomás Silva, the art director who will design the platform.

“We have to approach the art of journalism with the goal of transmitting information with the highest degree of refinement possible,” Netto said. “There are subjective ways to complement objective content.” If it were up to the group, there’d be more Snow Falls.

The platform is still under construction; the team said the site will be launched by mid-year.
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