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| Q&A: David Leonhardt says The Upshot won’t replace Nate Silver at The New York Times Posted: 23 Apr 2014 10:07 AM PDT Yesterday, The New York Times launched The Upshot, a new politics and policy vertical that was conceived when Nate Silver left the paper for ESPN. The project is led by David Leonhardt — previously a Pulitzer-winning economics columnist and Washington bureau chief at the Times — who says he’s excited to experiment with story formats and tools for storytelling. The first day of publishing at The Upshot revealed a content scope that goes beyond the numbers-driven journalism Silver has become famous for. The launch included a reported piece on the American middle class, a Senate forecast model explainer, a “where the data came from” piece on income, a short post about an old Truman-in-peril photograph, and more. Leonhardt believes there’s a market in news for complicated issues, simply explained, which has invited much comparison with recently launched FiveThirtyEight and Vox. It’s too soon to say exactly how the three measure up — Leonhardt says he’s fan of the work being produced by both sites — but the Times has both resources and a preexisting audience to set it apart. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of a conversation in which Leonhardt explains how The Upshot will function as an experimental space that is both outside the Times, in a sense, while also integrated into the newsroom. Caroline O’Donovan: Thanks for making the time to chat with me. It was nice to look at the site and read some of the pieces you have up there. So much different stuff going on — it’s not just data and explainers. You’ve got photos of former presidents, you’ve got pieces about why you’re going open source on the polling model — it really is an ambitious project. David Leonhardt: Thank you! I appreciate that. One of the things that’s fun for me is this is the first interview I’ve done with someone who’s read the site, because all the other ones were before it launched. Let me just tell you: It’s so much more fun. I enjoy talking about it, period, but it’s so much more fun to talk about specific journalism rather than principles of journalism. O’Donovan: That’s a good point. Something I think people have been talking about is the difference, when you launch something, between explaining what it is you’re going to do — what the goals are, who we are, who we’re not — versus just doing it. How did you approach how you were going to launch the whole thing? Leonhardt: We started with a pretty general idea. What this grew out of was Nate Silver’s departure. Nate left, and I was well known internally as a champion of Nate’s. I was a sort of obvious person to put on a committee to figure out to do after he left. We decided quite quickly — maybe even in our first meeting — that we didn’t want to go out and replace Nate. Nate has a set of skills that is unusual, in a good way. And not only that, but that 2012 wasn’t going to be repeated. There wasn’t going to be, in all likelihood, another election that went the way that one did. Trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle, when other people out there — including Nate — were going to be out there doing it, seemed like not the right way to go. On the other hand, we said, you know what? The lessons of FiveThirtyEight are not narrow lessons. They’re consistent with a bunch of whole other lessons we think we’ve heard here. You look all over the paper, in all kinds of different ways, and it’s clear that readers had a demand for this sort of journalism. This funny mix of really substantive on really big, complicated topics, but presented in a really approachable way. Our hugely successful interactives are another example of this. The most visited page in New York Times history is based on an academic study about linguistics, right? That’s amazing. We realized, when we do this journalism, people like it, and we can do much more than we’re doing. Once we defined it that way, I realized it was a dream job for me, and I got interested in doing it. O’Donovan: I had this question, and someone actually voiced it in the Guardian earlier today: Conventional wisdom might say the audience for explanatory journalism and data journalism are opposite. That the explainers are for people who don’t know as much as they want to about something, and the data is for people who really know a lot about it and want to know specifically new things. But it seems like what you’re saying is you’ve found a way to do both at the same time in a way that’s interesting for people. Leonhardt: I don’t know that we’ve invented anything totally new. I really do think people want both. I don’t think they conflict. I think that people want information on big, complicated topics that they can grasp, even if they’re not experts. I think that description encompasses what I would define both as explanatory journalism and data journalism. To me, explanatory journalism is just something that’s written well enough that someone who isn’t an expert really understands it. Understands it so well that they could turn around and explain it to somebody else. That’s my test as a reader. If I get to the end of an article about how X caused Y, and I can’t go then explain to someone else how X caused Y, I think the article has failed. It’s data journalism because I don’t think it’s possible to write about 99 percent of important topics without using some data. Sometimes it’s a single number, and often it’s very few numbers, but the cliche is, data’s just another word for facts. O’Donovan: It seems like The Upshot is interested in working with existing New York Times content. I was talking with someone recently about how interested Jill Abramson is in the “story behind the story,” and the Times’ role in surfacing its own process — you have Times Insider, a new project along the same lines. How do you think about the role of existing Times content in what The Upshot is trying to do? I think a really interesting example is making Leo1 open source and completely transparent. How have you thought about that? Leonhardt: Two different ways. Leo is the better example, but the smaller example is we put two pieces online, one about the methodology and two about the backstory behind the middle class piece. For a long time, journalists tried to project this image of the infallible authority. Maybe that worked in another time, I don’t know, but it doesn’t work now. People don’t buy it. People are too smart to believe there’s this special class of people called journalists who were infallible. I think we have more credibility when we’re honest with people about what we know and what we don’t know. “Hey, this clearly seems to be happening, but we don’t know what’s causing it.” Or: “Hey, it looks like this is more likely to happen than not, but it’s not certain.” Or: “These two sides are having a fight and this one side seems to have a bigger claim on the evidence, but we’re not sure about that.” That is the kind of voice we’re going to write in. I think it’s a voice that readers appreciate. Consistent with that voice is the idea of showing our work. I don’t want to show it most of the time on the first pass, because a lot of our readers don’t want to see all our work. But the beauty of the web is you can publish it and people who want it can go get it. It is consistent with Jill’s vision. We are going to do a lot of it. One of the things I want to do — I hope we can wait a while before doing it — is say, Here are some of the things we got wrong over the past few months. I love when columnists write that column. I really want us to be integrated in the newsroom. I really want us to work with other Times reporters — on the national staff, on the political staff, on the science staff — who are interested in doing this kind of journalism. We’re not separate. Our material will run in the newspaper. It will run on the website. Sometimes it will run without even The Upshot label. What I care about is doing good work that gets in front of Times readers. O’Donovan: What about people outside the Times? Leonhardt: We have these outside contributors, like Michael Beschloss and other people. And to some extent we’ll collaborate with academics. I’ve done a lot of that in my career. Today’s story about middle class incomes is effectively a collaboration, even though it’s not a formal collaboration. So, yes. O’Donovan: There’s an interesting element of this that’s actually more about tone than you’d think. There’s the one side, these very specific data reporting skills, but then there’s also this other question of how it’s written. How is the way The Upshot is written different from the way typical New York Times copy is written? Leonhardt: I think tone matters. We newspapers adopted this tone that worked for a long time that was based on the idea that people were getting their news from the bundle of newspapers that arrived at their door every morning. When you are trying to explain the implications of something that people already know about, I think you want to use a voice that’s different. That’s more conversational, that sometimes uses the first and second person. It’s not as if smart people avoid using first and second person when they talk. Sometimes, it’s hard to be clear about your point when using the 20th-century–form journalism. You can be a lot clearer in using a different form. What we should do is think about the best form for every story. O’Donovan: Speaking of that genuineness, and the desire to have a conversation — in your announcement you really focused on wanting to communicate with readers, having the readers contribute ideas, be able to ask questions, to be in conversation with them. How do you see that playing out more specifically? Whose job is it? How are you bringing them into the process? Leonhardt: It’s all of our jobs. One of the things I want us to do is spend more time on Facebook than many journalists do. O’Donovan: Specifically Facebook? Leonhardt: Specifically Facebook. Journalists really like Twitter. You don’t have to twist most journalists’ arms, particularly the journalists who are doing this kind of work, to spend time on Twitter. It comes naturally to them. O’Donovan: I’m guilty. Leonhardt: Me too! You do have to give them a little nudge to spend time on Facebook. But Facebook’s really important. We’ve created our own Facebook page at The Upshot, which is relatively unusual at The New York Times. We’re also going to encourage people to spend more time on Facebook. Josh Barro is already quite good on Facebook, and he can become a model for the rest of the team. We want to try some things that the whole paper isn’t necessarily doing. Let’s say some new social media site comes along and we decide we’re going to spend 10 hours a week combined doing stuff on this new social media site — and then after a year we decide, Well, that social media site has fizzled, it’s not worth our time. That’s not that big of a cost. If the entire New York Times had done that, it would have been a big cost. On the other hand, if we do it and it succeeds, we’ve been this little laboratory that the rest of the Times can then learn from. O’Donovan: Ah, there’s that laboratory word. Leonhardt: We should be a laboratory! The traditional mistake that longtime, successful organizations make is they say, We can’t do that because we’ve never done it that way, or, We can’t do that, because that will cannibalize us. When a business is changing, you don’t get to choose whether you’re going to be cannibalized. You only get to choose whether you’re the one who does it, or you let someone else do it. People at the Times — my bosses, Jill and others — very much want us to experiment, and want us to learn from things, so that when we see something that seems to work, the rest of the Times can adopt a version of it. And when we try something and it doesn’t work, we haven’t just tried to turn the huge battleship of The New York Times and then have to try and undo the turn. O’Donovan: This is a smaller question, but I’m curious how you’re thinking about how people get to the content. Are you hoping people visit nytimes.com/upshot, or are you thinking it’s going to be based on what their interests are through those various social networks? Leonhardt: All of the above. One, we want to get audience through social media. Two, The New York Times’ homepage is a massively powerful convener of audiences and we want to benefit from that. Three, we want to do stuff that’s interesting enough that outside sites link to us. And then four — and this isn’t in any order — we want to build an audience for our own page, so that people feel as if, Oh, hey, there’s something interesting there every day, I want to go back and check it out. To me, the ideal thing is if someone comes to us because they saw a link on another site, or they saw a tweet about us. They see an article of ours in another place, they read it, they think it’s interesting, they decide to check out the site, they see more stuff there, then they come back to the site — and suddenly that person is a New York Times reader. O’Donovan: Getting back to the specific content a bit, I did want to ask you about the dialect quiz of 2013. You’re bringing some of that into The Upshot, but as I said, there’s a lot of stuff you guys are trying to do. How do you see it fitting in? Leonhardt: I think that one of the things to remember is that Arthur Sulzberger, at least internally, famously liked to use the phrase platform agnostic to talk about paper versus web. A version of that is we should be story-form agnostic when we start thinking about stories. There’s this fascinating information — should we write a 1,500-word article about that? Should we go send a reporter somewhere to spend three weeks there? Should we do a 10-minute video on it? Should we do a chart on it? Or, wait a second, we should give people 25 questions and let them answer and place them on a map — that’s the right way to do that story. I think a lot of it starts from that. Today’s a good example: We did do a traditional 1,800-word story on the middle class. We didn’t do a 1,500-word traditional story on our Senate model. Either you or I could write that story. You could take our Senate model — you could write a newspaper story based on it. We didn’t think that was the right form to do that. O’Donovan: On the one side, you’re taking datasets that are big and have tons of information in them and breaking them off into granular, interesting chunks, but is there any effort or focus on getting access to datasets that other people don’t have? Trying to get your hands on data other people aren’t looking at? Leonhardt: Yes. That, to me, is really important. We don’t just want to be chewing over the same data that everyone’s chewing over. You know, today’s two stories are an example. It’s not as if this was secret data that we had to steal or persuade a whistleblower to give to us — it was out there. We had to spend a lot of time collecting data in the case of the Senate model before we could even begin analyzing it, and we had to persuade a group of academic researchers that we were serious about this project and we were going to spend time to do it seriously. Going out there and getting new data sets is, to me, crucial. It’s saying: Are you shedding light on something, or are you just saying the same thing that everyone else has said? O’Donovan: If there was a breaking-news–caliber whistleblower data set that made its way to the Times somehow, would that go to you guys, the news desk, a collaboration, or what? Leonhardt: I think it would depend. The Times has a great database reporting team. They’re the ones who did all the stuff with the Medicare doctor data a few weeks ago. I think if you asked me to try to think about what would have happened if that had come out after The Upshot launched, I think the answer is they take the lead, they work with the reporter writing the main story, and we think about: Can we play a supporting role, given the expertise the people on our team have? And can we do something that no one else at the paper is doing? Is there a way to break off other pieces? Is there a way to take some of the knowledge that people at The New York Times already have that ends up on the cutting room floor and put it in front of readers? This is something we think about with polling. Our polling team here is fabulous. They often are asked by members of our staff to look at polls and analyze them, and they’ll write these emails or memos that make you so much smarter about polling. We should be publishing some of those. In fact, we’re just about to — we’re going to publish something about the polling behind affirmative action. That’s the kind of thing that, in the past, would basically have been an internal document. Joe Nocera, the op-ed columnist here who used to be a business columnist, sometimes likes to say that he often finds when he talks to a reporter about a story that he or she wrote, that reporter is much smarter about the story than they could have gleaned from what they wrote. One of the jobs of journalism today is to help bridge that gap, help move the story that we publish closer to the knowledge and insight that the journalist has. O’Donovan: That’s so interesting, because of all the things that I’ve heard people say, it reminds me most of what Nick Denton says about Gawker. He’s talking about gossip, but he’s still talking about this extra stuff that journalists know, or think they know, or are talking about that wouldn’t have made its way to a traditional story, that can now find a different digital home. Even though he’s talking about a different information value, it’s actually the same thing. Leonhardt: Yep — I agree. I absolutely agree. Image of David Leonhardt at the Aspen Ideas Festival by The Aspen Institute used under a Creative Commons license. Notes
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| Q&A: Craig Mod on making writing more mobile-friendly and where digital publishing is headed Posted: 23 Apr 2014 07:52 AM PDT Craig Mod spends a lot of time in motion. He’s also spends no small amount of time thinking — and writing — about the future of publishing and the ways technology is transforming how we write and what we read. Given that he often finds himself shuttling between New York, Tokyo, and San Francisco, it makes sense that he would be working on a project that blends writing with a sense of place.
Mod, who previously worked for Flipboard and launched his own publishing startups, cofounded Hi with Chris Palmieri. The site’s been in beta for over eight months, but is now open to anyone. Mod coined the phrase “subcompact publishing” as a way to get at the smaller, stripped down, mobile-friendly online publications that are flowering in the media. Hi is one way of putting that idea into practice. While he never planned on being a Johnny Appleseed for digital publishing, Mod said the environment now for experimenting with writing and technology is better than it has ever been: “It feels like for the first time in years there’s such a good energy out there around publishing startups and media startups.” Mod and I talked about how Hi was developed, how to build tools to encourage a regular writing routine, and where online publishing is heading next. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Justin Ellis: Explain to me where the idea for Hi came from. It sounds like it came out of a desire to find a better way of writing, and perhaps writing connected to place. Craig Mod: It’s sort of been a slow-burning project for a while. For years, really. I built the first prototype for it about four years ago, I think. And that was using Twitter. Twitter released the geo-API at the end of 2009, and the iPhone was a thing back then. We had the 3GS, and the camera was pretty good and it took pretty good photos. It just seemed like there was this confluence of technologies, really all spiraling around Twitter. And back then, Twitter was still a platform on which you could think about building things. Twitter still hadn’t quite gone into that space of no more third-party apps. I started thinking in the fall of 2009 that this was really interesting. You could place these markers, using a tweet, a piece of geo, and a photo if you want. Chris Palmieri and I had been working on this for years — Chris runs this design agency called AQ in Tokyo. So we sort of sat down and did a two-month, off-the-cuff knockout of a prototype. And it was pretty neat. You could sort of tweet out to our robot, and if it had geo data and a photo, the robot would suck it up, create an account for you, and start mapping out all the little moments you had as you thought they were good enough to capture and put into the system. It was really focused on maps. Then I got pulled into Silicon Valley and I just sort of disappeared for a few years working on stuff at Flipboard and then doing some other investments and advising and consulting work out there. But a little over a year ago, I had expected someone to have built something similar by that point. At the end of 2012 I was thinking: Why hasn’t someone built this?
So we resurrected the project and hired a couple of developers and started iterating on it. So, really, Hi is, if nothing else — it’s getting away from theory. Because I think it’s easy to be a “thinkfluencer” or whatever and just sit in your chair and type some things out, right? But I think it’s really important to get in the muck and build tools too. Hi is just that. It’s us getting our hands dirty and playing with the clay. It’s hard to explain these things. You kinda go: Well, what is it? Well, it’s sort of a thinking man’s Instagram, or WordPress and Twitter had a lovechild, but kinda like Medium but not really like Medium. For us, we use it very differently than any of these other tools. To me there isn’t really any overlap. But being able to explain that using the pancakes, and this idea of the full stack, I think finally helped us understand it too, what we were working on, what we had built.
We have these smartphones, but are we really building with them in mind? Or are we saying, instead of looking at the processes of publishing and asking, “What part of that process can have an indigenous home on a smartphone?” rather than looking at the smartphone and saying “Oh, we can do all these neat things now, what kind of publishing tools should we build?” For me, it feels like a less nourishing way to approach the problem. Ellis: Tell me a little bit more about the creation of Hi, specifically about using it on mobile and making it seamless for the user by utilizing the tech we have in our devices. There had to be some challenges in doing that. Mod: One of the great benefits of the web is everything can have a unique address that is accessible as a net connection, effectively. There’s something incredible powerful about that. So, to build an iOS app-only, Android app-only ecosystem feels like, to me, you’re leaving on the floor 80 percent of the magic of what the Internet brings to publishing. So one of the core precepts of this project was certainly to be very open on the web — accessible anywhere, from any device. When you start from that place, it just makes sense to first and foremost optimize for the web experience and then kind of work your way back. One of the reasons I think Safari on the iPhone, the Chrome browser, any of these things, aren’t as good as they could be for running applications is because five years ago, or whenever the App Store opened, we sort of abandoned the web in a way. Originally, Steve Jobs got up on stage and said anyone can write an app for this, it’s called a web page. And we didn’t really embrace that. Partially because Apple didn’t really help us embrace it either. For the first time, we have in our pocket a camera and a GPS, with great net access. And this current crop of affordable (and increasingly more affordable) Android phones that are sort of trickling their way around the world. That points directly back to that same moment to me. So if you build something on the open web that takes advantage of HTML5, and all these Android phones are shipping with Chrome browsers that are HTML5 capable. Then you sort of for free get this incredible benefit of capturing an audience, or having the potential to capture an audience that’s so much — to me — more interesting. But it’s just really: Why not? We have enough photos of coffee in Brooklyn, right? You make an iOS app and you’re going to get a lot of photos of coffee in Brooklyn. So why not open it in a way that it is literally accessible to anyone with even the thinnest of 3G connections and a $100-or-less and increasingly cheaper smartphone?
Ellis: One of the most interesting things to me in Hi is the iterative writing structure to encourage more writing. Why was that important to build in? Mod: When we started, it was far more focused on the mapping piece. I remember one of the stakes in the ground that we had a year ago was “every page must have a map.” You quickly realize that maps are not that interesting. It’s this fallacy, that maps are inherently interesting objects. I love maps. I love old maps, I love printed maps, I love navigating cities with strange maps. I love all of that. But I think we tend to conflate maps as context vs. content. And a lot of products that use maps and feature maps treat it as content, and most of the time a map is not a very interesting thing. We just need it quickly, for a little bit of context, and then have it go away. The stages of the writing process were built into it, but over the last eight months, really the thing that’s taking us by surprise is the engagement of the community. That pancake essay is all about community. That’s curious, because that’s the greatest benefit, I think, of having that is that you can be pulled along or pushed along. One of the hardest things online is developing an audience, or building an audience, or feeling like you are part of something. What we found on Hi is that people — and maybe we were just lucky with the crowd who were early adopters of it — they were just hunting sketches that people had posted, really saying “tell me more about this,” and really encouraging things. Over the last eight months, seeing these sort of friendships blossom on top of this platform, and on top of the writing process, has been kind of the subtext to that, those relationships. You can look at a tool like Hi and go, “Well, why am I putting my writing into this other space that I don’t own?” Whereas with WordPress you can download it, can host your own WordPress site, and yada, yada, yada. But one of the advantages of placing it into this pre-existing space is you get the community. So that’s been fun. But the iterative component of the writing process, and also the flow of using the smartphone, that was really just coming from “how do we treat this, and what part of writing feels indigenous to a smartphone?” Obviously, the longform part doesn’t feel super-indigenous to a smartphone. But looking at the capabilities of a smartphone, you’re out — especially as a traveller — exploring a new city, and you notice things. I use little notepads. I use Simplenote to take a lot of notes. In a way, Hi is meant to be a networked, community-facing version of that. That first step of the writing process is taking place on the smartphone. And then you’re able to go back on the desktop and draft as much as you want. I have drafts that have been sitting in my unpublished folder here for three, four months. Ellis: What about the community — is it important to find these smaller communities in publishing versus finding the mass audience? Mod: I think it depends on the kind of writing that you’re doing and what your goals as a writer are. As isolated as writers tend to be, there are so many workshopping groups. And I think there is a natural tendency as a writer to need to get out of your isolation chamber and get some feedback and have human contact and discuss things out in the open. So I think there’s a tremendous benefit to that. But obviously not all kinds of writing should be done in this way, it goes without saying. But I think there are certain kinds that — why not do the experiment of trying them? And travel writing, I think, fits really naturally within this space. One of the things going on with Hi that we haven’t really talked a lot about is the topics. Anybody can add a moment, they can invent a topic, they can add to existing topics — they can do whatever they want. Topics are meant to be a response to undiscoverability and impossibility to navigate — the nature of hashtags. Hashtags are a great idea that anybody can contribute to a shared space. But they have no hierarchy whatsoever, and they tend to not scale very well. And they tend to fall apart quickly. To get to the great stuff inside of a hashtag is almost impossible. Hashtags tend to be associated with shortform stuff. So Instagram is one of the canonical hashtag-owning services. Really quick, bite-sized nuggets of information. But for me, one of the really interesting things about Hi — and I would love if people used Hi for this —is the idea of topics as a space around which an emerging news event can happen or can rally. A community can kind of coalesce. So if you have something like the Trayvon Martin protest that happened around the trial announcement. You know the protests are going on, but you don’t have a sense of really what’s happening. You can go on Twitter, search for the hashtag, can go on Instagram and look on the hashtag. But it’s kind of a mess. For example, when something like an earthquake happens, I would love to see Hi used as a place to have a Sendai quake 2011 topic. Anybody can contribute to it, anyone can add photos or text. So that sense-making, the sensing component that happens on Twitter, that happens on Instagram, can be captured there. And that topic becomes a longterm full archive of all that sensing, filtered by photos, viewing the raw moments. To be able to come to that topic page and get, effectively, a New York Times homepage of citizen journalism, citizen meditation, on top of that event, I feel like that would be the greatest possible use for a tool like this. I feel like it would be a success if it was used in a way like that. Ellis: What happens next for Hi? What are your expectations, what do you want to do next? Are you building out users, or looking for additional funding? Mod: The feature list of stuff to add and update is pretty endless. But like any good, creative project, I think you need to do stages of execution, and, similar to the writing process, you take a step back and think about what have you made so far. The thing I’m most excited about is taking a couple months to watch how things organically evolve. What we’ve built is fully-formed; all the loops in the system are closed in the sense of all the ways of having conversations. The ways of poking, the ways of following, of watching subscribers. If you don’t have an account and you land on the site, anything you tap will allow you to easily create an account. So the full ecosystem is there. I’m just excited to see: Does the community stay as tight as it was over the last eight months? Does it get filled with spam? Is there another kind of writing that suddenly starts to flourish on here? Do we get picked up in a different country? Really, it’s about entering a period of meditation — fixing things, cleaning things up, and just watching how the users play in the playground. |
There’s a bunch of geo-storytelling things. There’s a lot. A lot of people have worked on this problem. But as a writer — and as someone who understands technology, but mainly as a writer — I didn’t feel compelled, or didn’t feel any of the tools matched how I thought about travel and telling stories. Certainly it didn’t match what I felt was a natural writing flow. App after app was coming out and nothing. 
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