This is long, but I recommend that you read it all:
The line between science and journalism is getting blurry....again
By Bora Zivkovic
Human #1: "Hello, nice weather today, isn't it?"
Human #2: "Ummm...actually not. It's a gray, cold, windy, rainy kind of day!"
Many a joke depends on confusion about the meaning of language, as in the example above. But understanding the sources of such confusion is important in realms other than stand-up comedy, including in the attempts to convey facts about the world to one's target audience.
In the example above, Human #1 is using Phatic language, sometimes referred to as 'small talk' and usually exemplified, at least in the British Isles, with the talk about the highly unpredictable weather. (image: by striatic on Flickr)
Phatic language
Phatic discourse is just one of several functions of language. Its role is not to impart any factual information, but to establish a relationship between the people. It conveys things like emotional state, relative social status, alliance, intentions and limits to further conversation (i.e., where the speaker "draws the line").
If a stranger rides into a small town, a carefully chosen yet meaningless phrase establishes a state of mind that goes something like this: "I come in peace, mean no harm, I hope you accept me in the same way". The response of the local conveys how the town looks at strangers riding in, for example: "You are welcome...for a little while - we'll feed you and put you up for the night, but then we hope you leave". (image: Clint Eastwood in 'Fistful of Dollars' from Squidoo)
An important component of phatic discourse is non-verbal communication, as the tone, volume and pitch of the voice, facial expression and body posture modify the language itself and confirm the emotional and intentional state of the speaker.
It does not seem that linguistics has an official term for the opposite - the language that conveys only pure facts - but the term usually seen in such discussions (including the domain of politics and campaigning) is "Conceptual language" so this is what I will use here. Conceptual language is what Human #2 in the joke above was assuming and using - just the facts, ma'am.
Rise of the earliest science and journalism
For the sake of this article, I will use two simplified definitions of science and journalism.
Journalism is communication of 'what's new'. A journalist is anyone who can say "I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it."
Science is communication of 'how the world works'. A scientist is anyone who can say "I understand something about the world, you don't, let me explain it to you".
Neither definition necessitates that what they say is True, just what they know to the best of their ability and understanding.
Note that I wrote "science is communication". Yes, science is the process of discovery of facts about the way the world works, but the communication of that discovery is the essential last step of the scientific process, and the discoverer is likely to be the person who understands the discovery the best and is thus likely to be the person with the greatest expertise and authority (and hopefully ability) to do the explaining.
For the greatest part of human history, none of those distinctions made any sense. Most of communication contained information about what is new, some information about the way the world works, and a phatic component. Knowing how the world works, knowing what is happening in that world right now, and knowing if you should trust the messenger, were all important for survival.
For the most part, the information was local, and the messengers were local. A sentry runs back into the village alerting that a neighboring tribe, painted with war-paints, is approaching. Is that person a member of your tribe, or a stranger, or the well-known Boy Who Cried Wolf? What do you know about the meaning of war-paint? What do you know about the neighboring tribe? Does all this information fit with your understanding of the world? Is information coming from this person to be taken seriously? How are village elders responding to the news? Is this piece of news something that can aid in your personal survival?
For the longest time, information was exchanged between people who knew each other to some degree - family, neighbors, friends, business-partners. Like in a fishing village, the news about the state of fishing stocks coming from the ships at sea is important information exchanged at the local tavern. But is that fish-catch information 'journalism' (what's new) or 'science' (how the world works)? It's a little bit of both. And you learn which sailors to trust by observing who is trusted by the locals you have already learned to trust. Trust is transitive.
Someone in the "in-group" is trusted more than a stranger - kids learned from parents, the community elders had the authority: the trust was earned through a combination of who you are, how old you are, and how trustworthy you tended to be in the past. New messengers are harder to pin down on all those criteria, so their information is taken with a degree of skepticism. The art of critical thinking (again, not necessarily meaning that you will always pick the Truth) is an ancient one, as it was essential for day-to-day survival. You trust your parents (or priests or teachers) almost uncritically, but you put up your BS filters when hearing a stranger.
Emergence of science and of journalism
The invention of the printing press precipitated the development of both journalism and science. But that took a very long time - almost two centuries (image: 1851, printing press that produced early issues of Scientific American). After Gutenberg printed the Bible, most of what people printed were political pamphlets, church fliers and what for that time and sensibilities went for porn.
London Gazette of 1666 is thought to be the first newspaper in the modern sense of the word. (image: from DavidCo) Until then, newspapers were mostly irregular printings by individuals, combining news, opinion, fiction and entertainment. After this, newspapers gradually became regular (daily, weekly, monthly) collections of writings by numerous people writing in the same issue.
The first English scientific journal was published a year before - the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665 (image: Royal Society of London).
Until then, science was communicated by letters - those letters were often read at the meetings of scientists. Those meetings got formalized into scientific societies and the letters read at such meetings started getting printed. The first scientific journals were collections of such letters, which explains why so many journals have the words "Letters", "Annals" or "Proceedings" in their titles.
Also, before as well as for a quite a long time after the inception of first journals, much of science was communicated via books - a naturalist would spend many years collecting data and ideas before putting it all in long-form, leather-bound form. Those books were then discussed at meetings of other naturalists who would often respond by writing books of their own. Scientists at the time did not think that Darwin's twenty-year wait to publish The Origin was notable (William Kimler, personal communication) - that was the normal timeline for research and publishing at the time, unusual only to us from a modern perspective of 5-year NIH grants and the 'publish or perish' culture.
As previously oral communication gradually moved to print over the centuries, both journalistic and scientific communication occured in formats - printed with ink on paper - very similar to blogging (that link leads to the post that served as a seed from which this article grew). If born today, many of the old writers, like Montaigne, would be Natural Born Bloggers ('NBBs' - term coined by protoblogger Dave Winer). A lot of ship captains’ logs were essentially tweets with geolocation tags.
People who wanted to inform other people printed fliers and pamphlets and books. Personal letters and diaries were meant to be public: they were as widely shared as was possible, they were publicly read, saved, then eventually collected and published in book-form (at least posthumously). Just like blogs, tweets and Facebook updates today….
The 18th century 'Republic of Letters' (see the amazing visualization of their correspondence) was a social network of intellectual leaders of Europe who exchanged and publicly read their deep philosophical thoughts, scientific ideas, poetry and prose.
Many people during those centuries wrote their letters in duplicate: one copy to send, one to keep for publishing Collected Letters later in life. Charles Darwin did that, for example (well, if I remember correctly, his wife made copies from his illegible originals into something that recipients could actually read), which is why we have such a complete understanding of his work and thought - it is all well preserved and the availability of such voluminouos correspondence gave rise to a small industry of Darwinian historical scholarship.
What is important to note is that, both in journalism and in science, communication could be done by anyone - there was no official seal of approval, or licence, to practice either of the two arts. At the same time, communication in print was limited to those who were literate and who could afford to have a book printed - people who, for the most part, were just the wealthy elites. Entry into that intellectual elite from a lower social class was possible but very difficult and required a lot of hard work and time (see, for example, a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace). Membership in the worlds of arts, science and letters was automatic for those belonging to the small group of literate aristocracy. They had no need to establish formalized gatekeeping as bloodlines, personal sponsorship and money did the gatekeeping job quite well on their own.
As communication has moved from local to global, due to print, trust had to be gained over time - by one's age, stature in society, track record, and by recommendation - who the people you trust say you should trust. Trust is transitive.
Another thing to note is that each written dispatch contained both 'what's new' and 'how the world works' as well as a degree of phatic discourse: "This is what happened. This is what I think it means. And this is who I am so you know why you should trust me." It is often hard to tell, from today's perspective, what was scientific communication and what was journalism.
Personal - and thus potentially phatic - communication was a norm in the early scientific publishing. For example, see "A Letter from Mr J. Breintal to Peter Collinfoxl, F. RXS. contairnng an Account of what he felt after being bit by a Rattle-fnake" in Philosophical Transactions, 1747. - a great account of it can be found at Neurotic Physiology. It is a story of a personal interaction with a rattlesnake and the discovery leading from it. It contained "I was there, you were not, let me tell you what happened" and "I understand something, you don't, let me explain that to you" and "Let me tell you who I am so you can know you can trust me".
Apparently, quite a lot of scientific literature of old involved exciting narratives of people getting bitten by snakes - see this one from 1852 as well.
The anomalous 20th century - effects of technology
The gradual changes in society - invention of printing, rise of science, rise of capitalism, industrial revolution, mass migration from rural to urban areas, improvements in transportation and communication technologies, to name just a few - led to a very different world in the 20th century.
Technology often leads societal changes. If you were ever on a horse, you understand why armies that used stirrups defeated the armies that rode horses without this nifty invention.
Earlier, the speed of spreading news was much slower (see image: Maps of rates of travel in the 19th century - click on the link to see bigger and more). By 1860 Telegraph reached to St. Louis. During its short run the Pony Express could go the rest of the way to San Francisco in 10 days. After that, telegraph followed the rails. First transcontinental line was in 1869. Except for semaphores (1794) information before the telegraph (1843) could only travel as fast as a rider or boat (Thanks to John McKay for this brief primer on the history of speed of communication in Northern America. I am assuming that Europe was slightly ahead and the rest of the world somewhat behind).
The 20th century saw invention or improvement of numerous technologies in transportation - cars, fast trains, airplanes, helicopters, space shuttles - and in communication - telephone, radio, and television. Information could now travel almost instantly.
But those new technologies came with a price - literally. While everyone could write letters and send them by stagecoach, very few people could afford to buy, run and serve printing presses, radio stations and television studios. These things needed capital, and increasingly became owned by rich people and corporations.
Each inch of print or minute of broadcast costs serious money. Thus, people were employed to become official filters of information, the gatekeepers - the editors who decided who will get access to that expensive real estate. As the editors liked some people's work better than others, those people got employed to work in the nascent newsrooms. Journalism became professionalized. Later, universities started journalism programs and codified instruction for new journalists, professionalizing it even more.
Instead of people informing each other, now the few professionals informed everyone else. And the technology did not allow for everyone else to talk back in the same medium.
The broadcast media, a few large corporations employing professional writers informing millions – with no ability for the receivers of information to fact-check, talk back, ask questions, be a part of the conversation – is an exception in history, something that lasted for just a few decades of the 20th century.
The anomalous 20th century - industrialization
Industrial Revolution brought about massive migration of people into big cities. The new type of work required a new type of workforce, one that was literate and more educated. This led to the invention of public schools and foundation of public universities.
In the area of science, many more people became educated enough (and science still not complex and expensive yet) to start their own surveys, experiments and tinkering. The explosion of research led to an explosion of new journals. Those too became expensive to produce and started requiring professional filters - editors. Thus scientific publishing also became professionalized. Not every personal anecdote could make it past the editors any more. Not everyone could call oneself a scientist either - a formal path emerged, ending with a PhD at a university, that ensured that science was done and published by qualified persons only.
By the 1960s, we got a mass adoption of peer-review by scientific journals that was experimentally done by some journals a little earlier. Yes, it is that recent! See for example this letter to Physical Review in 1936:
Dear Sir,
We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the — in any case erroneous — comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.
Respectfully,
Albert Einstein
Or this one:
John Maddox, former editor of Nature: The Watson and Crick paper was not peer-reviewed by Nature… the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident. No referee working in the field … could have kept his mouth shut once he saw the structure...
Migration from small towns into big cities also meant that most people one would meet during the day were strangers. Meeting a stranger was not something extraordinary any more, so emergence and enforcement of proper proscribed conduct in cities replaced the need for one-to-one encounters and sizing up strangers using phatic language. Which is why even today phatic language is much more important and prevalent in rural areas where it aids personal survival than in urban centers where more general rules of behavior among strangers emerged (which may partially explain why phatic language is generally associated with conservative ideology and conceptual language with politicial liberalism, aka, the "reality-based community").
People moving from small hometowns into big cities also led to breaking up of families and communities of trust. One needed to come up with new methods for figuring out who to trust. One obvious place to go was local media. They were stand-ins for village elders, parents, teachers and priests.
If there were many newspapers in town, one would try them all for a while and settle on one that best fit one's prior worldview. Or one would just continue reading the paper one's parents read.
But other people read other newspapers and brought their own worldviews into the conversation. This continuous presence of a plurality of views kept everyone's BS filters in high gear - it was necessary to constantly question and filter all the incoming information in order to choose what to believe and what to dismiss.
The unease with the exposure to so many strangers with strange ideas also changed our notions of privacy. Suddenly we craved it. Our letters are now meant for one recepient only, with the understanding it will not be shared. Personal diaries now have lockets. After a century of such craving for privacy, we are again returning to a more historically traditional notions, by much more freely sharing our lives with strangers online.
The anomalous 20th century - cleansing of conceptual language in science and journalism
Until the 20th century we did not see the consolidation of media into large conglomerates, and of course, there were no mass radio or TV until mid-20th century. Not until later in the century did we see the monopolization of local media markets by a single newspaper (competitors going belly-up) which, then, had to serve everyone, so it had to invent the fake "objective" HeSaidSheSaid timid style of reporting in order not to lose customers of various ideological stripes and thus lose advertising revenue.
Professionalising of journalism, coupled with the growth of media giants serving very broad audiences, led to institutionalization of a type of writing that was very much limited to "what's new".
The "let me explain" component of journalism fell out of favor as there was always a faction of the audience that had a problem with the empirical facts - a faction that the company's finances could not afford to lose. The personal - including phatic - was carefully eliminated as it was perceived as unobjective and inviting the criticism of bias. The way for a reporter to inject one's opinion into the article was to find a person who thinks the same in order to get the target quote. A defensive (perhaps cowardly) move that became the norm. And, once the audience caught on, led to the loss of trust in traditional media.
Reduction of local media to a single newspaper, a couple of local radio stations and a handful of broadcast TV channels (that said esentially the same thing), left little choice for the audience. With only one source in town, there was no opportunity to filter among a variety of news sources. Thus, many people started unquestioningly accepting what 20th-century style broadcast media served them.
Just because articles were under the banners of big companies did not make them any more trustworthy by definition, but with no alternative it is still better to be poorly informed than not informed at all. Thus, in the 20th century we gradually lost the ability to read everything critically, awed by the big names like NYT and BBC and CBS and CNN. Those became the new parents, teachers, tribal elders and priests, the authority figures whose words are taken unquestioningly.
In science, explosion in funding not matched by explosion of job positions, led to overproduction of PhDs and a rise of hyper-competitive culture in academia. Writing books became unproductive. The only way to succeed is to keep getting grants and the only way to do that is to publish very frequently. Everything else had to fall by the wayside.
False measures of journal quality - like the infamous Impact Factor - were used to determine who gets a job and tenure and who falls out of the pipeline. The progress of science led inevitably to specialization and to the development of specialized jargon. Proliferation of expensive journals ensured that nobody but people in highest-level research institutions had access to the literature, so scientists started writing only for each other.
Scientific papers became dense, but also narrowed themselves to only "this is how the world works". The "this is new" became left out as the audience already knew this, and it became obvious that a paper would not be published if it did not produce something new, almost by definition.
And the personal was so carefully excised for the purpose of seeming unbiased by human beings that it sometimes seems like the laboratory equipment did all the experiments of its own volition.
So, at the close of the 20th century, we had a situation in which journalism and science, for the first time in history, completely separated from each other. Journalism covered what's new without providing the explanation and context for new readers just joining the topic. Science covered only explanation and only to one's peers.
In order to bridge that gap, a whole new profession needed to arise. As scientists understood the last step of the scientific method - communication - to mean only 'communication to colleagues', and as regular press was too scared to put truth-values on any statements of fact, the solution was the invention of the science journalist - someone who can read what scientists write and explain that to the lay audience. With mixed success. Science is hard. It takes years to learn enough to be able to report it well. Only a few science journalists gathered that much expertise over the years of writing (and making mistakes on the way).
So, many science journalists fell back on reporting science as news, leaving the explanation out. Their editors helped in that by severely restricting the space - and good science coverage requires ample space.
A good science story should explain what is known by now (science), what the new study brings that is new (news) and why does that matter to you (phatic discourse). The lack of space usually led to omission of context (science), shortening of what is new (news) and thus leaving only the emotional story intact. Thus, the audience did not learn much, Certainly not enough to be able to evaluate next day's and next week's news.
This format also led to the choice of stories. It is easy to report in this way if the news is relevant to the audience anyway, e.g., concerning health (the "relevant" stories). It is also easy to report on misconduct of scientists (the "fishy" stories) - which is not strictly science reporting. But it was hard to report on science that is interesting for its own sake (the "cool" stories).
What did the audience get out of this? Scientists are always up to some mischief. And every week they change the story as to what is good or bad for my health. And it is not very fun, entertaining and exciting. No surprise that science as endeavour slowly started losing trust with the (American) population, and that it was easy for groups with financial, political or religious interests to push anti-science rhetoric on topics from hazards of smoking to stem-cell research to evolution to climate change.
At the end of the 20th century, thus, we had a situation in which journalism and science were completely separate endeavors, and the bridge between them - science journalism - was unfortunately operating under the rules of journalism and not science, messing up the popular trust in both.
Back to the Future
It is 2010. The Internet has been around for 30 years, the World Wide Web for 20. It took some time for the tools to develop and spread, but we are obviously undergoing a revolution in communication. I use the word "revolution" because it is so almost by definition - when the means of production change hands, this is a revolution.
The means of production, in this case the technology for easy, cheap and fast dissemination of information, are now potentially in the hands of everyone. When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, we call that 'citizen journalism.' And some of those citizens possess much greater expertise on the topics they cover than the journalists that cover that same beat. This applies to science as well.
In other words, after the deviation that was the 20th century, we are going back to the way we have evolved as a species to communicate - one-to-one and few-to-few instead of one-to-many. Apart from technology (software instead of talking/handwriting/printing), speed (microseconds instead of days and weeks by stagecoach, railroad or Pony Express, see image above) and the number of people reached (potentially - but rarely - millions simultaneously instead of one person or small group at a time), blogging, social networking and other forms of online writing are nothing new – this is how people have always communicated. Like Montaigne. And the Republic of Letters in the 18th century. And Charles Darwin in the 19th century.
All we are doing now is returning to a more natural, straightforward and honest way of sharing information, just using much more efficient ways of doing it. (Images from Cody Brown)
And not even that – where technology is scarce, the analog blogging is live and well (image: Analog blogger, from AfriGadget).
What about trustworthiness of all that online stuff? Some is and some isn’t to be trusted. It’s up to you to figure out your own filters and criteria, and to look for additional sources, just like our grandparents did when they had a choice of dozens of newspapers published in each of their little towns.
With the gradual return of a more natural system of communication, we got to see additional opinions, the regular fact-checks on the media by experts on the topic, and realized that the mainstream media is not to be trusted.
With the return of a more natural system of communication, we will all have to re-learn how to read critically, find second opinions, evaluate sources. Nothing new is there either – that is what people have been doing for millennia – the 20th century is the exception. We will figure out who to trust by trusting the judgment of people we already trust. Trust is transitive.
Return of the phatic language
What does this all mean for the future of journalism, including science journalism?
The growing number of Web-savvy citizens have developed new methods of establishing trustworthiness of the sources. It is actually the old one, pre-20th century method - relying on individuals, not institutions. Instead of treating WaPo, Fox, MSNBC and NPR as the proxies for the father, teacher, preacher and the medicine man, we now once again evaulate individuals.
As nobody enters a news site via the front page and looks around, but we all get to individual articles via links and searches, we are relying on bylines under the titles, not on the logos up on top. Just like we were not born trusting NYTimes but learned to trust it because our parents and neighbors did (and then perhaps we read it for some time), we are also not born knowing which individuals to trust. We use the same method - we start with recommendations from people we already trust, then make our own decisions over time.
If you don't link to your sources, including to scientific papers, you lose trust. If you quote out of context without providing that context, you lose trust. If you hide who you are and where you are coming from - that is cagey and breeds mistrust. Transparency is the new objectivity.
And transparency is necessarily personal, thus often phatic. It shows who you are as a person, your background, your intentions, your mood, your alliances, your social status.
There are many reasons sciencebloggers are more trusted than journalists covering science.
First, they have the scientific expertise that journalists lack - they really know what they are talking about on the topic of their expertise and the audience understands this.
Second, they link out to more, more diverse and more reliable sources.
Third, being digital natives, they are not familiar with the concept of word-limits. They start writing, they explain it as it needs to be explained and when they are done explaining they end the post. Whatever length it takes to give the subject what it's due.
Finally, not being trained by j-schools, they never learned not to let their personality shine through their writing. So they gain trust by connecting to their readers - the phatic component of communication.
Much of our communication, both offline and online, is phatic. But that is necessary for building trust. Once the trust is there, the conceptual communication can work. If I follow people I trust on Twitter, I will trust that they trust the sources they link to so I am likely to click on them. Which is why more and more scientists use Twitter to exchage information (PDF). Trust is transitive.
Scientists, becoming journalists
Good science journalists are rare. Cuts in newsrooms, allocation of too little space for science stories, assigning science stories to non-science journalists - all of these factors have resulted in a loss of quantity and quality of science reporting in the mainstream media.
But being a good science journalist is not impossible. People who take the task seriously can become experts on the topic they cover (and get to a position where they can refuse to cover astronomy if their expertise is evolution) over time. They can become temporary experts if they are given sufficient time to study instead of a task of writing ten stories per day.
With the overproduction of PhDs, many scientists are choosing alternative careers, including many of them becoming science writers and journalists, or Press Information Officers. They thus come into the profession with the expertise already there.
There is not much difference between a research scientist who blogs and thus is an expert on the topic s/he blogs about, and a research scientist who leaves the lab in order to write as a full-time job. They both have scientific expertise and they both love to write or they wouldn't be doing it.
Blog is software. A medium. One of many. No medium has a higher coefficient of trustworthiness than any other. Despite never going to j-school and writing everything on blogs, I consider myself to be a science writer.
Many science journalists, usually younger though some of the old ones caught on quickly and became good at it (generation is mindset, not age), grok the new media ecosystem in which online collaboration between scientists and journalists is becoming a norm.
At the same time, many active scientists are now using the new tools (the means of production) to do their own communication. As is usually the case with novelty, different people get to it at different rates. The conflicts between 20th and 21st style thinking inevitably occur. The traditional scientists wish to communicate the old way - in journals, letters to the editor, at conferences. This is the way of gatekeeping they are used to.
But there have been a number of prominent cases of such clashes between old and new models of communication, including the infamous Roosevelts on toilets (the study had nothing to do with either US Presidents or toilets, but it is an instructive case - image by Dr.Isis), and several other smaller cases.
The latest one is the Arsenic Bacteria Saga in which the old-timers do not seem to undestand what a 'blog' means, and are seemingly completely unaware of the important distinction between 'blogs' and 'scienceblogs', the former being online spaces by just about anyone, the latter being blogs written by people who actually know their science and are vetted or peer-reviewed in some way e.g., at ResearchBlogging.org or Scienceblogging.org or by virtue of being hand-picked and invited to join one of the science blogging networks (which are often run by traditional media outlets or scientific publishers or societies) or simply by gaining resepect of peers over time.
Case by case, old-time scientists are learning. Note how both in the case of Roosevelts on toilets and the Arsenic bacteria the initially stunned scientists quickly learned and appreciated the new way of communication.
In other words, scientists are slowly starting to get out of the cocoon. Instead of just communicating to their peers behind the closed doors, now they are trying to reach out to the lay audience as well.
As more and more papers are Open Access and can be read by all, they are becoming more readable (as I predicted some years ago). The traditional format of the paper is changing. So they are covering "let me explain" portion better, both in papers and on their own blogs.
They may still be a little clumsy about the "what's new" part, over-relying on the traditional media to do it for them via press releases and press conferences (see Darwinius and arsenic bacteria for good examples) instead of doing it themselves or taking control of the message (though they do need to rely on MSM to some extent due to the distinction between push and pull strategies as the media brands are still serving for many people as proxies for trustworthy sources).
But most importantly, they are now again adding the phatic aspect to their communication, revealing a lot of their personality on social networks, on blogs, and even some of them venturing into doing it in scientific papers.
By combining all three aspects of good communication, scientists will once again regain the trust of their audience. And what they are starting to do looks more and more like (pre-20th century) journalism.
Journalists, becoming scientists
On the other side of the divide, there is a renewed interest in journalism expanding from just "this is new" to "let me explain how the world works". There are now efforts to build a future of context, and to design explainers.
If you are not well informed on an issue (perhaps because you are too young to remember when it first began, or the issue just started being relevant to you), following a stream of 'what is new' articles will not enlighten you. There is not sufficient information there. There is a lot of tacit knowledge that the writer assumes the readers possess - but many don't.
There has to be a way for news items to link to some kind of collection of background information - an 'explainer'. Such an explainer would be a collection of verifiable facts about the topic. A collection of verifiable facts about the way the world works is....scientific information!
With more and more journalists realizing they need to be transparent about where they are coming from, injecting personality into their work in order to build trust, some of that phatic language is starting to seep in, completing the trio of elements of effective communication.
Data Journalism - isn't this science?
Some of the best journalism of the past - yes, the abominable 20th century - was done when a reporter was given several months to work on a single story requiring sifting through boxes and boxes of documents. The reporter becomes the expert on the topic, starts noticing patterns and writes a story that brings truly new knowledge to the world. That is practically science! Perhaps it is not the hardest of the hard sciences like physics, but as good as well-done social science like cultural anthropology, sociology or ethnography. There is a system and a method very much like the scientific method.
Unfortunately, most reporters are not given such luxury. They have to take shortcuts - interviewing a few sources to quote for the story. The sources are, of course, a very small and very unrepresentative sample of the relevant population - from a rolodex. Call a couple of climate scientists, and a couple of denialists, grab a quote from each and stick them into a formulaic article. That is Bad Science as well as Bad Journalism. And now that the people formerly known as audience, including people with expertise on the topic, have the tools to communicate to the world, they often swiftly point out how poorly such articles represent reality.
But today, most of the information, data and documents are digital, not in boxes. They are likely to be online and can be accessed without travel and without getting special permissions (though one may have to steal them - as Wikileaks operates: a perfect example of the new data journalism). Those reams of data can be analyzed by computers to find patterns, as well as by small armies of journalists (and other experts) for patterns and pieces of information that computer programs miss.
This is what bioinformaticists do (and have already built tools to do it - contact them, steal their tools!).
Data journalism. This is what a number of forward-thinking journalists and media organizations are starting to do.
This is science.
On the other hand, a lot of distributed, crowdsourced scientific research, usually called Citizen Science, is in the business of collecting massive amounts of data for analysis. How does that differ from data journalism? Not much?
Look at this scientific paper - Coding Early Naturalists' Accounts into Long-Term Fish Community Changes in the Adriatic Sea (1800–2000) - is this science or data journalism? It is both.
The two domains of communicating about what is new and how the world works - journalism and science - have fused again. Both are now starting to get done by teams that involve both professionals and amateurs. Both are now led by personalities who are getting well-known in the public due to their phatic communication in a variety of old and new media.
It is important to be aware of the shortness of our lives and thus natural tendency for historical myopia. Just because we were born in the 20th century does not mean that the way things were done then are the way things were 'always done', or the best ways to do things - the pinnacle of cultural and social development. The 20th century was just a strange and deviant blip in the course of history.
As we are leaving the 20th century behind with all of its unusual historical quirks, we are going back to an older model of communicating facts - but with the new tools we can do it much better than ever, including a much broader swath of society - a more democratic system than ever.
By the way, while it's still cold, the rain has stopped. And that is Metaphorical language...
This article was commissioned by Science Progress and will also appear on their site in 24 hours.
Tags: language, journalism, blogging, media, history, communication
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1. AndiKuszewski 01:48 PM 12/20/10
It's amazing (yet unsurprising) how easily scientists can fall into that low-effort, blind acceptance state when presented with scientific data as long as it is peer-reviewed. Additionally, if it isn't peer-reviewed, it gets rejected without so much as a second glance. Watson & Crick didn't go through peer review?! Then the whole field of genetics must all be wrong! Built on a false premise! My mind is blown!!
I feel that we go through cycles of communication and critical thinking/questioning of the methods and systems like you mentioned in the explanation of early newspapers and the public becoming the editors.
Once a method of review is accepted by the people as valid, the public gets lazy, sits back, and stops questioning the actual data. Inevitably, the sources providing the data get lazy as well and over time, the data can't be guaranteed to have that same level of purity yet the public still accepts it because of the blind acceptance of the messenger. Eventually, people start protesting. I think we are starting to see a backlash of the unconditional acceptance of peer review which is a very good thing.
I gave a presentation this past summer on ways to maximize your cognitive potential, and one of the things I brought up was how an over-reliance on modern tech (such as GPS) to do our critical thinking for us, can result, over time, in a weakening of those cognitive skills. I fear the same is happening in a broader sense with how we think about science we stop using our critical thinking skills, and they become less sharp. Our sciencey radar system weakens, and we are less effective gatekeepers of scientific data.
Science has become so methodized, that we inclined to accept the process without questioning why we are using that approach in the first place. The small group that continues to question often gets punished or mocked. Creativity and critical thinking has been suffering for the last decade or so, but I think with the addition of modern technology, social networks, and transparency, things have already begun to change and it won't be stopped, as much as the traditional scientists may resist.
The fact that there is so much controversy, friction and discord right now in science, science communication, and journalism in general, can only mean progress. It means the Revolution is already taking place, and change is inevitable. These are all good things.
Also I love the juxtaposition of old & new methods of science communication using the basic ideas in a new medium, to achieve higher goals.
Loved this piece!
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2.
2. billsmith 02:31 PM 12/20/10
Bravo. The distinction between communication of trustworthiness, explanation, and novelty is an excellent one. I hope all Scientific American writers study this essay.
Whether it's recent political events or discoveries in medical science, I often feel like a newspaper article is just pointless fluff added onto the first paragraph. There is no greater context of what was known before and how this new information fits into a bigger picture.(And yet I read them anyway. How sad.)
If you write that a dictator suffers a coup, explain to me in detail who was upset with him and why and explain how similar upheavals affected other countries. If a scientific study seems to contradict one that you wrote about last month, explain how one of the studies is irrelevant, or how they are both part of a more complicated truth.
Science Daily is one of my favorite sources for accurately reported science news, but their "Related Stories" sidebar still often amusingly provides evidence that the "breakthrough" reported by a university press office is just one piece of a decade-long puzzle.
I forgive them the lapses, though, partly because their writers and "Related Stories" often provide a fair amount of context. But more than that, the links to the ACTUAL PAPERS being reported on are highly reassuring and informative.
I hope that Scientific American writers will try to include accurate context whenever possible. I also hope that they will realize the power of transparency and without exception provide links to the original journal articles, abstracts, and researchers' websites. (Thank you to those who have started doing this more often.)
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3.
3. EricMJohnson 05:27 PM 12/20/10
As someone with training in science, journalism, and (now) history I think this is a wonderfully synthesized and provocative piece of writing. Too many professionals in journalism as well as science (and the editors in both fields especially) have come to fear phatic language because it reveals that both endeavors are human activities with all of the failings that come along with that. By emphasizing conceptual language, as you say, it merely gives the illusion of objectivity. But we are all biased. Good scientists and good journalists use different tools but their shared goal is to try and move beyond their personal biases and report on the world as it really is. Trust is built through hard work and reputation and it must be constantly earned. It is an individual process and can't be shifted to the anonymous entity of "brand authority" (whether that is Nature, The New York Times, or BBC News).
I would argue that the commitment to promoting brand authority actually serves to undermine critical thinking. Readers turn off their BS filters because the brands have convinced them that the critical thinking has already been done. But when readers must enter into conflicting interpretations it forces them to make up their own mind about the issues based on the integrity of the source and the veracity of the information (and then, perhaps, even write about it themselves which continues to promote the critical thinking process). Blogs fill an important gap in our media ecosystem, one that has increasingly become a monoculture as more and more sources of information are controlled by a handful of media conglomerates.
The critique by some traditional journalists about how some blogs are poor quality misses the point. Just look at the poor quality of the mainstream media today! When Judith Miller can promote known falsehoods about Iraqi WMDs using anonymous sources in the Times, when Fox News receives the highest ratings and is the most trusted news organization despite the fact that viewers are more likely to be woefully misinformed (according to a recent WPO report: http://bit.ly/fNeK1b) the problem is not one of media platform, it is one of media literacy. The traditional media gatekeepers have become less interested in what is true and more interested in what is good for the bottom line (as well as continued access to institutions of power: http://huff.to/an9dAB). We are currently in the Golden Age of media and, I for one, am very hopeful about what this means for scientific literacy as well as for democracy in general.
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4.
4. xprof 08:12 PM 12/20/10
When writing about science and journalism, how can one omit reference to science journalists like Natalie Angier and Olivia Judson who are equally at home in the field, the laboratory and at the typewriter, and who superbly articulate scientific concepts and discoveries in a stimulating and informative way?
Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA
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5.
5. Bora Zivkovic in reply to xprof 08:56 PM 12/20/10
Excellent writers like that have been mentioned under the link "good science writers are rare" up there. I did not say they don't exist, but that they are rare, and then go on to describe how they come about: they either spend years studying and specializing, or they come to journalism from a scientific background.
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6.
6. Bora Zivkovic in reply to AndiKuszewski 08:59 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. I guess in our busy lives it is usually a good heuristic to trust again people we trusted before. Once we invest a lot of trust in someone over prolonged time, it is a difficult realization they may be wrong - as it implies we are wrong as well, something that is hard to admit.
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7.
7. Bora Zivkovic in reply to billsmith 09:00 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. Yes, under pressure by a number of bloggers over time, it is good to notice that some media organizations have started more routinely to link to primary papers, e.g., BBC and Reuters. Let's home more do.
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8.
8. Bora Zivkovic in reply to EricMJohnson 09:04 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. You make a number of excellent points here. I agree that this is a Golden Age of sorts - never before in history did we have as much quantity and quality of science coverage and as ease of access to it by as many people around the world.
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9.
9. clrbear430 09:10 PM 12/20/10
Spellcheck, spellcheck!! There are a number of errors in the above Observation. For example:
Charles Darwin did that, for example (well, if I remember correctly, his wife made copies from his illegible originals into something that recipients could actually read), which is why we have such a complete understanding of his work and thought - it is all well preserved and the availability of such voluminouos correspondence gave rise to a small industry of Darwinian historical scholarship. [Voluminous?]
**I do like the abundance of links in this post.**
Just because we were born in the 20th century does not mean that the way things were done then are the way things were 'always done', or the best ways to do things - the pinnacle of cultural and social development.
Don't assume everyone reading this post is older than 10!! I started to read interesting articles from the Internet approximately when I was 8.
Claire Binkley
West Chester, PA
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10.
10. Bora Zivkovic in reply to clrbear430 09:21 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. An occasional typo on a blog is actually a part of phatic communication - it is a demonstration that the writer spoke directly, with no filters.
And in such situations typos happen - one becomes typo-blind after spending a lot of time with one's own piece of text. A fresh set of eyes (copyeditor if lucky, spouse more usually) can find them, but that adds one more layer of distance between the writer and the reader.
Which is why blog-readers are so tolerant of typos, even if they vocally point them out in works published by corporate media.
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Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
And here's looking into someones crystal ball:http://www.niemanlab.org/category/themes/predictions-2011/
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
To close out 2010, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2011 will bring for the future of journalism.
Dec. 13: What will 2011 bring for journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread disruptions for syndication
Dec. 13: The great paywall debate: Will The New York Times’ new model work?
Dec. 13: Steven Brill: 2011 will bring ebook battles, paywall successes, and a new model for long-form articles
Dec. 14: Better curation on Twitter, pushback against anonymity, and more new startups: Predictions for 2011
Dec. 14: Smartphone growth, Murdoch’s Daily, and journalism for the poor: Predictions for mobile news in 2011
Dec. 15: In-car app stores, success for Xinhua, and more social media: Predictions for journalism in 2011
Dec. 15: Coming soon to journalism: Matt Thompson sees the “Speakularity” and universal instant transcription
Dec. 15: Dave Winer: There’s no good place for a new Maginot Line for the news
Dec. 16: Jonathan Stray: In 2011, news orgs will finally start to move past the borders of their own content
Dec. 16: Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots, and a new blogging golden age: Predictions for 2011
Dec. 17: DDoS attacks on the U.S. media, Twitter history searching, and a big blog deal: More predictions for 2011
Dec. 17: Jason Fry: A blow to content farms, Facebook’s continued growth, and the continued pull of the open web
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
What will 2011 bring for journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread disruptions for syndication
By Clay Shirky / Dec. 13 / 10 a.m. / 19 comments
Editor’s Note: To mark the end of the year, we at the Lab decided to ask some of the smartest people we know what they thought 2011 would bring for journalism. We’re very pleased that so many of them agreed to share their predictions with us.
Over the next few days, you’ll hear from Steve Brill, Vivian Schiller, Michael Schudson, Markos Moulitsas, Kevin Kelly, Geneva Overholser, Adrian Holovaty, Jakob Nielsen, Evan Smith, Megan McCarthy, David Fanning, Matt Thompson, Bob Garfield, Matt Haughey, and more.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
To start off our package of predictions, here’s Clay Shirky. Happy holidays.
The old news business model has had a series of shocks in the 15 or so years we’ve had a broadly adopted public web. The first was the loss of geographic limits to competition (every outlet could reach any reader, listener or viewer). Next was the loss of progressive layers of advertising revenue (the rise of Monster and craigslist et alia, as well as the “analog dollars to digital dimes” problem). Then there is the inability to charge readers easily without eviscerating the advertising rate-base (the failure of micropayments and paywalls as general-purpose solutions).
Next up for widespread disruption, I think, is syndication, a key part of the economic structure of the news business since the founding of Havas in the early 19th century. As with so many parts of a news system based on industrial economics, that model is now under pressure.
Keep reading »
Tags: aggregation, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Jonathan Stray, linking, Nicholas Carr, syndication
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
The great paywall debate: Will The New York Times’ new model work?
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 13 / noon / 16 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Many of their predictions centered on what may be the most anticipated business-model shift of 2011: The New York Times’ shift to charging for full access to NYTimes.com next month. We found voices on both sides of the “will it work” debate. Here are Markos Moulitsas, Megan McCarthy, C.W. Anderson, Paddy Hirsch, Jason Fry, Nikki Usher, and Barry Sussman on how they see the metered model shaking out.
Megan McCarthy, editor, Mediagazer
Prediction for 2011: The building up — and subsequent tearing down — of online paywalls for general news sites. The New York Times are planning to implement their paywall in January and I predict it will be modified enough — either by the Times themselves or outside developers — to be rendered irrelevant by March.
C.W. Anderson, assistant professor of media culture, CUNY
Faced with a massive migration of regular readers to the Guardian and the BBC, The New York Times will abandon its recently enacted paywall.
Keep reading »
Tags: Barry Sussman, C. W. Anderson, charging, Jason Fry, Journalism Online, Markos Moulitsas, Megan McCarthy, New York Times, Paddy Hirsch, paywall
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Steven Brill: 2011 will bring ebook battles, paywall successes, and a new model for long-form articles
By Steven Brill / Dec. 13 / 3 p.m. / 4 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Here, Journalism Online cofounder and long-time journalism entrepreneur Steven Brill lays out three predictions for 2011.
1. E-books will continue to soar — and authors will get into major fights with publishers over who gets what percentage of the take, with more top authors withholding their e-book rights and selling them independently or through specialty distributors.
2. Someone — via Press+, I hope — will go into the business of commissioning long-form magazine articles from top writers and providing the first two or three paragraphs online for free and then selling the rest for, say, 75 cents or a dollar. That trailblazing publisher might call these “mini-e-books” and use a business model of simply splitting the revenues with the author, 50-50. My favorite candidates would be website publishers who already have great brand names, such as the Huffington Post or Daily Beast, but that want to revive long-form journalism and make money doing it (and limit risk by making some top writers their 50-50 business partners, rather than pay high flat fees for their work.)
Keep reading »
Tags: business model, charging, ebooks, long-form journalism, paid content, paywall, Press+, Steve Brill
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Better curation on Twitter, pushback against anonymity, and more new startups: Predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 14 / 10 a.m. / No comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Bob Giles, Alan Murray, David Beard, Geneva Overholser, Alan D. Mutter, Melissa Ludtke, Brooke Kroeger, Jan Schaffer, and Ory Okolloh.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Bob Giles, curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Newspaper companies will regret the deep cutting of newsgathering resources as the economy recovers and advertisers conclude that local newspapers are no longer vital sources of community coverage. Moreover, newspapers will follow their historical pattern of being slow to adapt to what’s new — in this case, opportunities offered by the iPad and other tablets.
Geneva Overholser, director, USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism
This will be the year when collaboration finally, truly, really takes hold. Smart legacy media leaders will determine what they and they alone can do best, then ally themselves with others who can supply the rest. Radio, TV, web-based publications, print publications, bloggers, international and national news providers, journalism schools, nonprofits, and commercial media — the smart ones will figure out their niche and how to partner (strategically) with others to be sure their work is seen. The public will be the biggest beneficiary.
Keep reading »
Tags: Alan Murray, Alan Mutter, Brooke, David Beard, Geneva Overholser, Jan Schaffer, Melissa Ludtke, Ory Okolloh
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Smartphone growth, Murdoch’s Daily, and journalism for the poor: Predictions for mobile news in 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 14 / noon / 1 comment
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
One of the common threads through many of their predictions was mobile — the impact smartphones and tablets and apps will have on how news is reported, produced, distributed, and consumed. (Not to mention how it’s paid for.) Here are Vivian Schiller, Keith Hopper, Jakob Nielsen, Alexis Madrigal, Michael Andersen, Richard Lee Colvin, Megan McCarthy, David Cohn, and David Fanning on what 2011 will bring for the mobile space.
Vivian Schiller, president and CEO, NPR
After two decades of saying that “this is the year of mobile,” 2011 really will be the year of mobile.
Michael Andersen, editor, Portland Afoot
My wild prediction: 2011 will be the year of media initiatives that serve poor and middle-income people.
For 20 years, almost all native Internet content has been made for the niche interests — often the professional interests — of people who make more than the median household income of $50,000 or so. But one of the best things about the mobile Internet is that it’s finally killing (or even reversing) the digital divide.
Poor folks may not have broadband, but they’ve got cell phones. African Americans and Latinos are more likely than white people to use phones for the web, pictures, texts, emails, games, videos, and social networking. As hardware prices keep falling, we’ll see more and more demand for information that is useful to the lower-income half of the population — and thanks to low marginal costs, people will be creating products that fill that need. It’s about damn time, wouldn’t you say?
Keep reading »
Tags: Alexis Madrigal, apps, David Cohn, David Fanning, iPad, iPhone, Jakob Nielsen, Keith Hopper, Megan McCarthy, Michael Andersen, mobile, news apps, Richard Colvin, Vivian Schiller
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
In-car app stores, success for Xinhua, and more social media: Predictions for journalism in 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 15 / noon / No comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Paul Bass, John Paton, Philip Balboni, Martin Moore, Mark Luckie, Adrian Monck, Ken Doctor, Keith Hopper, and Vivian Schiller.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Paul Bass, founder, New Haven Independent
Every city of 100,000 or more in America will have its own online-only daily local news site.
Local governments will create their own “news” sources online to try to control the message and compete with new media and compensate for the decline of old media channels.
Newspapers, TV and radio stations, and online news outlets will collaborate on a bigger scale on local coverage and events
Vivian Schiller, president and CEO, NPR
“Local” takes center stage in online news, as newspaper sites, Patch, Yahoo, NPR member stations and new start ups (not for profit and for profit) form alliances, grow, and compete for audience and revenue online.
Twitter and Facebook become established as journalism platforms for newsgathering, distribution and engagement.
In-car Internet radio becomes a hot media topic, though penetration of enabled cars will lag by a few years.
Keep reading »
Tags: Adrian Monck, John Paton, Keith Hopper, Ken Doctor, Mark Luckie, Martin Moore, Paul Bass, Philip Balboni, predictions, Vivian Schiller, Xinhua
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Coming soon to journalism: Matt Thompson sees the “Speakularity” and universal instant transcription
By Matt Thompson / Dec. 15 / 1 p.m. / 9 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
We also want to hear your predictions: Take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Here’s Matt Thompson, he of Newsless, Snarkmarket, and NPR fame.
At some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent. And this moment — let’s call it the Speakularity — will be a watershed moment for journalism.
So much of the raw material of journalism consists of verbal exchanges — phone conversations, press conferences, meetings. One of journalism’s most significant production challenges, even for those who don’t work at a radio company, is translating these verbal exchanges into text to weave scripts and stories out of them.
After the Speakularity, much more of this raw material would become available. It would render audio recordings accessible to the blind and aid in translation of audio recordings into different languages. Obscure city meetings could be recorded and auto-transcribed; interviews could be published nearly instantly as Q&As; journalists covering events could focus their attention on analyzing rather than capturing the proceedings.
Keep reading »
Tags: data, search, transcription, video, YouTube
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Dave Winer: There’s no good place for a new Maginot Line for the news
By Dave Winer / Dec. 15 / 2 p.m. / 6 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, it’s web pioneer Dave Winer, a man key to the evolution of many of the publishing technologies we use online today, currently a visiting scholar in journalism at NYU, and half the team behind the Rebooting the News podcast.
When people in the news business try to figure out how to make news pay after the Internet, it seems analogous to the French, after being invaded by Germany in World War II, trying to figure out where to put the new Maginot Line.
The Maginot Line would have been a perfect defense in World War I. It didn’t help much in the second war.
Analogously, there was a perfect paywall in the pre-Internet news business, the physical product of a newspaper. There is no equivalent in the new distribution system.
Keep reading »
Tags: charging, commerce, CraigsList, deal brokering, Groupon, Maginot Line, paywall
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Jonathan Stray: In 2011, news orgs will finally start to move past the borders of their own content
By Jonathan Stray / Dec. 16 / 11 a.m. / 3 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, our predictor is Jonathan Stray, interactive technology editor for the Associated Press and a familiar byline here at the Lab. His subject: the building of new multi-source information products, and whether it’ll be news organizations that do the building.
2011 will be the year that news organizations finally start talking about integrated products designed to serve the complete information needs of consumers, but it won’t be the year that they ship them.
News used to be more or less whatever news organizations published and broadcast. With so many other ways to find out about the world, this is no longer the case. Professional journalism has sometimes displayed an antagonistic streak towards blogs, Wikipedia, and social media of all types, but it’s no longer possible to deny that non-journalism sources of news are exciting and useful to people.
Unencumbered by such tribalism — and lacking content creation behemoths of their own — the information technology industry has long understood the value of curating multiple sources, including traditional news content. Google web search was the first truly widespread digital public information system. RSS allowed readers to assemble their own news feeds. Mid-decade, Wikipedia exploded into the one of the top ten sites on the web, used as much for news as for reference. The business practices of news aggregators angered publishers, but there’s no getting around the fact that they are tremendously useful tools. The most recent change in information distribution is social. Twitter has become an entirely new form of news network, while Facebook wants media organizations to use their social infrastructure to reach users.
Keep reading »
Tags: aggregation, curation, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, information needs, service, Wikipedia
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots, and a new blogging golden age: Predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 16 / 1 p.m. / 2 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Susan Orlean, Joe Grimm, Matt Haughey, Adrian Holovaty, Megan McCarthy, Mark Potts, Jake Shapiro, and Cody Brown.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results in a couple days.
Susan Orlean, Twitter artist, and staff writer, The New Yorker
We’ll be reading more on our phones, our iPads, and our Super Scout Decoder rings by the end of next year.
Several magazines — maybe Time or Newsweek or both — will go monthly and/or digital only. But there will be new magazine startups in print that will be luxurious and expensive and book-like. 2011 will be the year of those two forms making themselves distinct; things on line will become more webby, and print publications will become more “collectible” and classic.
Journalism schools will offer a “web producer” major.
The last typewriter living in the wild will be captured, its DNA sequenced; and then it will be humanely destroyed.
Keep reading »
Tags: Adrian Holovaty, Cody Brown, Jake Shapiro, Joe Grimm, Mark Potts, Matt Haughey, Megan McCarthy, Susan Orlean
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
DDoS attacks on the U.S. media, Twitter history searching, and a big blog deal: More predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 17 / 11 a.m. / 2 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Michael Schudson, Alexis Madrigal, Markos Moulitsas, Joy Mayer, Nicco Mele, Nikki Usher, Steve Buttry, Paddy Hirsch, John Davidow, Ethan Zuckerman, Richard Lee Colvin, and Kevin Kelly.
We also want to hear your predictions: Today’s the last day we’ll be accepting entries in our Lab reader poll, where you tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results in a couple days.
Michael Schudson, historian and sociologist, Columbia Journalism School
Prognosticating about the news media in these times is a risky business, but I’ll try one nonetheless: In 2011, none of the 250 largest U.S. cities will stop publishing (on paper) its last remaining daily newspaper. Cities with more than one daily newspaper may be reduced to one survivor.
Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic and co-founder, Longshot Magazine
One of the truly important big city papers will go digital-only.
Kevin Kelly, author and founder, Wired Magazine
Twitter will go down for 36 hours. The ensuing media attention will prompt a 10 percent increase in signups in the months following.
Keep reading »
Tags: Alexis Madrigal, Ethan Zuckerman, John Davidow, Joy Mayer, Kevin Kelly, Markos Moulitsas, Michael Schudson, Nicco Mele, Nikki Usher, Paddy Hirsch, Richard Colvin, Steve Buttry
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Jason Fry: A blow to content farms, Facebook’s continued growth, and the continued pull of the open web
By Jason Fry / Dec. 17 / 1 p.m. / 3 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring. Today, our predictor is Jason Fry, a familiar byline at the Lab. Jason also prognosticated earlier this week about the potential success of the NYT paywall.
Hyperlocal will remain stubbornly small scale. Large-scale efforts at cracking hyperlocal will seed more news organizations with content, but that content will remain mostly aggregation and data and still feel robotic and cold. Meanwhile, small-scale hyperlocal efforts will continue to win reader loyalty, but struggle to monetize those audiences. By the end of 2011, the most promising developments in hyperlocal will come from social media. Promising efforts to identify and leverage localized news and conversation in social media will be the buzz of late 2011, and we’ll be excited to think that social media is proving an excellent stepping stone to greater involvement in our physical communities.
Google will deal the content farms a big blow by tweaking its algorithms to drive down their search rankings. But the company will be opaque to the point of catatonia about exactly what it did and why it did it, reflecting its reluctance to be drawn into qualitative judgments about content. There will be talk of lawsuits by the spurned content farms and no small amount of jawing about Google’s power, lack of transparency, and whether or not it’s being evil. But even those worried about Google’s actions will admit that search is a much better experience now that results are less cluttered with horribly written crap.
Keep reading »
Tags: content farms, Facebook, Google, hyperlocal, search engine optimization, social media, tablets
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Is an English major the best way to become a journonerd? | A study of the NYT’s interactive news team finds a liberal-arts heart beating in the code
Apple’s impact | What Steve Jobs’ latest announcements mean for the news industry’s mobile strategy
Could a name-your-own-price model work for news?
Panera is experimenting with a new model. Can you build a business on good will?
Who owns the news? Could sharing a hot story be illegal?
The right to link is up for debate in a critical court case, pitting news orgs against Google and Twitter
Apps vs. browsers | Why the biggest competitor to iPad news apps may be a familiar but forgotten icon in the dock
The changing value of copyediting in an online age
How can copy desks stay relevant in a time of content farms, Captcha, and crowdsourced errors?
Why Twitter looks like a social network but feels like news media | The promise of many-to-many communication ends up looking more like broadcast
This chart is not encouraging | Ignore the spin: The latest circ numbers aren’t cheery
When the public’s right to know meets copyright
States are using the copyright code to keep otherwise public data private. What rights do journalists — and citizens — have?
* No, seriously: What Old Spice can teach us about news
* What makes a nonprofit news org legit? Six clues
* Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers on print
* An involuntary Facebook for reporters and their work
* The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Back to the pre-print world?
* The NYT’s depressing list of most looked-up words
* Why Apple banned a Pulitzer winner from the iPhone
From Twitter
* Predicted: In 2011, Google will tweak its algorithms to drive down content farms' search rankings http://nie.mn/gYd0yQ 49 mins ago
* Better curation on Twitter, more news start-ups, and reconsidering anonymity: More 2011 predictions for media http://nie.mn/h3YqBk 2 hrs ago
* DDoS attacks on the media. A more searchable Twitter. An important paper goes digital-only. More predictions for 2011 http://nie.mn/g0bk1q 4 hrs ago
* 2011 predictions continue: Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots--and a new golden age for blogging http://nie.mn/fMxnWh 6 hrs ago
* Dealing with equal and opposite forces in news start-ups: How to speed up and slow down http://nie.mn/ecmX9e 8 hrs ago
* More updates...
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
To close out 2010, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2011 will bring for the future of journalism.
Dec. 13: What will 2011 bring for journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread disruptions for syndication
Dec. 13: The great paywall debate: Will The New York Times’ new model work?
Dec. 13: Steven Brill: 2011 will bring ebook battles, paywall successes, and a new model for long-form articles
Dec. 14: Better curation on Twitter, pushback against anonymity, and more new startups: Predictions for 2011
Dec. 14: Smartphone growth, Murdoch’s Daily, and journalism for the poor: Predictions for mobile news in 2011
Dec. 15: In-car app stores, success for Xinhua, and more social media: Predictions for journalism in 2011
Dec. 15: Coming soon to journalism: Matt Thompson sees the “Speakularity” and universal instant transcription
Dec. 15: Dave Winer: There’s no good place for a new Maginot Line for the news
Dec. 16: Jonathan Stray: In 2011, news orgs will finally start to move past the borders of their own content
Dec. 16: Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots, and a new blogging golden age: Predictions for 2011
Dec. 17: DDoS attacks on the U.S. media, Twitter history searching, and a big blog deal: More predictions for 2011
Dec. 17: Jason Fry: A blow to content farms, Facebook’s continued growth, and the continued pull of the open web
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
What will 2011 bring for journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread disruptions for syndication
By Clay Shirky / Dec. 13 / 10 a.m. / 19 comments
Editor’s Note: To mark the end of the year, we at the Lab decided to ask some of the smartest people we know what they thought 2011 would bring for journalism. We’re very pleased that so many of them agreed to share their predictions with us.
Over the next few days, you’ll hear from Steve Brill, Vivian Schiller, Michael Schudson, Markos Moulitsas, Kevin Kelly, Geneva Overholser, Adrian Holovaty, Jakob Nielsen, Evan Smith, Megan McCarthy, David Fanning, Matt Thompson, Bob Garfield, Matt Haughey, and more.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
To start off our package of predictions, here’s Clay Shirky. Happy holidays.
The old news business model has had a series of shocks in the 15 or so years we’ve had a broadly adopted public web. The first was the loss of geographic limits to competition (every outlet could reach any reader, listener or viewer). Next was the loss of progressive layers of advertising revenue (the rise of Monster and craigslist et alia, as well as the “analog dollars to digital dimes” problem). Then there is the inability to charge readers easily without eviscerating the advertising rate-base (the failure of micropayments and paywalls as general-purpose solutions).
Next up for widespread disruption, I think, is syndication, a key part of the economic structure of the news business since the founding of Havas in the early 19th century. As with so many parts of a news system based on industrial economics, that model is now under pressure.
Keep reading »
Tags: aggregation, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Jonathan Stray, linking, Nicholas Carr, syndication
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
The great paywall debate: Will The New York Times’ new model work?
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 13 / noon / 16 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Many of their predictions centered on what may be the most anticipated business-model shift of 2011: The New York Times’ shift to charging for full access to NYTimes.com next month. We found voices on both sides of the “will it work” debate. Here are Markos Moulitsas, Megan McCarthy, C.W. Anderson, Paddy Hirsch, Jason Fry, Nikki Usher, and Barry Sussman on how they see the metered model shaking out.
Megan McCarthy, editor, Mediagazer
Prediction for 2011: The building up — and subsequent tearing down — of online paywalls for general news sites. The New York Times are planning to implement their paywall in January and I predict it will be modified enough — either by the Times themselves or outside developers — to be rendered irrelevant by March.
C.W. Anderson, assistant professor of media culture, CUNY
Faced with a massive migration of regular readers to the Guardian and the BBC, The New York Times will abandon its recently enacted paywall.
Keep reading »
Tags: Barry Sussman, C. W. Anderson, charging, Jason Fry, Journalism Online, Markos Moulitsas, Megan McCarthy, New York Times, Paddy Hirsch, paywall
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Steven Brill: 2011 will bring ebook battles, paywall successes, and a new model for long-form articles
By Steven Brill / Dec. 13 / 3 p.m. / 4 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Here, Journalism Online cofounder and long-time journalism entrepreneur Steven Brill lays out three predictions for 2011.
1. E-books will continue to soar — and authors will get into major fights with publishers over who gets what percentage of the take, with more top authors withholding their e-book rights and selling them independently or through specialty distributors.
2. Someone — via Press+, I hope — will go into the business of commissioning long-form magazine articles from top writers and providing the first two or three paragraphs online for free and then selling the rest for, say, 75 cents or a dollar. That trailblazing publisher might call these “mini-e-books” and use a business model of simply splitting the revenues with the author, 50-50. My favorite candidates would be website publishers who already have great brand names, such as the Huffington Post or Daily Beast, but that want to revive long-form journalism and make money doing it (and limit risk by making some top writers their 50-50 business partners, rather than pay high flat fees for their work.)
Keep reading »
Tags: business model, charging, ebooks, long-form journalism, paid content, paywall, Press+, Steve Brill
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Better curation on Twitter, pushback against anonymity, and more new startups: Predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 14 / 10 a.m. / No comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Bob Giles, Alan Murray, David Beard, Geneva Overholser, Alan D. Mutter, Melissa Ludtke, Brooke Kroeger, Jan Schaffer, and Ory Okolloh.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Bob Giles, curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Newspaper companies will regret the deep cutting of newsgathering resources as the economy recovers and advertisers conclude that local newspapers are no longer vital sources of community coverage. Moreover, newspapers will follow their historical pattern of being slow to adapt to what’s new — in this case, opportunities offered by the iPad and other tablets.
Geneva Overholser, director, USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism
This will be the year when collaboration finally, truly, really takes hold. Smart legacy media leaders will determine what they and they alone can do best, then ally themselves with others who can supply the rest. Radio, TV, web-based publications, print publications, bloggers, international and national news providers, journalism schools, nonprofits, and commercial media — the smart ones will figure out their niche and how to partner (strategically) with others to be sure their work is seen. The public will be the biggest beneficiary.
Keep reading »
Tags: Alan Murray, Alan Mutter, Brooke, David Beard, Geneva Overholser, Jan Schaffer, Melissa Ludtke, Ory Okolloh
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Smartphone growth, Murdoch’s Daily, and journalism for the poor: Predictions for mobile news in 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 14 / noon / 1 comment
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
One of the common threads through many of their predictions was mobile — the impact smartphones and tablets and apps will have on how news is reported, produced, distributed, and consumed. (Not to mention how it’s paid for.) Here are Vivian Schiller, Keith Hopper, Jakob Nielsen, Alexis Madrigal, Michael Andersen, Richard Lee Colvin, Megan McCarthy, David Cohn, and David Fanning on what 2011 will bring for the mobile space.
Vivian Schiller, president and CEO, NPR
After two decades of saying that “this is the year of mobile,” 2011 really will be the year of mobile.
Michael Andersen, editor, Portland Afoot
My wild prediction: 2011 will be the year of media initiatives that serve poor and middle-income people.
For 20 years, almost all native Internet content has been made for the niche interests — often the professional interests — of people who make more than the median household income of $50,000 or so. But one of the best things about the mobile Internet is that it’s finally killing (or even reversing) the digital divide.
Poor folks may not have broadband, but they’ve got cell phones. African Americans and Latinos are more likely than white people to use phones for the web, pictures, texts, emails, games, videos, and social networking. As hardware prices keep falling, we’ll see more and more demand for information that is useful to the lower-income half of the population — and thanks to low marginal costs, people will be creating products that fill that need. It’s about damn time, wouldn’t you say?
Keep reading »
Tags: Alexis Madrigal, apps, David Cohn, David Fanning, iPad, iPhone, Jakob Nielsen, Keith Hopper, Megan McCarthy, Michael Andersen, mobile, news apps, Richard Colvin, Vivian Schiller
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
In-car app stores, success for Xinhua, and more social media: Predictions for journalism in 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 15 / noon / No comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Paul Bass, John Paton, Philip Balboni, Martin Moore, Mark Luckie, Adrian Monck, Ken Doctor, Keith Hopper, and Vivian Schiller.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Paul Bass, founder, New Haven Independent
Every city of 100,000 or more in America will have its own online-only daily local news site.
Local governments will create their own “news” sources online to try to control the message and compete with new media and compensate for the decline of old media channels.
Newspapers, TV and radio stations, and online news outlets will collaborate on a bigger scale on local coverage and events
Vivian Schiller, president and CEO, NPR
“Local” takes center stage in online news, as newspaper sites, Patch, Yahoo, NPR member stations and new start ups (not for profit and for profit) form alliances, grow, and compete for audience and revenue online.
Twitter and Facebook become established as journalism platforms for newsgathering, distribution and engagement.
In-car Internet radio becomes a hot media topic, though penetration of enabled cars will lag by a few years.
Keep reading »
Tags: Adrian Monck, John Paton, Keith Hopper, Ken Doctor, Mark Luckie, Martin Moore, Paul Bass, Philip Balboni, predictions, Vivian Schiller, Xinhua
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Coming soon to journalism: Matt Thompson sees the “Speakularity” and universal instant transcription
By Matt Thompson / Dec. 15 / 1 p.m. / 9 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
We also want to hear your predictions: Take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results later this week.
Here’s Matt Thompson, he of Newsless, Snarkmarket, and NPR fame.
At some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent. And this moment — let’s call it the Speakularity — will be a watershed moment for journalism.
So much of the raw material of journalism consists of verbal exchanges — phone conversations, press conferences, meetings. One of journalism’s most significant production challenges, even for those who don’t work at a radio company, is translating these verbal exchanges into text to weave scripts and stories out of them.
After the Speakularity, much more of this raw material would become available. It would render audio recordings accessible to the blind and aid in translation of audio recordings into different languages. Obscure city meetings could be recorded and auto-transcribed; interviews could be published nearly instantly as Q&As; journalists covering events could focus their attention on analyzing rather than capturing the proceedings.
Keep reading »
Tags: data, search, transcription, video, YouTube
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Dave Winer: There’s no good place for a new Maginot Line for the news
By Dave Winer / Dec. 15 / 2 p.m. / 6 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, it’s web pioneer Dave Winer, a man key to the evolution of many of the publishing technologies we use online today, currently a visiting scholar in journalism at NYU, and half the team behind the Rebooting the News podcast.
When people in the news business try to figure out how to make news pay after the Internet, it seems analogous to the French, after being invaded by Germany in World War II, trying to figure out where to put the new Maginot Line.
The Maginot Line would have been a perfect defense in World War I. It didn’t help much in the second war.
Analogously, there was a perfect paywall in the pre-Internet news business, the physical product of a newspaper. There is no equivalent in the new distribution system.
Keep reading »
Tags: charging, commerce, CraigsList, deal brokering, Groupon, Maginot Line, paywall
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Jonathan Stray: In 2011, news orgs will finally start to move past the borders of their own content
By Jonathan Stray / Dec. 16 / 11 a.m. / 3 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, our predictor is Jonathan Stray, interactive technology editor for the Associated Press and a familiar byline here at the Lab. His subject: the building of new multi-source information products, and whether it’ll be news organizations that do the building.
2011 will be the year that news organizations finally start talking about integrated products designed to serve the complete information needs of consumers, but it won’t be the year that they ship them.
News used to be more or less whatever news organizations published and broadcast. With so many other ways to find out about the world, this is no longer the case. Professional journalism has sometimes displayed an antagonistic streak towards blogs, Wikipedia, and social media of all types, but it’s no longer possible to deny that non-journalism sources of news are exciting and useful to people.
Unencumbered by such tribalism — and lacking content creation behemoths of their own — the information technology industry has long understood the value of curating multiple sources, including traditional news content. Google web search was the first truly widespread digital public information system. RSS allowed readers to assemble their own news feeds. Mid-decade, Wikipedia exploded into the one of the top ten sites on the web, used as much for news as for reference. The business practices of news aggregators angered publishers, but there’s no getting around the fact that they are tremendously useful tools. The most recent change in information distribution is social. Twitter has become an entirely new form of news network, while Facebook wants media organizations to use their social infrastructure to reach users.
Keep reading »
Tags: aggregation, curation, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, information needs, service, Wikipedia
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots, and a new blogging golden age: Predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 16 / 1 p.m. / 2 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Susan Orlean, Joe Grimm, Matt Haughey, Adrian Holovaty, Megan McCarthy, Mark Potts, Jake Shapiro, and Cody Brown.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results in a couple days.
Susan Orlean, Twitter artist, and staff writer, The New Yorker
We’ll be reading more on our phones, our iPads, and our Super Scout Decoder rings by the end of next year.
Several magazines — maybe Time or Newsweek or both — will go monthly and/or digital only. But there will be new magazine startups in print that will be luxurious and expensive and book-like. 2011 will be the year of those two forms making themselves distinct; things on line will become more webby, and print publications will become more “collectible” and classic.
Journalism schools will offer a “web producer” major.
The last typewriter living in the wild will be captured, its DNA sequenced; and then it will be humanely destroyed.
Keep reading »
Tags: Adrian Holovaty, Cody Brown, Jake Shapiro, Joe Grimm, Mark Potts, Matt Haughey, Megan McCarthy, Susan Orlean
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
DDoS attacks on the U.S. media, Twitter history searching, and a big blog deal: More predictions for 2011
By Lois Beckett / Dec. 17 / 11 a.m. / 2 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Below are predictions from Michael Schudson, Alexis Madrigal, Markos Moulitsas, Joy Mayer, Nicco Mele, Nikki Usher, Steve Buttry, Paddy Hirsch, John Davidow, Ethan Zuckerman, Richard Lee Colvin, and Kevin Kelly.
We also want to hear your predictions: Today’s the last day we’ll be accepting entries in our Lab reader poll, where you tell us what you think we’ll be talking about in 2011. We’ll share those results in a couple days.
Michael Schudson, historian and sociologist, Columbia Journalism School
Prognosticating about the news media in these times is a risky business, but I’ll try one nonetheless: In 2011, none of the 250 largest U.S. cities will stop publishing (on paper) its last remaining daily newspaper. Cities with more than one daily newspaper may be reduced to one survivor.
Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic and co-founder, Longshot Magazine
One of the truly important big city papers will go digital-only.
Kevin Kelly, author and founder, Wired Magazine
Twitter will go down for 36 hours. The ensuing media attention will prompt a 10 percent increase in signups in the months following.
Keep reading »
Tags: Alexis Madrigal, Ethan Zuckerman, John Davidow, Joy Mayer, Kevin Kelly, Markos Moulitsas, Michael Schudson, Nicco Mele, Nikki Usher, Paddy Hirsch, Richard Colvin, Steve Buttry
Series: Predictions for Journalism 2011
Jason Fry: A blow to content farms, Facebook’s continued growth, and the continued pull of the open web
By Jason Fry / Dec. 17 / 1 p.m. / 3 comments
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring. Today, our predictor is Jason Fry, a familiar byline at the Lab. Jason also prognosticated earlier this week about the potential success of the NYT paywall.
Hyperlocal will remain stubbornly small scale. Large-scale efforts at cracking hyperlocal will seed more news organizations with content, but that content will remain mostly aggregation and data and still feel robotic and cold. Meanwhile, small-scale hyperlocal efforts will continue to win reader loyalty, but struggle to monetize those audiences. By the end of 2011, the most promising developments in hyperlocal will come from social media. Promising efforts to identify and leverage localized news and conversation in social media will be the buzz of late 2011, and we’ll be excited to think that social media is proving an excellent stepping stone to greater involvement in our physical communities.
Google will deal the content farms a big blow by tweaking its algorithms to drive down their search rankings. But the company will be opaque to the point of catatonia about exactly what it did and why it did it, reflecting its reluctance to be drawn into qualitative judgments about content. There will be talk of lawsuits by the spurned content farms and no small amount of jawing about Google’s power, lack of transparency, and whether or not it’s being evil. But even those worried about Google’s actions will admit that search is a much better experience now that results are less cluttered with horribly written crap.
Keep reading »
Tags: content farms, Facebook, Google, hyperlocal, search engine optimization, social media, tablets
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Making the business case for long stories at Slate
The Internet is supposed to wreck attention spans. So why is Slate seeing great numbers for its longest pieces?
Surviving in an age of brand fragmentation
How will paid-content models adjust to a world where publications are no longer the atomic unit of news?
The Wikipedia of news translation
How a Chinese website assembled a volunteer army to translate English stories — despite Beijing interference
Is an English major the best way to become a journonerd? | A study of the NYT’s interactive news team finds a liberal-arts heart beating in the code
Apple’s impact | What Steve Jobs’ latest announcements mean for the news industry’s mobile strategy
Could a name-your-own-price model work for news?
Panera is experimenting with a new model. Can you build a business on good will?
Who owns the news? Could sharing a hot story be illegal?
The right to link is up for debate in a critical court case, pitting news orgs against Google and Twitter
Apps vs. browsers | Why the biggest competitor to iPad news apps may be a familiar but forgotten icon in the dock
The changing value of copyediting in an online age
How can copy desks stay relevant in a time of content farms, Captcha, and crowdsourced errors?
Why Twitter looks like a social network but feels like news media | The promise of many-to-many communication ends up looking more like broadcast
This chart is not encouraging | Ignore the spin: The latest circ numbers aren’t cheery
When the public’s right to know meets copyright
States are using the copyright code to keep otherwise public data private. What rights do journalists — and citizens — have?
* No, seriously: What Old Spice can teach us about news
* What makes a nonprofit news org legit? Six clues
* Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers on print
* An involuntary Facebook for reporters and their work
* The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Back to the pre-print world?
* The NYT’s depressing list of most looked-up words
* Why Apple banned a Pulitzer winner from the iPhone
From Twitter
* Predicted: In 2011, Google will tweak its algorithms to drive down content farms' search rankings http://nie.mn/gYd0yQ 49 mins ago
* Better curation on Twitter, more news start-ups, and reconsidering anonymity: More 2011 predictions for media http://nie.mn/h3YqBk 2 hrs ago
* DDoS attacks on the media. A more searchable Twitter. An important paper goes digital-only. More predictions for 2011 http://nie.mn/g0bk1q 4 hrs ago
* 2011 predictions continue: Gawker copycats, luxurious print, more robots--and a new golden age for blogging http://nie.mn/fMxnWh 6 hrs ago
* Dealing with equal and opposite forces in news start-ups: How to speed up and slow down http://nie.mn/ecmX9e 8 hrs ago
* More updates...
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
I know,I never though that I would ever say this but here is another (that's two) great Australian ;>}:
10 December 2010
Who can now say that the WikiLeaks cables detail no new information?
It was only last week that ABC TV’s 7.30 Report featured a story with supposed foreign affairs experts, including the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who largely dismissed the significance of the document dump. Within a few days these men were all proven wrong.
Now we know Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib sends confidential information to the Americans. He’s not alone.
Crucially, however, our media class aren’t asking the next obvious questions.
The Australian’s Paul Maley argues that communication between politicians, journalists and diplomats is part of the daily job.
“It is no surprise the Americans were talking to Arbib,” he writes, “They talk to everyone.”
And yet the senior Murdoch journalist doesn’t understand that the general public are rarely told about such meetings. What is discussed? What are the agendas? Is there transparency in such dealings? And who is telling what information to whom? Who benefits and what stories are not being told to avoid embarrassing somebody?
The cosiness between these players is exactly what WikiLeaks is aiming to challenge. Why shouldn’t the voting public be privy to whims and wishes of the American government and their relationships with key government ministers, individuals voted in by all of us? If Arbib was warning the Americans he thought Rudd may fall, why wasn’t he telling his constituents, the ones who put him in office?
The fact that the US had followed the rise of Julia Gillard and approved her views on the American alliance, Afghanistan and Israeli aggression is worrying though unsurprising.
It’s extremely rare that a leader rises who hasn’t received American approval or extensive years of obedience grooming. Former Labor leader Mark Latham was loathed by the US because he publicly expressed scepticism about the US alliance, the war in Iraq and then-president George W Bush.
It’s worth recalling that Latham called former prime minister John Howard an “arselicker” of the Bush administration and described a delegation of Liberal party politicians going to Washington as "a conga line of suckholes".
Latham would undoubtedly use equally colourful language to describe Arbib and Kevin Rudd. So why did ABC TV’s 7.30 Report feel the need to mitigate the damage to Rudd and Australia with the latest release of cables this week by featuring a soft-ball interview with assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell?
Host Kerry O’Brien didn’t even blush when he acknowledged that, “he [Campbell] asked to come on the program to counter the damage from today's exposure in Fairfax newspapers of the US embassy cables”. Since when is the ABC designed to offer air-time to a senior US official with a clear agenda to kiss and make up with Canberra? Moreover, viewers were expected to believe that Rudd was one of Barack Obama’s “best mates”?
The interview was symptomatic of the greater media malaise in this massive story; journalistic jealousy and closeness to state power.
The latest leaks that show profound Australian Government doubts over the Afghan mission are damning. Ministers are complicit but what about the journalists who visit Afghanistan, embed with our troops and paint an overly rose picture of brave men and women in a winnable war? Scepticism is often in short supply when reporting from the front lines.
When Hillary Clinton recently visited Australia, she was treated to a light interview with ABC’s Leigh Sales (who even Tweeted a grinning photo of the two). There were no challenging questions, just friendly banter and space for the Secretary of State to spin lines about loving Australia and its hospitality.
To learn a few weeks later, via WikiLeaks, that Clinton directed US officials across the world to spy on unsuspecting governments and UN officials should elicit outrage from a media fraternity that recently offered little more than obsequiousness before American power. There’s been not a peep.
Such obedience doesn’t come naturally; it takes years of practice. Annual events such as the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue - a secret gathering of politicians, journalists and opinion-makers - consolidate the unhealthy, uncritical relationship between Australia and America. Many corporate journalists have attended, including the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher and former Labor MP and ABC reporter Maxine McKew. It aims to consolidate American hegemony rather than challenging it.
It’s largely a one-way street. Australians display loyalty to an agenda and the Americans are allegedly thankful. As US participant Steve Clemons wrote in 2007:
“Phil Scanlan, founder of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, is proud of the fact that in 15 years, no-one has leaked any of the internal conversations of the conference. I won't either... unless I get permission from one of the speakers or commentators to do so which is allowed by the rules.”
The Australia-Israel Leadership Dialogue, inspired by the American one, is once again about to head to Israel for a short burst of Zionist propaganda. Journalists and politicians invariably return with the required Israeli talking points (let me guess this year; Iran is the greatest threat to the Middle East and the world?).
The Age’s Michelle Grattan tweeted this week of the post-WikiLeaks reality of the tour:
“All those pollies travelling to the Aust-Israel dialogue might be a bit more inclined to zip their lips in private.”
But why are such gatherings so secret? Why do journalists allow themselves to be romanced without revealing the kinds of agendas they’re pushing? It’s obvious why; being close to top officials and politicians makes them feel connected and important. Being an insider is many reporters’ ideal position. Independence is secondary to receiving sanctioned links and elevated status in a globalised world.
The WikiLeaks documents challenge the entire corrupted relationship between media and political elites. Founder Julian Assange is an outsider and doesn’t attend exclusive and secret meetings where the furthering of US foreign policy goals are on the cards. He aims to disrupt that dynamic. Many in the media resent not being leaked the information themselves and are jealous. Others simply dislike a lone-wolf citizen with remarkable tech-savvy to challenge their viability.
One can dismiss The Australian’s bragging of knowing virtually everything in the WikiLeaks cables before they were released - if only they more deeply scrutinised the effect of war policies they backed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and beyond - because the key point here isn’t merely covering disillusionment over Rudd or Gillard or anyone else. It’s something far bigger; a fundamental re-writing of the relationship between journalists and governments.
The WikiLeaks cable dumps have revealed a chasm between establishment attitudes towards truth-telling and furious attempts to protect the embarrassed. The sign of any healthy democracy is the ways in which it deals with the most sensitive of information. Senior media figures and government authorities are often remarkably consistent in their messaging. They move in similar worlds and they often rely on each other for sourcing.
It’s this kind of dangerous, mutual sycophancy that WikiLeaks could break.
Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney journalist, author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution and currently working on a book about disaster capitalism
10 December 2010
Who can now say that the WikiLeaks cables detail no new information?
It was only last week that ABC TV’s 7.30 Report featured a story with supposed foreign affairs experts, including the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, who largely dismissed the significance of the document dump. Within a few days these men were all proven wrong.
Now we know Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib sends confidential information to the Americans. He’s not alone.
Crucially, however, our media class aren’t asking the next obvious questions.
The Australian’s Paul Maley argues that communication between politicians, journalists and diplomats is part of the daily job.
“It is no surprise the Americans were talking to Arbib,” he writes, “They talk to everyone.”
And yet the senior Murdoch journalist doesn’t understand that the general public are rarely told about such meetings. What is discussed? What are the agendas? Is there transparency in such dealings? And who is telling what information to whom? Who benefits and what stories are not being told to avoid embarrassing somebody?
The cosiness between these players is exactly what WikiLeaks is aiming to challenge. Why shouldn’t the voting public be privy to whims and wishes of the American government and their relationships with key government ministers, individuals voted in by all of us? If Arbib was warning the Americans he thought Rudd may fall, why wasn’t he telling his constituents, the ones who put him in office?
The fact that the US had followed the rise of Julia Gillard and approved her views on the American alliance, Afghanistan and Israeli aggression is worrying though unsurprising.
It’s extremely rare that a leader rises who hasn’t received American approval or extensive years of obedience grooming. Former Labor leader Mark Latham was loathed by the US because he publicly expressed scepticism about the US alliance, the war in Iraq and then-president George W Bush.
It’s worth recalling that Latham called former prime minister John Howard an “arselicker” of the Bush administration and described a delegation of Liberal party politicians going to Washington as "a conga line of suckholes".
Latham would undoubtedly use equally colourful language to describe Arbib and Kevin Rudd. So why did ABC TV’s 7.30 Report feel the need to mitigate the damage to Rudd and Australia with the latest release of cables this week by featuring a soft-ball interview with assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell?
Host Kerry O’Brien didn’t even blush when he acknowledged that, “he [Campbell] asked to come on the program to counter the damage from today's exposure in Fairfax newspapers of the US embassy cables”. Since when is the ABC designed to offer air-time to a senior US official with a clear agenda to kiss and make up with Canberra? Moreover, viewers were expected to believe that Rudd was one of Barack Obama’s “best mates”?
The interview was symptomatic of the greater media malaise in this massive story; journalistic jealousy and closeness to state power.
The latest leaks that show profound Australian Government doubts over the Afghan mission are damning. Ministers are complicit but what about the journalists who visit Afghanistan, embed with our troops and paint an overly rose picture of brave men and women in a winnable war? Scepticism is often in short supply when reporting from the front lines.
When Hillary Clinton recently visited Australia, she was treated to a light interview with ABC’s Leigh Sales (who even Tweeted a grinning photo of the two). There were no challenging questions, just friendly banter and space for the Secretary of State to spin lines about loving Australia and its hospitality.
To learn a few weeks later, via WikiLeaks, that Clinton directed US officials across the world to spy on unsuspecting governments and UN officials should elicit outrage from a media fraternity that recently offered little more than obsequiousness before American power. There’s been not a peep.
Such obedience doesn’t come naturally; it takes years of practice. Annual events such as the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue - a secret gathering of politicians, journalists and opinion-makers - consolidate the unhealthy, uncritical relationship between Australia and America. Many corporate journalists have attended, including the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher and former Labor MP and ABC reporter Maxine McKew. It aims to consolidate American hegemony rather than challenging it.
It’s largely a one-way street. Australians display loyalty to an agenda and the Americans are allegedly thankful. As US participant Steve Clemons wrote in 2007:
“Phil Scanlan, founder of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, is proud of the fact that in 15 years, no-one has leaked any of the internal conversations of the conference. I won't either... unless I get permission from one of the speakers or commentators to do so which is allowed by the rules.”
The Australia-Israel Leadership Dialogue, inspired by the American one, is once again about to head to Israel for a short burst of Zionist propaganda. Journalists and politicians invariably return with the required Israeli talking points (let me guess this year; Iran is the greatest threat to the Middle East and the world?).
The Age’s Michelle Grattan tweeted this week of the post-WikiLeaks reality of the tour:
“All those pollies travelling to the Aust-Israel dialogue might be a bit more inclined to zip their lips in private.”
But why are such gatherings so secret? Why do journalists allow themselves to be romanced without revealing the kinds of agendas they’re pushing? It’s obvious why; being close to top officials and politicians makes them feel connected and important. Being an insider is many reporters’ ideal position. Independence is secondary to receiving sanctioned links and elevated status in a globalised world.
The WikiLeaks documents challenge the entire corrupted relationship between media and political elites. Founder Julian Assange is an outsider and doesn’t attend exclusive and secret meetings where the furthering of US foreign policy goals are on the cards. He aims to disrupt that dynamic. Many in the media resent not being leaked the information themselves and are jealous. Others simply dislike a lone-wolf citizen with remarkable tech-savvy to challenge their viability.
One can dismiss The Australian’s bragging of knowing virtually everything in the WikiLeaks cables before they were released - if only they more deeply scrutinised the effect of war policies they backed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and beyond - because the key point here isn’t merely covering disillusionment over Rudd or Gillard or anyone else. It’s something far bigger; a fundamental re-writing of the relationship between journalists and governments.
The WikiLeaks cable dumps have revealed a chasm between establishment attitudes towards truth-telling and furious attempts to protect the embarrassed. The sign of any healthy democracy is the ways in which it deals with the most sensitive of information. Senior media figures and government authorities are often remarkably consistent in their messaging. They move in similar worlds and they often rely on each other for sourcing.
It’s this kind of dangerous, mutual sycophancy that WikiLeaks could break.
Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney journalist, author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution and currently working on a book about disaster capitalism
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
WOW this one is for real:Google's New Meta-Tags For News Story Authors
| from the tree-of-attribution dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday November 26, @22:33 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/0117252/Googles-New-Meta-Tags-For-News-Story-Authors?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EreIamJH writes "Google News is [0]experimenting with meta-tags in an
effort to ensure that the correct news source is credited with an
article. The original-source meta-tag will identify the newspaper that
breaks a story, while syndication-source is for everyone who repeats the
story. Both meta-tags can appear multiple times — for instance an article
that sources information from other articles would include an
original-source tag for each article used in preparing the new article.
While the intention is worthy, I look forward to lots of snarky blogger
fights as journalists vent their hurt feelings for having been omitted as
an original source."
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/27/0117252&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html
| from the tree-of-attribution dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday November 26, @22:33 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/27/0117252/Googles-New-Meta-Tags-For-News-Story-Authors?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EreIamJH writes "Google News is [0]experimenting with meta-tags in an
effort to ensure that the correct news source is credited with an
article. The original-source meta-tag will identify the newspaper that
breaks a story, while syndication-source is for everyone who repeats the
story. Both meta-tags can appear multiple times — for instance an article
that sources information from other articles would include an
original-source tag for each article used in preparing the new article.
While the intention is worthy, I look forward to lots of snarky blogger
fights as journalists vent their hurt feelings for having been omitted as
an original source."
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/27/0117252&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html
How do you like this for the future of Journalism??:Digital Domain
When the Software Is the Sportswriter
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: November 27, 2010
ONLY human writers can distill a heap of sports statistics into a compelling story. Or so we human writers like to think.
The StatSheet site for Ohio State men's basketball. One recent story on the site had 10 sentences and 156 words — written entirely by software.
StatSheet, a Durham, N.C., company that serves up sports statistics in monster-size portions, thinks otherwise. The company, with nine employees, is working to endow software with the ability to turn game statistics into articles about college basketball games.
Established in 2007, StatSheet.com provides statistical analysis of college football and basketball, Nascar and other sports. It dices data in more ways than any fan could possibly absorb. But charts, graphs and rankings alone cannot replace words that tell a story. We humans love stories; a craving for narrative seems part of our nature.
This month, StatSheet unveiled StatSheet Network, made up of separate Web sites for each of the 345 N.C.A.A. Division I men’s basketball teams. Beyond statistics galore, each site has what the company calls “automated content,” stories written entirely by software, including write-ups of the team’s games, past and future. With a joking wink, StatSheet’s founder, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as the “Robot Army.”
Each team’s StatSheet Web site is located at a freestanding Web address, conveying the sense that it is wholly invested in the interests of that school’s fans. (To find a domain name, a fan first visits http://statsheet.com/#websites.)
The software is imbued with the smarts to flatter each particular team. The same statistics, documenting the same game, produce an entirely different write-up and headline at the opposing team’s page.
A team like No. 1-ranked Duke — whose StatSheet Network Web site is at BlueDevilDaily.com — does not lack for attention from human sports writers. But StatSheet expects that the sports programs of smaller schools will appreciate the advent of robot journalism.
“There are at least 200 Division I schools that the large sports media companies give no attention to,” says Mr. Allen at StatSheet. “Once we have the algorithm in place, there’s no cost to adding the Lamars and Elons to the Dukes and U.N.C.’s.”
Small schools are less likely to have large alumni bases and to draw significant traffic, Mr. Allen said, so he is knocking on their doors to explore licensing partnerships.
Mr. Allen explains that his story-writing software does not perform linguistic analysis; it just uses template sentences and a database of phrases that numbers about 5,000 for now.
“My goal was that 80 percent of readers wouldn’t question that the content was written by a human,” he says, “and now that we’ve launched, I think the percentage is higher.”
In the battle between human writers and robots, I’m not a dispassionate observer: I own up to rooting for the home team. So I asked Michael W. White, an assistant professor of linguistics at Ohio State and a specialist in the field of natural language generation, for his professional opinion of the quality of the robot army’s writing.
We visited the StatSheet site for Ohio State’s team —BuckeyesBeat.com — and looked at the write-up of its Nov. 12 season opener, written expressly for Buckeyes fans: ”Ohio State Gets 102-61 Monster Win Over North Carolina A&T.” “Ohio State has already started living up to monumental expectations with a good first game,” it began. “On November 12th on their home court, the Buckeyes waxed the Aggies, 102-61.”
The story had 10 sentences and 156 words. Over all, Professor White said, it read “pretty well.” He praised the first sentence as very good and said the use of “waxed” in the second was a nice touch.
Then he pointed out some glitches. In one passage, the software lost track of who had beaten whom and forgot to use “the” when referring to Ohio State’s supposed victory “over Buckeyes.” A note that followed the write-up was a bit overeager to show that Ohio State was undefeated so far this season, when its record was still just 1-0.
The Statsheet Network’s Web sites are plainly labeled “beta,” and these minor bugs can easily be eliminated with tweaks. The bigger problem, the professor said, is that StatSheet’s software lacks the awareness of linguistic structures that would let it generate more complex sentences: “Getting from remarkably good to human level is very hard. The more you cram into a sentence, the more difficult it is to do it well.”
The StatSheet software avoids those difficulties by using simple sentences and swapping in particular details. “This makes it perfectly readable, but it also can make it seem stilted,” he said.
Mr. Allen of StatSheet says he believes that what some readers regard as “stilted” will be appreciated by others who say “‘ I don’t like personality — I just want the straight facts.’”
He sees opportunities to extend robo-journalism not only to other sports but also to other subject areas — like financial news — in which there is an abundance of readily available data.
Will StatSheet’s robo journalists replace business columnists? Not a chance: we humans are undefeated.
Only problem is, just like the Buckeyes two weeks ago, we’re just 1-0.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
When the Software Is the Sportswriter
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: November 27, 2010
ONLY human writers can distill a heap of sports statistics into a compelling story. Or so we human writers like to think.
The StatSheet site for Ohio State men's basketball. One recent story on the site had 10 sentences and 156 words — written entirely by software.
StatSheet, a Durham, N.C., company that serves up sports statistics in monster-size portions, thinks otherwise. The company, with nine employees, is working to endow software with the ability to turn game statistics into articles about college basketball games.
Established in 2007, StatSheet.com provides statistical analysis of college football and basketball, Nascar and other sports. It dices data in more ways than any fan could possibly absorb. But charts, graphs and rankings alone cannot replace words that tell a story. We humans love stories; a craving for narrative seems part of our nature.
This month, StatSheet unveiled StatSheet Network, made up of separate Web sites for each of the 345 N.C.A.A. Division I men’s basketball teams. Beyond statistics galore, each site has what the company calls “automated content,” stories written entirely by software, including write-ups of the team’s games, past and future. With a joking wink, StatSheet’s founder, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as the “Robot Army.”
Each team’s StatSheet Web site is located at a freestanding Web address, conveying the sense that it is wholly invested in the interests of that school’s fans. (To find a domain name, a fan first visits http://statsheet.com/#websites.)
The software is imbued with the smarts to flatter each particular team. The same statistics, documenting the same game, produce an entirely different write-up and headline at the opposing team’s page.
A team like No. 1-ranked Duke — whose StatSheet Network Web site is at BlueDevilDaily.com — does not lack for attention from human sports writers. But StatSheet expects that the sports programs of smaller schools will appreciate the advent of robot journalism.
“There are at least 200 Division I schools that the large sports media companies give no attention to,” says Mr. Allen at StatSheet. “Once we have the algorithm in place, there’s no cost to adding the Lamars and Elons to the Dukes and U.N.C.’s.”
Small schools are less likely to have large alumni bases and to draw significant traffic, Mr. Allen said, so he is knocking on their doors to explore licensing partnerships.
Mr. Allen explains that his story-writing software does not perform linguistic analysis; it just uses template sentences and a database of phrases that numbers about 5,000 for now.
“My goal was that 80 percent of readers wouldn’t question that the content was written by a human,” he says, “and now that we’ve launched, I think the percentage is higher.”
In the battle between human writers and robots, I’m not a dispassionate observer: I own up to rooting for the home team. So I asked Michael W. White, an assistant professor of linguistics at Ohio State and a specialist in the field of natural language generation, for his professional opinion of the quality of the robot army’s writing.
We visited the StatSheet site for Ohio State’s team —BuckeyesBeat.com — and looked at the write-up of its Nov. 12 season opener, written expressly for Buckeyes fans: ”Ohio State Gets 102-61 Monster Win Over North Carolina A&T.” “Ohio State has already started living up to monumental expectations with a good first game,” it began. “On November 12th on their home court, the Buckeyes waxed the Aggies, 102-61.”
The story had 10 sentences and 156 words. Over all, Professor White said, it read “pretty well.” He praised the first sentence as very good and said the use of “waxed” in the second was a nice touch.
Then he pointed out some glitches. In one passage, the software lost track of who had beaten whom and forgot to use “the” when referring to Ohio State’s supposed victory “over Buckeyes.” A note that followed the write-up was a bit overeager to show that Ohio State was undefeated so far this season, when its record was still just 1-0.
The Statsheet Network’s Web sites are plainly labeled “beta,” and these minor bugs can easily be eliminated with tweaks. The bigger problem, the professor said, is that StatSheet’s software lacks the awareness of linguistic structures that would let it generate more complex sentences: “Getting from remarkably good to human level is very hard. The more you cram into a sentence, the more difficult it is to do it well.”
The StatSheet software avoids those difficulties by using simple sentences and swapping in particular details. “This makes it perfectly readable, but it also can make it seem stilted,” he said.
Mr. Allen of StatSheet says he believes that what some readers regard as “stilted” will be appreciated by others who say “‘ I don’t like personality — I just want the straight facts.’”
He sees opportunities to extend robo-journalism not only to other sports but also to other subject areas — like financial news — in which there is an abundance of readily available data.
Will StatSheet’s robo journalists replace business columnists? Not a chance: we humans are undefeated.
Only problem is, just like the Buckeyes two weeks ago, we’re just 1-0.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
Good Editor Journalist here: RIAA Now Blames Journalists For Its Piracy Trouble
| from the who's-to-blame dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 24, @22:24 (Music)
| https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/24/2336248/RIAA-Now-Blames-Journalists-For-Its-Piracy-Trouble?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
adeelarshad82 writes "RIAA executives have [0]written a letter to PCMag
expressing 'deep disappointment' for publishing an article on [1]Limewire
Alternatives. While the article includes a disclaimer from PCMag that it
does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material, RIAA
executives believe that 'PCMag is slyly encouraging people to steal more
music.' The letter goes on to ask PCMag to retract the article from their
website. PCMag's [2]Editor in Chief has responded to the letter by
stating that music industry's charges remain groundless and that it reeks
of desperation. He points out that PCMag covers all aspects of
technology, which includes the products, services and activities that
some groups and individuals might deem objectionable. He defends
publishing the article by saying 'We covered these Limewire alternatives
because we knew they would be of interest to our readers. We understand
that some might use them to illegally download content. We cannot
encourage that action, but also cannot stop it. Reporting on the
existence of these services does neither.' PCMag has also refused to
retract the article."
Discuss this story at:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/24/2336248&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i39b5c49ccd74a21f9f4fb80d8c7ba149
1. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371590,00.asp
2. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373273,00.asp
| from the who's-to-blame dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 24, @22:24 (Music)
| https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/24/2336248/RIAA-Now-Blames-Journalists-For-Its-Piracy-Trouble?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
adeelarshad82 writes "RIAA executives have [0]written a letter to PCMag
expressing 'deep disappointment' for publishing an article on [1]Limewire
Alternatives. While the article includes a disclaimer from PCMag that it
does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material, RIAA
executives believe that 'PCMag is slyly encouraging people to steal more
music.' The letter goes on to ask PCMag to retract the article from their
website. PCMag's [2]Editor in Chief has responded to the letter by
stating that music industry's charges remain groundless and that it reeks
of desperation. He points out that PCMag covers all aspects of
technology, which includes the products, services and activities that
some groups and individuals might deem objectionable. He defends
publishing the article by saying 'We covered these Limewire alternatives
because we knew they would be of interest to our readers. We understand
that some might use them to illegally download content. We cannot
encourage that action, but also cannot stop it. Reporting on the
existence of these services does neither.' PCMag has also refused to
retract the article."
Discuss this story at:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/11/24/2336248&from=newsletter
Links:
0. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i39b5c49ccd74a21f9f4fb80d8c7ba149
1. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371590,00.asp
2. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373273,00.asp
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Some of you might be interested in this:
Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration
■ Friday, January 21 – Tuesday, March 15
Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery, Tokyo
Some fifty years ago, the small community of Cape Dorset in the Canadian Arctic was introduced to the ancient traditions of Japanese printmaking. James Houston, then a government employee, introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset in 1957. To learn more about printmaking himself, Houston travelled the next year to Japan to study for three months with Un'ichi Hiratsuka, one of the world's leading masters of the art. Houston went back to the Arctic in 1959 to share his knowledge and his collection of Japanese prints with the fledgling printmakers of Cape Dorset.
"Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration" will feature exquisite and historically significant works of art from Japan and the world-renowned Cape Dorset print studio. By juxtaposing the works, the exhibition reveals the many ways in which the Cape Dorset artists creatively "localized" Japanese influences.
Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration
■ Friday, January 21 – Tuesday, March 15
Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery, Tokyo
Some fifty years ago, the small community of Cape Dorset in the Canadian Arctic was introduced to the ancient traditions of Japanese printmaking. James Houston, then a government employee, introduced printmaking to Cape Dorset in 1957. To learn more about printmaking himself, Houston travelled the next year to Japan to study for three months with Un'ichi Hiratsuka, one of the world's leading masters of the art. Houston went back to the Arctic in 1959 to share his knowledge and his collection of Japanese prints with the fledgling printmakers of Cape Dorset.
"Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration" will feature exquisite and historically significant works of art from Japan and the world-renowned Cape Dorset print studio. By juxtaposing the works, the exhibition reveals the many ways in which the Cape Dorset artists creatively "localized" Japanese influences.
We have talked about flash crowds and here is something else that might be useful for Journalists Crowd sourcings:http://gigaom.com/2010/11/17/can-you-crowdsource-fact-checking-truthsquad-says-yes/
Can You Crowdsource Fact-Checking? Truthsquad Says Yes
By Mathew Ingram Nov. 17, 2010, 9:36am PDT 2 Comments
*
*
NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, spent a week earlier this year on an experiment it called Truthsquad — a project that tried to “crowdsource” fact-checking, and specifically some of the major statements made by public figures and special-interest groups about issues such as health care. NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin has released some of the results from that experiment, saying the project was a success, and NewsTrust and its partners plan to expand the effort over the next year. Among the things NewsTrust learned, according to Florin:
* Game mechanics work. NewsTrust says the Truthsquad experiment generated twice as much participation as some of its other pilots in 2010. Users gave 10 times more answers per quote than reviews per story; over half the participants read linked stories; and a third answered a Truthsquad quote. Florin said the high level of engagement was partly due to the game-like quality of the user experience, which started by inviting people to guess whether a statement was true or false.
* Pros and amateurs can work together. Truthsquad was a collaboration with advisors and journalists from the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org, and Florin said having experienced professionals judge results and help users with the fact-checking avoided “some of the pitfalls of pure crowdsourcing initiatives, which can turn into mob scenes — particularly around politically charged issues.” Amateurs learned valuable skills, he said, and some community members posted links that were “critical to reaching our verdicts.”
* Crowdsourcing takes effort. Florin said despite high levels of participation, Truthsquad “didn’t get as many useful links and reviews from our community as we had hoped,” and as a result, the startup’s editorial team had to do a lot of work researching the evidence behind the statements they were checking, making the whole effort more labor-intensive than the group expected. Florin said in the future, NewsTrust is going to experiment with more visible rewards for input, such as badges, redeemable credits of some kind and possibly even prizes.
Truthsquad isn’t the only attempt to bring a crowdsourced element to media fact-checking; MediaBugs, founded by former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg, is another fact-checking-oriented site. MediaBugs is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and recently announced it has moved out of beta and is going national. The startup has a widget that allows publishers to integrate crowd or reader-driven fact-checking into their websites, and is hoping to find other ways to distribute its services, rather than making people go to the MediaBugs site.
Like most blog-focused sites, GigaOM gets plenty of fact-checking from our readers, through the comments on our posts — and it’s a critical part of what we do (unfortunately, we aren’t perfect). Many traditional publishers, however, don’t get as much as they probably need, and both MediaBugs and NewsTrust are interesting efforts in that direction.
NewsTrust, meanwhile, says it’s hoping to fact-check one public statement a day for the next year using Truthsquad. Florin says he also wants to help train users and readers in how to fact-check statements by politicians and others in the media, using the skills of the startup’s advisors, including the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org. That’s something we could probably all benefit from. If you want to participate, you can sign-up here.
Can You Crowdsource Fact-Checking? Truthsquad Says Yes
By Mathew Ingram Nov. 17, 2010, 9:36am PDT 2 Comments
*
*
NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, spent a week earlier this year on an experiment it called Truthsquad — a project that tried to “crowdsource” fact-checking, and specifically some of the major statements made by public figures and special-interest groups about issues such as health care. NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin has released some of the results from that experiment, saying the project was a success, and NewsTrust and its partners plan to expand the effort over the next year. Among the things NewsTrust learned, according to Florin:
* Game mechanics work. NewsTrust says the Truthsquad experiment generated twice as much participation as some of its other pilots in 2010. Users gave 10 times more answers per quote than reviews per story; over half the participants read linked stories; and a third answered a Truthsquad quote. Florin said the high level of engagement was partly due to the game-like quality of the user experience, which started by inviting people to guess whether a statement was true or false.
* Pros and amateurs can work together. Truthsquad was a collaboration with advisors and journalists from the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org, and Florin said having experienced professionals judge results and help users with the fact-checking avoided “some of the pitfalls of pure crowdsourcing initiatives, which can turn into mob scenes — particularly around politically charged issues.” Amateurs learned valuable skills, he said, and some community members posted links that were “critical to reaching our verdicts.”
* Crowdsourcing takes effort. Florin said despite high levels of participation, Truthsquad “didn’t get as many useful links and reviews from our community as we had hoped,” and as a result, the startup’s editorial team had to do a lot of work researching the evidence behind the statements they were checking, making the whole effort more labor-intensive than the group expected. Florin said in the future, NewsTrust is going to experiment with more visible rewards for input, such as badges, redeemable credits of some kind and possibly even prizes.
Truthsquad isn’t the only attempt to bring a crowdsourced element to media fact-checking; MediaBugs, founded by former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg, is another fact-checking-oriented site. MediaBugs is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and recently announced it has moved out of beta and is going national. The startup has a widget that allows publishers to integrate crowd or reader-driven fact-checking into their websites, and is hoping to find other ways to distribute its services, rather than making people go to the MediaBugs site.
Like most blog-focused sites, GigaOM gets plenty of fact-checking from our readers, through the comments on our posts — and it’s a critical part of what we do (unfortunately, we aren’t perfect). Many traditional publishers, however, don’t get as much as they probably need, and both MediaBugs and NewsTrust are interesting efforts in that direction.
NewsTrust, meanwhile, says it’s hoping to fact-check one public statement a day for the next year using Truthsquad. Florin says he also wants to help train users and readers in how to fact-check statements by politicians and others in the media, using the skills of the startup’s advisors, including the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org. That’s something we could probably all benefit from. If you want to participate, you can sign-up here.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING HAPPENING IN JOURNALISM TODAY:
WikiLeaks release: Why law is powerless to stop WikiLeaks from publishing
The structure of WikiLeaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
The structure of Wikileaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs Photo: EPA
By Jon Swaine in New York 10:38PM GMT 22 Nov 2010
Many of the documents published on the site are classified or protected by copyright. Ordinarily the original owners would attempt to have them removed.
However, Wikileaks hosts its publications across several different servers, which “are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs” that could be seized, the organisation says.
Julian Assange, the founder and editor, has said his group uses “state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails”.
Mr Assange told a conference in July that Wikileaks passes its data through countries that offer relatively strong legal protection to people who leak information, including Sweden, Iceland and Belgium.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs
Mikael Viborg, the owner of PRQ, said Swedish authorities were aware of the servers’ location but had not made any attempt to shut them down.
He said Wikileaks also had backup servers in place in other countries that were ready to be activated if their primary servers were shut down.
Reports have also claimed some Wikileaks servers are 30 metres underground, in a Cold War nuclear bunker that was carved out of a large rock hill in Stockholm.
After Wikileaks released its Iraq war logs earlier this year, it emerged the organisation was also “mirroring” the data on US-based servers, in a move seen as a deliberate taunt to the Pentagon and US authorities.
WikiLeaks release: Why law is powerless to stop WikiLeaks from publishing
The structure of WikiLeaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
The structure of Wikileaks makes it practically impossible for governments and other organisations embarrassed by its disclosures to make legal challenges against it.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs Photo: EPA
By Jon Swaine in New York 10:38PM GMT 22 Nov 2010
Many of the documents published on the site are classified or protected by copyright. Ordinarily the original owners would attempt to have them removed.
However, Wikileaks hosts its publications across several different servers, which “are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs” that could be seized, the organisation says.
Julian Assange, the founder and editor, has said his group uses “state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails”.
Mr Assange told a conference in July that Wikileaks passes its data through countries that offer relatively strong legal protection to people who leak information, including Sweden, Iceland and Belgium.
PRQ, a Swedish internet hosting company linked to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has said it provides Wikileaks with server space from a base in the Stockholm suburbs
Mikael Viborg, the owner of PRQ, said Swedish authorities were aware of the servers’ location but had not made any attempt to shut them down.
He said Wikileaks also had backup servers in place in other countries that were ready to be activated if their primary servers were shut down.
Reports have also claimed some Wikileaks servers are 30 metres underground, in a Cold War nuclear bunker that was carved out of a large rock hill in Stockholm.
After Wikileaks released its Iraq war logs earlier this year, it emerged the organisation was also “mirroring” the data on US-based servers, in a move seen as a deliberate taunt to the Pentagon and US authorities.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Wow, here is something else to talk about:
Stauber Lectures on the Public Relations World
Source: The Northern Iowan, November 11, 2010
CMD Founder John Stauber
The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production. The hormone was unnecessary, and milk from the cows was the first genetically-engineered food product on the market, but the subject was little-covered by the news media. Stauber discovered that was because of the work of public relations professionals. He has since authored several books on the covert activities of the PR industry, including "Weapons of Mass Deception: Bush's War on Iraq," about the PR spin that duped the country into accepting an unnecessary war in Iraq. In a Q&A session at the end of his lecture, a fired-up public relations major asked whether Stauber was shedding a negative light on the PR world. "My background is not in public relations, my job isn't to police public relations and it's not to improve public relations. I'm an investigative reporter who is interested in exposing how propaganda campaigns work to help people use that information," Stauber replied.
Stauber Lectures on the Public Relations World
Source: The Northern Iowan, November 11, 2010
CMD Founder John Stauber
The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production. The hormone was unnecessary, and milk from the cows was the first genetically-engineered food product on the market, but the subject was little-covered by the news media. Stauber discovered that was because of the work of public relations professionals. He has since authored several books on the covert activities of the PR industry, including "Weapons of Mass Deception: Bush's War on Iraq," about the PR spin that duped the country into accepting an unnecessary war in Iraq. In a Q&A session at the end of his lecture, a fired-up public relations major asked whether Stauber was shedding a negative light on the PR world. "My background is not in public relations, my job isn't to police public relations and it's not to improve public relations. I'm an investigative reporter who is interested in exposing how propaganda campaigns work to help people use that information," Stauber replied.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
This book review from Mantex is maybe a little long for you, however important enough for me to post and you to read.
Here Comes Everybody
how change happens when people come together
Clay Shirky’s basic argument is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.
Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.
A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.
There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.
The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.
The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.
Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.
There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.
The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.
The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’
Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.
He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.
His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.
Here Comes Everybody
how change happens when people come together
Clay Shirky’s basic argument is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.
Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.
A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.
There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.
The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.
The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.
Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.
There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.
The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.
The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’
Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.
He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.
His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Some people take living on this planet seriously and they put them selves on the line always. Take a look at these posters from wiki leaks:>http://picasaweb.google.com/AoC4WL/WikiLeaksPosters?ref=nf#
See you next week in the Media Lab on the 6th Flr. Goucher Building for the end of 'The Cove', no pop corn.
See you next week in the Media Lab on the 6th Flr. Goucher Building for the end of 'The Cove', no pop corn.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Here is another try at making newspapers viable again:
More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: November 2, 2010
The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer.
Enlarge This Image
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News
The Times and The Sunday Times of London began charging for access last June, and lost fewer visitors than they had expected.
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* News Corporation
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The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said.
The company’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general-interest newspapers to start charging for their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue.
“These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of the News Corporation that publishes The Times papers.
The News Corporation already charges for access to The Wall Street Journal. The company, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, also moved another British newspaper, the tabloid News of the World, behind a pay wall.
The conventional wisdom among media analysts has been that it will be difficult to persuade readers to pay for general news online, given the panoply of free news available on the Web.
But, some specialty publications in areas like business and finance have had modest success with paid access.
The Financial Times, for example, says it has attracted 189,000 paying customers for its Web site, which uses a metered model, giving online readers a limited number of free articles every month before charges kick in.
The New York Times, which also publishes The International Herald Tribune, has said it plans to take a similar approach when it begins charging for its Web site next year.
When the News Corporation switched to a paid model, the company estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent. In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the charges were instituted.
Many of those visitors do not go beyond the home pages.
But the News Corporation has said the newspapers will benefit despite drawing smaller audiences, because they can sell more focused advertising, as well as generate new revenue from subscribers.
Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant in Lille, France, said the News Corporation’s announcement left a number of questions for advertisers unanswered, including the amount of time that users were spending on the sites.
“Much as we all want newspapers to succeed and make money, in a market as rough and crowded as the U.K., The Times pay wall was always going to be a tall order,” he said.
Another question is what effect the charges are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.
Analysts say the move to paid-for Web sites could also open up other possibilities for the News Corporation, including bundled sales of online access with subscriptions to British Sky Broadcasting, a pay-television service with 10 million customers. The News Corporation owns 39 percent of Sky and has proposed buying full control.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.
More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: November 2, 2010
The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer.
Enlarge This Image
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News
The Times and The Sunday Times of London began charging for access last June, and lost fewer visitors than they had expected.
Add to Portfolio
* Amazon.com Inc
* News Corporation
Go to your Portfolio »
The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said.
The company’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general-interest newspapers to start charging for their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue.
“These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of the News Corporation that publishes The Times papers.
The News Corporation already charges for access to The Wall Street Journal. The company, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, also moved another British newspaper, the tabloid News of the World, behind a pay wall.
The conventional wisdom among media analysts has been that it will be difficult to persuade readers to pay for general news online, given the panoply of free news available on the Web.
But, some specialty publications in areas like business and finance have had modest success with paid access.
The Financial Times, for example, says it has attracted 189,000 paying customers for its Web site, which uses a metered model, giving online readers a limited number of free articles every month before charges kick in.
The New York Times, which also publishes The International Herald Tribune, has said it plans to take a similar approach when it begins charging for its Web site next year.
When the News Corporation switched to a paid model, the company estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent. In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the charges were instituted.
Many of those visitors do not go beyond the home pages.
But the News Corporation has said the newspapers will benefit despite drawing smaller audiences, because they can sell more focused advertising, as well as generate new revenue from subscribers.
Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant in Lille, France, said the News Corporation’s announcement left a number of questions for advertisers unanswered, including the amount of time that users were spending on the sites.
“Much as we all want newspapers to succeed and make money, in a market as rough and crowded as the U.K., The Times pay wall was always going to be a tall order,” he said.
Another question is what effect the charges are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.
Analysts say the move to paid-for Web sites could also open up other possibilities for the News Corporation, including bundled sales of online access with subscriptions to British Sky Broadcasting, a pay-television service with 10 million customers. The News Corporation owns 39 percent of Sky and has proposed buying full control.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.
Friday, October 29, 2010
I would like to analyze the following very good, long story running in the New York Times:
Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 28, 2010
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MUMBAI — The newest and most exclusive residential tower for this city’s superrich is a cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens in a Blade Runner-meets-Babylon edifice overlooking India’s most dynamic city.
Enlarge This Image
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
The 27-story house of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, in Mumbai, India.
There are nine elevators, a spa, a 50-seat theater and a grand ballroom. Hundreds of servants and staff are expected to work inside. And now, finally, after several years of planning and construction, the residents are about to move in.
All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
“One family is going to live in that?” said Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising filmmaker and prominent city resident. “Either it is a landmark, or a symbol, or it is Mammon.” He added: “There is shock and awe — both at the same time.”
Mr. Ambani, his wife, Nita, and their three children are expected to move into the building after a housewarming party with 200 guests scheduled for Nov. 28. For his part, Mr. Ambani has refused to comment about the project and required his designers, decorators and other contractors to sign confidentiality agreements, as if a cone of silence could be erected around a skyscraper rising near the edge of the Arabian Sea.
Predictably, and perhaps by design, the opposite has happened. Details have spilled out — many of them confirmed or disputed anonymously. Some reports have estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet. Press accounts also have estimated the value of the building at $1 billion, a figure disputed by people familiar with the project.
Regardless, a gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
A bit.
For decades, the Ambani family has been India’s most famous corporate soap opera. The father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a brazen, rags-to-riches tycoon who established Reliance Industries after rising out of the city’s Dickensian tenements, known as chawls. Today, Reliance is the world’s biggest producer of polyester fibers and yarns and accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s exports, according to the company’s annual report. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, inherited and divided the empire and have spent years feuding, including a nasty recent fight over natural gas rights that brought a reprimand from the prime minister before India’s Supreme Court settled the case in Mukesh’s favor.
Of the two brothers, Anil is the more flamboyant and outgoing, while Mukesh is regarded as more staid — less likely, at least, to build at 27-story house for himself. The new tower is located on Altamount Road, the same leafy residential street in south Mumbai where the father bought his first home after moving the family out of the tenements. Later, he purchased a 14-story apartment building named Sea Wind, where both Mukesh and Anil have lived with their families on different floors, even during their feud. (Their mother refereed from her own residence in the building.)
Now Mukesh is moving into a tower that makes Sea Wind seem like a guest house.
“It’s kind of returning with a vengeance to where they made it into the middle class and trumping everybody,” said Hamish McDonald, who chronicled the family’s history in his new book, “Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud.”
“He’s sort of saying, ‘I’m rich and I don’t care what you think,’ ” Mr. McDonald said.
Mumbai, once known as Bombay, is India’s most cosmopolitan city, with a metropolitan area of roughly 20 million people. Migrants have poured into the city during the past decade, drawn by Mumbai’s reputation as India’s “city of dreams,” where anyone can become rich. But it is also a city infamous for its poor: a recent study found that roughly 62 percent of the population lived in slums, including one of Asia’s biggest, Dharavi, which houses more than one million people.
Real estate prices are among the highest in the world, pushing many working-class residents into slums, even as developers have brazenly cleared land for a new generation of high-rise apartment towers for the affluent. High-rises are considered necessary, given the city’s limited land, yet the rising towers have further insulated the rich from the teeming metropolis below. With his helipads, which still await operating approval, Mr. Ambani could conceivably live in Mumbai without ever touching the ground.
“This is a gated community in the sky,” said Gyan Prakash, author of the new book “Mumbai Fables.” “It is in a way reflective of how the rich are turning their faces away from the city.”
Along Altamount Road, which is also home to other industrialists, the reaction to the new neighbor is mixed. Some senior citizens along the street worry about the noise from the comings and goings of helicopters. But Utsav Unadkat and Harsh Daga, college students who grew up in the neighborhood, stared up at the tower on a recent afternoon as if it were a dream realized.
“I heard he has a BMW service station inside,” said Mr. Unadkat, dragging on a cigarette (unconfirmed). “There’s also a room where you can create artificial weather,” Mr. Daga added (apparently true).
Standing nearby, Laxmi Kant Pujari, 26, a decorator’s assistant, waited to carry glass samples into the building. If his samples are selected, Mr. Pujari, a migrant, would handle the installation — a task he considered an honor. “Whether it is a beggar or an Ambani, the desire to be rich is in everyone’s heart,” he said.
Farther down the street, Sushala Pawar admitted struggling to comprehend the difference in Mr. Ambani’s life and her own. She cooks for a family in a nearby apartment, earning 4,000 rupees a month, or about $90. She sleeps on the floor of the hallway after the family has gone to bed.
“I’m a human being,” she said. “And Mukesh Ambani is a human being. Sometimes I feel bad that I live on 4,000 rupees and Mukesh Ambani lives there.”
But then, nodding toward the building, she perked up.
“Maybe,” she said, “I could get a job there.”
Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 28, 2010
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MUMBAI — The newest and most exclusive residential tower for this city’s superrich is a cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens in a Blade Runner-meets-Babylon edifice overlooking India’s most dynamic city.
Enlarge This Image
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
The 27-story house of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, in Mumbai, India.
There are nine elevators, a spa, a 50-seat theater and a grand ballroom. Hundreds of servants and staff are expected to work inside. And now, finally, after several years of planning and construction, the residents are about to move in.
All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
“One family is going to live in that?” said Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising filmmaker and prominent city resident. “Either it is a landmark, or a symbol, or it is Mammon.” He added: “There is shock and awe — both at the same time.”
Mr. Ambani, his wife, Nita, and their three children are expected to move into the building after a housewarming party with 200 guests scheduled for Nov. 28. For his part, Mr. Ambani has refused to comment about the project and required his designers, decorators and other contractors to sign confidentiality agreements, as if a cone of silence could be erected around a skyscraper rising near the edge of the Arabian Sea.
Predictably, and perhaps by design, the opposite has happened. Details have spilled out — many of them confirmed or disputed anonymously. Some reports have estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet. Press accounts also have estimated the value of the building at $1 billion, a figure disputed by people familiar with the project.
Regardless, a gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
A bit.
For decades, the Ambani family has been India’s most famous corporate soap opera. The father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a brazen, rags-to-riches tycoon who established Reliance Industries after rising out of the city’s Dickensian tenements, known as chawls. Today, Reliance is the world’s biggest producer of polyester fibers and yarns and accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s exports, according to the company’s annual report. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, inherited and divided the empire and have spent years feuding, including a nasty recent fight over natural gas rights that brought a reprimand from the prime minister before India’s Supreme Court settled the case in Mukesh’s favor.
Of the two brothers, Anil is the more flamboyant and outgoing, while Mukesh is regarded as more staid — less likely, at least, to build at 27-story house for himself. The new tower is located on Altamount Road, the same leafy residential street in south Mumbai where the father bought his first home after moving the family out of the tenements. Later, he purchased a 14-story apartment building named Sea Wind, where both Mukesh and Anil have lived with their families on different floors, even during their feud. (Their mother refereed from her own residence in the building.)
Now Mukesh is moving into a tower that makes Sea Wind seem like a guest house.
“It’s kind of returning with a vengeance to where they made it into the middle class and trumping everybody,” said Hamish McDonald, who chronicled the family’s history in his new book, “Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud.”
“He’s sort of saying, ‘I’m rich and I don’t care what you think,’ ” Mr. McDonald said.
Mumbai, once known as Bombay, is India’s most cosmopolitan city, with a metropolitan area of roughly 20 million people. Migrants have poured into the city during the past decade, drawn by Mumbai’s reputation as India’s “city of dreams,” where anyone can become rich. But it is also a city infamous for its poor: a recent study found that roughly 62 percent of the population lived in slums, including one of Asia’s biggest, Dharavi, which houses more than one million people.
Real estate prices are among the highest in the world, pushing many working-class residents into slums, even as developers have brazenly cleared land for a new generation of high-rise apartment towers for the affluent. High-rises are considered necessary, given the city’s limited land, yet the rising towers have further insulated the rich from the teeming metropolis below. With his helipads, which still await operating approval, Mr. Ambani could conceivably live in Mumbai without ever touching the ground.
“This is a gated community in the sky,” said Gyan Prakash, author of the new book “Mumbai Fables.” “It is in a way reflective of how the rich are turning their faces away from the city.”
Along Altamount Road, which is also home to other industrialists, the reaction to the new neighbor is mixed. Some senior citizens along the street worry about the noise from the comings and goings of helicopters. But Utsav Unadkat and Harsh Daga, college students who grew up in the neighborhood, stared up at the tower on a recent afternoon as if it were a dream realized.
“I heard he has a BMW service station inside,” said Mr. Unadkat, dragging on a cigarette (unconfirmed). “There’s also a room where you can create artificial weather,” Mr. Daga added (apparently true).
Standing nearby, Laxmi Kant Pujari, 26, a decorator’s assistant, waited to carry glass samples into the building. If his samples are selected, Mr. Pujari, a migrant, would handle the installation — a task he considered an honor. “Whether it is a beggar or an Ambani, the desire to be rich is in everyone’s heart,” he said.
Farther down the street, Sushala Pawar admitted struggling to comprehend the difference in Mr. Ambani’s life and her own. She cooks for a family in a nearby apartment, earning 4,000 rupees a month, or about $90. She sleeps on the floor of the hallway after the family has gone to bed.
“I’m a human being,” she said. “And Mukesh Ambani is a human being. Sometimes I feel bad that I live on 4,000 rupees and Mukesh Ambani lives there.”
But then, nodding toward the building, she perked up.
“Maybe,” she said, “I could get a job there.”
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