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April 26 2012
LedeHub to Foster Open, Collaborative Journalism
I'm honored to be selected as one of the inaugural AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship fellows for the 2012-13 academic school year, and am excited to begin work on my project, LedeHub.
I believe in journalism's ability to better the world around us. To fully realize the potential of journalism in the digital age, we need to transform news into a dialogue between readers and reporters. LedeHub does just that, fostering collaborative, continuous and open journalism while incorporating elements of crowdsourcing to allow citizens, reporters and news organizations to come together in unprecedented ways.
LedeHub in Action
Here's a potential case study: "Alice" isn't a journalist, but she loves data and can spot the potential for a story amid the rows and columns of a CSV file. She comes across some interesting census data illustrating the rise of poverty in traditionally wealthy Chicagoland suburbs, but isn't quite sure how to use it, so she points her browser to www.ledehub.com. She creates a new story repository called "census-chicago-12," tags it under "Government Data," and commits the numbers.
Two days later, "Bob" -- a student journalist with a knack for data reporting -- is browsing the site and comes across Alice's repository. He forks it and commits a couple paragraphs of analysis. Alice sees Bob's changes and likes where he's headed, so she merges it back into her repository, and the two continue to collaborate. Alice works on data visualization, and Bob continues to do traditional reporting, voicing the story of middle-class families who can no longer afford to send their children to college.
A few days later, a news outlet like the Chicago Tribune sees "census-chicago-12" and flags it as a promising repository -- pulls it, edits, fact-checks and publishes the story, giving Alice and Bob their first bylines.
As you can see, LedeHub re-imagines the current reporting and writing workflow while underscoring the living nature of articles. By representing stories as "repositories" -- with the ability to edit, update, commit and revert changes over time -- the dynamic nature of news is effectively captured.
Fostering Open-Source Journalism
GitHub and Google Code are social coding platforms that have done wonders for the open-source community. I'd like to see similar openness in the journalism industry.
My proposal for LedeHub is to adapt the tenets of Git -- a distributed version control system -- and appropriate its functionality as it applies to the processes of journalism. I will implement a web application layer on top of this core functionality to build a tool for social reporting, writing and coding in the open. This affords multiple use cases for LedeHub, as illustrated in the case study I described above -- users can start new stories, or search for and contribute to stories already started. I'd like to mirror the basic structure of GitHub, but re-appropriate the front end to cater to the news industry and be more reporter-focused, not code-driven. That said, here's a screenshot of the upcoming LedeHub repository on GitHub (to give you a general idea of what the LedeHub dashboard might look like):
Each story repository may contain text, data, images or code. The GitHub actions of committing (adding changes), forking (diverging story repositories to allow for deeper collaboration and account for potential overlap) and cloning will remain analagous in LedeHub. Repositories will be categorized according to news "topics" or "areas" like education or politics. Users -- from citizens to reporters or coders -- will have the ability to "watch" different story repositories they are interested in and receive updates when changes to that story are made. Users can also comment on different "commits" for a story, offering their input or suggestions for improvement. GitHub offers a "company" option, which allows for multiple users to be added to the organization, a feature I would like to mimic in my project for news outlets, in addition to Google Code's "issues" feature.
Next Steps
I recognize that the scope of my project is ambitious, and my current plan is to segment implementation into iterations -- to build an initial prototype to test within one publication and expand from there.
Journalism needs to become more open, like the web. Information should be shared. The collaboration between the New York Times and the Guardian over WikiLeaks data was very inspiring, two "competing" organizations sharing confidential information for publication. With my project, LedeHub, I hope to foster similar transparency and collaboration.
So, that's the proposal. There's still a lot to figure out. For example, what's the best way to motivate users to collaborate? What types of data can be committed? What copyright issues need to be considered? Should there be compensation involved? Fact-checking? Sound off. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Keep up with all the new content on Collaboration Central by following our Twitter feed @CollabCentral or subscribing to our RSS feed or email newsletter:Katie Zhu is a junior at Northwestern University, studying journalism and computer science, and is particularly interested in human-computer interaction, data visualization and interaction design. She has previously interned at GOOD in Los Angeles, where she helped build GOOD's mobile website. She continues development work part-time throughout the school year, and enjoys designing and building products at the intersection of news and technology. She was selected as a finalist in the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership in 2011.
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April 20 2012
How Ushahidi Deals With Data Hugging Disorder
At Ushahidi, we have interacted with various organizations around the world, and the key thing we remember from reaching out to some NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Kenya is that we faced a lot of resistance when we began in 2008, with organizations not willing to share data which was often in PDFs and not in machine-readable format.
This was especially problematic as we were crowdsourcing information about the events that happened that year in Kenya. Our partners in other countries have had similar challenges in gathering relevant and useful data that is locked away in cabinets, yet was paid for by taxpayers. The progress in the Gov 2.0 and open data space around the world has greatly encouraged our team and community.
When you've had to deal with data hugging disorder of NGOs, open data is a welcome antidote and opportunity. Our role at Ushahidi is to provide software to help collect data, and visualize the near real-time information that's relevant for citizens. The following are some thoughts from our team and what I had hoped to share at OGP in Brazil.
Government Data is important
- It is often comprehensive - It covers the entire country. For example, a national census covers an entire country, so it has a large sample, whereas other questionnaires have a smaller sample.
- Verified - Government data is "clean" data; it has been verified -- for example, the number of schools in a particular region. Crowdsourcing projects done by government can be quite dependable. (Read this example of how Crowdmap was used by the Ministry of Agriculture in Afghanistan to collect commodity prices.)
- Official - government data forms the basis of government decision making and policy. If you want to influence government policy and interventions, it needs to be based on official data.
- Expensive - Government data because it is comprehensive and verified is expensive to collect -- this expense is covered by the taxpayer.
Platforms are important
Libraries were built before people could read. Libraries drove the demand for literacy. Therefore, it makes sense that data and data platforms exist before before citizens have become literate in data. As David Eaves wrote in the Open Knowledge Foundation blog:
It is worth remembering: We didn't build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.
Some countries like Kenya now have the data, and now open-source platforms available not just for Kenya but worldwide. What are we missing?
Platforms like Ushahidi are like fertile land, and having open data is like having good seeds. (Good data equals very good seeds.) But fertile land and seeds are not much without people and actions on that very land. We often speak about technology being 10 percent of what needs to go into a deployment project -- the rest is often partnership, hard work and, most of all, community. Ordinary citizens can be farmers of the land; we need to get ordinary citizens involved at the heart of open government for it to powerful.
Ushahidi's role
Accessible data: The ownership debate has been settled as we agree government data belongs to the citizens. However, ownership is useless without access. If you own a car that you do not have access to, that car is useless to you. In the same way, if our citizens own data they have no access to, it's useless to them. Ownership is exercised through access. Ushahidi makes data accessible -- our technology "meets you where you are." No new devices are needed to interact with the data.
Digestible data: Is Africa overpopulated? If Africa is overpopulated or risks overpopulation, what intervention should we employ? Some have suggested sterilization. However, the data shows us that the more education a woman has, the less babies she has. Isn't a better intervention increasing education opportunities for women? This intervention also has numerous additional advantages for a country -- more educated people are usually more economically productive.
Drive demand for relevant data: Governments are frustrated that the data they have released is not being used. Is this because data release is driven mainly by the supply side, not the demand side -- governments release what they want to release, not what is wanted? How do we identify data that will be useful to the grassroots? We can crowdsource demand for data. For example: The National Taxpayer Alliance in Kenya has shown that when communities demand and receive relevant data, they become more engaged and empowered. There are rural communities suing MPs for misusing constituency development funds. They knew the funds were misused because of the availability of relevant data.
Closing the feedback loop: The key to behavioral change lies in feedback loops. These are very powerful, as exemplified by the incredible success of platforms like Facebook, which are dashboards of our social lives and that of our networks. What if we had a dashboard of accountability and transparency for the government? How about a way to find out if the services funded and promised for the public were indeed delivered and the service level of said services? For example: The concept of Huduma in Kenya, showed an early prototype of what such a dashboard would look like. We are working on more ways of using the Ushahidi platform to provide for this specific use case. Partnership announcements will be made in due course about this.
All this, To what end? Efficiency and change
If we as citizens can point out what is broken, and if the governments can be responsive to the various problems there are, we can perhaps see a delta in corruption and service provision.
Our role at Ushahidi is making sure there's no lack of technology to address citizen's concerns. Citizens can also be empowered to assist each other if the data is provided in an open way.
Open Data leading to Open Government
It takes the following to bridge open data and open government:
- Community building - Co-working spaces allow policy makers, developers and civic hackers to congregate, have conversations, and build together. Examples are places like the iHub in Kenya, Bongo Hive in Zambia, and Code For America meetups in San Fransisco, just to name a few.
- Information gathering and sharing - Crowdsourcing plus traditional methods give not only static data but a near real-time view of what's going on on the ground.
- Infrastructure sharing - Build capacity once, reuse many times -- e.g., Crowdmap.
- Capacity building - If it works in Africa, it can work anywhere. Developing countries have a particularly timely opportunity of building an ecosystem that is responsive to citizens and can help to leapfrog by taking open data, adding real-time views, and most of all, acting upon that data to change the status quo.
- Commitment from government - We can learn from Chicago (a city with a history of graft and fraud), where current CTO John Tolva and Mayor Rahm Emmanuel have been releasing high-value data sets, running hackathons, and putting up performance dashboards. The narrative of Chicago is changing to one of a startup haven! What if we could do that for cities with the goal of making smart cities truly smart from the ground up? At the very least, surfacing the real-time view of conditions on the ground, from traffic, energy, environment and other information that can be useful for urban planners and policy makers. Our city master plans need a dose of real-time information so we can build for our future and not for our past.
- Always including local context and collaboration in the building, implementation and engagement with citizens.
Would love to hear from you about how Ushahidi can continue to partner with you, your organization or community to provide tools for processing data easily and, most importantly, collaboratively.
Daudi Were, programs director for Ushahidi, contributed to this post.
A longer version of this story can be found on Ushahidi's blog.
April 18 2012
Who watches the watchmen? The Guardian crowdsources its investigation into online tracking
As Guardian journalists were preparing to launch their new investigative project on cookies and other online tools that track you around the web, they realized they had to figure out just what kind of trackers exist on their own website.
Turns out this isn’t an easy task. “There are so many legacy ones from us that we forgot about — we had to do some research,” said Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian.
Like many news sites, the Guardian has a mix of cookies — some for geotargeting where readers are, some for registering readers on the site, some for advertising, and more. The end result was this illuminating guide that lays itself over a story page and shows what cookies the Guardian uses. That kind of transparency fits with the Guardian’s embrace of what it calls open journalism, but it’s also an incentive for readers to uncover what kind of cookies follow them around the web. As part of their investigation, the Guardian wants readers to help guide their reporting by telling them what cookies they encounter in their day-to-day internet use. Thanks to Mozilla’s Collusion add-on, users will be able to track the trackers and then hand over that data to the Guardian.
“Essentially what we’re saying is, ‘You tell us what cookies you receive over the period you use this tool and we will find out which are the most prevalent cookies,’” Katz said. “We will do the work of finding out what they are and what they do.”
This week the Guardian is publishing Battle for the Internet, a series that looks at the future of the Internet and the players involved, from the private sector to governments, militaries, and activists. Cookies have an new significance because of a regulation passed last year that requires sites based in the U.K. to inform users they are being watched.
Joanna Geary, the digital development editor for the Guardian, said the idea is to go deep on cookies — not just what they do, but the companies behind them, what happens to the information they collect, and how they connect various parts of the web. Geary said the Collusion tool was perfect for this project because it not only tracks the trackers, but it provides a helpful — if not scary — illustration of how cookies work across various sites. “The Guardian being what it is, and being conscious of our commitment to open journalism, it felt like this was the right project to get our readers involved in,” she said. As for the Guardian’s own self-examination, “I think it would be weird if we had undergone any sort of crowdsourcing project without doing it,” she said. “We have the responsibility of telling people what we use on our site ourselves.”
Asking the crowd for help is a regular part of the Guardian’s playbook, and because of that they’ve learned a bit about what works and what doesn’t. Katz said a big part of success in crowdsourcing it the ease of contributing to a given project, whether you are asking someone to look at a document for a few minutes or put a pin on a map. This project could prove a bit more tricky since it requires downloading a browser add-on (that only works on Firefox) and later exporting data to the Guardian.
But just as important as the ease-of-use question is the motivation, Katz said. “You have to tap into an issue people are relatively fired up about,” he said. “You can’t sort of create that sense of urgency unless people already feel it.” Katz said people need to not only feel like they are making a difference — they also have to see their work in action. Katz admits that not all of the Guardian’s crowdsourcing efforts have been as successful as they hoped, saying the responsibility for that lies with the paper “when we have not reflected that work back in an interesting way.”
Katz said the graphics team will work on visualizations from the cookie data to display findings from readers. But the ultimate fate of any further reporting rests in what the audience finds. Instead of reporting out what it sees as problem cookies, the paper is asking readers to show what trackers are a growing part of daily life online. “It’s a genuine sort of combined enterprise, that both sides are bringing something to the party,” he said. “In this case, you bring the data and we’ll do the reporting.”
Image from Danny Sullivan used under a Creative Commons license.
March 29 2012
Creating a Taxonomy of News Partnerships
In collaborative journalism right now we can see media theorist Clay Shirky's urge towards vast experimentation manifested. The journalism partnerships emerging around the country vary in size and type, and the practices that define those partnerships are still being negotiated and hashed out in newsrooms and communities.
Some partnerships bring together very different news organizations in order to provide expanded coverage, while others coalesce around similar newsrooms to cut down on duplicative efforts. Some focus on local or hyperlocal news, while others focus on regional and national reporting. Some bring the resources of multiple organizations together to focus on one issue in depth, while others partner with the public to capture a range of different angles on one issue.
This diversity in approaches to collaborative journalism is one of its strengths -- and one of its great challenges.
A Collaboration Framework
Journalists, editors and managers at news organizations are trying to navigate the parameters of these new kinds of partnerships as they happen. Developing a framework to categorize journalism collaborations is useful as practitioners look for lessons and models to replicate and build on. The dynamics between different newsrooms, and their various motivations for partnering, shape how a given collaboration is structured. While some collaborations may defy categorization, a few basic partnership models have emerged:- Commercial News Collaborations: These partnerships tend to be contractual agreements between commercial news organizations such as television stations and newspapers. They are often defined by the legal deals that structure them: Shared Services Agreements, Local News Sharing Agreements, Newspaper Broadcast Cross-Ownership, Joint Operating Agreements, etc. Many of these agreements consolidate resources, equipment, production and even newsroom staff. These kinds of commercial partnerships and near-mergers pre-date the larger collaborative trend we've witnessed across newsrooms since 2008.
- Non-Profit and Commercial Collaborations: These partnerships are usually between public or non-commercial entities and a private news organization. This model gained significant attention during the Comcast-NBC merger debates because Comcast promised to expand local news coverage on NBC stations through partnerships with non-profit journalism organizations. Other examples include the New York Times' local news partnerships with non-profits in major media markets and sites like California Watch, whose model is based on these partnerships. In these arrangements, the commercial news outlet often serves as the distributor of content the non-profit produces. However, more complex and expansive non-profit and commercial reporting collaborations are also emerging.
- Public and Non-Commercial Collaborations: These partnerships connect multiple public media outlets or bring public radio and TV stations together in collaboration with other non-profit newsrooms. The networked nature of the U.S. public media system, in which stations across the country are both producers and distributors, has meant that partnerships within the system are built into the DNA of the organizations. In recent years, innovative public media producers have built on that history and taken collaboration to the next level. We have also seen inventive partnerships between public media broadcasters and non-profit digital news startups.
- University Collaborations: University partnerships with local news organizations are engaging journalism and mass communications students in hands-on reporting efforts that are producing some great journalism. This model takes many forms, from curricular-based service-learning efforts to campus-based investigative reporting workshops, and involves both commercial and non-commercial news organizations.
- Community and Audience Collaborations: Journalists are also collaborating with their communities in new and important ways. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding -- as exemplified by projects at The Guardian, ProPublica and public media's Public Insight Network and Spot.Us -- are finding new ways for audiences to contribute to the funding, research and editorial decisions that shape the news. At their best, these projects are not just transactional, wherein the audience hands over something (money, information) and gets something in return (a story or other journalistic product); they are transformative for both journalists and participants -- as in the case of Departures, a web-based documentary series about Los Angeles developed by public media station KCET in close partnership with community members.
This taxonomy focuses primarily on editorial collaborations around the production of specific news products; however, each collaborative model listed above also encompasses cases in which news organizations can and do collaborate around shared infrastructure. Examples of infrastructure-driven collaboration include: broadcasters sharing equipment, such as news helicopters; two non-profits sharing the costs of developing a mobile app; and universities acting as fiscal agents for journalism organizations. Organizations like J-Lab, the Media Consortium and the Investigative News Network are all helping facilitate both editorial and infrastructural partnerships.
No One-Size-Fits-All Solutions
Too often, in debates over the future of journalism, we get caught up looking for a silver bullet -- the one business model to rule them all. Some debates about collaboration echo this narrow focus, assuming there will be a universal set of practices or guidelines that newsrooms can replicate and scale across the country. The categorization above should highlight the vastly different approaches to journalistic collaboration that exist.We are still at the early stages of experimentation with large- and small-scale collaboration across the news and journalism ecosystem. Partners differ, motivations differ, needs differ and funding differs. This list isn't meant to suggest that news organizations only draw lessons from partnerships that most closely resemble their own -- indeed quite the opposite is true: We should be drawing on the lessons from across models, but we should do so with an awareness of the unique context of each collaboration. Each of the various models outlined above present unique challenges and opportunities that deserve to be unpacked and detailed in more depth.
Do you think these five categories are comprehensive or would you add others? Or would you suggested categorizing collaboration more by the type of journalism than the structure of the newsroom? For example, we might reorganize the list above to highlight similarities and differences between collaborations organized around investigative reporting, niche journalism, covering local beats, etc. Let me know how you would organize the field in the comments below.
Photo of silver bullet by Flickr user Ed Schipel.
Josh Stearns is a journalist, organizer and community strategest. He is Journalism and Public Media Campaign Director for Free Press, a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization working to reform the media through education, organizing and advocacy. He was a co-author of "Saving the News: Toward a national journalism strategy," "Outsourcing the News: How covert consolidation is destroying newsrooms and circumventing media ownership rules," and "On the Chopping Block: State budget battles and the future of public media." Find him on Twitter at @jcstearns.
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February 20 2012
“All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard”
Here’s a must-read for anyone interested in sports journalism that goes beyond the weekend’s player ratings. As one of the biggest names in European football goes into administration, The Guardian carries a piece by the author of Rangerstaxcase.com, a blogger who “pulled down the facade at Rangers”, including a scathing commentary on the Scottish press’s complicity in the club’s downfall:
“The Triangle of Trade to which I have referred is essentially an arrangement where Rangers FC and their owner provide each journalist who is “inside the tent” with a sufficient supply of transfer “exclusives” and player trivia to ensure that the hack does not have to work hard. Any Scottish journalist wishing to have a long career learns quickly not to bite the hands that feed. The rule that “demographics dictate editorial” applied regardless of original footballing sympathies.
“[...] Super-casino developments worth £700m complete with hover-pitches were still being touted to Rangers fans even after the first news of the tax case broke. Along with “Ronaldo To Sign For Rangers” nonsense, it is little wonder that the majority of the club’s fans were in a state of stupefaction in recent years. They were misled by those who ran their club. They were deceived by a media pack that had to know that the stories it peddled were false.”
Over at Rangerstaxcase.com, the site expands on this in its criticism of STV for uncritical reporting:
“There does not appear to be a point where the media learns its lessons. There is no capacity for improvement. No voice that says: we have been misled by people from this organisation so often in the past that we need to get corroboration before we publish anything more. Alastair Johnston, you will recall, artfully created the impression for Rangers’ supporters and shareholders that the payment of the tax bills that are now crushing their club would be the responsibility of the parent company. His words then were carefully chosen to avoid actually lying, but his intended audience seemed in little doubt at the time as to what they thought he meant. Either Mr. Johnston has been misrepresented by STV or he appears to be trying to gain an advantage in the battle to oust Whyte by misleading Rangers’ supporters.”
The piece also includes some interesting reflections on collaborative journalism and crowdsourcing:
“Rangerstaxcase.com has become a platform for some of the sharpest minds and most accomplished professionals to share information, debate, and form opinions based upon a rational interpretation of the facts rather than PR-firm fabrications. In all of the years when the mainstream media had a monopoly on opinion forming and agenda setting, the more sentient football fan had no outlet for his or her opinions. Blogs and other modern media, like Twitter, have democratised information distribution.
“Rangerstaxcase.com has gone far beyond its half-baked “I know a secret” origins to become a forum for citizen journalism. The power of the crowd‑sourced investigation initiated by anyone who is able to ignite the interest of others is a force that has the potential to move mountains in our society. All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard.”
Rangerstaxcase.com is not unique. Combine the passion of sports supporters with the lack of critical faculty in much sports journalism and you have potentially fertile ground.
For my own club, Bolton Wanderers, for example, I turn to Manny Road (site currently laid low by a malware attack).
For the Olympics there will be a regular and easy supply of good news stories to wade through, but also an extremely active network of local and international blogs from people scrutinising the foggier side of the Olympic spirit, which is why I set up Help Me Investigate the Olympics and am encouraging my students to connect with those communities.
February 05 2012
December 10 2011
Tom Stites: layoffs, cutbacks, and the new world of news deserts
Journalism as a public good? - No, I don't think so. Instead information is a public good and journalism is a transport protocol for how information will be transferred to "readers"; journalism forms a crucial part of a larger nervous system of a society, a part definitely essential for any society to stay healthy.
Niemanlab :: Isn’t it a crucial issue that a huge part of the American people, the less-than-affluent majority, is civically malnourished due to the sad state of U.S. journalism — and that the nation’s broad electorate is thus all but certainly ill informed? It has long troubled me, and many others, that an issue so central to democracy has such a peripheral role in the discourse about journalism’s future, which tends to focus more on crowdsourcing, Twitter and Facebook, aggregation vs. original reporting, how AOL is faring with Patch, and search engine optimization. These are important topics, but
[Tom Stites:] ... perhaps an energizing frame like “news desert” can widen the aperture of thinking about journalism’s future and sharpen the focus on people’s and democracy’s needs — on journalism as public good.
Continue to read Tom Stites, www.niemanlab.org
August 27 2011
LNR- #Irene : Scenes from the storm: New York Times readers’ photos
New York Times :: Times readers submitted their photos of early evacuations, storm scenes and aftermath damage.
Browse through the photo gallery here www.nytimes.com
August 01 2011
The Takeaway, Gas prices, Haiti - crowdsourced maps: how to get started and stories to consider
Reynolds Center :: As the ranks of journalists at news organizations shrink, one of our biggest news-gathering assets is our audience. We increasingly rely on users for tips and information via social media, and some companies are working overtime to make crowdsourcing news easier. One of the most interesting emerging uses for all that crowd sourced news is in mapping.
All kinds of individual stories can include mapped components. NPR’s “The Takeaway” set up a national gas prices map. The New York Times and WNYC asked users to share bird-watching spots. Following Haiti’s earthquake, users all over the world cobbled together a map of earthquake damage and relief sites to assist aid workers.
Continue to read Rebekah Monson, businessjournalism.org
July 31 2011
6 Proposals for Journalism Education Today
I’ve spent a huge amount of time this year thinking about and working on journalism curriculum. From developing and teaching a four-week program to train journalism educators in Africa in the practice of online journalism, to helping with a major overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum in my own department, to my current preparations to teach journalism at a university in Indonesia, I have been thinking a lot about what students need to learn today.
Here are six proposals in three distinct areas of journalism that are increasingly important today.
Data Journalism
My colleague Ron Rodgers sent me this post from the Guardian, and it has great value in its brevity and directness: Data journalism at the Guardian: What is it and how do we do it? It addresses 10 big themes that a journalism educator could build a whole course around, but you can read the whole post in about 10 minutes.
In contrast, a paper produced last August as the outcome of a conference in Europe about data-driven journalism is quite long — 78 pages. The paper, Data-driven journalism: What is there to learn?, provides many details in a very well organized format, and it includes lots of links to examples and tools (free tools!).
Moreover, there’s a new book to help us teach students about data! The video below explains it.
Proposals: (1) A journalism degree program should ensure that all students are introduced to basic data journalism, using current examples and demonstrating how to apply concepts. (2) A journalism degree program should offer at least one 3-credit elective course that focuses exclusively on data journalism.
Social Media and Participation
Just about everyone who teaches journalism is trying to figure out how to integrate social media into the mix. We all know that young people are already active users of social media — but that doesn’t mean they understand how to use those media ethically and effectively to do journalism.
Did you know that journalists in Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English newsrooms have had intensive social-media training? Read about it here. The same article discusses how social media links drive traffic to news websites.
As well as getting involved (if they choose) in newsgathering, verification and curation of news, readers and viewers have also become part of the news-distribution system as they share and recommend items of interest via e-mail and social networks. [source]
The phrase participatory journalism is not precisely defined, but I take it to mean that the audience participates in setting the agenda for news. This requires that journalists make themselves open to listening more, and listening to more sources (not only official ones), as well as making a commitment to go beyond superficial (and sometimes denigrating) man-on-the-street interviews.
Another important term is crowdsourcing. This is one kind of audience participation in gathering news — but not the only kind. This BBC story provides a good overview of crowdsourcing, and this article from the scholarly journal Journalism Practice discusses some excellent examples.
Proposals: (3) All journalism students need to learn how to use social media for specific journalistic goals. Assignments should focus on distinct uses such as identifying experts, crowdsourcing, and crisis mapping. (4) In any journalism program, the instructors must work together to eliminate unnecessary repetition in the program — for example, two or more required courses might have almost identical Twitter assignments or blogging assignments. This is a particular danger because it’s easy to integrate social media into almost any course — but redundancy risks trivializing the experience for students.
Presentation
This is not just a matter of design (as in “page layout and design”), and it should never be a mere afterthought in the production of news materials. A wonderful post by designer Andy Rutledge illustrates better than anything else I have seen why news websites — and many news applications for mobile devices — are more likely to repel readers than to attract them.
Sometimes I think the students who choose to major in journalism came to us through a time machine from a place where people still read text that is printed on paper. What’s especially strange is that most of these students do not themselves read any text on paper — but they imagine that someone will give them a job where they will spend all their time writing text, text, text that will not interact with any other media.
In the early days of print newspapers, pictures were added to help attract people who would buy the product and read the text. Formats and font sizes (among other things) make journalism more appealing. When the product is appealing, it does not drive people away.
Unfortunately, many online and digital news products since the mid 1990s have been doing just that — driving people away. Why was this permitted? Why didn’t the entire newsroom stand up and protest that the website was hideous, slow, impossible to read, horrible, offputting, unusable? They didn’t do it because it wasn’t their job — the way their stories looked was of no concern to them. As the readers abandoned them, the journalists continued to be silent and even ignorant about the destructive effects of bad digital design.
Educators could use this book, for example, and assign students to evaluate news web pages according to its principles: Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
Proposals: (5) Every journalism program needs a required course in visual design. (6) A journalism course in visual design must educate students in the principles that make an image, a frame, a page, and a screen appealing — or offputting. The course does not need to produce skilled designers; rather, it should produce journalists who recognize when a presentation of news or journalism is effective, and when it is confusing, difficult, and fails.
I’ve spent a huge amount of time this year thinking about and working on journalism curriculum. From developing and teaching a four-week program to train journalism educators in Africa in the practice of online journalism, to helping with a major overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum in my own department, to my current preparations to teach journalism at a university in Indonesia, I have been thinking a lot about what students need to learn today.
Here are six proposals in three distinct areas of journalism that are increasingly important today.
Data Journalism
My colleague Ron Rodgers sent me this post from the Guardian, and it has great value in its brevity and directness: Data journalism at the Guardian: What is it and how do we do it? It addresses 10 big themes that a journalism educator could build a whole course around, but you can read the whole post in about 10 minutes.
In contrast, a paper produced last August as the outcome of a conference in Europe about data-driven journalism is quite long — 78 pages. The paper, Data-driven journalism: What is there to learn?, provides many details in a very well organized format, and it includes lots of links to examples and tools (free tools!).
Moreover, there’s a new book to help us teach students about data! The video below explains it.
Proposals: (1) A journalism degree program should ensure that all students are introduced to basic data journalism, using current examples and demonstrating how to apply concepts. (2) A journalism degree program should offer at least one 3-credit elective course that focuses exclusively on data journalism.
Social Media and Participation
Just about everyone who teaches journalism is trying to figure out how to integrate social media into the mix. We all know that young people are already active users of social media — but that doesn’t mean they understand how to use those media ethically and effectively to do journalism.
Did you know that journalists in Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English newsrooms have had intensive social-media training? Read about it here. The same article discusses how social media links drive traffic to news websites.
As well as getting involved (if they choose) in newsgathering, verification and curation of news, readers and viewers have also become part of the news-distribution system as they share and recommend items of interest via e-mail and social networks. [source]
The phrase participatory journalism is not precisely defined, but I take it to mean that the audience participates in setting the agenda for news. This requires that journalists make themselves open to listening more, and listening to more sources (not only official ones), as well as making a commitment to go beyond superficial (and sometimes denigrating) man-on-the-street interviews.
Another important term is crowdsourcing. This is one kind of audience participation in gathering news — but not the only kind. This BBC story provides a good overview of crowdsourcing, and this article from the scholarly journal Journalism Practice discusses some excellent examples.
Proposals: (3) All journalism students need to learn how to use social media for specific journalistic goals. Assignments should focus on distinct uses such as identifying experts, crowdsourcing, and crisis mapping. (4) In any journalism program, the instructors must work together to eliminate unnecessary repetition in the program — for example, two or more required courses might have almost identical Twitter assignments or blogging assignments. This is a particular danger because it’s easy to integrate social media into almost any course — but redundancy risks trivializing the experience for students.
Presentation
This is not just a matter of design (as in “page layout and design”), and it should never be a mere afterthought in the production of news materials. A wonderful post by designer Andy Rutledge illustrates better than anything else I have seen why news websites — and many news applications for mobile devices — are more likely to repel readers than to attract them.
Sometimes I think the students who choose to major in journalism came to us through a time machine from a place where people still read text that is printed on paper. What’s especially strange is that most of these students do not themselves read any text on paper — but they imagine that someone will give them a job where they will spend all their time writing text, text, text that will not interact with any other media.
In the early days of print newspapers, pictures were added to help attract people who would buy the product and read the text. Formats and font sizes (among other things) make journalism more appealing. When the product is appealing, it does not drive people away.
Unfortunately, many online and digital news products since the mid 1990s have been doing just that — driving people away. Why was this permitted? Why didn’t the entire newsroom stand up and protest that the website was hideous, slow, impossible to read, horrible, offputting, unusable? They didn’t do it because it wasn’t their job — the way their stories looked was of no concern to them. As the readers abandoned them, the journalists continued to be silent and even ignorant about the destructive effects of bad digital design.
Educators could use this book, for example, and assign students to evaluate news web pages according to its principles: Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
Proposals: (5) Every journalism program needs a required course in visual design. (6) A journalism course in visual design must educate students in the principles that make an image, a frame, a page, and a screen appealing — or offputting. The course does not need to produce skilled designers; rather, it should produce journalists who recognize when a presentation of news or journalism is effective, and when it is confusing, difficult, and fails.
6 Proposals for Journalism Education Today
I’ve spent a huge amount of time this year thinking about and working on journalism curriculum. From developing and teaching a four-week program to train journalism educators in Africa in the practice of online journalism, to helping with a major overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum in my own department, to my current preparations to teach journalism at a university in Indonesia, I have been thinking a lot about what students need to learn today.
Here are six proposals in three distinct areas of journalism that are increasingly important today.
Data Journalism
My colleague Ron Rodgers sent me this post from the Guardian, and it has great value in its brevity and directness: Data journalism at the Guardian: What is it and how do we do it? It addresses 10 big themes that a journalism educator could build a whole course around, but you can read the whole post in about 10 minutes.
In contrast, a paper produced last August as the outcome of a conference in Europe about data-driven journalism is quite long — 78 pages. The paper, Data-driven journalism: What is there to learn?, provides many details in a very well organized format, and it includes lots of links to examples and tools (free tools!).
Moreover, there’s a new book to help us teach students about data! The video below explains it.
Proposals: (1) A journalism degree program should ensure that all students are introduced to basic data journalism, using current examples and demonstrating how to apply concepts. (2) A journalism degree program should offer at least one 3-credit elective course that focuses exclusively on data journalism.
Social Media and Participation
Just about everyone who teaches journalism is trying to figure out how to integrate social media into the mix. We all know that young people are already active users of social media — but that doesn’t mean they understand how to use those media ethically and effectively to do journalism.
Did you know that journalists in Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English newsrooms have had intensive social-media training? Read about it here. The same article discusses how social media links drive traffic to news websites.
As well as getting involved (if they choose) in newsgathering, verification and curation of news, readers and viewers have also become part of the news-distribution system as they share and recommend items of interest via e-mail and social networks. [source]
The phrase participatory journalism is not precisely defined, but I take it to mean that the audience participates in setting the agenda for news. This requires that journalists make themselves open to listening more, and listening to more sources (not only official ones), as well as making a commitment to go beyond superficial (and sometimes denigrating) man-on-the-street interviews.
Another important term is crowdsourcing. This is one kind of audience participation in gathering news — but not the only kind. This BBC story provides a good overview of crowdsourcing, and this article from the scholarly journal Journalism Practice discusses some excellent examples.
Proposals: (3) All journalism students need to learn how to use social media for specific journalistic goals. Assignments should focus on distinct uses such as identifying experts, crowdsourcing, and crisis mapping. (4) In any journalism program, the instructors must work together to eliminate unnecessary repetition in the program — for example, two or more required courses might have almost identical Twitter assignments or blogging assignments. This is a particular danger because it’s easy to integrate social media into almost any course — but redundancy risks trivializing the experience for students.
Presentation
This is not just a matter of design (as in “page layout and design”), and it should never be a mere afterthought in the production of news materials. A wonderful post by designer Andy Rutledge illustrates better than anything else I have seen why news websites — and many news applications for mobile devices — are more likely to repel readers than to attract them.
Sometimes I think the students who choose to major in journalism came to us through a time machine from a place where people still read text that is printed on paper. What’s especially strange is that most of these students do not themselves read any text on paper — but they imagine that someone will give them a job where they will spend all their time writing text, text, text that will not interact with any other media.
In the early days of print newspapers, pictures were added to help attract people who would buy the product and read the text. Formats and font sizes (among other things) make journalism more appealing. When the product is appealing, it does not drive people away.
Unfortunately, many online and digital news products since the mid 1990s have been doing just that — driving people away. Why was this permitted? Why didn’t the entire newsroom stand up and protest that the website was hideous, slow, impossible to read, horrible, offputting, unusable? They didn’t do it because it wasn’t their job — the way their stories looked was of no concern to them. As the readers abandoned them, the journalists continued to be silent and even ignorant about the destructive effects of bad digital design.
Educators could use this book, for example, and assign students to evaluate news web pages according to its principles: Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
Proposals: (5) Every journalism program needs a required course in visual design. (6) A journalism course in visual design must educate students in the principles that make an image, a frame, a page, and a screen appealing — or offputting. The course does not need to produce skilled designers; rather, it should produce journalists who recognize when a presentation of news or journalism is effective, and when it is confusing, difficult, and fails.
I’ve spent a huge amount of time this year thinking about and working on journalism curriculum. From developing and teaching a four-week program to train journalism educators in Africa in the practice of online journalism, to helping with a major overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum in my own department, to my current preparations to teach journalism at a university in Indonesia, I have been thinking a lot about what students need to learn today.
Here are six proposals in three distinct areas of journalism that are increasingly important today.
Data Journalism
My colleague Ron Rodgers sent me this post from the Guardian, and it has great value in its brevity and directness: Data journalism at the Guardian: What is it and how do we do it? It addresses 10 big themes that a journalism educator could build a whole course around, but you can read the whole post in about 10 minutes.
In contrast, a paper produced last August as the outcome of a conference in Europe about data-driven journalism is quite long — 78 pages. The paper, Data-driven journalism: What is there to learn?, provides many details in a very well organized format, and it includes lots of links to examples and tools (free tools!).
Moreover, there’s a new book to help us teach students about data! The video below explains it.
Proposals: (1) A journalism degree program should ensure that all students are introduced to basic data journalism, using current examples and demonstrating how to apply concepts. (2) A journalism degree program should offer at least one 3-credit elective course that focuses exclusively on data journalism.
Social Media and Participation
Just about everyone who teaches journalism is trying to figure out how to integrate social media into the mix. We all know that young people are already active users of social media — but that doesn’t mean they understand how to use those media ethically and effectively to do journalism.
Did you know that journalists in Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English newsrooms have had intensive social-media training? Read about it here. The same article discusses how social media links drive traffic to news websites.
As well as getting involved (if they choose) in newsgathering, verification and curation of news, readers and viewers have also become part of the news-distribution system as they share and recommend items of interest via e-mail and social networks. [source]
The phrase participatory journalism is not precisely defined, but I take it to mean that the audience participates in setting the agenda for news. This requires that journalists make themselves open to listening more, and listening to more sources (not only official ones), as well as making a commitment to go beyond superficial (and sometimes denigrating) man-on-the-street interviews.
Another important term is crowdsourcing. This is one kind of audience participation in gathering news — but not the only kind. This BBC story provides a good overview of crowdsourcing, and this article from the scholarly journal Journalism Practice discusses some excellent examples.
Proposals: (3) All journalism students need to learn how to use social media for specific journalistic goals. Assignments should focus on distinct uses such as identifying experts, crowdsourcing, and crisis mapping. (4) In any journalism program, the instructors must work together to eliminate unnecessary repetition in the program — for example, two or more required courses might have almost identical Twitter assignments or blogging assignments. This is a particular danger because it’s easy to integrate social media into almost any course — but redundancy risks trivializing the experience for students.
Presentation
This is not just a matter of design (as in “page layout and design”), and it should never be a mere afterthought in the production of news materials. A wonderful post by designer Andy Rutledge illustrates better than anything else I have seen why news websites — and many news applications for mobile devices — are more likely to repel readers than to attract them.
Sometimes I think the students who choose to major in journalism came to us through a time machine from a place where people still read text that is printed on paper. What’s especially strange is that most of these students do not themselves read any text on paper — but they imagine that someone will give them a job where they will spend all their time writing text, text, text that will not interact with any other media.
In the early days of print newspapers, pictures were added to help attract people who would buy the product and read the text. Formats and font sizes (among other things) make journalism more appealing. When the product is appealing, it does not drive people away.
Unfortunately, many online and digital news products since the mid 1990s have been doing just that — driving people away. Why was this permitted? Why didn’t the entire newsroom stand up and protest that the website was hideous, slow, impossible to read, horrible, offputting, unusable? They didn’t do it because it wasn’t their job — the way their stories looked was of no concern to them. As the readers abandoned them, the journalists continued to be silent and even ignorant about the destructive effects of bad digital design.
Educators could use this book, for example, and assign students to evaluate news web pages according to its principles: Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
Proposals: (5) Every journalism program needs a required course in visual design. (6) A journalism course in visual design must educate students in the principles that make an image, a frame, a page, and a screen appealing — or offputting. The course does not need to produce skilled designers; rather, it should produce journalists who recognize when a presentation of news or journalism is effective, and when it is confusing, difficult, and fails.
July 21 2011
VIDEOS: Should the MIT-Knight Civic Media Confab Get Supersized?
One of the things we at MIT are very quietly considering -- quietly in the same sense that I first considered getting a creative writing degree, as in, seduced by the prospect while overawed by the reality -- is holding a large, public civic media conference as part of, or in addition to, our invitation-only Civic Media Conference with the Knight Foundation.
We last discussed it as videos from this year's Civic Media Conference came online, and I'd like to share those videos, not just for their own sake, but for you to ask yourself: Would you travel to Boston to be a part of these kinds of talks if we had 2,000 people rather than 250? Hearing your thoughts might just push us in the big-conference direction.
Crowdsourcing Crisis: How Civic Media Informs Breaking News
The first half of 2011 has seen dramatic events -- some tragic, others encouraging -- take place across the globe. From revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia to an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan, breaking news has been reported by individual citizens as well as professional journalists. And explaining the complex nuances of unfolding events has shown the power of civic media in informing local communities and the wider world.
In this session, we talked with two individuals who've been part of efforts to share perspectives from civic media with a global audience. Mohamed Nanabhay, head of New Media at the AlJazeera Network, helped unpack the North African revolutions using video from Facebook and other online sources. And Joi Ito, the new head of MIT's Media Lab, has worked with a group of civic reporters and citizen scientists in Japan to document the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
The two discuss the emerging media environment, where professional and civic media interact to produce a richer and more inclusive picture of global events.
Download Crowdsourcing Crisis (.mp4)
Civic Media Mobilization
Successful civic media tools -- especially ones designed by this conference's attendees -- re-engineer how mass-mobilization happens. But does that mean we should turn the page on old lessons?
Originally envisioned as a way to connect like-minded people across borders, civic media is proving just as powerful at mobilizing neighbors, in their towns, where they vote. So even for national issues, is all civic media really local? From the Wisconsin protests to presidential campaigns, civic media is playing a larger role in organizing communities and defining political arenas. This conversation between an organizer and activist explores how online activism differs from face-to-face.
Chris Faulkner, a member of the Tea Party, spends much of his time organizing online. Yesenia Sanchez, from P.A.S.O.-West Suburban Action Project 52, works street-level to drive community participation. Together with moderator Damian Thorman, the two discussed ways organizers can use online and offline strategies to their advantage and debate situations in which one is more effective than the other.
Download Civic Media Mobilization (.mp4)
Mobile Storytelling in Real Time
- Andy Carvin, National Public Radio
- Liz Henry, BlogHer
- Dan Sinker, Columbia College Chicago, @mayoremanuel
Download Mobile Storytelling in Real Time (.mp4)
The Future of Civic Media
- Sasha Costanza-Chock, MIT Comparative Media Studies
- Chris Csikszentmihályi, MIT Center for Civic Media
- Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center/MIT Center for Civic Media
Download The Future of Civic Media (.mp4)
So after checking out these videos, what do you think? Should we should take the Civic Media Conference to the next level?
July 20 2011
How to collaborate (or crowdsource) by combining Delicious and Google Docs
RSS girl by HeatherWeaver on Flickr
During some training in open data I was doing recently, I ended up explaining (it’s a long story) how to pull a feed from Delicious into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I promised I would put it down online, so: here it is.
In a Google Docs spreadsheet the formula =importfeed will pull information from an RSS feed and put it into that spreadsheet. Titles, links, datestamps and other parts of the feed will each be separated into their own columns.
When combined with Delicious, this can be a useful way to collect together pages that have been bookmarked by a group of people, or any other feed that you want to analyse.
Here’s how you do it:
1. Decide on your tag, network or user
The spreadsheet will pull data from an RSS feed. Delicious provides so many of these that you are spoilt for choice. Here are the main three:
A tag
Used by various people.
Advantages: quick startup – all you need to do is tell people the tag (make sure this is unique, such as ‘unguessable2012′).
Disadvantages: others can hijack the tag – although this can be cleaned from the resulting data.
A network
Consisting of the group of people who are bookmarking:
Advantages: group cannot be infiltrated.
Disadvantages: setup time – may need to create a new account to build the network around.
A user
Created for this purpose:
Advantages: if users are not confident in using Delicious, this can be a useful workaround.
Disadvantages: longer set up time – you’ll need to create a new account, and work out an easy way for it to automatically capture bookmarks from the group. One way is to pull an RSS feed of any mentions on Twitter and use Twitterfeed to auto-tweet them with a hashtag, and then Packrati.us to auto-bookmark all tweeted links (a similar process is detailed here).
The RSS feed for each will be found at the bottom of pages, and is consistently formatted like so:
Delicious.com/tag/unguessable2012
Delicious.com/network/unguessable2012
Delicious.com/unguessable2012
2. Create your spreadsheet
In Google Docs, create a new spreadsheet and in the first cell type the following formula:
=importfeed(“
…adding your RSS feed after the quotation mark, and then this at the end:
“)
So it looks something like this:
=importfeed(“http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/unguessable2012?count=15″)
Now press enter and after a moment the spreadsheet should populate with data from that feed.
You’ll note, however, that at most you will have only 15 rows of data here. That’s because the RSS feed you’ve copied includes that limitation.
If you look at the RSS feed you’ll see an easy clue on how to change this…
So, try editing it so that the count=15 part of that URL reads count=20 instead. You can put a higher number – but Google Docs will limit results to 20 at a time.
3. Collecting contributions
Technically, you’re now all set up. The bigger challenge is, of course, in getting people to contribute. It helps if they can see the results – so think about publishing your spreadsheet.
You’ll also need to make sure that you check it regularly and copy into a backup spreadsheet so you don’t miss results after that top 20.
But if you find it doesn’t work it may be worth thinking of other ways of doing this – for example, with a Google Form, or using =importfeed with the RSS feed for a search on results for a Twitter hashtag containing links (Twitter’s advanced search allows you to limit results accordingly – and all search results come with an RSS feed link like this one)
Of course there are far more powerful ways of doing this which are worth exploring once you’ve understood the basic possibilities.
Doing more with =importfeed
The =importfeed formula has some other elements that we haven’t used.
Another way to do this, for example, is to paste your RSS feed URL into cell A1 and type the following anywhere else:
=importfeed(A1, ”Items Title”, FALSE, 20)
This has 4 parts in the parentheses:
- A1 – this points at the URL you just pasted in cell A1, and means that you only have to change what’s in A1 to change the feed being grabbed, rather than having to edit the formula itself
- “Items Title” – this is the part of the feed that is being grabbed. If you look in the feed you will see a part that says <item> and within that, an element called <title> – that’s it. You could change this to “Items URL” to get the <URL> part of <title> instead, for example. Or you could just put “Items” and get all 5 parts of each item (title, author, URL, date created, and summary). You can also use “feed” to get information about the feed itself, or “feed URL” or “feed title” or “feed description” to get that single piece of information.
- FALSE – this just says whether you want a header row or not. Setting to TRUE will add an extra row saying ‘Title’, for example.
- 20 – the number of results you want.
You can see an example spreadsheet with 3 sheets demonstrating different uses of this formula here.
July 18 2011
Guardian Poll: Which questions do Rebekah Brooks, James and Rupert Murdoch need to answer?
Guardian :: Ahead of Tuesday's hearing with the key players in the phone hacking saga, the Guardian want to know which questions you think are the most important for MPs to ask. Nick Davies has his suggested line of questioning here. Sunday's editorial in the Observer posed a number of questions, MP Tom Watson has been crowdsourcing questions from the public via Twitter, and our own readers have been posting questions on our phone hacking live blog, and on our Facebook page this morning.
Continue to read Hannah Waldram, www.guardian.co.uk
July 05 2011
June 13 2011
Sarah Palin’s emails and a call for collaborative journalism
If you were committing an act of news on Friday, June 10, chances are every national news organization missed it.
Why? We all had boxes and boxes of printed emails of an ex-political official to go through. From the New York Times to Mother Jones/MSNBC/ProPublica, the Washington Post and my own employer – many national news sources spent enormous amounts [...]
June 12 2011
Upheaval in Egypt - Amr Salama, filmmaker, received 300 GB footage via Twitter
Beet TV :: Amr Salama, an Egyptian filmmaker and a central figure in creating the alternative media universe during the revolution in Egypt, is finishing a documentary about the historic events. his Twitter account, he received 300 GB of camcorder and camera phone footage, he says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Continue to watch Andy Plesser, www.beet.tv
May 27 2011
LIVE: Session 1B – Sorting the social media chaos
We have Matthew Caines and Ben Whitelaw from Wannabe Hacks liveblogging for us at news:rewired all day. You can follow session 1B ‘Sorting the social media chaos’, below.
Session 1B features: Nicola Hughes, data journalist, Data Miner UK; Alex Gubbay, social media editor, BBC News; Neal Mann, freelance field producer, Sky News; Fergus Bell, senior producer for the Associated Press. Moderated by Suw Charman-Anderson, social technologist.
May 18 2011
BBC Social Media Summit: Crowdsourcing a Research Agenda
The BBC College of Journalism is staging a Social Media Summit (hashtag #BBCSMS) in London this week, which will bring together industry leaders, practitioners and academics from around the world, with a view to collaboratively mapping the future of social journalism.
Social media is having a transformative impact on professional journalism. And the speed of the real-time revolution raises significant challenges and opportunities for journalists and their publishers. But it also necessitates a rigorous, industry-relevant academic research agenda.
The issues confronting journalism in the social media space include fundamental shifts in the practice of verification, the merger of private lives and professional practice, and the new journalistic role of community engagement.
These themes will be central to the summit, which will culminate in an open forum on Friday, featuring contributions from senior editors at The Guardian, Al Jazeera, NPR and The Washington Post.
Peter Horrocks, BBC head of Global News, said in February 2010 that social media practice for journalists was no longer discretionary. He was right. But this means that the professional training of journalists in social media theory and practice is also essential.
And, fundamental to teaching and training journalists in this new form of "social journalism," should be cutting-edge and industry-relevant academic research in the field of journalism studies.
A collaborative social media research agenda
One of the objectives of the BBC Social Media Summit, which has attracted industry leaders and academics from around the world, will be identifying key areas for research in the field which can assist journalists and media organizations as they adapt to the challenges and opportunities of the social media age.
The process of charting a course for research into journalism and social media at the summit will be collaborative, with researchers in the field (me included) seeking to coordinate an approach that draws on industry expertise and responds to needs identified by the journalists and editors in attendance. We believe journalism research should be informed by journalistic practice and have a professionally relevant purpose. We're also committed to feeding back our research findings -- in an accessible and easily digestible way -- to the broader community for input, in keeping with social media ethos and our belief in practically applicable research.
The Twitterization of Journalism
I'm writing a Ph.D. on the Twitterization of journalism, or the transformative impact of social media on the field. My research has so far highlighted the effect of engagement with sources and Jay Rosen's "people formerly known as the audience," the ways in which professional practice is being reshaped through real-time reporting, increased transparency, and the conflation of private and professional lives in the space.
As I've identified in the course of this research project (some elements of which I've previously explored at MediaShift) there are many rich and important research questions emerging in the field -- almost at the speed of tweets!
Key Research Themes and Questions
Here are some of my contributions to framing a social media research agenda for journalism grouped under key themes I've identified in the process of academic and journalistic research in the field -- a process which has included social media crowdsourcing of responses.
VERIFICATION
• How is social media changing the practices and processes of verification?
• What new methods of verification are emerging? How effective are they?
• What is the impact of changing verification practices -- including crowdsourcing verification -- on accuracy in reporting and journalistic credibility?
CLASH OF THE PROFESSIONAL AND PRIVATE
• What is the impact (personally and professionally) of the merger of journalists' personal and private lives and their professional and public lives on social media sites?
• How do so-called audiences react to the blurring of personal and professional lives by journalists through their social media practice? What impact does it have on their views of journalists who use social media "socially?" Are they more or less likely to collaborate with such journalists?
ENGAGEMENT
• How do journalists' interactions with the "people formerly known as audience" impact their research, reporting, and commentary of issues (including framing, source selection, objectivity and verification)?
• What rules of engagement do journalists bring to social media interaction? With what success/effect?
CONFLICT AND COMPLAINTS
• What are journalists' experiences with being confronted with criticism about their work from colleagues, competitors and audiences on social media sites?
• What views have media organizations formed about the role of individual journalists in complaints handling via social media? What processes and guidelines are being, or need to be, developed?
INDUSTRIAL/LOGISTICAL ISSUES
• What are the impacts on journalists' workload, productivity and well-being of 24/7 real-time social media practice and engagement?
• What systems and procedures are media employers putting in place to address the issues of workload, time management and risks associated with social media?
NETWORKING, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & GLOBALIZATION
• Explore the role and impact of cross-cultural and transnational communication via social media on journalists and their subjects
• Explore mentoring, networking, and employment patterns among professional journalists through social media
ROUNDS & BEATS
• Develop case studies of best-practice approaches to social media strategies in reporting rounds such as health, education, courts, emergencies, politics
• Explore the role of social media in public journalism projects
JOURNALISM EDUCATION
• How should social media be incorporated into university and professional training courses?
• Measure outcomes/impacts of training
TECHNOLOGY
• Explore cross-disciplinary approaches to problem-solving, involving computer scientists, journalists/journalism researchers (et al.) in development of industry-applicable resources and programs applicable to aiding reporting via social media, measuring social media impacts, verification, etc.
• Platform-specific research, e.g., How is Facebook changing journalism?
LEGAL/REGULATORY ISSUES
• How are courts and governments around the world responding to the challenges posed to publishing laws presented by real-time "masses media?"
• What are the implications for media freedom/freedom of expression of attempts to regulate the social web?
Share your ideas, help frame the research agenda
So, that's my contribution to framing the research discussion at the summit. But what ideas would you like to throw into the mix? And what research approaches would you suggest, with what estimated value? We are particularly interested in hearing from journalism professors and researchers in the field.
There are three ways you can get involved. 1) You can contribute your ideas directly by participating in the summit in London this week; or 2) you can contribute your ideas and express interest by commenting on this post; or 3) you can participate remotely in the open conference session on Friday, May 20, by contributing to the Twitter discussion curated under the #BBCSMS hashtag.
We look forward to hearing your ideas and working together to chart the future of journalism research in the field of social media.
Julie Posetti is an award-winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She's been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on journalism and social media, on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She blogs at J-Scribe and you can follow her on Twitter.
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With its newest round of Knight funding, DocCloud will figure out how to scale reader annotations
Two years ago, DocumentCloud received $719,500 from the Knight News Challenge to build a tool that news organizations could use to upload, share, and then collaboratively read and analyze documents. Since then, the project has not only made good on its promise to “turn documents into data,” introducing its tool into the workflows of investigative reporters in newsrooms across the country, but it’s also found a way to ensure the tool’s sustainment, at least into the near future: In early June, DocCloud’s staff announced that the project would merge operations with, appropriately enough, Investigative Reporters and Editors. And more good news for DocCloud came later in June, when Knight made it a rare double-winner in its News Challenge, granting the project $320,000 to develop an additional feature: reader annotations.
The idea for an annotation mechanism actually originated, indirectly, with the Online News Association, says Amanda Hickman, DocCloud’s program director. She and the team had been thinking about how to include readers more broadly in the process of collaborative document-parsing; at last year’s ONA conference, Hickman began talking with the Public Insight Network‘s Andrew Haeg about how DocCloud might integrate what it already had — an interface that allows a small group of registered users to upload documents and make annotations — with what Public Insight has been up to: finding, and then tracking, a large group of potential story sources. Their conversations, Hickman told me in an email, resulted in “a very whittled down tool for identifying specific experts and asking them to review specific documents, pre-publication.”
That tool is currently in place in the DocCloud system — with the important caveat that, to use it, you have to be invited by a newsroom to do so. From the news organization’s perspective, “there’s a practical limit to who you can invite,” Hickman points out, and “there’s a certain degree of trust involved,” since a public document means, also, public annotations. “It’s a tool that makes sense,” she notes, “if you’re dealing with a few people who aren’t part of your newsroom who need to look over a document.”
It’s a tool that makes less sense, though, if you want broader public input in a given document — which, increasingly, news orgs do. So the reader annotations project faces a tricky task: taking the interplay between expertise and trust that has worked so well in the invite-only annotations system…and building it, somehow, to scale.
And that’s where the Knight funding comes in. With it, DocCloud will figure out how, exactly, to build out the tool’s existing efficiencies to facilitate, and encourage, broader public participation. The goal is pretty much the same as it was when Hickman and Haeg first chatted: to marry DocCloud’s existing annotations infrastructure with the Public Insight approach that helps newsrooms to connect with more sources, more diverse sources, and untapped sources of expertise.
An added twist, though: Whatever system the DocCloud team builds will likely need to interface with outlets’ existing comments infrastructures. Which is both practical and problematic. “We’re not here to reinvent anyone’s moderation system,” Hickman noted in a phone call, “so we’ll have to sort out how to let newsrooms moderate reader annotations,” she says — in basically the same way they already moderate comments. They’ll have to build flexibility, in other words, into a single system to accommodate different outlets’ different approaches to reader commentary.
And they’ll also have to figure out a UI that leverages both the (hoped for) abundance of contributions and the (definite) need for operational efficiency. Visual and otherwise. “If one or two reporters annotate a document, they can make their own decision about how cluttered or uncluttered a page should be,” Hickman points out; with reader annotations, on the other hand, “there’s going to have to be some way to access an uncluttered page if you just want to read the document.”
And that necessity will only expand as the tool’s document set does — especially since a document whose content is meaningful in one way, at one point in time, might take on an entirely different relevance later on, in a different context. So DocCloud will be tasked in part with “figuring out how you present a document that’s annotated in a different context,” Hickman notes. “It’s a really interesting puzzle.”