Rabu, 23 April 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

“The Golden Era of ‘Fashion Blogging’ Is Over”

Posted: 22 Apr 2014 01:44 PM PDT

That’s the claim of Pulitzer-winning critic Robin Givhan in a piece at New York:

These fashion guerillas hoisted their digital cameras, their iPhones, and their iPads aloft in order to capture the drama on the runway — and its environs — and transmit it directly to their followers. They live-blogged and they tweeted and they initiated a real-time conversation where once only silence existed. The first generation of bloggers, such as Bryan Yambao, Susanna Lau, Tavi Gevinson, and Scott Schuman were contrarians. In their words and images, there was an earnest and raw truth that did not exist in traditional outlets. They had unique points of view and savvy marketing strategies. They had a keen awareness of how technology could help them attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of like-minded fashion fans who had been shut out of the conversation…

Slowly, the legacy media fought back. Editors went on the offensive. Glamour editor Cindi Leive, Lucky's Eva Chen, Joe Zee (formerly of Elle), Nina Garcia of Marie Claire — the very people who once were envied for their front-row view of fashion week — were now tapping out quips and bon mots to all who would listen. Legacy editors began watching the runway from the backside of their iPhone cameras as they shared their up-close views with the virtual world. Critics, instead of reserving their droll commentary for post-show dinner patter, now spewed it fast and succinctly on Twitter.

I note this not because fashion criticism is a particular interest of mine (just look at me!), but because it’s an instance of a well worn cycle: Slow incumbents leave room for insurgent newcomers. Some insurgent newcomers get co-opted and join incumbents. Others lose interest. Incumbents learn from the newcomers, and the advantages of the new class get blunted. Reminds me a lot of what we saw with political blogging in the early-to-mid 2000s, for instance: Some got hired by Big Media, others got bored, others provided the roadmap for older outlets to start their own political blogs. And then the cycle repeats when a new wave comes along.

The Establishment…will not give up ground easily. And mostly, newcomers are drawn to fashion, not because they are determined to change it, but because they are mesmerized by it. They want to be the next Anna Wintour — not make her existence obsolete. They love fashion. And fashion loves them back. Then swallows them whole.

How is user-generated content used in TV news?

Posted: 22 Apr 2014 11:18 AM PDT

The Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism School is out with Act 1 of a new report that examines the ways TV news organizations and online media companies employ user-generated content. “Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User-Generated Content in TV News and Online” is a survey of over 1,000 hours of TV and more than 2,200 online pages from channels like Al Jazeera (Arabic and English), BBC World, CNN International, France 24, NHK World, and TeleSUR.

While the report finds that UGC is used daily, there's no consistent method of labeling material from the audience or crediting those individuals. And the reasons why news channels air user-generated content — and how they discover it — vary widely.

User-generated content is used when other pictures are not available, as the ongoing reliance on it to cover the Syrian conflict demonstrates. The way that UGC was integrated during coverage of the Glasgow helicopter crash and the razing of Lenin's statue in Kiev during the Ukrainian protests suggests that UGC is often employed as a stopgap before news agency pic- tures emerge—interestingly, even if the professional ones are less dramatic. This was demonstrated during the coverage of Nelson Mandela's death. The news organizations had so much material stockpiled from planning for the event that there was no need to seek out UGC. This, even though there were compelling pictures filmed by people on the streets of South Africa documenting the way the country was reacting to Mandela's death.

UGC also inspired stories that would otherwise have been ignored, as long as the pictures were compelling enough. Within our sample there were a handful of stories that were driven solely by the UGC that emerged. Some were kicker stories like one about a ship's cook who was unexpect- edly found alive by a dive team sent to investigate a sunken ship. Others were shocking cases of police brutality captured through secret filming on camera phones.

Researchers found that the majority of content came from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, but that many outlets also rely on agencies like Storyful, the Eurovision Newsexchange, or Reuters to supply user-generated material as well. You can read the rest of this part of the report here; the full report comes out May 30.

Why Vox (and other news orgs) could use a librarian

Posted: 22 Apr 2014 08:00 AM PDT

The facts of the present won’t sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

—William Macneile Dixon

Every 45 years, roughly half of the medical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis is disproven or becomes out of date.

“This is about twice the half-life of the actual radioisotope samarium-151,” writes Samuel Arbesman in his book, “The Half-Life of Facts.”

Arbesman’s book argues that we can measure the obsolescence of knowledge and facts the same way we measure radioactive decay. “It turns out knowledge is a lot like radioactive atoms because it decays over time,” he wrote in a Harvard Business Review article adapted from the book. “And when we’re dealing with large amount of facts and information, we can actually predict how long it will take for it to spread or decay by applying the laws of mathematics.”

Researchers came up with the 45-year calculation for cirrhosis and hepatitis after studying medical journal articles and determining the rate at which findings faded away over time.

We don’t have the same calculations for news articles, but the recent launch of Vox.com provided an interesting bit of data.

The half-life of cardstacks

In their launch post, the site’s cofounders described Vox as an effort to “build the vast repository of information that will make it possible for us to explain the news in real time.”

They want to provide a comprehensive place to read the latest news while also enabling people to understand the context thanks to explainers (formatted as card stacks) offering the necessary background. It’s real-time news plus rapidly updated topic pages.

It’s also a huge challenge, due to the rapid decay of facts related to news stories and current events.

To attain its goal, Vox has to create and maintain in close to real time stacks of cards about an ever-evolving and increasing set of topics related to public policy, politics, world events, and myriad other areas. Adding to the challenge is the reality that facts about these topics will change at any given moment due to a news event, or something more obscure, such as a government report or academic research paper.

For example, soon after Vox’s launch, a card about the crisis in Ukraine needed to be updated to reflect new facts. Since then, another card in that stack was updated “to reflect a UN draft report on election abuses in Crimea’s referendum vote.” In all, there have been five Ukraine cards updated and one added in about two weeks. A card stack about income inequality has been updated three times. (Not all those updates were a result of new facts coming to light, but they nevertheless required someone to make changes.)

The gender wage gap card stack hasn’t yet had any changes, but its final card is entitled “What else should I be reading about the wage gap?” That reading list will need to stay current in order to offer value. (There’s also a joke to be made about the number of updates that a card stack about Congressional dysfunction will warrant — but I’ll just note that so far it’s been updated once.)

As a point of comparison, I asked David Cohn, chief content officer of mobile news app Circa, how many times they’ve made new updates to their ever-evolving story about the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. Cohn said they’ve officially made more than 20 updates since the flight went missing on March 8. He added that the number of changes to the story would be even higher if you counted each tweak and addition.

The faster a card stack is overcome by new facts, the more frequently the Vox team will need to make updates. The more card stacks they create, the more complicated it will be to keep all of them current.

“We want them very basic,” Klein told New York magazine when asked about the kind of topics they will tackle in card stacks. That means a lot of card stacks — and a lot of facts and knowledge to manage. As of this writing, there are 17 card stacks displayed on the Vox’s “cards” page, though that’s not the full count of what they’ve produced. Vox could easily get to 50 card stacks by the end of the month. And on and on and on…

This is what it means to aspire to a “vast repository of information.” It makes the 45-year half-life for cirrhosis research seem downright glacial. It’s not hard to imagine a card stack having a half-life of 45 hours due to new developments. Others may be current for weeks or even months. Then, suddenly, they’ll need to be updated. Someone at Vox is going to need to know which card stacks to update when, and to deploy the right person(s) it quickly. Otherwise, they’ll have out-of-date explainers. No one wants a vast repository of old information.

A managing editor for facts?

This knowledge management challenge is arguably new to news writing. But it’s familiar territory to librarians — a particular species whose ranks have been thinned out in newsrooms.

“[I]n the 1970s librarians everywhere were coping with the very real implications of the exponential growth of knowledge: Their libraries were being inundated,” writes Arbesman in his book. He continues:

They needed ways to figure out which volumes they could safely discard. If they knew the half-life of a book or article’s time of obsolescence, it would go a long way to providing a means to avoid overloading a library’s capacity. Knowing the half-lives of a library’s volumes would give a librarian a handle on how long books should be kept before they are just taking up space on the shelves, without being useful.

In the context of Vox, it’s less about space constraints and knowing what to discard; it’s about the challenge of unlimited topics and the rapid obsolescence of facts related to those topics.

This presents an intriguing challenge: How can Vox keep all of its card stacks as up to date as possible with the least amount of time and effort? What triggers will they use to know which ones to update? Can they begin to predict the update patterns of card stacks in specific topic areas, much like the researchers did with cirrhosis?

I asked Vox cofounder Melissa Bell about the challenge of keeping an ever-growing number of card stacks factually up to date. But this very challenge is one of the things keeping her too busy to talk right now.

“Thank you so much for your interest in my site, and that’s a great question, but the truth is: I am drowning right now,” she wrote back. “I just don’t have a spare second right now. (I need to get to work on making sure we’re meeting that challenge!)”

So, allow me to offer a couple of suggestions without the benefit of insider knowledge. (Which means my facts may soon be obsolete!)

One option for Vox over time is to recruit and reward a Wikipedia-like retinue of volunteer editors who can demonstrate the relevant knowledge to own specific card stacks. To hear Klein talk, Wikipedia is in his sights. “I think it’s weird that the news cedes so much ground to Wikipedia,” he said in the interview with New York magazine.

At Wikipedia, there are an average of 96 edits per minute to articles on the English site. In 2012, it had over 75,000 editors who made at least five contributions to the site in the span of a month.

It’s not hard to understand why news currently cedes the explainer market to Wikipedia. Explaining requires scale and speed to keep pace with the half-life of facts.

The celebrated product folks at Vox Media have an opportunity (or perhaps an imperative) to create a system that helps deploy the right human resources to the right card stacks when needed, and to enable people to ignore the ones that can be left alone. Otherwise, it will be incredibly difficult to scale their explanatory efforts.

Maybe that means a scheduling function for card stacks whereby the owner(s) is reminded that they haven’t updated in x days or weeks. Maybe it means notifications tied to Google Alerts or other sources as a way to nudge a certain card stack to the top of the pile, based on fact-based activity.

One thing I hope happens is that they collect data about card changes — in order to get a sense of the half-life of card stacks and the facts therein. This would guide their efforts, but my admittedly selfish desire is to have better data about the half-life of facts related to newsworthy topics. How will marijuana legalization compare to income inequality? What about the Pope versus bitcoin? Global warming versus fracking?

A final suggestion with no self-interest is that co-founders Melissa Bell, Ezra Klein, and Matthew Yglesias go looking for a research librarian/editor to become their managing editor for facts. After all, who better than a librarian to manage an ever-growing card catalogue?

Creating a new brand for financial news, in Michigan of all places

Posted: 22 Apr 2014 07:00 AM PDT

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — Carl Icahn is not pleased. On this Monday morning in early March the activist investor is taking to CNBC to respond to eBay after it rejected his bid to remove some members of its board.

This is a big news event for Benzinga, a network of financial news and information sites, and a handful of staffers have crowded around the news desk to watch the interview unfold.

“Good answer, good answer,” Benzinga CEO and founder Jason Raznick says to nobody in particular as Icahn avoids a leading question from the anchor.

Benzinga_Logo_2Raznick started the company in his basement in 2010, and it’s grown to include three separate platforms: Benzinga, a free site featuring news-you-can-use investment tips, both aggregated and original content; Benzinga Pro, a subscription service that has a constantly updated feed of financial news; and Marketfy, an online marketplace where investors can solicit products and trading advice from experts called “mavens.”

Within the first two minutes Icahn is on the air, a Benzinga Pro analyst, who sits before a bank of eight computer monitors, sends out four alerts to subscribers. That afternoon, a news story covering Icahn’s comments was posted to Benzinga.com.

“Anytime they do an interview [with Icahn] there could be something big,” says Jake L’Ecuyer, who oversees Benzinga Pro.

But unlike other media organizations covering the Icahn-eBay brouhaha and finance in general, Benzinga is not headquartered in a skyscraper high above Wall Street or Midtown Manhattan. Instead, Benzinga is run out of a squat one-story building in an office park just north of Detroit. It also maintains a small space in Chicago and a one-person office in Delaware.

Raznick initially bootstrapped the company, later securing investments including a $1.5 million investment in 2011 from Lightbank, the venture fund started by the founders of Groupon.

The company breaks even — or is slightly cash-flow positive — on a month-to-month basis, Raznick said. Benzinga is in the process of securing additional investors though Raznick said he could not disclose who he was meeting with since negotiations are ongoing.

But attracting additional investment has not been a top priority for Benzinga since the company is able to support itself in its current iteration, said COO Fernando Prieto, who joined last November with a mandate to “put metrics and data in the company.”

“If you ask a venture capital fund, they would probably not want you to focus on profit and just to focus on growth, but I think there’s a conflict of interest there because they have 20 companies in their portfolio,” Prieto said. “If you go bust, another company may make up for you if they get extra return on their investment. But for us, having the option to raise more money or just keep doing what we’re doing — you know, sign a few more deals and licensing deals, and then hire more people as soon as we can actually afford them — that gives us options.”

Benzinga has about 40 employees, in addition to a network of contributors, and it’s looking to grow. Still, the company prides itself on its startup mentality. “You can eat what you kill here,” Raznick told me.

And despite its drab exterior, even Benzinga’s spacious open-plan office and work culture look and feel like a stereotypical startup with brightly painted blue and orange walls and gaudy orange couches as well as ping pong, air hockey, and foosball tables. Recently, when I called the number listed on the Benzinga Pro website to inquire about a subscription, Raznick was the one to answer the phone.

A native of metro Detroit, Raznick says he’s committed to the area, and the company is now looking at moving into Detroit itself or to Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, which is about 40 miles west of Detroit.

“We could be in Chicago or New York and recruiting would be a little easier, doing interviews would be easier, but we really want to impact the outcome here,” Raznick said.

In addition to looking to hire a number additional developers to continue to build out its products, Benzinga is also looking to expand its editorial staff by hiring up to 10 people this year, including an executive editor, Raznick said. (As a metro Detroit native myself, he even asked me several times if I knew anyone who may be interested in working for Benzinga.)

Benzinga gets about 1 million unique visitors per month to its free site, Raznick said, but the company also has licensing deals for its content with CNN Money, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, and others. With all its partnerships, he says Benzinga content is seen by about 10 million users monthly.

The content partnerships all link back to Benzinga’s site — Prieto said he expects Benzinga’s traffic to continue to grow as the company plans to ink more partnership deals.

“That gives us the ability to take that traffic, monetize it with advertising revenue or create free leads for Benzinga Pro or our Marketfy products,” Prieto said, noting that they will use the products to promote one another. For instance, many of the Marketfy Mavens write columns on Benzinga.com that are available for free.

The site was initially focused on covering only smaller companies with market caps of $300 million to $2 billion or so. But Benzinga has expanded its coverage to include investment tips and more as the sites it partnered with wanted additional content.

“We’re trying to bring that knowledge to the average investor,” Raznick said. “It’s not easy because people only have so much time in the day. So are people going to go read the Wall Street Journal and then come read Benzinga? How do we impact the people on the first 20 seconds of reading our articles or reading our data? That’s what we have to think about."

The company also licenses use of its Benzinga Pro newswire, which it launched in 2011, to about 10 different brokerages including TD Ameritrade, Trade Station, and Lightspeed. Individuals can purchase a subscription to Benzinga Pro starting at $39 per month. That’s a fraction of the $2,000 monthly price for a Bloomberg Terminal. But the company says it’s not aiming to compete with financial data heavyweights like Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters. Raznick declined to offer concrete subscription data on Benzinga Pro, but said the number of subscriptions is “in the thousands.”

On an average day, about 2,000 updates are sent across Benzinga Pro’s wire, but during earnings season that total can reach up to 10,000, said L’Ecuyer. Benzinga Pro includes some original reporting, but also focuses on press releases and alerts on events like earning reports and interviews like the one Icahn gave with CNBC.

“You can get any of this information pretty much for free online if you dig enough, but the amount of time it would take you to build a Google News aggregator with alerts and all that and then a really well curated Twitter account and really solid set of chats, you’re talking a couple years to do that because you have to vet everything,” L’Ecuyer said. “It’s a lot of wasted time, but we’ve already done that and put it in this feed.”

Benzinga Pro focuses on U.S. equities, and Prieto admits the company hasn’t spent much time or resources doing additional development or marketing of Benzinga Pro, noting that “it’s a good product, but it’s kind of limited in terms of technology [and] needs to be improved dramatically."

“We need to pick our battles, and we are choosing to spend a lot of time on Marketfy,” he said.

Marketfy, meanwhile, launched in early 2013. Each Maven contracts with Benzinga to sell their product or service on the marketplace. The professional investors and their products are all approved by Benzinga in an attempt to give consumers confidence about the products.

When it started there were about 45 mavens and 100 different products on Marketfy. Only recently has Marketfly began to add to the product, because Benzinga wanted to slowly develop without overloading it, Prieto said.

“They take care of all the technology and administrative garbage,” said Tim Melvin, a Marketfy Maven who focuses on value investing and offers several products on the platform. “I just do good research and focus good stocks"

New Knight Prototype Fund winners offer a glimpse of new journalism tools

Posted: 22 Apr 2014 06:00 AM PDT

The Knight Foundation is lending a helping hand to new tools and technology that could be useful to journalist. The latest round of the Knight Prototype Fund includes 17 projects that will each receive $35,000 to push ideas one step closer to a formal launch.

Some of the prototype fund awardees may be familiar to journalists, including Tabula, an open source tool created by Mozilla OpenNews fellows that pulls data from PDFs. Others — like Project Fission, a newsroom tool for collecting information, or Capitol Hound, which would develop a searchable database of transcripts from the North Carolina legislature — have plenty of potential value for reporters.

Each of the projects will go through a six-month training and prototyping program where they will learn about human-centered design in advance of a demo day. Below are the journalism-inclined projects. For the full list of winners go here.

Capitol Hound: Offering the public a searchable database of the transcripts of North Carolina legislative sessions, including an audio archive and alert system for General Assembly sessions and committee meetings.

Louder: Testing the use of a crowdfunded advertising platform that allows users to donate small amounts to spread news and information that is important to them.

Minezy: Creating a tool to help journalists more easily find information in email archives received through Freedom of Information Act requests by analyzing data and highlighting important social relationships, dates and topics.

MLRun: Helping journalists create deeper stories through a user-friendly Web platform that helps analyze large data sets by discovering patterns in documents.

News On Demand: Increasing the "quality time" people spend with news by building a system that provides news based on a reader's available time and attention level.

Open Data Philly: Improving government transparency and citizen engagement by expanding OpenDataPhilly.org, which provides access to data related to the Philadelphia region.

PressSecure: Preserving privacy and freedom of expression by developing a secure media sharing and storage app for citizen journalists that will give them more control over their mobile content.

Project Fission: Creating a newsroom tool that allows journalists to collect and explore small units of information that can be pulled together to create new story formats.

Tabula: Improving an open-source tool that makes it easier for journalists to extract data from PDF documents.

Tipsy: Making it easier for content providers to generate revenue by developing a new way to fund news sites through micropayments from readers.

Uncovering Cost, Examining Impact: Developing a crowdsourcing tool to collect data from California residents about what they pay for common health care procedures and making the information available to journalists and the public through KQED, Southern California Public Radio and ClearHealthCosts.com.

Whilecard: Creating a tool that recognizes user preferences for news and information based on their activities (i.e. world and sports in the morning, and stocks and tech when working).

Wiredcraft: Creating an open source tool that allows people to collaboratively edit and publish geographic data and related maps quickly and efficiently.
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