Paul's Web Space 2.1

The Future of News & the Knight Commission

I've been working on this post for a couple months, and it keeps getting longer and longer, so here goes - the Future of News:

In February, Walter Isaacson kicked off a flurry of commentary on the state of the news business with a provocative article in Time Magazine – How to Save Your Newspaper – which asserts that news media must start to charge for content to survive, and that micropayments a-la Apple's iTunes store offer significant promise. That month I saw David Bollier speak about his book Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. As he discussed the sharing economy of the Internet, he spent some time looking at the difficulties that the news business is having dealing with these new realities. Bollier also mentioned micropayments as a possible tool, but was more excited by a public model for funding that wouldn't threaten journalistic independence, but rather could be modeled on the early days of newspaper home delivery, which was subsidized by the Post Office.

Bollier referred to a recent article by Eric Alterman in the Nation "Save the News, Not the Newspapers," the writing of NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, and the local citizen journalism project Spot.Us. The concept of micropayments also came up in an interesting Yi-Tan conference call I listened to that week on the Future of News — featuring Mitch Ratcliffe, Dan Gillmor, and Liza Boyd, whose blog is also titled The Future of News. Spot.Us founder David Cohn also stopped by for part of the call.

These were followed by the March release of the annual report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2009. It outlines economic trends that are rapidly worsening for traditional news media, while the adoption of online news offered by both traditional news operations as well as a growing variety of alternative sources continues to accelerate. This offers both challenges and opportunities for traditional journalistic entities to move as quickly as possible to migrate to the web and embrace new possibilities offered by interactive multimedia and participatory interfaces.

Later that month came two eye-opening pieces. Clay Shirky wrote "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," which pretty much shredded the business-as-usual, digital version of what we were doing before solutions tried by newspapers to date. Dan Conover on the blog Xark wrote 2020 vision: What's next for news, which contained numerous provocative ideas for what's in store for journalism over the next several years. Along the same lines this month, CPSR colleague Andy Oram blogged about how we might obtain the important contributions we receive from journalism – expertise, diversity, and debate – without relying on the institutions that provide it today. A fascinating (and long) article in Vanity Fair details how the current publisher of the New York Times has made several strategic blunders recently, and thus the Times finds itself in more financial trouble than it might — in spite of publishing one of the best newspapers, with one of the best web sites, in the world.

At the April meeting of the Newspaper Association of America in San Diego, AP Chairman Dean Singleton declared war on news aggregators and search engines. Responses were fast and furious, from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Danny Sullivan. Taking the side of the newspapers, Michael Moran wrote No Such Thing as Free News in the Nation. I saw a Tweet from Jay Rosen at the conference, asking what readers thought of a proposal that Google favor articles of "real newspapers" in search results. I say newspapers should liberally link to each other to boost their SEO, rather than Google favoring any content over any other.

Given the level of the crisis in the newspaper industry, and various proposals for government policy to assist newspapers, it was inevitable that Congress would get involved, first with House hearings in April, then with Senate hearings this week. Forbes has a nice summary of six proposals offered to the Senate explaining how they might save the newspaper business.

In my previous post, I explained how the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy seeks comment through today on the draft introduction to its report. I'm an informal adviser to the commission staff, and in my comments I say that I like a lot of what they see as possibilities for new funding models (public and/or nonprofit) and organizational structures, but there is too little about embracing alternatives to traditional journalism, about enabling citizens to take advantage of access to tools and data transparency, and of new forms of civic discourse springing up, enabled by new technologies. I believe that we need to figure out ways to help some version of the existing journalistic enterprise survive and adapt, but also encourage the development of these alternatives — only by pursuing both tracks to we hope to deliver the most information possible to enable communities to effectively govern themselves and prosper into the future.

Labels: community, democracy, future, journalism

   Link: http://future-of-news.blogspot.com/

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Knight Commission Invites Public Input on Community Information Needs

(I'm part of an informal advisory committee helping the staff of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy by providing ideas and feedback, and spreading the word about this public input period. I'll be blogging about this report and the future of news in general later this week, but please check out the draft introduction and provide your input as well. -PH)

What information do Americans need to accomplish the personal goals and to be effective citizens in our democracy? How are they getting their news and information? And what would they do to improve the quality of news and information available to them?

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (www.knightcomm.org) has been conducting the first major study in the digital age to identify the information needs of communities in a democracy, assess how and whether those needs are being met, and recommend steps to improve the fulfillment of those needs.

Now the Commission, in partnership with PBS Engage, is seeking public input from citizens across the nation from Tuesday April 21 – Friday May 8, 2009 at www.pbs.org/publicinput. The site offers an interactive experience and includes a preliminary draft of the introduction to the Commission’s report, survey questions for the public to answer, highlight videos from some of the public forums and meetings held by the Commission, blogs about the Commission’s work, and a forum for citizens to express their thoughts and opinions.

During the public input period, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Co-Chair of the Commission, will answer citizens’ questions about the Commission’s work via Google Moderator, which enables participants to both submit and vote on questions they think should be answered

The Commission’s upcoming final report will include recommendations for achieving the news and information environment that democratic communities need in order to thrive. The Commission launched in June 2008 with an aggressive agenda to assess the information needs of citizens from a variety of different types of communities in order to make concrete recommendations to public policy makers about improving local information flow. The free flow of news and information in communities is essential to effective democracy. With the digital age transforming media worldwide, reducing traditional journalism in a number of communities, the Commission is focused on how Americans will get the news and information they need to make informed decisions for themselves and for their communities.

Over the past year the Commission held seven public forums and meetings in communities across the nation and heard from more than 100 speakers, including community organizers, educators, journalists from old and new media, labor leaders, technology engineers and strategists, entrepreneurs, futurists, public officials, policy analysts, economic consultants and community foundation representatives. The Commission has also received significant input from an informal advisory network of journalists, academics, and people involved in policy and community work.

The Knight Commission, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, operates out of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program in Washington, D.C. It includes seventeen respected representatives of journalism, communities and public policy with diverse perspectives, including Co-Chairs Mayer and Theodore B. Olson, Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and former U.S. Solicitor General, and ex-officio members Alberto Ibargüen and Walter Isaacson, presidents respectively of Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute. The Commission’s executive director is Peter Shane, a law professor at The Ohio State University, who is advised by a committee of journalists, policymakers and academic experts from a variety of fields. For more information on the Knight Commission, visit www.knightcomm.org.

A project of the Aspen Institute and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Labels: community, democracy, journalism, open government, politics

   Link: http://www.pbs.org/publicinput

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ONA08 Day Two - Tina Brown, Semantic Web

The main sessions of the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference were held September 12 (my birthday:) and September 13. First up was a keynote address by Tina Brown. Some may have wondered why Tina Brown – former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and author of a book on Princess Di – was speaking at an online news event, but she made it plain to see, offering an interesting take on what's missing in the online news space, and announcing her latest venture. This month she launched the Daily Beast, a news aggregation service that features content selected by 20 or so live editors, rather than utilizing automation to pick stories — offering content designed to appeal to "the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.” She was coy about details, but opened up a little more to Jeff Jarvis the night before. Not the most insightful talk, but it was interesting to hear the perspective of an old-school magazine type trying to navigate the waters of Web 2.0.

The first session I attended was a presentation by Marik Bide, project director of the Automated Content Access protocol (ACAP), a new European initiative that would provide the ability for news stories and other content to specify what uses are permitted. It's aimed particularly at search engines, but as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, seems to violate the basic tenets of the "link economy" that enable the Web to thrive. He was even harder on ACAP in his conference wrap-up, also directing criticism at ONA for emphasizing old-school news and its approach to the web rather than actively seeking our new types of news organizations and companies. Even though I work for an old-school newspaper, I've worked in the web and online space much longer, and I can see where he's coming from to a point. However, there were exceptions to his critique.

The next panel I attended, The Next New Metrics, tried to divine coming trends in audience measurement, beyond the page view. The most interesting presenter was Matt Cutler of Visible Measures, which specializes in measuring the consumption and distribution of Internet video; he stated emphatically that advertisers want more video – it consistently commands the highest CPMs and sells out inventory – so our charge is to create more video content, and presumably the money will follow.

Finally, I watched presentations of a couple interesting new developments in the Semantic Web space, first from Tom Tague of OpenCalais, a tool from Thompson/Reuters that enables automated tagging of content with rich semantic information — more semantic, but less of a "wow" application, at least yet, and available for free to all users. Then we heard from Tristan Harris of Apture, which gives publishers the ability to quickly link key concepts or details in their stories with a variety of multimedia and background information, all without leaving the page — less purely semantic, but with a more immediate payoff. This tool is available for free to bloggers and nonprofit publishers.

Labels: freeculture, journalism, metrics, ona08, semantic web, video

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/

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Press Intimidation at the National Political Conventions

There were disturbing examples of police trampling on press freedom at both the Demcratic and Republican national conventions in recent weeks.

First, at the DNC08 convention in Denver, an ABC News producer was arrested outside the hotel where a private breakfast was being held for Democratic party leadership and VIP donors to the party. Nightline was in the midst of a series called "Money Talks," reporting the continued influence of big money donors on the political process, and ABC News correspondent Brian Ross opined "We're getting under their skin, I think."



Then the following week brought many incidents of harassment of independent journalists covering the RNC08 convention in St. Paul. In perhaps the most infamous, Amy Goodman or Democracy Now!, along with two of her producers, were arrested while trying to cover the police response to a demonstration, even though their press credentials were plainly visible. As Goodman recounts the arrests were somewhat violent — her producers were stomped and bloodied and Goodman's press pass ripped from her neck when she protested that they were credentialed journalists.

What possible reason exists for these arrests other than to intimidate journalists interested in covering the dissent – and not just the spectacle – surrounding the conventions. It's a chilly day when freedom of speech is infringed and diverse voices are deliberately silenced and marginalized in conjunction with these highly visible manifestations of our democratic process. And for the most part, mainstream media stood silently by as these events transpired, and for the most part concentrated their coverage on the packaged spectacle.

Labels: DNC08, freedomofspeeech, journalism, politics, RNC08

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My ONA08 Day One - Like Minds, Jeff Jarvis

As I walked up to the registration desk at the Online News Association Annual Conference (ONA08) at the Capital Hilton in DC, I received a warm greeting from conference co-chair Amy Webb (I helped out a little on the social media subcommittee).

I then walked into the Like Minds workshop, where Neil Budde of DailyMe.com was discussing the issues and ideas involved with editing a stand-alone news site (rather than one connected to an existing newspaper or broadcast media outlet). In reality a lot of the issues are the same, just dealing with different audiences (or entrenched editorial staff). He pointed out that our site, edweek.org, doesn't have to deal with the same sort of noise and invective as many media sites, partly due to the civility of our audience; this is starting to change, however, as we wade into the world of politics (but our readers are still more well behaved than many).

It can be difficult to impart ethical or journalistic standards to people in the technology world rather than journalists. It can help if you ask them to look at readers as users — strive to provide a satisfying user experience, and you will be doing good journalism. This actually sounds similar to my prior blogging that good SEO can lead to good usability.

He discussed the utility of measurement, page clicks vs. time on site/length of impression. It can be tough to convince advertisers that a lasting impression might be better than a fleeting click, but one way is to demonstrate the difference visually. Metrics can also help determine most valuable content/tasks based upon traffic/audience response; through a show of hands, we saw that some in attendance actually follow and react to metrics in real time.

Finally, it is the job of the editor to ensure that technologists help productivity, not make production/reporting staff jump through hoops to fit some software/technology imperative. At edweek.org, we operate much like this, with many of our projects aimed at labor saving and automating repetitive tasks.

Then Dale Steinke of KING5.com discussed the challenges facing ediotors of broadcast sites. In the area of video, he stated that raw video most popular, showing a funny clip they posted featuring ping-pong car crashes after an ice storm in Portland OR that was subsequently shared on YouTube many thousand times. Compelling produced video samples included a documentary of suffering in Africa, and a very funny video mash-up of the movie Election with Hillary Clinton produced by Andy Bowers & Bill Smee, guys I knew from Yale who are now with SlateV.

Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick


He then launched into a discussion of newsroom integration, for which I had submitted some comments that I was asked to relate. Here are some of the notes that I had sent in:

Newsroom integration – we have some successful strategies, mostly by involving editors and reporters in as much of our web operations as possible. Specifically, we introduced staff-written blogs a couple years ago, and over the past year, increased the pace of introductions, so that now a significant number of reporters and editors actually write (or lightly edit) blogs. Likewise, with our online chats, we have involved the newsroom in scheduling and moderating them, and our e-newsletters are edited by newsroom desk editors. Also, over the past year, we have assigned a rotating reporter to sit with the web editorial/production team for three months at a time, learning all the tools, and participating in production to the extent that is practical for such a temporary “producer.” Lastly, we sent two reporters to each political convention over the past two weeks, and they were equipped with laptops, smart phones, and flip video cameras, and trained in video shooting and in using our Twitter account. They were blogging, twittering, shooting video to post in their blogs, and even writing an occasional news article. Mojos if only just for special events (so far).

Going viral – we were plugged in to the C-SPAN convention coverage, our blogs were included, we used the hashtags so our tweets were included, but really, the biggest rush of traffic comes from our own e-newsletters. We also use Facebook, MySpace, Social Tagging, YouTube, etc, but with little payoff yet.

I also attended the J-School Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, and heard various people connected with schools of journalism discuss projects they have undertaken that involve more creative use of the web, which is a tremendous development. The dinner keynote speaker at this event was Jeff Jarvis, Directory of the Interactive Journalism Program at CUNY and author of the blog BuzzMachine. Jeff described his Entrepreneurial Journalism program, starting with why that is not an oxymoron. He rather believes that business thinking is becoming more and more important in the world of networked journalism, and the only way to create a "sustainable journalistic enterprise." He described an evolution of journalism that is necessary in today's business environment, including these steps and more:

1. Survival
2. Stewardship
3. Innovation
4. Good Management
5. Opportunity

Jeff described how the curriculum covers many business topics that are increasingly important for journalists to understand, from elevator pitches, to advertising models, to subscriber acquisition and churn, and the way that these projects eventually were pitched to real angel investors, and the winning ideas will eventually be tried as real businesses. He also briefly described some of the ideas, imploring us not to shear these ideas in our own blogs invoking the novel (to me) concept of "FrienDA" – a play in NDA, or non-disclosure agreement among friends – a seemingly risky concept in other contexts, but probalby low-risk in the world of journalists familiar with news embargoes.

Labels: education, internet, journalism, ona08

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/archives/001203.php#thursday

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Online News Association Conference: 9/11-13 in DC

Tomorrow the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference kicks of in Washington DC with a series of workshops and a reception at the Newseum. It promises to be a fabulous conference, featuring keynote speeches by Tina Brown, Robert Scoble and Devin Wenig, more panels than ever before, and the Annual Banquet featuring the Online Journalism Awards Banquet.

I'm looking forward to sessions about everything from audience measurement, video and multimedia, and social media in the newsroom. There will be a town hall style panel covering online ethics, which has created an online ethics wiki to get the conversation started ahead of time. Then on Saturday afternoon, the conference closes with a Super Panel as usual, but this time addressing how to save a struggling media company. Read the case study (pdf) and join the conversation on the conference discussion forum; super-panelists will incorporate some of the ideas posted in this forum.

I'm on the conference organizing committee, participating primarily social media subcommittee headed by Chrys Wu. It's been an amazing group, and we've come up with some really cool (if not absolutely bleeding edge) social media tools to assist those at the conference as well as those who cannot make it:

• A pre-conference podcast series featuring interviews with conference speakers, organizers, and student journalists. This series is available as an RSS feed and an through iTunes. There are now six interviews available;
• - A Twitter feed that's the "control tower" for all things ONA08 online; if you're twittering, please be sure to use the hash tag #ONA08;
• A Tweet widget that collects all Twitter messages tagged @ONA08 and #ONA08 provided by at Widgetbox (see below);
• A public bulletin board for discussing panels and workshops, making last-minute announcements, and arranging meetups;
• A Flickr pool where you can upload conference photos; join and tag your photos with ONA08;
• Last but not least, the ONA08 Facebook Group, where we've been discussing the conference for a while.
  

Several people have asked who's coming to the conference. Post a message in the "Hang Out in the Lounge" forum to find out and meet in person.

We still need bag stuffers. If you know of people in who will be in Washington on Wednesday, let them know we'd like their help. Have them email Tiffany.Shackelford@gmail.com to volunteer.

ONA08 as much about community as it is about industry. And this year promises to offer more information and ideas than ever before from all sorts of people interested in the future of online news. I hope you’ll join the conference online and in person.

Labels: conference, journalism, ONA, ona08

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference

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Interactive Narratives 2.0 Launches

The Online News Association (ONA) has just relaunched Interactive Narratives, a very cool showcase of multimedia storytelling, now with new contribution and rating functionality. Interactive Narratives was originally created by Andrew DiVigal to keep track of interesting multimedia storytelling examples for conference presentations and courses he taught at SFSU and for the Poynter Institute. He started out by creating a database to maintain a list of bookmarks he used in these presentations, then he made this database available to everyone through the original Interactive Narratives site.

When he was hired to be Multimedia Editor at the New York Times, he found he no longer had time to maintain the site all by himself, so he worked with ONA to relaunch Interactive Narratives 2.0. The site now relies on members of its community to both contribute new content, and also to rate, tag, and review all of the content it contains, to make it easier for people to locate what they are looking for, or just to find the best storytelling examples as chosen by the crowd. Site participation is open to all; ONA members are already registered, others need to sign up.

Read more:

• ONA President's Letter - Interactive 2.0 Launches by Jonathan Dube
• Interview on Poynter Online with site founder Andrew DiVigal
• Guidelines for posting content
  

Additional tools and resources:

• Submit Bookmarklet
• Netvibes Universe
• Facebook Fan Page
  

Labels: journalism, multimedia, ONA, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.interactivenarratives.org/

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