Nieman Journalism Lab

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Connecting place to product: Nikki Usher’s new report on the physical shifts of digital newsrooms Posted: 11 Apr 2014 07:59 AM PDT Our friend Nikki Usher is out with a new report today at the Tow Center (pdf here) on the role of physical space in newspapers making the transition from print to digital. With shrinking staffs, a desire for cultural change, and a reduced role for printing plants, lots of newsrooms have moved in recent years. What difference can a change of scenery make? As newsrooms shed their old, industrial pasts through optioning real estate, then perhaps the future for post-industrial journalism is quite bright. But if these moves are about nothing more than downsizing and loss, then we ought to be deeply concerned about the viability for quality news in the digital age, particularly from metropolitan newsrooms. The task of this paper is to explore how physical change might make a difference to the future of journalism. The goal here is to help those inside and close to the industry understand the transition newspapers are making away from their manufacturing roots and into their post-industrial present. The relationship between physical and digital space, and what it means to journalists and their work, should help us learn more about what is happening inside journalism — and hopefully offer some insights into opportunities and blind spots. Nikki’s paper builds on a number of pieces about newsroom space that have run here at Nieman Lab (one, two, three). Among the questions she addresses in the paper: — Can a move to a new physical space help to update newsroom culture? Can it serve as a digital do-over? — Does moving to a post-industrial space — abandoning the presses out in the suburbs, say — communicate something about the nature of the newspaper to readers, advertisers, and citizens? — How can the physical organization of newsroom space be optimized for breaking news online? — How important is physical space when everyone has a laptop and a smartphone, anyway? From Nikki’s conclusion: Newsroom moves matter. Journalists are storytellers and they have always crafted their own myths about the profession. If the message now for metropolitan newsrooms is digital innovation, then it may be necessary to create a very explicit break with the past. New stories need to be created to establish a new narrative about the purpose and mission of journalism. One facet of cultural change began when online journalists were integrated into the main newsroom as equal partners. This was a story of physical space just as it was one of cultural change. [...] It’s easy to get wistful about the decline of newspapers. And indeed, the loss of large newspaper buildings and their imprint on their respective cities is sad to those who have sentimental attachments to old journalism. The symbolism of these moves is incredibly meaningful to both reporters and the public. For this reason, newspapers need to tell their own stories of change. They must be able to create a tale that downsizing space is not downsizing the news.

This Week in Review: Vox and the wonk boom, and Comcast defends its TWC merger plans Posted: 11 Apr 2014 06:55 AM PDT This week’s essential reads: If you’ve only got a minute or two, this week’s essential reads are Felix Salmon on the boom in wonk journalism, David Carr with big questions for Comcast and Time Warner Cable about their merger, and Washington Post editor Marty Baron’s reasons for optimism about the future of journalism. Vox, tech, and wonk journalism: Former Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein launched his explanatory journalism site, Vox, this week, cautioning in an introductory note with co-editors Melissa Bell and Matt Yglesias that it’s still quite unfinished. The Washington Post profiled Klein’s new boss, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff, but most of the focus was on Vox’s distinctive tech. The New York Times centered on Vox Media’s internally built content management system, Chorus, which was a key tool in recruiting Klein. Ad Age looked at Vox’s “card stacks,” the system the site is using to break their explainers into digestible chunks for readers. That includes cards to note how card stacks have been altered for corrections or changing events, as Poynter reported. Initial reviews were curious but critical. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Greg Marx saw Vox as a welcome test of Klein’s argument that what news needs are more clear and helpful entry points for complex, ongoing stories. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom liked Vox’s clear purpose and “cards” organization format, but expressed concern that it’s going to have to compete with Wikipedia and lacks a personal orientation. The Wire’s Allie Jones said many of the initial cards “don’t seem to provide any information that you can’t get on Wikipedia or About.com.” PandoDaily’s Nathaniel Mott was also skeptical, referring to the cards as “glorified slideshows” and describing the style as “BuzzFeed written by a college professor.” RELATED ARTICLE Marty Baron on Ezra Klein’s departure: “The company is owned 100 percent by Jeff Bezos, so any decision to fund a new venture would be his to make” Vox’s launch also reignited the discussion about Klein’s departure from the Post after his proposal for an explanatory journalism site there was turned down. The Times article on Vox quoted Klein as saying he was “badly held back” by the technology and the culture at the Post, though it later edited it to refer to newspapers in general, not just the Post. At a conference last weekend, Post editor Marty Baron said Klein had proposed an entirely new news organization separate from the Post, rather than an expansion of his Wonkblog. Mathew Ingram said Baron’s justification makes decent financial sense, but starting sites like Vox are precisely the bets the Post should be taking in an attempt to survive the disruption of news. Similarly, Reuters’ Felix Salmon said Klein made the right decision by going with a nimbler company and voiced his doubt that the Post is the best place to develop the wonky journalism that’s so popular right now. “In general, the bigger and more entrenched the media company you're part of, the harder it is to get stuff done,” he wrote. In another piece for Politico, Salmon explained why analytical journalism like Klein’s and Nate Silver’s is experiencing a boom, and Laurie Penny of the New Statesman questioned why white men like Klein and Silver are being feted as the future of journalism: “These, it turns out, are the kind of ‘outsiders’ the old guard can cope with: outsiders who look almost exactly like them, except younger and cooler.” Comcast and the competition: Comcast and Time Warner Cable started down the regulatory road toward their proposed merger this week, appearing before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that was mostly skeptical about the value for consumers of a merger of the nation’s two largest cable TV and broadband providers. The New York Times’ David Carr asked several critical questions about the merger heading into the committee hearing, noting at one point that because of its size in the broadband market, a combined Comcast/Time Warner “may have an effective veto over the programming and technological innovations of others.” The two companies also made the case for their merger this week in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, arguing that they’ve been diligent about trying to improve their service and that they’re trying to defend themselves against the competition of streaming video services like Netflix, Roku, and Apple TV. Variety and Ars Technica gave closer looks at their arguments. Several other writers picked those arguments apart, particularly Comcast’s claim to be one of many little guys in a giant pool of competitors. The Verge’s Adi Robertson, Recode’s Amy Schatz, and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick all dissected Comcast’s list of competitors, noting that many of those competitors rely on Comcast and Time Warner for distribution of their online streaming services, and that cable providers rarely compete directly with each other because they’ve largely divvied up various geographical areas among themselves. Gigaom’s Stacey Higginbotham also had some critical questions for regulators to ask, and the Daily Dot’s Andrew Couts poked holes in Comcast’s avowed embrace of net neutrality. More than 50 groups sent a letter to the FCC objecting to the merger, and some conservative groups have joined the fight against it as well, though as BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria explained, no major TV content providers have opposed the deal. As the Sunlight Foundation’s Palmer Gibbs noted, however, Comcast and Time Warner have been very politically active, with their employees giving millions of dollars to many of the key political figures in the upcoming regulation decisions. Heartbleed’s quiet leak: Experts discovered a security bug this week, called Heartbleed, which has quietly left a great deal of the web’s encrypted information open to hackers for two years. The best explainers on Heartbleed are by Vox’s Timothy B. Lee, Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram, and NPR’s Jeremy Bowers, but here’s the very quick summary: Heartbleed is an opening in the popular OpenSSL encryption software that could let hackers into information on servers that isn’t even part of the server’s initially encrypted information. Other than changing passwords once a site has patched the leak, there’s not much users can do to protect themselves at this point — most of the work is on web companies’ ends. At Source, Mike Tigas gave some valuable tips to newsrooms on dealing with the bug on their sites. We don’t know who, if anyone, has taken advantage of Heartbleed — as Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed noted, the most likely culprit may be the U.S. National Security Agency. The New Yorker’s Rusty Foster went deeper into the roots of the bug, noting that it’s partly a function of an OpenSSL that’s run by a small group of volunteers and relies on an old and more vulnerable programming language (C). “If open-source software is at the heart of the Internet, then we might need to examine it from time to time to make sure it's not bleeding,” he wrote. Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times also addressed the difficulty of keeping the web’s security up to speed with its growth. Reading roundup: Several interesting conversations popped up around journalism and tech this week. Here are a few worth following: — Tech entrepreneur Chris Dixon lamented the dominance of apps over the mobile web, arguing that apps are governed by a rich-get-richer dynamic and subject to the whims of the keepers of the app stores. Tech blogger John Gruber disagreed, saying that whether we’re talking about apps or the mobile web, it’s all the web. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson said the shift to apps has led to less risk-taking in tech entrepreneurship, and blogger Ben Thompson argued that the web still matters for writing. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram summed up the discussion and emphasized the importance of links. — Poynter’s Howard Finberg and Lauren Klinger released a report comparing the views of journalists, journalism educators, and students about which skills are important in journalism, finding that educators view technical skills — especially multimedia — as much more important than professionals do. Meanwhile, journalism professor Mindy McAdams took a couple of looks at what multimedia journalism skills mean today and what skills are necessary for journalism students to learn. — Twitter introduced new profiles this week that emphasize photos and look a lot like Facebook’s. PandoDaily’s Nathaniel Mott said the changes are a good thing, as they “showcase a Twitter willing to move beyond its simple, what-you-see-is-what-you-get roots in order to create a more approachable service.” RELATED ARTICLE We need to talk: 26 awkward questions to ask news organizations about the move to digital — Finally, several great reads to look at this weekend: Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark on what it takes to create a new mode of journalism and whether data journalism qualifies, Adrienne LaFrance on rethinking online news archives, News Corp.’s Raju Narisetti with 26 key questions to ask about news organizations’ move to digital, and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron on reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism. Photos of “Wonky” sign in Los Angeles by Payton Chung and Comcast remote by MoneyBlogNewz used under a Creative Commons license.

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