Journalism News

Google's OS expected to be available in second half of 2010

Vulnerabilities exist in both Mac and Windows versions of the browser.

The key to blogging is quenching the thirst knowledge of your audience and often times, it has nothing to do with "voice"

Reduce risk and put executive fears at ease when it comes to corporate blogging

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]

The Times, plagiarism and the link: A few weeks ago, the resignations of two journalists from The Daily Beast and The New York Times accused of plagiarism had us talking about how the culture of the web affects that age-old journalistic sin. That discussion was revived this week by the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, whose postmortem on the Zachery Kouwe scandal appeared Sunday. Hoyt concluded that the Times “owes readers a full accounting” of how Kouwe’s plagiarism occurred, and he also called out DealBook, the Times’ business blog for which Kouwe wrote, questioning its hyper-competitive nature and saying it needs more oversight. (In an accompanying blog post, Hoyt also said the Times needs to look closer at implementing plagiarism prevention software.)

Reuters’ Felix Salmon challenged Hoyt’s assertion, saying that the Times’ problem was not that its ethics were too steeped in the ethos of the blogosphere, but that they aren’t bloggy enough. Channeling CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis’ catchphrase “Do what you do best and link to the rest,” Salmon chastised Kouwe and other Times bloggers for rewriting stories that other online news organizations beat them to, rather than simply linking to them. “The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren’t really bloggers at heart,” Salmon wrote.

Michael Roston made a similar argument at True/Slant the first time this came up, and ex-newspaperman Mathew Ingram strode to Salmon’s defense this time with an eloquent defense of the link. It’s not just a practice for geeky insiders, he argues; it’s “a fundamental aspect of writing for the web.” (Also at True/Slant, Paul Smalera made a similar Jarvis-esque argument.) In a lengthy Twitter exchange with Salmon, Times editor Patrick LaForge countered that the Times does link more than most newspapers, and Kouwe was an exception.

Jason Fry, a former blogger for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Ingram and Smalera, but theorizes that the Times’ linking problem is not so much a refusal to play by the web’s rules as “an unthinking perpetuation of print values that are past their sell-by date.” Those values, he says, are scoops, which, as he argued further in a more sports-centric column, readers on the web just don’t care about as much as they used to.

Location prepares for liftoff: The massive music/tech gathering South By Southwest (or, in webspeak, SXSW) starts today in Austin, Texas, so I’m sure you’ll see a lot of ideas making their way from Austin to next week’s review. If early predictions are any indication, one of the ideas we’ll be talking about is geolocation — services like Foursquare and Gowalla that use your mobile device to give and broadcast location-specific information to and about you. In anticipation of this geolocation hype, CNET has given us a pre-SXSW primer on location-based services.

Facebook jump-started the location buzz by apparently leaking word to The New York Times that it’s going to unveil a new location-based feature next month. Silicon Alley Insider does a quick pro-and-con rundown of the major location platforms, and ReadWriteWeb wonders whether Facebook’s typically privacy-guarding users will go for this.

The major implication of this development for news organizations, I think, is the fact that Facebook’s jump onto the location train is going to send it hurtling forward far, far faster than it’s been going. Within as little as a year, location could go from the domain of early-adopting smartphone addicts to being a mainstream staple of social media, similar to the boom that Facebook itself saw once it was opened beyond college campuses. That means news organizations have to be there, too, developing location-based methods of delivering news and information. We’ve known for a while that this was coming; now we know it’s close.

The future of context: South By Southwest also includes bunches of fascinating tech/media/journalism panels, and one of them that’s given us a sneak preview is Monday’s panel called “The Future of Context.” Two of the panelists, former web reporter and editor Matt Thompson and NYU professor Jay Rosen, have published versions of their opening statements online, and both pieces are great food for thought. Thompson’s is a must-read: He describes the difference between day-to-day headline- and development-oriented information about news stories that he calls “episodic” and the “systemic knowledge” that forms our fundamental framework for understanding an issue. Thompson notes how broken the traditional news system’s way of intertwining those two forms of knowledge are, and he asks us how we can do it better online.

Rosen’s post is in less of a finished format, but it has a number of interesting thoughts, including a quick rundown of reasons that newsrooms don’t do explanatory journalism better. Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls ties together both Rosen’s and Thompson’s thoughts and talks a bit more about the centrality of stories in pulling all that information together.

Tech execs’ advice for newspapers: Traditional news organizations got a couple of pieces of advice this week from two relatively big-time folks in the tech world. First, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen gave an interview with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld in which he told newspaper execs to “burn the boats” and commit wholeheartedly to the web, rather than finding way to prop up modified print models. He used the iPad as a litmus test for this philosophy, noting that “All the new [web] companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

Not everyone agreed: Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin said publishers’ current strategy, which includes keeping the print model around, is an intelligent one: They’re milking the print-based profits they have while trying to manage their business down to a level where they can transfer it over to a web-based model. News business expert Alan Mutter offered a more pointed counterargument: “It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.”

Second, Google chief economist Hal Varian spoke at a Federal Trade Commission hearing about the economics of newspapers, advising newspapers that rather than charging for online content, they should be experimenting like crazy. (Varian’s summary and audio are at Google’s Public Policy Blog, and the full text, slides and Martin Langeveld’s summary are here at the Lab. Sync ‘em up and you can pretty much recreate the presentation yourself.) After briefly outlining the status of newspaper circulation and its print and online advertising, Varian also suggests that newspapers make better use of the demographic information they have of their online readers. Over at GigaOM, Mathew Ingram seconds Varian’s comments on engagement, imploring newspapers to actually use the interactive tools that they already have at their sites.

Reading roundup: We’ll start with our now-weekly summary of iPad stuff: Apple announced last week that you can preorder iPads as of today, and they’ll be released April 3. That could be only the beginning — an exec with the semiconductor IP company ARM told ComputerWorld we could see 50 similar tablet devices out this year. Multimedia journalist Mark Luckie urged media outlets to develop iPad apps, and Mac and iPhone developer Matt Gemmell delved into the finer points of iPad app design. (It’s not “like an iPhone, only bigger,” he says.)

I have two long, thought-provoking pieces on journalism, both courtesy of the Columbia Journalism Review. First, Megan Garber (now with the Lab) has a sharp essay on the public’s growing fixation on authorship that’s led to so much mistrust in journalism — and how journalists helped bring that fixation on. It’s a long, deep-thinking piece, but it’s well worth reading all the way through Garber’s cogent argument. Her concluding suggestions for news orgs regarding authority and identity are particularly interesting, with nuggets like “Transparency may be the new objectivity; but we need to shift our definition of ‘transparency’: from ‘the revelation of potential biases,’ and toward ‘the revelation of the journalistic process.’”

Second, CJR has the text of Illinois professor Robert McChesney’s speech this week to the FTC, in which he makes the case for a government subsidy of news organizations. McChesney and The Nation’s John Nichols have made this case in several places with a new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism,” on the shelves, but it’s helpful to have a comprehensive version of it in one spot online.

Finally, the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a simple tip for newspaper publishers looking to stave off their organizations’ decline: Learn to understand technology from the consumer’s perspective. That means, well, consuming technology. Niles provides a to-do list you can hand to your bosses to help get them started.

Apple is taking preorders for its highly anticipated iPad tablet via the company's web site.

America has voted and we have out Top 12 on American Idol.

Once living the life of a professional, a former IT and Finance executive lives life hotel to hotel

OnLive will unveil its new on-demand gaming service.

President Obama, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, hands out his winnings to a rich and diverse group of non-profits.

Medical tourism is a trend that is taking the globe by storm, with travelers searching all ends of the world to find perfect healthcare

PitchIt! Award Winners Melinda Whittstock and Lucas Sommer with presenter Bob Ross, President and CEO Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. Photo by Chelsea Matiash

AssignIt and Audimated won We Media’s 2010 PitchIt! Challenge Thursday, beating six other profit and non-profit groups vying for the $25,000 prizes.

AssignIt We Media PitchIt! 2010 Pitch View more presentations from wemedia.

AssignIt CEO and founder Melinda Wittstock said the money “will allow us to do the prototype we need to do to get the support and network we need to make this a real success.”

Wittstock, a former ABC News and BBC staffer and founder of Capitol News Connection, said AssignIt’s aim is to marry technology with the oversight of journalists. Users will set the agenda for journalists who will produce a variety of news, including investigative work. Wittstock plans to launch AssignIt’s first mobile device app in six months, with a goal of operating in cities nationwide within five years.

Lucas Sommer’s Audimated, a late entrant in the competition, will connect musicians and fans, giving both of them opportunity to make money. Sommer is a 2007 graduate of the University of Miami business school – where the eight finalists made their pitches and the winners were announced at the end of We Media’s annual conference there.

Audimated We Media Miami 2010 PitchIt submission View more presentations from wemedia.

Sommer said the prize will “have a tangible effect on everyone in this room, especially myself and the independent artists.”

He won support from many in the audience during his pitch with his description of “Poster Boy,” who can’t effectively monetize his music, and “Fan Tastic,” a music connoisseur who can’t effectively support independent artists.

The other six finalists who made seven-minute pitches Thursday were: Blitz Bazaar, Rate My Water Quality, MiCAST, Stractor, LoudSauce and Citizens Market.

PitchIt!, which started four years ago on a whim as a way to help small entrepreneurs connect with influential attendees of the globally recognized conference and community, expanded this year to include another sponsor, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The competition’s other major partners are the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and Ashoka Changemakers. Another first this year: a boot camp for projects not quite ready for the finals.

“We think the future is built on the visions of social and commercial entrepreneurs who are imaging the future for us,” said We Media co-founder Andrew Nachison.

Before the pitching began, last year’s winners reflected on what’s happened since they took home their oversized check.

Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix shared some of the things he struggled with a year ago he still struggles with, like getting government to respond.  He’s learned to “really focus your message” and that “the message will shift depending on who your audience is.”

He said he values even getting the chance to make a pitch last year.  “Eight minutes is going to feel really quick; over the next year, you’ll probably never be given eight minutes again.”

Tiger's embattled brand took a step towards the rebuilding process, but might be too late, despite hiring one of the more disenfranchised PR counselors

Emmett Malloy's documentary feature Under Great White Northern Lights follows The White Stripes on a Canadian tour.

What Buzz should have been? Aol launches Lifestream as a standalone product http://j.mp/aWYzxa »

Latte analytics: Foursquare and Starbucks join forces http://j.mp/aQB7Uq »

Startups and hypergrowth: How much success is too much success? http://j.mp/9AgWco (via @nytimesbits) »

“Google obviously thinks that providing the best local results possible is the future for a large number of its services” http://j.mp/aUWmuS »

The latest episode of “Breaking the New News” is up: @cshirky on scarcity and abundance in journalism http://j.mp/aBkgWT »

Allie Burns joined the Case Foundation in 2009 as the Director of Communications, focused on spreading the word about the Foundation’s great work with the ultimate goal of mobilizing more people to make giving a part of their everyday lives.

Allie joined the Case Foundation from AOL’s communications team, where she did a little bit of everything – from serving as a company spokesperson for consumer advocacy and public policy, managing international communications initiatives to leading PR efforts for MapQuest and AOL’s commerce and marketplace sites. Prior to AOL, she spent time at Boston and DC-based communications firms leading a range of public relations initiatives for technology companies.

She holds an MBA from Thunderbird School of International Management and a B.S. in Communications from Boston University.

When not at the office, Allie is often trying out a new restaurant, cheering on the Red Sox, walking her two rambunctious dogs or contemplating her next big travel adventure. An Arizona native, you can often find her outdoors (when the weather is warm enough!), cautiously navigating the W&OD and Mt. Vernon trails on her trusty bike or training for a half marathon.

Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers shows that SXSW isn't afraid of risky programming.

Taronga Zoo keepers were amazed when after an intensive and complicated six day labor, a live but weak male Asian elephant calf was born.

Matthew Vaughn's highly-anticipated feature film Kick-Ass will debut tomorrow evening to kick-off the SXSW film festival.

Like most investigative reporters, the culmination of Bill Dedman's reporting is generally an article or a package of articles. As he worked on his latest project, he collected images and documents that helped tell the story of a wealthy, elderly heiress who owns several expansive homes but doesn't appear to live in them.

When he was ready to write, he decided that, rather than craft a 2,500-word story, he'd rely on the images he had shown to his family and coworkers, accompanied by captions. The slide show would be an experiment, a way to see if in-depth reporting could be presented in a way that would reach far more people.

Judging by the response, it may have been. Dedman told me that he's received 500 e-mails from readers about the story, entitled, "The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery." That's more than he's received for any story he's done in 30 years. And with 78 million page views, that's more than any other story on msnbc.com.

Dedman and I corresponded by e-mail and discussed how he decided to do a slide show, what he gained and lost with this story form, and whether this can work for other stories. Here's an edited version of our exchange.

Steve Myers: What is this story about?

Bill Dedman Bill Dedman: It's a historical mystery with connections from the Civil War era to today. Why are the mansions of one of America's richest women sitting vacant?

The mansions are owned by the reclusive Huguette Clark, now 103, whose father, copper miner William Andrews Clark, was one of the richest men in the country and also a U.S. senator from Montana who had to leave the Senate in disgrace -- then was re-elected.

People in Montana were surprised to learn that his daughter was still alive. But where is she? And what will become of her fortune?

How did you get interested in this story?

Dedman: I got into the story last summer, when I saw the Connecticut house for sale. Tiring of looking at real estate listings for houses I couldn't afford, I looked at houses I really couldn't afford.

The mansion in New Canaan is on the market for $24 million. In the assessor's records online, I saw the owner's name, Huguette Clark, but didn't recognize it. I read in the zoning minutes online that her attorney said it had not been lived in for 50 years. Then I saw an online discussion in Santa Barbara about her empty mansion there. And her father's political history was interesting. So I was hooked.

If you write about what you're interested in, others will be interested, too.

How long did this take?

Dedman: I started last summer, but I did other stories, went to Haiti, etc., in the meantime. It was probably two months of work, counting reading all the Clark books I could find, tracking down a few distant relatives, waiting for public records to be dragged out of archives, hanging out with the doormen.

In your reporting, were you guided by your research, which led you to seek photos to illustrate it, or were you guided by the images you found?

Dedman: All along I was collecting all the photos I could. I had planned to do a normal story format, with as many photos as we could use.

The photos also help with interviews; if you show up at an interview with a notebook, you are in a subservient position, begging for information. If instead you show up with printouts of photos to show, then the person you're interviewing is learning something, is eager to see them all, and it helps the conversation along. It's the same trick as making the graphic for a story as you do the reporting, so you can take the graphic to the interview, and let the sources draw on your draft copy, correct it, add what they know.

Where did you find the images?

The New York Times Caption from MSNBC.com slideshow: "Tracing the lives of William Andrews Clark and his Huguette, we are left with mysteries. What does she remember of 'Papa'? Is she well cared for? What will she leave to the world? 'It's hard to find out what the real story was,' said nephew [Ian] Devine. 'No one is alive -- except for Huguette.' " Dedman: Some were free: The New York Times generously shared two old photos; the Library of Congress; the Realtor for the Connecticut home; the Corcoran Gallery of Art had old photos, photos of the art, and a color photo of the salon that it still has on display from Clark's mansion. The grand-nephew, in Austria, let me use a couple of old family photos from his book, which unfortunately is published only in French. Old newspaper clippings came from the Google News Archive, a New York Times subscription and ProQuest Historical Newspapers, which many public libraries have access to. Pictometry gave us one aerial of Santa Barbara, similar to what you can see on Bing. And I took photos at Woodlawn Cemetery and her apartment building.

The only photo I just grabbed off the Web was the Renoir; that image was the best I could get. Sotheby's, which sold the painting, would not hand over a better image, but this one is good enough.

Paid images: New-York (yes, there's a hyphen) and Montana and Las Vegas historical societies and archives. Maybe $100 apiece. We paid a Santa Barbara photographer for a better copy of an aerial he had already shot -- $150. Altogether, perhaps $1,000 or $1,200.

Documents included a marriage license, divorce record, wills and probate files, cemetery lot cards, passenger ship's registries, passport application, zoning records, assessor records, and census forms from 1880 through 1930.

How did you decide to do a slide show?

Dedman: I like to talk stories through before I write them. As I was collecting photos of the Clarks, I kept showing them in a little slide show to my family, to my mother (81) and my daughters (7 and 10). It really helped tell the story.

I put the photos online to show our projects team at msnbc.com, and photographer Jim Seida said, why don't we just publish it as a slide show? I was skeptical at first -- would that crimp the writing? -- but in the end I was advocating doing it this way when the photo team was skeptical. I thought far more people would read through it this way, and it would be worth an experiment.

We've done slide shows for years, of course, but the slide show is not our usual medium for telling an investigative or in-depth story.

The photo editors threw the photos into our standard slide show template, which was built in-house years ago. You just drag the photos into a folder and it makes a slide show, which you can edit by moving the photos around and writing captions.

One problem: I didn't like the font, which was way too small for reading a long narrative. Our standard caption text is smaller than our standard story text, too small to read that many words comfortably. The solution was to put the text in the headline field of our slide show template, so it came out larger. A workaround.

Once you decided that this could work as a slide show, how did you construct the narrative?

Dedman: The order of the photos was determined by what I had found would draw the listener/reader/user into the story: first just a shot to establish the two main characters (father and daughter), then the empty mansions, and from them on it was chronological. Readers sent e-mails saying they thought "Oh no!" when they saw that it was 47 slides, but then after the first four, they couldn't stop.

Chronology is the easiest way to tell a story, and easiest on the reader. It's just like telling a bank robbery or other story. You might tell the main points or the most interesting part first -- "Four people were taken hostage ..." -- but soon you have to start at the beginning: "It all began just after closing time ..." In this slide show, that transition comes on slide 5, "Where did such wealth come from?" which takes us back to 1863, the beginning of the story of William Andrews Clark.

What did you gain by presenting this as a slide show? What did you lose?

Dedman: First, it's a pain to write in 50-word chunks. I had to go over and over that text, to tighten, far more than I would have if it had been a "story." That's a gain.

An enterprise story on the site, presented in a normal story page, might get a million page views. The page views for this slide show, so far, are 78 million.In writing a story, you can throw in a phrase or sentence when you need to clarify something; no room for that here. If you don't -- or can't -- throw in that extra phrase or sentence, the narrative moves much more quickly. So something gained and lost.

You lose attribution. Except for attributing the quotes, I removed all the "how do you know this" material. That all went into the "notes and sources" page, along with the tidbits that couldn't fit on the slide show.

You lose complexity. For example, we quote Mark Twain, who had a grand time going on for pages about how bad Sen. Clark was. "He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs." Well, the story is more complicated. As I point out on the notes page, Twain's benefactor, the man who rescued Twain from bankruptcy, was Henry Huttleston Rogers, who was a business competitor of Clark's. It's possible that Twain's wallet was talking.

You also lose paragraph marks. I could have put them in, but that adds more lines, and I was worried that the text would run over, breaking the whole experience for readers in some browsers. So I chose in the end to keep the captions to one paragraph. That makes it harder to maintain clarity.

The story is more readable in the print version, for that reason. That print version is also the life raft for people who have trouble seeing the slide show in their browser.

How would someone know if this approach would work for his story? Are there certain types of stories that would be appropriate?

I'm not a fan of slide shows that are created just to generate page views. If you have 10 reasons the Red Sox are going to be better this year, just tell me the 10 reasons; don't make me click through 10 slides to find out. The readers know they're being manipulated.

But if you have a tale that you're finding is much easier to tell to your friends and family and colleagues if you show them the photos, then you should probably tell it that way to the reader, too.

Are the captions really 2,500 words? Didn't seem like it.

Dedman: Thanks! It's 2,788 words, not counting photo credits.

The idea that we have to write shorter for the Web is hooey. If we write about something that people care about, they keep reading.

Of course, on a normal story that jumps to two or more pages, far fewer people read the second page than the first. It drops off significantly. We might have 600,000 people read the first page of a story, and only 60,000 read the second page; most of those 60,000 readers will then stick with us for several more pages.

But so what if fewer people read page 2? The ones who want more are getting the full story, and we're getting more page views, and more time on the site, which are the main measures that advertisers are interested in.

What is the rationale to write shorter on the Web? There's no savings in time. You have to research a story thoroughly either way, and as Mark Twain and others have pointed out, it takes longer to write short than it does to write long.

How has traffic been? Is there any way to compare that to traffic for a similar 2,500-word story?

Dedman: The page views so far are 78 million. There are 47 slides, so that's the equivalent of more than 1.6 million people reading every slide. Not that it works that way, of course; some people dipped in and out. In all, 2.2 million unique users (computers) went to the slide show.

A typical slide show, such as snow photos from a big storm, or the Week in Pictures, might get 3 million page views. "An evening at the Oscars" might do 6 or 8 million.

The 78 million isn't a record. Our Haiti earthquake slide show got 99 million page views in a week. But it's more than the death of Michael Jackson (56 million page views on the slide show and 7.4 million on the first story about his death).

An enterprise story on the site, presented in a normal story page, might get a million page views. It all depends how long it's on the cover of msnbc.com, and whether our half-sister company MSN picks it up. Some stories go over that number. For comparison, the story on Todd Palin's e-mails was about 1.5 million. The series on abusive interrogations at Guantanamo got 3 million. A story on Hillary Clinton's hidden thesis at Wellesley reached 3.2 million.

If this same slide show had been told as a story, and had gotten the same display on our cover, I'm guessing it would have had 1.5 to 2 million page views. But the time spent by readers would have been far less. The average time spent by readers on this slide show was more than 13 minutes.