Journalism News

Mirror, mirror on the wall who's the most famous fame-whore of them all?

Tigers are disappearing from the Indian sub-continent and the government is enrolling the help of stars, politicians and citizens to help in the cause to save the animals

Another day of the tournament down, and there was far less intrigue, but the winds of upset have hardly died down.

A grandmother drives her 9-year-old son to school drunk, crashing the car while another mother is being accused of beating her 2-year-old, who eventually died from his injuries

Miley Cyrus doesn't appear to forget where she comes from, which could bode well for her success, both professionally and personally

When both Politico and The Atlantic are duped by a hoax, you know it's malicious and unfun.

FT removes last free-to-all articles from site; now, free viewing requires registration/Google path (ht @felixsalmon) http://j.mp/9gnbI7 »

Photojournalism prof calls @NiemanReports‘ latest issue “a treasure chest.” We agree http://j.mp/d5JH0n »

Nice. @ProPublica launches interactive #hcr news app: compare Senate-passed bill, House reconciliation changes http://j.mp/bo7GNN »

New front in the geowars? The Brightkite guys are launching a one-stop check-in service, @caro reports http://j.mp/cbvFqW

Apple is now accepting iPad apps; submit them by 3/27 to get them in App Store by 4/3 launch http://j.mp/dkR5bJ » Facebook, social justice edition: the Jumo rollout begins http://j.mp/b7IADM » MPA launches “mapps,” a comprehensive list of magazines’ mobile apps (via @fishbowlny) http://j.mp/bwO6AU » WaPo attributes paucity of databases to old CMS; says “state-of-the art system” will be in place by year’s end http://j.mp/fVHi5 » In Feb 2010, global web users spent two hours more on social networks than they did in Feb 2009 http://j.mp/c4Gz4n » Twitter search returns may soon be ranked by popularity, rather than immediacy (via @mathewi) http://j.mp/9uCVSe » “Digital content, like water, will always find a path to freedom. You lock it down, someone else will open it up.” http://j.mp/d4yZIg » Startups compete to determine who’ll get to do your menial tasks for you http://j.mp/b83B2U »

Sleepless? Try counting…tweeps. 48% of social media users check Facebook and/or Twitter after they go to bed http://j.mp/9IYr9X »

Why hasn’t Facebook overtaken Google in the UK? Hitwise has the numbers http://j.mp/bfG8R5 »

Good morning! Google may pull out of China as soon as April 10, China Business News reports http://j.mp/8YFJSM »

Unstructured data is typically said to account for up to 80 percent of information stored on business computer systems. While this is a widely accepted notion, I'm inclined to agree with Seth Grimes that this 80 percent rule is inflated, depending on the type of business. Still, If we could structure even a fraction of that data, it would create significant value for small newspapers.

The type of data that has my attention is free-form text. Small newspapers in particular have computers full of text files containing information about their communities. Often, these files lie dormant, left on the hard drive of a dusty computer somewhere in the back of the newsroom, inaccessible to the public. Compounding this problem is the fact that newspapers realize no additional value from content they paid journalists to produce. The information is gathered, and then much of it sits somewhere, unused and untouched. Only parts of it end up being published.

To further understand the potential of resurrecting unstructured data, one must realize the workflow of traditional small newspapers.

Newspaper Workflow

It surprised me several years ago when I learned learn that most community newspapers utilize a very low-tech workflow when managing their data. A typical newspaper might organize their content in hierarchical folders as shown in the example below. Files are grouped by month, then named with the day of publication:

The workflow is simple, effective and has served its purpose for many years. Once a file's publication date has passed, it is ignored forever. At best, a selection of these files are copy and pasted into a content management system for publication online. But this process seldom happens until after the newspaper's print edition has been completed. At this point the newspaper has little incentive to process these files further, as attention must now be focused on the next day's edition.

This reality helps illustrate the potential for the CMS Upload Utility, my Knight News Challenge project. It's an inexpensive way to move text files into a web-accessible database. Once inside a database, possibilities abound for how value can be created from this data. In my next post, I'll share several sample use cases to help explain how the application works.

For now, though, think about all of that unstructured data, and how we can make better use of it.

Director Paul Greengrass makes me sick...literally.

Is there anything more important that Sandra Bullock and Jessie James or March Madness? Arguably yes: the Large Hadron Collider.

People across Australia are being given the rare opportunity to see a display of nine Victoria Cross Medals in an exhibition that with travel across the country.

Michelle McGee sold her story for fame, but the trail of lies and deception she's left will come back to haunt her.

Quadruple Witching, is it that old black magic?

Or: when a handshake is better than a kiss.

[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]

A raft of ideas at SXSW: The center of the journalism-and-tech world this week has been Austin, Texas, site of the annual conference South by Southwest. The part we’re most concerned about — SXSW Interactive — ran from last Friday to Tuesday. The New York Times’ David Carr gives us a good feel for the atmosphere, and Poynter’s Steve Myers asked 15 journalists what they took away from SXSW, and it makes for a good roundup. A handful of sessions there grabbed the attention of a lot of the journalism thinkers on the web, and I’ll try to take you on a semi-quick tour:

— We saw some conversation last week leading up to Matt Thompson’s panel on “The Future of Context,” and that discussion continued throughout this week. We had some great description of the session, between Steve Myers’ live blog and Elise Hu’s more narrative summary. As Hu explains, Thompson and his fellow panelists, NYU prof Jay Rosen and Apture founder Tristan Harris, looked at why much of our news lacks context, why our way of producing news doesn’t make sense (we’re still working with old values in a new ecosystem), and how we go about adding context to a largely episodic news system.

Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center echoes the panelists’ concerns, and Lehigh prof Jeremy Littau pushes the concept further, connecting it with social gaming. Littau doesn’t buy the idea that Americans don’t have time for news, since they obviously have plenty of time for games that center on collecting things, like Facebook’s Farmville. He’d like to see news organizations try to provide that missing context in a game environment, with the gamer’s choices informed by “blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding.”

— NYU’s web culture guru, Clay Shirky, gave a lecture on the value that can be squeezed out of public sharing. Matt Thompson has a wonderful live blog of the hourlong session, and Liz Gannes of GigaOM has a solid summary, complete with a few of the made-for-Twitter soundbites Shirky has a knack for, like “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does,” and “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Once again, Jeremy Littau pulls Shirky’s ideas together and hones in on their implications for journalism in a thoughtful post, concluding that while the future of journalism is bright, its traditional players are clueless. “I just don’t see a future for them when they’re trying to protect information as a scarce commodity,” he writes. “The scarcity, in truth, is in media companies trying to create civic goods via user sharing.”

— danah boyd, who studies social media and youth culture for Microsoft Research, gave a well-received talk on privacy and publicity online. It doesn’t have much to do directly with journalism, but it’s a brilliant, insightful glimpse into how web culture works. Here’s a rough crib of the talk from boyd, and a summary from TechCrunch. There’s a bunch of cool nuggets in there, like boyd’s description of the “inversion of defaults” in privacy and publicity online. Historically, conversations were private by default and public by effort, but conversations online have become public by default and private by effort.

— One of the big journalism-related stories from SXSW has been AOL and Seed’s efforts to employ a not-so-small army of freelancers to cover each of the 2,000 or so bands at the festival. The Daily Beast has the best summary of the project and its goals, and TechCrunch talks about it with former New York Times writer Saul Hansell, who’s directing the effort. Silicon Alley Insider noted midweek that they wouldn’t reach the goal of 2,000 interviews.

One of the big questions about AOL and Seed’s effort is whether they’re simply creating another kind of “content mill” that many corners of the web have been decrying over the past few months. Music writer Leor Galil criticized it as crass, complaining of the poor quality of some of the interviews: “AOL is shelling out cash and providing great space for potentially terrible content.” David Cohn of Spot.Us compared AOL to the most notorious content farm, Demand Media, concluding that journalists shouldn’t be worried about them exploiting writers, but should be worried about their threat to the journalism industry as a whole.

— One other session worth noting: “Cult of the Amateur” author and digital dystopian Andrew Keen gave a sobering talk called “Is Innovation Fair?” As Fast Company’s Francine Hardaway aptly summarized, he pointed to the downsides of our technological advances and argued that if SXSW is a gathering of the winners in the cultural shift, we have to remember that there are losers, too.

Pew’s paywall findings: The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual “State of the News Media” study, and it’s a smorgasbord of statistics about every major area of journalism, from print to TV to the web. A summary of summaries: The study’s six major emerging trends (expanded on by Poynter’s Bill Mitchell), some of its key statistical findings, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s seven eye-popping statistics from the study.

The biggest headline for most people was the study’s finding that only seven percent of the Americans who get their news online say they’d spring for a favorite news source’s content if it went behind a paywall. (The AP writeup has a few more statistics and some analysis about online loyalty and advertising.) Jeff Jarvis, a longtime paywall opponent, wondered why newspapers are spending so much time on the paywall issue instead of their “dreadful” engagement and loyalty online. Former WSJer Jason Fry breaks down the study to conclude that the basic unit of online journalism is not the site but the article — thus undermining the primary mindset behind the paywall.

Poynter’s Rick Edmonds, who writes the study’s section on newspapers each year, said he’s done with dead-and-dying as an industry theme. Instead, he said, the problem with most newspapers is that they are becoming insubstantial, shells of their former selves. “They lack the heft to be thrown up the front porch or to satisfy those readers still willing to pay for a good print newspaper.” Editor & Publisher pulled some of the more depressing statistics from Edmonds’ chapter. Yet Lee Rainie, who co-authored the study’s section on online economics, said he was still optimistic about journalism’s future.

A bleak look at local TV news: Another fascinating journalism study was released late last week by USC researchers that found disappointing, though not necessarily surprising, trends in Los Angeles local TV news: Crime, sports, weather and teasers dominate, with very little time for business and government. USC’s press release has some highlights, and co-author Martin Kaplan offers a quick, pointed video overview of the report, concluding with a barb about wants and needs: “I want ice cream. I need a well-balanced meal. Apparently the people of Los Angeles want 22 seconds about their local government. Maybe if they got more than that, they’d want more than that.”

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps was “flat-out alarmed” by the study and vowed some vague form of action. Jay Rosen was ruthless in his criticism on Twitter, and Los Angeles Times critic James Rainey used the study as the basis for a particularly well-written evisceration of local TV news. Rainey had the most promising suggestion, proposing that a cash-strapped TV station find a newspaper, nonprofit or j-school interested in partnering with it to build an audience around more substantive, in-depth TV news.

The iPad, magazines and advertising: As we expected, lots and lots of people have been ordering iPads since they went on sale — 50,000 in the first two hours and 152,000 in three days, according to estimates. We’re also continuing to get word of news organizations’ and publishers’ plans for apps; this week we heard that the AP will have an app when the iPad rolls out next month, and saw a nifty interactive feature for the digital Viv Mag. (The Guardian has a roundup of other video iPad demos that have come out so far.)

SXSW also had at least three sessions focusing on media companies and the iPad: 1) One on the iPad and the magazine industry focused largely on advertising — here’s a DigitalBeat summary and deeper thoughts by Reuters’ Felix Salmon on why advertising on the iPad could be more immersive and valuable than in print; 2) Another focusing on the iPad and Wired magazine, with Salmon opining on why the iPad is a step backwards in the open-web world; 3) And a third on iPad consumption habits and their effects on various industries.

Reading roundup: One ongoing discussion, two pieces of news and one smart analysis:

The conversation sparked by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen’s advice for newspapers to forget the printed paper and go all-in with online news continued this week, with Frederic Filloux noting that “there are alternatives to envisioning the transformation of the print media as only a choice between euthanizing the paper product or putting it on life support.” Steve Yelvington looked at setting up separate print and online divisions (been there, done that, he says), Tim Kastelle spun Andreesen and Google’s Hal Varian off into more thoughtful suggestions for newspapers, and Dorian Benkoil took the opportunity to marvel at how much things have changed for the better.

The first piece of news was Twitter’s launch at SXSW of @anywhere, a simple program that allows other sites to implement some of Twitter’s features. TechCrunch gave a quick overview of what it could do, CNET’s Caroline McCarthy looked at its targeting of Facebook Connect, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram was unimpressed.

Second, ABC News execs revealed that they’re planning on putting up an online paywall by this summer. The Guardian and paidContent have detailed interviews with ABC News digital chief Paul Slavin.

And finally, newspaper vet Alan Mutter examines the often-heard assertion that small newspapers are weathering the industry’s storm better than their larger counterparts. He nails all the major issues at play for small papers, both the pluses (lack of competition and broadband access, loyal readership) and the minuses (rapidly aging population, some local economies lacking diversity). He ultimately advises small papers to ensure their future success by innovating in order to become indispensable to their communities: “To the degree publishers emphasize short-term profits over long-term engagement, they will damage their franchises — and open the way to low-cost online competitors.”

Things are starting to get exciting out in San Francisco, and I feel fine.

Google Calendar has a new feature in Labs called Smart Rescheduler to help reschedule events.

VIENNA — In August 2008, two wars unfolded in South Ossetia. Georgian newspapers and television stations reported an aggressive, unprovoked Russian invasion of their country. Russians, meanwhile, watched images and read tales of Georgian troops committing genocide.

For a brief period, Georgians could flip between TV stations to watch both versions. Soon, access to the Russian media ended. (Russians could not access Georgian TV and few Russians would be able to read Georgian print media.)

Margarita Akhvlediani, a longtime war correspondent and editor in chief of Go Group/Eyewitness Studio, studied the coordinated PR campaign by Georgia, the ensuing media coverage of the conflict by both Georgian and Russian media, and the role of NGOs in the information cycle. She presented some of her findings and related research at the Milton Wolf Seminar on the future of news and NGOs here in Vienna this morning. Her conclusion: International NGOs are critical to the dissemination of information in war and crisis zones.

Akhvlediani described a tale that came to symbolize the conflict for many Russians. According to the war story, dozens of Georgian villagers, seeking safety in a local church, died when Georgian soldiers burned the church to the ground. Human Rights Watch looked into the story, spending three months traveling to villages throughout the region looking for the church. Eventually, Human Rights Watch concluded: “…numerous Ossetian villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch in [the] village said they never heard about, let alone witnessed, such an incident.”

Akhvlediani argues that this independent research serves as an important fact check on one-sided reporting happening by both sides of the conflict. Local NGOs, Akhvlediani explained, found themselves in a similar situation as local media — unwilling or unable to report a rounded look at the conflict, instead presenting a single point of view.

Western media, which parachuted in to cover the conflict, by and large provided a biased take, too, especially at the start of the conflict, according to fellow panelist Andrei Zolotov, editor-in-chief of Russia Profile (and a former Nieman Fellow). Many journalists seemed happy to latch onto the underdog narrative the Georgia government had pushed, he said. (Two dozen press releases went out in the first few days of the conflict, seeking to shore up Western support for Georgia). “It’s a very easy story to sell,” Zolotov said.

The work of Human Rights Watch, which took three months, is an unlikely project for any outlet, even the best-off newspapers. It’s an example of an ongoing theme we’ve covered this week: How can NGOs be newsmakers?

These are real life characters, I simply turned my camera towards them and the story told itself.

Six years ago I had the opportunity to work on an ambitious social project that set out to socialize the living room. Keep in mind, this was before the popularization of social networking as it exists today. In almost every way, this system predicted what would ultimately transform your experience on PCs as well as everything else. It was rooted in the realization that the Web was an isolated and lonely experience and that in order for online and terrestrial content to connect with audiences in the future, a new hybrid was required – one that fused social, consumption, and participation in the overall experience.

For many of those who’ve flown Virgin America and experienced Red, their inflight entertainment system, you can get a feel for what lies ahead. The relevance of Red is less about the on-demand aspects of content consumption and more about the ability to view content with others in flight and socialize on screen during the program.

We become part of the experience and as such, we define the experience for ourselves and everyone else who is viewing and contributing to the conversation.

Many technologists, media industrialists, and marketers refer to the current landscape of content consumption as “The Three Screens,” representing mobile, PC, and also televisions. The three screens are the windows of the world, your world, as you are increasingly empowered to take control of the experiences in which you wish to immerse.

The three screens are powered by an underlying technology platform that fuses the social, mobile, and real-time Web into a Golden Triangle and connected by the devices that deliver an immersive and participatory experience, on-demand, regardless of location.

The Golden Triangle will one day soon engender a shared experience across the three screens, but for the meantime, a resurgence of crowd-powered demand for relevance and personalization is leading a groundswell of change and evolution within each medium.

Today, when you view the trending topics on Twitter, we can see the clustering of conversations around particular programs and events as participants gather around a virtual water cooler to share their reactions and essentially socialize around a focal point. The coalescence of this activity is visible and as it increases in volume, the reach and effects resonate across social graphs attracting outsiders and converting them into real-time participants – motivated by a common sentiment of not wanting to miss out in something that potentially carries cultural significance, albeit finite.

The New York Times refers to this online social phenomena as the Water Cooler Effect. In fact, this social effect is credited with breathing new life into the dwindling audiences for television overall.

According to the New York Times article…

This year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched program in United States history, beating out the final episode of “M*A*S*H” in 1983. Awards shows like the Grammys are attracting their biggest audiences in years. Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV.

The Web is becoming part of us and we’re bringing it to everything we experience in the real world and now, also on TV.

Nielsen observed that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony was online at the same time. And, that number will only continue to escalate. As such, networks are seeking to capitalize on the social effect. Jon Gibs, a vice president at Nielsen, told the NY Times that he is encouraged by recent Olympic data that shows simultaneous TV-and-Web viewing signaled the growing importance of interactivity to the television experience, “Increased usage of social media is definitely driving the ratings

NBC aired The Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and because of the tremendous social boosts it experienced, the network is now planning to recreate the experience for the Emmy Awards this fall. Accordingly networks will also further experiment with methods to trigger viewing and online engagement simultaneously.

A connected and shared experience is defining a new and attractive digital lifestyle.

But as this water-cooler effect gains in influence, its true opportunity lies in its holistic integration in each of the three screens – especially as tablets earn a new role in the consumption and engagement behavior of the digerati.

Today, TVs offer networking capabilities, quite literally. For example, my Samsung TV is connected to my Apple network hub in the living room, which allows it to connect to several social networks including Twitter. While viewing a program, I can view my Twitter stream on screen and also tweet directly from the TV (wish it had a keyboard however.)

Imagine the possibilities if each program was socialized within the screen of my choice. Suddenly my viewing and associated online engagement is liberated from the living room and now enabled from the place and device of my choosing. In the meantime however, the mediums are forcing creativity and as a result traditional perspectives are now complemented with multiple sides in a peer-to-peer format.

For example, online networks are proving to be effective channels for content experimentation, often extending the audience of a traditional program. The 51st Grammy Awards created additional live programming and partnered with uStream, the leading live online video network, and Facebook to broadcast complementary coverage of the event as an exclusive for the social Web. As a result, the video hosted as many as 200,000 simultaneous online viewers and the ensuing conversations that spilled over into concentric social graphs and networks helped increase the overall TV audience by 35%.

The result of the social effect and the integrated social hooks inherent in today’s online networks will only inspire a genre of connectivity and interaction as programming will eventually feature creative triggers that engender desired responses and action. The same is true for any event, whether it’s on air, live, or on the big screen.

Chloe Sladden is Twitter’s director of media partnerships and her words perfectly capture the sociological impact of social media, “Twitter [and other networks] lets people feel plugged in to a real-time conversation. In the future, I can’t imagine a major event where the audience doesn’t become part of the story itself.”

The water cooler or social effect is only one part of defining a more meaningful experience over time. It is culturally significant as it connects people around common interests in real-time all over the web using events as our participation hub and as our magnet for convergence. The social effect, as a united audience, will also force broadcasters and media to produce more meaningful and engaging programming, content and ultimately experiences, as we are leading the democratization of all media and attention.

Our actions speak louder than our words and as such the change we wish to instill lies beyond taking part in online conversations. We seek a more participatory experience where viewers can also dictate outcomes. Our role will mature from viewer to contributor and this shift will ensure the relevance and livelihood of media while connecting us, as individuals and online denizens, to a more personal and fulfilling engagement and the community that it fundamentally cultivates.

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