This weekend, a friend of mine said reading the news was difficult because they felt like they were not caught up on the news. So jumping into the middle of a news saga was quite difficult.
What if each news resource could restructure an article based on what else you have already read? So, if I have been following a story closely, it will float the most important parts to the top, or only make those parts visible.
But, if this the first time I’m reading about an oil spill, it will give me much more background and detail.
I need to sketch this out, but right now I only have a few minutes to get the idea down in text.
This video shows how powerful it is to create a project for “other people to participate and collaborate.” This is an interesting and powerful point I want to consider during my work this year. How can I design something to help people understand the news while giving them creative energy and power? How does that help? Will that help?
Lee also says “time is a concept that can be stretched.” I believe this is also true. We often say, I simply do not have time. But, this year, I put a dry erase board in our hallway and each day pose a simple question. Somehow, my neighbors and finds can always find just a few seconds to think and ponder to write something. And then, when you are rushing out the door, with simply no time at all, you can stretch 30 seconds to write a quick note. Lee argues if you work on something you love, you can create three more hours if you need them.
Today’s news and design inspiration has been centered around food.
In Khoi Vinh’s news design talk he compares the conversations we have at dinner parties. The conversations are good because our experience is good.
In Mark Deuze’s media chat today we talked about the farmer’s market here in Bloomington. It’s not that people are absolute die hard local foodies. If they were, they could just as easily go to Bloomingfoods down the street.
The Bloomington Farmer’s market is by far the biggest and best market in town. It’s a church-going experience in some ways. It’s a low commitment, free, socially responsible, productive pass time. I can go there, get my healthy groceries for the week and without a doubt, casually run into my friends in the community.
It’s the morning bar scene. It’s a place to get noticed. But, if you don’t make it to the market, there is no greater loss.
This relates to news design because of exactly what Vinh mentioned. How do we build these kinds of feelings, interactions and experiences online?
How can we engage the senses, do something greatly good, motivate conversations in our community and encourage discovery?
Above is a wonderful talk from Khoi Vinh discussing the design and the news (not design of the news). His talk by and large discusses his team’s focus on a quality user experience for New York Times digital products.
Consider this a spoiler alert, but Vinh suggests that the journalism community is very focused only on good content. And while that is important, he certainly stresses that its value is greatly decreased without a quality experience.
The analog news formula was simple: journalism + presentation + distribution, he says.
But what is the formula for digital news? Vinh focuses much less on presentation (re: the RSS reader). The new factor is the user experience, the structure and format regardless of the platform.
Analog media is a document, he says, but digital media exists in conversation (21:17). It’s not just the reporting but the conversations of the people in it, experiencing it and around it. He compares this concept to a dinner party. The dinner party experience. The conversation is good because of the time, the food and wine over dinner. This is how Vinh thinks about news and design.
In digital media, it is a conversation. 21:17
“Great journalism is not enough,” he says. “Great journalism is not a substitute for great user experience,” and compromise is needed.
He says the opportunity exists for users to create their own digital newspapers. He outlines closing points that he foresees in the future of news and what I predict he is working on.
The future of news will be based on more open news.
Social networks will be a huge part of the news experience.
Gaming will be a part of successful news organizations (and finding sources).
Great user experience.
I want to tease out these four points. What does it mean and how does that fit into the way we value news in our lives today? I had not thought much about news in the context of gaming, though it is increasingly becoming a part of our casual lives. I also want to explore what it means for news to be more open (and how does that fit into the New York Times paywall?).
One explanation for the decline of the traditional media that some, including News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch and Associated Press Chairman Dean Singleton, have seized upon is the rise of the news aggregator. According to this theory, news aggregators from Google News to The Huffington Post are free-riding, reselling and profiting from the factual information gathered by traditional media organizations at great cost. Rupert Murdoch has gone so far as to call Google’s aggregation and display of newspaper headlines and ledes “theft.” As the traditional media are quick to point out, the legality of a business model built around the monetization of third-party content isn’t merely an academic question — it’s big business. Revenues generated from online advertising totaled $23.4 billion in 2008 alone.
Building a business model around monetizing another website’s content isn’t novel, and methods for doing so have been around for almost as long as the Internet has been a commercial platform. Consider the practice of framing, or superimposing ads onto embeded websites. There’s also inline linking, or incorporating content from multiple websites into one single third-party site. These days, it’s news aggregators that are generating a lot of scrutiny. But are they legal?
Anyone with a computer and network connection can be an instant expert on nearly anything. In an informal chat with Mark Deuze and some of his students we tried to figure out what makes someone powerful in 2011.
Is it still knowledge? Maybe. Is it information? Probably not. Is it having access to major networks? Flooding the market with your message (re: Koran burning, Balloon Boy, Tea Party)? No. It’s connections.
Your network is power.
Through your network, digital connections and otherwise you can share information that already has been filtered for value. In the age of information (overload), we haven’t found a filter or algorithm to sort through everything there is to know in the world better than the people we know. The people in our lives know us like no computer can. Computers also know us like no person ever can.
The trust factor of friends’ suggestions can make a big difference. Mr. Altman said Loopt’s users are 20 times more likely to click on a place their friends had liked or visited than a place that simply ranked higher in search results.
So-called recommendation engines on sites like Amazon and Netflix try to guess what customers might like by comparing their previous purchases or rentals with those of others with similar tastes. But that approach often does not offer much insight as to why a particular film or restaurant is being recommended, said John Riedl, a professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota.
Social networks, he said, “do a richer job of constructing recommendations.” For example, seeing that a friend is frequenting a new pizzeria can have a lot of influence over whether you go.
In a news environment, editors see the big picture. They clean up copy, help communicate the message and direct and guide news pieces.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams make an argument in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything that professional journalists cannot see past themselves. They argue that as journalists continue to assert the need for editors they are losing out on an opportunity to learn from the collective.
Any serious news organiation today should also allow its community of readers to join in the editorial conversation. The fact that all major media properties don’t already offer a parallel front page edited by readers is troubling. The technology has been available for a decade. A cynic might call it contempt for the collective intelligence of media consumers. In some cases, the cynics might be right. But in most cases the sclerotic pace of change reflects the cultural inertia of instutions steeped in the journalistic traditions of mass media.”
In this case, the authors believe in and trust the readers to choose the best stories. But, this was written in 2006. Since then we have seen on news sites that most popular stories are often about health, love and society, rarely about global politics or economics. That being said, social editing helps people find out what they want to know but not always what they need to know.
As long as the media thinks they know what’s right, they’ll never be in a position to harness people’s collective intelligence. It’s a completely different culture and a completely different way of thinking about knowledge.”
By this she means this hurdle is keeping journalists from innovating. In an older post, I argued that journalists could have and should have created services like Craigslist, Groupon, Yelp and Twitter. But, they didn’t. And because journalists did not look forward, or innovate, we the media industry are suffering for it and losing circulation and readers.
So, where then are we and is there a smarter way to blend what people want versus what they need? I want to find out.
Upon the Spanish-American war, a new sensational, thrilling, sexy and often false kind of journalism boosted sales.
“At the end of the nineteenth century, American imperialism and journalistic dynamism ame together to create one of the darkest moments in the history of the news media….
The changing news business attracted entrepreneurs who saw journalism as an exciting frontier worthy of their creative talents. Two publishing visionaries in particular dominated the era and ultimately changed the profession: Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph erst. After they revolutionized journalism, their bitter rivalry gave birth to a brand of sensationalism known as yellow journalism. Its toxic formula–one part news to one part hype–fueled the infamous Hearst-Pulitzer circulation war.”
However, upon this time, as “dark” as it may be, it did indeed attract entrepreneurs. Pulitzer, “a mercenary fighting for the North in the Civil War” came to find himself a writer, reporter and journalist. He created the St. Louis Post Dispatch and brought news to people who had “been ignored by the comparatively staid sheets of the older order.” Streittmatter says Pulitzer believed newspapers cheap, written clearly, concisely and should actively crusade in the community interest.
Pulitzer changed journalism and laid down the building blocks for Twitter. The 140-character post microblog developers did exactly the same thing. Young entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to bring something to a community. Before Twitter, to be a blogger was still not casual. People would sit down in front of their glowing screens, write, edit, post and maybe edit again. Blogging was for writers whom many argued were not journalists, even if they practiced journalism. Twitter lowered the barrier for social journalists, people who wanted to broadcast their thoughts online.
How did Dorsey, Stone and Williams lower the barrier and motivate people to post, blog, write or broadcast online? They did what Pulitzer did. In creating a 140-character limit every writer had to become an editor. Their length limit forced people who may otherwise be overly verbose to write clearly and certainly concisely.
The other thing Pulitzer said news should do is “actively crusade in the community interest.” Social networks like Twitter and Facebook require our social journalists to do exactly that. When we follow someone who posts inane, offensive, boring or uninteresting content, we the community serve as their editor. We validate and approve their posts with replies, retweets, likes and comments. Poor posts get new feedback. Poor social journalists lose followers or get hidden.
When the New York Times came to your doorstep, you could not tell the delivery man to stop sending the Style or Sports section. The only way the reader could double as an editor (and I mean editor loosely) is to unsubscribe or write a letter. Now, good content (sensational or not) gets more validation, a boost in circulation which is exactly what Pulitzer was able to do.
According to The New York Times Bits Blog something is in the works. I hope my entire capstone has not just been built already.
We’re building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space,” said John Borthwick, chief executive officer at Betaworks.
Mr. Borthwick’s company has helped nurture TweetDeck, a popular desktop client for Twitter, and Web tools like Bit.ly, a URL shortener, and Chartbeat, a real-time Web analytics service.
The News.me product has been in the works for the last six months and is expected to be out sometime later this year, Mr. Borthwick said. It will initially debut as an iPad application, although a Web version may be introduced at some point.
Mr. Borthwick would not say exactly how the service would work, but he hinted that its name should give some indication.
I’ve been sitting on this post for a while. The thing I can do with digital media is put it out there and revise it over and over again. I cannot commit to what I have here. As I’m trying to define journalism, journalists and their values, I’m realizing I just don’t have the right information. I haven’t taken an introduction to journalism course since 2004. While I have a deeper, better sense of what it is and what this community does, I cannot define it yet.
I’m digging deep back into my books, lectures and resources. Here are my first instincts that I plan to later redefine with more research.
Merriam Webster takes a traditional approach to it’s definition of journalism.
1a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media
1b : the public press
1c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
2a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine
2b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation
2c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest
MW essentially defines journalism as writing about facts and events prepared for publication (press, broadcasting). This definition loosely leaves out the role of editors, practiced writers, news analysis and private news networks.
General access to broadcasting tools like Facebook, twitter and bloggers means that anyone can be a journalist. Bloggers can be journalists for as long as our traditional idea journalists do not need carry a professional license.
“The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others…One of the main concepts behind citizen journalism is that mainstream media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject — the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone.”
Glaser dates citizen journalism back to at least the 18th century. Thomas Paine printed and distributed the Federalist Papers, home grown zines made in basements and Londoners posting mobile photos from the 7/7 bomb attacks are all examples of citizen journalism.
Social Journalism
Social and citizen journalism often overlap. Social journalism is directly tied to the medium, a social medium such as Facebook or Twitter. The difference is that the content producers, posting to their networks are writing with the intent to broadcast to their social communities. Their news values are different than those of traditional journalist and generally do not post content with the intent to inform the public about general civic matters but rather those that are high in social value.
Social journalism any news, media, information or press broadcasted through the means of social media like Facebook and Twitter. It is not required that the networks are absolutely open and public for social journalists to create social news. Social news is not necessarily gossip either.