Lindsay Beyerstein address's many of the definitions of journalism and what it is not. Basically it is not Public Relations for a company, political party,government or religion. All of the fore mentioned believe they are a special case and do not have to follow everyone else when it comes to honesty and truth and integrity. In other words they can lie about the details because their agenda is, they believe, the ultimate truth. Lindsay Beyerstein 1 hr · Chris Hedges has been ordained as a minister and he claims that journalism is literally his ministry. Journalism shouldn't be a ministry of any kind. You can't be a journalist for a church any more than you can be a journalist for a corporation or a government or a non-profit advocacy group. Journalists are independent. Churches, governments, corporations, and non-profits can support journalism, but it's not real journalism unless it's independent. Journalists should advocate for values that they believe in, but shouldn't have a competing institutional agenda. Chris Hedges Ordained to Write Posted on Oct 13, 2014 By Chris Hedges Cornel West, left, listens as James Cone speaks at Chris Hedges’ ordination Oct. 5 at the Second Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, N.J. Screen shot from Leigha Cohen’s video posted on YouTube. For Leigha Cohen’s video of the ordination service, click here. Thirty years ago I stood in a church in Albany, N.Y., with my father, a Presbyterian minister. I had graduated from Harvard Divinity School and had purchased a one-way ticket to El Salvador, where the military government, backed by the United States, was slaughtering between 700 and 1,000 people a month. I had decided, as George Orwell and James Baldwin did earlier, to use my writing as a weapon. I would stand with the oppressed. I would give them a voice. I would describe their suffering and their hopes. And I would name the injustices being done to them. It was a decision that would send me to war for two decades, to experience the worst of human evil, to taste too much of my own fear and to confront the reality of violence and random death. Advertisement But going to El Salvador as a reporter was not something the Presbyterian Church at the time recognized as a valid ministry, and a committee rejected my “call.” I told my father, who was waiting outside the meeting room, that I was not to be ordained. It must have been hard for him to see his son come so close to ordination, only to have it slip away, and hard to know that his son was leaving for a conflict in which journalists had been killed and would be killed. What the church would not validate he did. “You,” he said, “are ordained to write.” James Baldwin, the son of a preacher and for a time a preacher himself, said he left the pulpit to preach the Gospel. Baldwin saw how the institutional church was often the enemy of mercy and justice. He saw how it too easily devolved into a sanctimonious club whose members glorified themselves at the expense of others. Baldwin, who was gay and black, was not interested in subjugating justice and love to the restrictions imposed by any institution, least of all the church. And that is why there is more Gospel, true Gospel, in Baldwin than in the writings of nearly all the theologians and preachers who were his contemporaries. His essays are sermons—among them “Princes and Powers,” “Down at the Cross,” “The Devil Finds Work,” “Sermons and Blues” and “History as Nightmare.” Baldwin deplored the self-love in American society—he counted white churches as being in the vanguard of self-love—and denounced what he called “the lie of their pretended humanism.” In his essay “Down at the Cross” he wrote: “… there was not love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all.” He went on: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” Baldwin, like Orwell, named truths that few others had the courage to name. He condemned evils that were held up as virtues by the powerful and the pious. And in this Baldwin was true to a spirit and power beyond his control. He was, in religious language, possessed. And he knew it. “The artist and the revolutionary function as they function,” Baldwin wrote, “and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.” This was a sentiment understood by Orwell, who fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and lived with tramps in Paris and London, as well as with impoverished coal miners in the north of England. “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice,” Orwell wrote. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” Orwell, like Baldwin, disdained the hypocrisy of the institutional church. He acidly observed that pious Christian capitalists “do not seem to be perceptibly different” from other capitalists. “Religious belief,” he wrote, “is frequently a psychological device to avoid repentance.” Moses, the pet raven in his “Animal Farm,” is used to pacify the other animals, telling them they will all go to an animal paradise called “Sugarcandy Mountain” once their days of labor and suffering come to an end. “As long as supernatural beliefs persist, men can be exploited by cunning priests and oligarchs, and the technical progress which is the prerequisite of a just society cannot be achieved,” Orwell wrote. And yet, like Baldwin, Orwell feared the sanctification of state power and the rise of the manufactured idols that took the place of God, those who promised an earthly rather than heavenly paradise. Orwell struggled throughout his life to find a belief system strong enough to oppose it. “If our civilization does not regenerate itself, it is likely to perish,” he wrote shortly before publishing “Animal Farm.” That regeneration, at least in Europe, he said, would have to draw on a moral code “based on Christian principles.”

Just the Facts? This Dossier Goes Further

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: Just the Facts? This Dossier Goes Further By NATASHA SINGEROCT. 4, 2014 Photo Credit Julia Yellow It was my birthday the other day, and, along with the usual private greetings from family and friends, I noticed a couple of public salutations about it on Twitter from entities I didn’t recognize. One was from @TalkingBizNews, a business news feed, which issued posts about my birthday and that of Lou Dobbs of Fox Business Network. Apparently, we have the same birthday. I was curious to find out where these greeters had obtained their information, since I don’t, for data security reasons, share my birth date with sites or stores. Did they get it from public records? Or had they bought it from one of the many companies that sell consumers’ details for marketing purposes? When I started looking into it, I discovered that one company had compiled information about me that was far more personal than my birthday — including references to my father’s marriages and my sister’s wedding announcement. Some of the material was factually accurate. Other elements were speculative. I have written at length about information brokers, those companies that compile, analyze and sell consumer profile data, but this experience provided an eye-opening window into the ways that companies can mix raw facts about people into a subjective soup. First, I contacted Chris Roush, the senior associate dean for undergraduate studies at the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who runs @TalkingBizNews. He told me he typically posts the birthdays of two to three business journalists a day, information that his team often gleans from LinkedIn or Facebook. But I hadn’t posted the information online. “I frankly can’t remember how I got your birthday,” Professor Roush said. Next I contacted NewsBios, a service in Denver that also posts the birthdays of certain reporters and editors. NewsBios compiles and sells dossiers on journalists. Its executive editor is Dean Rotbart, a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal. The clients are primarily public relations firms and corporations seeking to prep company executives on the journalists who interview them. Mr. Rotbart said news organizations had also bought the profiles for use in hiring staff members or checking out their competitors. “The idea is to write true dossiers on journalists, unvarnished dossiers,” he said, “things they would not disclose or be inclined to disclose” on LinkedIn. The reports may include “information that reflects on the journalist’s character and proclivities,” according to the NewsBios site. NewsBios’ small-scale intelligence-gathering bears some resemblance to the computerized data-mining that large-scale information brokers use to classify consumers’ behavior. For instance, Experian Marketing Services, which helps companies tailor their marketing pitches, segments consumers into categories like: “postindustrial survivors,” “metropolitan strugglers” and “bourgeois prosperity.” NewsBios compiles information on journalists from public sources like voter records, real estate records and motor vehicle records. It also parses their public social media accounts for clues about their political leanings, entertainment interests and favorite sports teams. And it makes inferences based on that data. Continue reading the main story “We will literally turn over every rock that’s out there that might have some bearing on what the journalist thinks or reports,” Mr. Rotbart said. After our phone chat, Mr. Rotbart kindly sent me my own profile. A client had apparently commissioned it in 2009, the year I moved to a new job as a reporter in the business news department of this newspaper from its Style section. The profile has not been sold or updated since, he said. The dossier contained many correct facts — the universities from which I graduated, my contact information, the name of my editor at the time, a list of some front-page articles I had written, citations from published corrections to my articles. There were also a couple of errors. The profile said I had written for a magazine to which I never contributed. It also mistakenly attributed a conservative editorial — published in The Forward, where I had worked as a Moscow correspondent in the 1990s — to me, citing the piece as evidence of my personal politics. I was not much troubled by the factual errors in my profile. As people who regularly check their credit reports well know, companies often collect incorrect information — and even correct data can quickly become out of date. But I was uncomfortable with instances in the profile that speculated on my personal motives or feelings. These assumptions were often off base, yet had the potential to affect my reputation. The dossier, for instance, contained a cropped photograph of the back of my head and neck. Under the picture was a note, tagged “NewsBios Observation” to indicate that it was opinion. “The fact that only the back of her head is showing may be coincidental,” the profile said, “or it may be further evidence that she, a veteran fashion and cosmetics industry reporter, herself has a low self-esteem when it comes to appearances.” In fact, the original photo, which ran in this newspaper to accompany an article I wrote about unglamorous backstage jobs at New York Fashion Week, showed a larger scene in which I sat on the floor, painting the toenails of a fashion model. I wore a utilitarian black outfit, issued to me by the nail polish company with which I was embedded for the article. Photo The image associated with the NewsBios profile of the writer, taken from a photograph that ran with a 2008 New York Times column that she wrote about Fashion Week, was cropped to show the back of her head and neck. Credit Donna Alberico for The New York Times Even so, Mr. Rotbart contended that the profile made a reasonable deduction about my self-esteem — based on the fact that I looked frumpy in the picture and that there were fewer photos of me online than of many other reporters. When I told him I cover privacy issues — that’s the reason I have opted to use an avatar on Twitter — he allowed: “It may be 100 percent that you have a personal privacy thing.” He said that he would amend and update my profile should a client order it again. NewsBios employs techniques that journalists use: Doing web searches of people’s backgrounds, reading their social media posts to learn more about them and drawing conclusions. The difference is that journalists generally notify and seek interviews with the subjects of profiles, whereas NewsBios promises to “never contact the journalists directly.” Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Mr. Rotbart said NewsBios prepares briefs on reporters similar to those compiled by public relations firms and corporate communications departments. Corporations don’t tell journalists that they are the subjects of internal briefings, either. I also contacted Vocus and Cision, companies that each sell information about journalists to public relations professionals. Their profiles of me contained only facts, not suppositions. There is little recourse, however, for subjects of data profiling, says David C. Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. With the exception of sectors like health care and credit, most consumer data is not protected by federal information practices laws. That leaves companies free, he says, to piece together the digital bread crumbs that people leave in their wake into a simulacrum that may bear little resemblance to the actual person. “It points to the gaps in federal regulation,” says Professor Vladeck, a former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Data broker reports can be inaccurate and can be misconstrued in ways that are unflattering to the individual. Yet consequential decisions can be based on them.” A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2014, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: Just the Facts? This Dossier Goes Further. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

News or Not

This article from the New York Times, an opinion piece is a good example of the difficulty of reading the news and coming up with a conclusion. "Obama, with Reluctance, returns to Action..." Is this true? Does the writer know? Obama might say so or infer his reluctance. However, a President, a superb politician,a Nobel Prize Peace holder, may want to appear forced, reluctant, and move in small steps. Kennedy did the same at the start of the Vietnam war. There is this tendency of American Presidents in the final term to turn to the International stage to ensure their legacy. Calculation seems more the descriptive word here. Move a little here and then not much somewhere else. And there are so many somewhere else's. Hedging bets. Perhaps waiting for the grand slam. Obama, With Reluctance, Returns to Action in Iraq By PETER BAKERAUG. 7, 2014 WASHINGTON — In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama on Thursday night found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition. The mandate he gave to the armed forces was more limited than that of his predecessors, focused mainly on dropping food and water. But he also authorized targeted airstrikes “if necessary” against Islamic radicals advancing on the Kurdish capital of Erbil and others threatening to wipe out thousands of non-Muslims stranded on a remote mountaintop. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Iraqi security forces and volunteers took part in fighting against Islamist militants north of Baghdad on Thursday. Jihadists Rout Kurds in North and Seize Strategic Iraqi DamAUG. 7, 2014 “I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,” President Obama said Thursday night. Obama Allows Limited Airstrikes on ISISAUG. 7, 2014 As he explained himself to a national television audience, Mr. Obama made a point of reassuring a war-weary public that the president who pulled American forces out of Iraq at the end of 2011 had no intention of fighting another full-scale war there. Yet his presence in the State Dining Room testified to the bleak reality that the tide of events in that ancient land have defied his predictions and aspirations before. President Obama spoke about actions taken by his administration in Iraq, including airdrops of humanitarian supplies and the authorization of airstrikes against ISIS forces. Video Credit By whitehouse.gov on Publish Date August 7, 2014. Image CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times “I know that many of you are rightly concerned about any American military action in Iraq, even limited strikes like these,” he said. “I understand that. I ran for this office in part to end our war in Iraq and welcome our troops home, and that’s what we’ve done. As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.” Mr. Obama has spent months resisting just that. Even after the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seized Falluja and other territory in the western part of the country at the beginning of the year and marched through Mosul and toward Baghdad by summer, the president expressed no enthusiasm for American military action. Continue reading the main story Related in Opinion In June, he sent in 300 special forces troops not to fight but to assess the situation, an assessment that has yet to be completed, and he increased surveillance passes over Iraq. But Mr. Obama rebuffed calls, including those from within his administration, to quickly send in air power to hit ISIS forces. Aides said his hand was not forced until ISIS won a series of swift and stunning victories last weekend and Wednesday night against the Kurds in the north, who have been a loyal and reliable American ally, especially compared to the Baghdad government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. ISIS threats to wipe out Yazidis and other religious minorities trapped on Mount Sinjar, they said, added to the urgency. Continue reading the main story The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has solidified control over large portions of both countries. Recent developments:1 ISIS militants captured the Mosul Dam.2 U.S. planes dropped food and water on Mount Sinjar, where as many as 40,000 Iraqis were stranded after death threats from ISIS.3 Bombings reported late Thursday were said to target ISIS fighters who had seized Gwer and Mahmour.4 Militants stormed Arsal, a town near the border in Lebanon. Related Maps and “You don’t have to have a ton of insight to know he feels reluctant,” said Douglas Ollivant, a former Iraq adviser in the White House under Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush. “He wants the Iraq problem not to exist. And that’s exactly what the American people sent him to the White House to do.” But “all these factors may kind of drag him kicking and screaming into some kind of decision.” To longtime opponents of the Iraq war, the president’s decision represented a step back down a dangerous path, one that may once again entangle the United States in a bloody and destructive venture. Far better, in their view, to find alternatives like urging the United Nations to help the Iraqis conduct their own humanitarian airdrop mission. Continue reading the main story “This is a slippery slope if I ever saw one,” said Phyllis Bennis, a scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, a research organization for peace activists. “Whatever else we may have learned from the president’s ‘dumb war,’ it should be eminently clear that we cannot bomb Islamist extremists into submission or disappearance. Every bomb recruits more supporters.” Others disagreed. “I don’t think this is a slippery slope; this is an isolated circumstance,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, saying he supported intervening on behalf of the Kurds, as opposed to the unpopular Baghdad government. “The Kurds are worth helping and defending.” To some, this is a crisis Mr. Obama brought on himself by not trying harder to leave a residual force behind at the end of 2011 and neglecting to recognize the growing threat as the civil war in Syria next door increasingly spilled over into Iraq. Some argued that a virtual state under ISIS control posed more than the humanitarian threat Mr. Obama seemed to be focused on. “This is about America’s national security,” said Ryan Crocker, who was ambassador to Iraq under Mr. Bush and to Afghanistan under Mr. Obama. “We don’t understand real evil, organized evil, very well. This is evil incarnate. People like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” the ISIS leader, “have been in a fight for a decade. They are messianic in their vision, and they are not going to stop.” But if not, then the question arises: How far is Mr. Obama willing to go? He said on Thursday that there is “no American military solution” to the Iraqi insurgency, pointing again to the need for a new politically inclusive government in Baghdad. What he might do if that fails he did not say. And while aides stressed this is a narrow mission, they acknowledged scenarios in which it could expand. Mr. Obama likewise strived to explain why this humanitarian emergency demands American military intervention when others elsewhere have not. Just a week ago, at a news conference, he made the point that the United States cannot intervene everywhere there is a crisis. “Nobody has the sense about why in some cases and not in others,” said James B. Steinberg, a former deputy secretary of state under Mr. Obama and now dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. “His last news conference just leaves you scratching your head. Yeah, we can’t do everything. But what matters to us?” Iraq, of course, offers a special case, given the amount of American blood spilled since Mr. Bush’s invasion in 2003. Beyond that, Mr. Obama said that this was an instance where there was a genuine calamity in the making; the government of the country requested help, and the United States had the capacity to step in and make a difference. “The United States cannot and should not intervene every time there is a crisis in the world,” he said. But in this case, he added, “I believe the United States cannot turn a blind eye.”

Use the computer to sift large documents

If you are into investigative journalism you should check this out:http://www.scribd.com/doc/230605794/Natural-Language-Processing-in-Investigative-Journalism;Natural Language Processing in Investigative Journalism Journalists frequently have far too many documents to read manually, whether it's a 10,000 page response to a Freedom of Information Request or 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables. We've spent the last three years applying NLP and visualization techniques to this problem, building a system called Overview which has now been used by journalists all over the world. In this talk I'll show you exactly how Overview's language processing pipeline works.

A great story about encouraging journalism in isolated places from The Tyee:A New Story from Attawapiskat Program trains young journalists in remote First Nation communities to report their community's news. By Lisa Charleyboy, Today, TheTyee.ca Share article via email Print this article COVER.richardspence.jpg Attawapiskat resident Richard Spence, 24, credits his participation in JHR's Northern Ontario Initiative for sparking his interest in journalism and storytelling. Photo by Danny Kresnyak. Also in this series: LEADING TOGETHER Dechinta Bush University: Learning off the Land How Do We Inspire Indigenous Youth? Apathy is Boring Engages the Rage On the Rez in Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug The Red Road Project: Trading Substances for Substance Kids Help Phone's Healthy Communities Initiative: How to Counsel the Counselors Exeko: Uniting Kanesatake through Radio Professional Networking, Indigenous-Styles A New Story from Attawapiskat Related Journalists: Please Stop Mistaking Aboriginal Ceremony for Spectacle An otherwise strong CBC story on tourism is marred by badly chosen images. How Do We Inspire Indigenous Youth? That question drove the creation of the Leading Together series that begins today. Journalists for Human Rights launches program in northern Ontario Read more: Aboriginal Affairs, Sign Up for the Tyee Newsletter go [Editor's note: This is part of a series of reports on successful youth-focused projects resulting from collaboration between indigenous communities and philanthropic organizations. Leading Together is itself a collaboration of Journalists for Human Rights, Tyee Solutions Society, Wawatay Native Communications Society, and the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation which commissioned this journalism. Look for one more Leading Together story in The Tyee next week.] Richard Spence, a 24-year-old member of the Attawapiskat First Nation, saw the camera crews come and go in 2011 and 2012, and how they portrayed his community. "All they showed were people in sheds, mouldy houses," said Spence. Those reports almost made me shameful to be from here." Months later, when Spence was invited to learn the basics of journalism in order tell more complex stories reflecting what he knew of Attawapiskat, he jumped at the chance. First Nations peoples make up four per cent of Canada's population. Yet they represent only one per cent of Canadian media professionals. Launched in spring 2013 by media development organization Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), the Northern Ontario Initiative aims to challenge that deficit. It is doing so by sending two journalism trainers to six remote communities. The goal is to train Indigenous participants to produce and freelance their radio and print stories to media outlets. Fort Severn, Weagamow, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, Moose Cree, Constance Lake, Lac Seul and Attawapiskat are all participating. Richard Spence's first outing resulted in a report on how his nation's education authority board members took action to detect and remedy a buried oil leak posing danger to kids at the elementary school. From Ghana to Nishnawbe Aski The Northern Ontario Initiative is rooted in Africa. Designed and managed by Robin Pierro, a young documentary filmmaker and former freelance journalist, the project idea first came up when she was in Ghana working as a trainer with JHR. Since 2002, JHR has worked to strengthen independent media in sub-Saharan Africa by helping local journalists report ethically and effectively on human rights and good governance. While in Ghana, Pierro, now an international programs manager at JHR, witnessed the power of journalism to spark positive change first hand. She thought, "Why not take this model and tweak it to a Canadian context and start working on improving human rights issues in our own country?" Upon returning to Canada in September 2011, Pierro got busy developing her idea at JHR's Toronto headquarters. First step? Make respectful inquiries about how JHR could be of service. In practical terms, that meant Pierro spent a year speaking with First Nations people in their own communities, as well as other stakeholders, to gain their perspectives. JHR found not only valuable counsel but a powerful partner in the Wawatay Native Communications Society, which for nearly four decades has serviced the remote First Nations communities of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) located in northwestern Ontario. Begun as an emergency information network that distributed CB radios and dropped leaflets from airplanes, Wawatay Native Communications Society now operates the Wawatay News newspaper, three quarterly magazines, daily radio programs, television production services and a multimedia website. If JHR could train new First Nations journalists, those graduates would have a ready outlet through Wawatay. Buy-in from all parties It took a first proposal, and then a refined version, to earn funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Key to that second-push success was Joyce Hunter, Cree from Weenusk First Nation, now the Aboriginal liaison strategy coordinator for the City of Thunder Bay. Hunter joined Wawatay as its special projects officer after the first JHR proposal rolled in. Hunter saw potential in the idea, but also recognized there needed to be increased dialogue and buy-in from the communities. "Joyce was a huge help in strengthening the second proposal," said Pierro. "She offered a unique perspective as an Aboriginal person from a remote community who worked in journalism, and Wawatay assigning her to work with me on the proposal showed their buy-in and commitment to making this happen." The Ontario Trillium Foundation approved the second pitch in February of 2013. Accenture Canada soon came on board. "We are providing $50,000 worth of free technology consulting and with that money we are building a robust online portal to bring together the journalism trainees, the trainers and the broader community," said Theresa Ebden, director of media and analyst relations Canada at Accenture. "We will have things like tutorials, a discussion board and connect these journalists in training with real editors who will really buy their stories." Wawatay News has budgeted for purchasing stories from the newly-trained community journalists and has already published some of their work. Many other media organizations have shown great interest in running the content, provided it meets their editorial standards. Two months into the initiative, Danny Kresnyak, a roaming journalism mentor currently stationed in Constance Lake, said he had gained as much knowledge as he was sharing. "People don't want to be talked to, they want to be worked with," said Kresnyak. "The main issues right now are visibility and inclusion in the process." "Community partners need to be included in the design of goals for the project to function. Both sides must work to create a mandate they can effectively buy into. I cannot just be here, take the story and leave. I need to leave a legacy for the work to be sustainable and the project to be a success." Learning by listening Kresynak said simple acts of listening and learning have been key to fostering a better relationship with the First Nations community. "Attawapiskat [where Kresnyak spent three months as a trainer] has become a lightning rod for major media stories about social problems on reserves. Many people here feel their community has been painted in an unfortunate light," he said. "As a result, many in the street don't trust journalists and there is often an opacity when dealing with outside government, band office, and local bureaucracy. Much of my effort is dedicated to shifting this paradigm." Kenny Thomas is head councillor at Fort Severn First Nations Band, where the project's second trainer, Kimberly Stinson, worked from June to September. Fort Severn is the northernmost community in Ontario. "The reason why training and journalism is important is to provide news to others and to show others that despite our hardships we are still here and enjoying life," said Thomas. "And the stories that are written are to be written in a way that people will understand and enjoy." Pierro hopes the Northern Initiative can expand into other provinces. Ultimately, the aim is to build partnerships with universities to create fellowships and implement curriculum on how to better cover Aboriginal issues. On June 13, Aboriginal Day, Wawatay and JHR won the 2013 Innovation Award from the Canadian Ethnic Media Association. As training proceeds, one person is particularly eager to see the results. "The thought that this time next year we might have six freelance writers in six different communities who are regularly contributing to the newspaper and to the magazines is really exciting and positive for Wawatay," said Shawn Bell, former editor of Wawatay. "It's going to make Wawatay so much stronger to have those stories." Richard Spence hopes to be one of Wawatay's writers. He'd like to balance journalism with attending college to become a music teacher in Attawapiskat. Before Danny Kresnyak seized his imagination by suggesting he could tell his own community's stories, Spence was without plans for his life. Not anymore. "This project helped me see that I could improve myself and improve my community by being able to write stories about it, and help give all of Canada an idea of what it's like on the rez." [Tyee] Read more: Aboriginal Affairs,

Got this from Slashdot and I highly recommend you downloading and looking over the free PDF book Verification Handbook: In the Unverified Digital World, Are Journalists and Bloggers Equal? Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 24, 2014 @10:08AM from the but-I-play-one-on-tv dept. oztechmuse (2323576) writes "As the source of news moves increasingly away from traditional channels to the millions of people carrying mobile phones and sharing commentary, photos and video on social networks, the distinction between journalists and bloggers has become increasingly blurred. Making sense of this type of information has been as much a challenge for journalists as it has bloggers. Journalists, like bloggers, have had to learn new skills in working in this environment. Highlighting this has been the release of the Verification Handbook which attempts to educate journalists in how to process user-generated content in the form of videos or images acknowledging that much of the reporting about situations, especially emergency ones, comes from the public. The techniques outlined are accessible to anyone reporting on a story, adding to the eroding gap between bloggers and journalists."

That about sums it all up.

Most Proof Reading Misses Are In the Headlines

Subject: Fw: Proof reading is a dying art Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter This one I caught in the SGV Tribune the other day and called the Editorial Room and asked who wrote this. It took two or three readings before the editor realized that what he was reading was impossible!!! They put in a correction the next day. I just couldn't help but send this along. Too funny. Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says Really? Ya think? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers Now that's taking things a bit far! ---------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over What a guy! --------------------------------------------------------------- Miners Refuse to Work after Death No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's! They must be UNION ! ------------------------------------------------------ Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant See if that works any better than a fair trial! ---------------------------------------------------------- War Dims Hope for Peace I can see where it might have that effect! ---------------------------------------------------------------- If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile Ya think?! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures Who would have thought! ---------------------------------------------------------------- Enfield (London) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide They may be on to something! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges You mean there's something stronger than duct tape? ---------------------------------------------------------- Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge He probably IS the battery charge! ---------------------------------------------- New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group Weren't they fat enough?! ----------------------------------------------- Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft That's what he gets for eating those beans! ---------------- --------------------------------- Kids Make Nutritious Snacks Do they taste like chicken? **************************************** Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half Chainsaw Massacre all over again! *************************************************** Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors Boy, are they tall! ******************************************* And the winner is.... Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead

Layout

28 Newspaper And Magazine Layout Disasters buzzfeed.com How not to edit a publication.

How Biology and Physics May Come to the Aid of Journalism

Here's a new move. Thanks to 'Data Science Weekly' for alerting me to this: Most Creative People Why The New York Times Hired A Biology Researcher As Its Chief Data Scientist To help make sense of the massive troves of data produced by people clicking around its website, the Times made a (very) nontraditional hire--Chris Wiggins, a biology researcher with a PhD in theoretical physics. If you can map the human genome, maybe you can even fix journalism. By Rebecca Greenfield 0 Comments Email It doesn't come as a huge surprise that the New York Times has hired a chief data scientist. Even 162-year-old media companies know that technology will play a huge role in the future of journalism. And, despite its age, the Times hasn't shied away from digital innovation. What's surprising, however, is that the new hire, Chris Wiggins, has spent the last 10 years steeped in biology research. Wiggins's role at the paper started less officially last fall, when he used a sabbatical to apply his skills to the newsroom. "The best thing you can do with a sabbatical is to find something completely unrelated to your research to do," he explained to Fast Company. "I've been hearing for years from my students that this is where the future is and I was happy that I found a way that I could participate in building that future while building the data science skills that I've been developing in a different domain within the academy," he added. Chris Wiggins As of last week, the Times made him a permanent fixture. Wiggins, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, will spend one day a week at the paper, leading its yet-to-be built "machine learning" team. Fast Company spoke with Wiggins about what that role will entail and how having a background in biology makes him at all qualified to lead the Times into the future. FAST COMPANY: Before we get to this biology quandary, tell us about your background. Maybe that will clear things up. CHRIS WIGGINS: My PhD was in theoretical physics. I got my PhD at Princeton at a time which is now called the second string revolution. Basically, everyone was interested in string theory, except for me. I was interested in the opposite of string theory. I was interested in how we model complex real-world problems in terms of the data that we have about them. At the time I was working in biology and that's where I've been working for the last several years doing what we would now call data science. Okay, got it. So that makes a little more sense of things. But still: what does biology have to do with media? The pain that many fields are experiencing by becoming data driven is a pain that was experienced in biology 15 years ago when whole genomes started being sequenced. I think there is a lot in common about applying data science in the natural sciences and applying data science in the real world. Real people have questions from a different domain, they have abundant data, and it's a fun and creative task to try to reframe those domain questions as machine learning tasks. You lost me at machine learning tasks, what does that mean? Machine learning sits at the intersection of data engineering and mathematical modeling. The thing that makes it different from statistics traditionally, is far more focus on building algorithms. Another difference, although this is more of a spiritual difference, is that statistics traditionally has had a stronger emphasis in explaining a data set and machine learning has far more interest in building predictive models. For example, when Netflix tells you what movie to watch or when Amazon predicts what book to buy--that’s machine learning. In a way, machine learning has crept up all around you. Like Netflix--now you're speaking our language. But how does this relate to the Times? How do you plan to apply "machine learning" to the Grey Lady and its newsroom? There's a lot of potential both on the business side and the editorial side. On the business side The New York Times is interested in establishing long-term relationships with their readers. So the Times is trying to understand what are the behaviors that seem to be correlated with loyalty, what are the behaviors that seem to be correlated with dissatisfaction, particularly among subscribers--the way a long-term relationship manifests itself at the Times is via subscribers. If we're trying to understand how people engage with the site in general and in the abstract, machine learning is both useful for gaining insights about what kind of content engages users, and also good business. There is a way to listen to your customers at scale that you can do at a website that is just qualitatively different than having a focus group or giving out a survey. And what about editorially? "Anytime anyone does anything on a website, that is an event and that person leaves a trail of data. Putting all of that data together is definitely a non-trivial task." I've worked with people on the data visualization group to think about how better to cluster the results that they look at that make the data visualization more interpretable. I've worked with business analysts to think about how to present data in user engagement in a way that is more meaningful and more statistically robust. I've worked with people from the personalization team to think about how best to test and optimize their recommendation models. There's a lot of opportunities for a machine learning group that makes all the groups stronger and draws a common narrative with people thinking about data in a high-powered way throughout the company, particularly on the technology side. It's a very technologically strong company. It sounds like they have a pretty strong tech department. People at the New York Times I found to be totally optimistic. They're not putting their heads in the sand. If you look at just the changes, even on the front-facing New York Times, they've really built out a presence in interactive news and much more video. I would say people are aware of the challenges and are really working hard to build a sustainable future for journalism. I understand that part of your role is to further extend the tech department and build a team? I'll be focusing on people who do and speak machine learning. There's already excellent data engineers; there's already excellent business analysts; there's already a great data visualization group. So it's a fantastic place now to build a machine learning group to try to make sense of those data, reframe business analytics questions as prediction problems, and to work with people who will visualize and help make interpretable the insights you gain from those types of predictive models. How do you think this team led by you will change things at the Times? News has gone from a device that shows up on your door step to a website, which just opens up a whole new universe of ways of understanding your readers and listening to your readers better. Anytime anyone does anything on a website, that is an event and that person leaves a trail of data. Putting all of that data together is definitely a non-trivial task. It gives so much immediate insight into the way people use your product, how your products can be improved, what new products you should be thinking about. I think that's a real transformation for anybody in any business. [Photos courtesy of Chris Wiggins] 0 Comments Email Rebecca Greenfield Rebecca Greenfield is a Staff Writer at Fast Company, where she covers creative people doing creative things. She was previously a Staff Writer at The Atlantic Wire, where she focused on technology news. Her work has also appeared at The Atlantic and The Hairpin. Continue February 12, 2014 | 6:06 AM

Thanks, MediaMatters

The Media..what?

Here we go with change running ahead of us:Ezra Klein Is Joining Vox Media as Web Journalism Asserts Itself JAN. 26, 2014 Launch media viewer Ezra Klein spoke last week at a conference on health care. He is leaving The Washington Post for a digital start-up. Charles Dharapak/Associated Press [David Carr] David Carr THE MEDIA EQUATION After a week of speculation, it turns out that Ezra Klein, the prolific creator of The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, will be going to Vox Media, the online home of SB Nation, a sports site, and The Verge, a fast-growing technology site. His change of address could be read as the latest parable of Old Media cluelessness — allowing a journalism asset to escape who will come back to haunt them — or as another instance of a star journalist cashing in on name-brand success. But it’s more complicated than that. Mr. Klein is not running away from something, he is going toward something else. Vox is a digitally native business, a technology company that produces media, as opposed to a media company that uses technology. Everything at Vox, from the way it covers subjects, the journalists it hires and the content management systems on which it produces news, is optimized for the current age. “We are just at the beginning of how journalism should be done on the web,” Mr. Klein said. “We really wanted to build something from the ground up that helps people understand the news better. We are not just trying to scale Wonkblog, we want to improve the technology of news, and Vox has a vision of how to solve some of that.” In making the switch, Mr. Klein is part of a movement of big-name journalists who are migrating from newspaper companies to digital start-ups. Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher left Dow Jones to form Re/code with NBC. David Pogue left The New York Times for Yahoo and Nate Silver for ESPN. At the same time, independent news sites like Business Insider, BuzzFeed and Vox have all received abundant new funding, while traffic on viral sites like Upworthy and ViralNova has exploded. All the frothy news has led to speculation that a bubble is forming in the content business, but something more real is underway. I was part of the first bubble as a journalist at Inside.com in 2001 — an idea a decade ahead of its time — and this feels very different. The web was more like a set of tin cans and a thin wire back then, so news media upstarts had trouble being heard. With high broadband penetration, the web has become a fully realized consumer medium where pages load in a flash and video plays without stuttering. With those pipes now built, we are in a time very similar to the early 1980s, when big cities were finally wired for cable. What followed was an explosion of new channels, many of which have become big businesses today. The same holds true for digital. Organizations like BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Vice and Vox, which have huge traffic but are still relatively small in terms of profit, will eventually mature into the legacy media of tomorrow. More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy. In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man. Kenneth Lerer, manager of Lerer Ventures and one of the backers of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, says that whenever he is pitched an editorial idea, he always asks who the technology partner is. How something is made and published is often as important as what is made. It’s worth remembering that Vox got its hands on The Verge because the people working at Engadget, a tech site owned by AOL, grew tired of trying to publish through the big, slow blob of a huge corporation. The staff came to Vox for the technology and used the flexible platform there to publish its way to an audience. Vox added Curbed, Eater and Racked last year, so Mr. Klein’s new venture will become part of a growing digital emporium. And from a standing start in 2011, The Verge has grown to over 10 million unique visitors a month, becoming a big player in technology and gadgets right out of the box. “It is not as simple as journalists going to a digital site and doubling their salary,” said Jim Bankoff, chief executive of Vox. “Many of these people, including Ezra, have a vision of creating something remarkable. There is a better way of doing things and we like to think that we are using technology in service of creativity, journalism and storytelling.” Mr. Klein, who is making the move with other colleagues at The Post, including Melissa Bell and Dylan Matthews, as well as Matthew Yglesias of Slate, said he was less interested in burnishing a personal brand than building a site that will go beyond politics and policy and serve as a prism on the rest of the news. “That’s the theory, but that’s all it is until we actually do something,” Mr. Klein said. But it still raises the question of why Jeffrey Bezos, who bought The Post in August and who has personally backed Business Insider and its founder Henry Blodget, did not want to fund Mr. Klein’s venture at The Post. He is not saying, but to start, The Post has long-festering problems with its core business. It has a strong editor in Martin Baron who is making strides, but to invest time and money in building out another discrete brand — Mr. Klein reportedly wanted a big presence and staff that could cost millions of dollars annually — would be a major distraction. Recent Comments David Mendoza 32 minutes ago The reason why this new venture could be so revolutionary is because it could change our expectations about how the news should be... David Bartlett 34 minutes ago And who is doing the actual work?So many of these 'new media' websites are merely re-sellers of the news-----still those tin... HKGuy 42 minutes ago In the whole article, Carr never mentions that sites like Curbed, Gawker and Huff Post are aggregate sites, vultures that feed on the news... See All Comments Write a comment Meanwhile, Business Insider sits at the sweet spot of digital content: high traffic, low cost, with a combination of sassy voices and viral content. Kevin Ryan, a backer and founder of the site, told me that he looked at Businessweek when it came up for sale for an effective price of zero dollars and found that it paid more than six times as much just for desk space and real estate per working journalist. While the ambitions of the journalism may be very different, Business Insider now has traffic that rivals The Wall Street Journal. And the skill set is not the same. “Digital journalism is as different from print and TV journalism as print and TV are from each other,” Mr. Blodget said by telephone from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Few people expect great print news organizations to also win in TV. Similarly, few should expect great TV or print organizations to win in digital. The news-gathering, storytelling and distribution approaches are just very different.” Great digital journalists consume and produce content at the same time, constantly publishing what they are reading and hearing. And by leaving mainstream companies, journalists are often able to get their own hands on the button to publish, which is exciting and gratifying. “If William Randolph Hearst and Bill Paley were alive today, they would think they were in heaven,” suggested Sir Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital. But while the barrier to entry is low, one big obstacle to long-term media success remains: quality. The reason that Vice, Vox, Gawker Media’s sites and other players stick out is that they use their digital tools to make remarkable, unexpected content that people flock to. NBC did not team with Re/code simply because it knows the secret of the Internet. “I have more flexibility, and can make decisions on staff and stories so much quicker, that we can keep up with organizations that are so much bigger than we are,” Ms. Swisher said. Staring into the whirlpool of content plays, it is easy to forget that building a credible news organization that people trust still takes time. Gawker is 12 years old, AllThingsD, which became Re/code, was founded seven years ago, and BuzzFeed has been around since 2006. It may not take $200 million, as it did to create a cable network, or $50 million as a national magazine might require, but creating a digital media company takes years. (And $25 million, give or take.) With the price for web advertising dropping by the second and new competitors coming out of the screen at a very high rate, it would seem like a terrible time to jump in. But what we are witnessing now is not the formation of a bubble, it is the emergence of a lasting commercial market, a game that has winners and losers, yet is hardly zero sum.

Pope Points

One of the biggest problems facing modern journalism is the massive amounts of information available and how to make sense of it. A journalist often becomes a specialist in a very narrow field to which they become 'expert'. That is expert with some real limitations. So I thought that this may be a break through for big data: The Overview Project Visual document mining for journalists >http://overview.ap.org/blog/2014/01/algorithms-are-not-enough-lessons-bringing-computer-science-to-journalism< Algorithms are not enough: lessons bringing computer science to journalism by Jonathan Stray on 01/15/2014 0 There are some amazing algorithms coming out the computer science community which promise to revolutionize how journalists deal with large quantities of information. But building a tool that journalists can use to get stories done takes a lot more than algorithms. Closing this gap has been one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of building Overview, and I really think we’ve learned something. Overview is an open-source tool to help journalists sort through vast troves of documents obtained through open government programs, leaks, and freedom of Information requests. Such document sets can include hundreds of thousands of pages, but you can’t find what you don’t know to search for. To solve this problem, Overview applies natural language processing algorithms to automatically sort documents according to topic and produce an explorable visualization of the complete contents of a document set. I want to get into the process of going from algorithm to application here, because — somewhat to my surprise — I don’t think this process is widely understood. The computer science research community is going full speed ahead developing exciting new algorithms, but seems a bit disconnected from what it takes to get their work used. This is doubly disappointing, because understanding the needs of users often shows that you need a different algorithm. The development of Overview is a story about text analysis algorithms applied to journalism, but the principles might apply to any sort of data analysis system. One definition says data science is the intersection of computer science, statistics, and subject matter expertise. This post is about connecting computer science with subject matter expertise. The algorithmic honeymoon In October 2010 I was working at the Associated Press on the recently released Iraq War Logs. AP reporters toiled for weeks with a search engine to find stories within these 391,832 documents. It was painful, and there had to be a better way. Rather than deciding what to look for I wanted the computer to read the documents and tell me what was interesting. I had a hunch that classic techniques from information retrieval (TF-IDF and cosine similarity) might work here, so I hacked together a proof-of-concept visualization of one month of the Iraq War Logs data using Ruby and Gephi. And it worked! By grouping similar documents together and coloring them by incident type we were able to see the broad structure of the war. It was immediately clear that most of the violence was between civilians, and we found clusters of events around tanker truck explosions, kidnappings, and specific battles. A few months later we had a primitive interactive visualization. It was exciting to see the huge potential of text analysis in journalism! This was our algorithmic honeymoon, when the problems were clear and purely technical, and we took big steps with rapid iterations. But that demo was all smoke and mirrors. It was the result of weeks of hacking at file formats and text processing and gluing systems together and there was no chance anyone but myself could ever run it. It was research code, the place where most visualization and natural language processing technology goes to die. No one attempted to do a story with the system because it wasn’t mature enough to try. Worse, it wasn’t even clear how you would do a story starting from one of these visualizations. Yes, we could see patterns in the data, but what did those patterns mean and how would we turn them into a story? In retrospect, this uncertainty should have told us that despite our progress in algorithms, we didn’t yet understand the journalism part of the problem. Getting real work done The next step was a prototype tool, initially developed by Stephen Ingram at UBC and completed by the end of 2011. This version introduced the topic tree and its folders for the first time. And I had a document set: 4,500 pages of recently declassified reports concerning private security contractors in Iraq. Trying to do a story about these documents taught us a lot about the difference between an algorithm and an application. The moment I began working with these documents — as a reporter, not a programmer — I discovered that it was stupendously important to have a smooth integrated document viewer. In retrospect it seems obvious that you’ll need to read a lot of documents while doing document mining, but it was easy to forget that sort of thing in the midst of talking about document vectors and topic modeling and fancy visualizations. I also found that I needed labels to show the size of each cluster, got frustrated at the overly complex tagging model, and implemented more intuitive panning and zooming in the scatterplot window. A few weeks of hacking eventually got me to a system I could use for reporting. The final story included the results of this document set analysis, reporting from other document sources, and an interview with a State Department official. This was the first time we were able to articulate a reporting methodology: I explored the topic tree from left to right, investigating each cluster and tagging to mark what I’d learned, then followed up with other sources. The aim of the reporting process was to summarize and contextualize the content of a large number of documents. This was a huge step forward for Overview, because it connected the very abstract idea of “patterns in the data” to a finished story. We thought all document set reporting problems would take this form. We were wrong. Just as the proof-of-concept was research code, the prototype was the kind of code you write on deadline to get the story done by any means necessary. The data journalism community often writes and releases code written for a single story. This is valuable because it demonstrates a technique and might even provide building blocks for future stories, but it’s usually not a finished tool that other people can easily use. We learned this lesson vividly when we tried to get people to install the Overview prototype. Git clone, run a couple of shell scripts to load your documents, how hard could it be? It turned out to be very hard. At NICAR 2012 I led a room full of people through installing Overview and loading up a sample file. We had every type of problem: incompatible versions of git, Ruby, and Java; operating system differences; and lots of people who had never used a command line before. Of 20 people who tried, only 3 got the system working. We were beginning to make contact with our user community. Usability trumps algorithm We re-wrote Overview as a web application to solve our installation woes (largely the work of Jonas Karlsson and Adam Hooper). We also dropped the scatterplot visualization, the visualization that we had started with, because log data and user interviews showed no one was using it. We went all-in on the tree and had a deployed system by the end of 2012. Do you understand what is happening in this screenshot? Is it clear to you that the window on the lower left is a list of documents, each represented a line of extracted keywords? It wasn’t obvious to our users either, and no one used this new system for many months. We knew that Overview was useful, because we and others had done stories with the prototype. But we were now expecting new people to come in fresh and learn to use the system without our help. That wasn’t happening. So we did think-aloud usability testing to find out why. We immediately discovered a number of serious usability problems. People were having a hard time getting their documents into Overview. They didn’t understand the document list interface. They didn’t understand the tree. We spent months overhauling the UI. We hired a designer and completely rebuilt the document list. And based on user feedback, we changed the clustering algorithm. During the prototype phase we had developed a high-performance document clustering algorithm based on preferentially sampling the edges between highly similar documents and building connected components, documented in this technical report. We were very proud of it. But it tended to produce long lists of very small clusters, meaning that each folder in the tree could have hundreds of sub-folders. This was a terrible way to navigate through a tree. So we replaced our fancy clustering with the classic k-means technique. We apply this recursively, splitting each folder into at most five sub-folders according to an adaptive algorithm.The resulting tree is not as faithful to the structure of the data as our original clustering algorithm, but that doesn’t matter. Overview’s visualization is for humans, not machines. The point is not to have a hyper-accurate representation of the data, but a representation that users are able to interpret and trust. For this reason, it was absolutely necessary to be able to explain how Overview’s clustering algorithm works for a non-technical audience. What do journalists actually do with documents? We solved our usability problems by the summer of 2013 and journalists began to use our system; we’ve had a great crop of completed stories in the last six months. And as we gained experience we finally began to understand what journalists actually do with a set of documents. We have seen four broad types of document-driven stories, and only one of them is the “summarize these documents” task we originally thought we wanted to support. In other cases the journalist is looking for something specific, or needs to classify and tag every document, or is looking to separate the junk from the gold. Today we have a solid connection to our users and their problems. Our users are generally not full-time data journalists and have typically never seen a command line. They get documents in every conceivable format, from paper to PDF. Even when the material is provided in electronic form it may need OCR, or the files may need to be split into their original documents. Our users are on deadline and therefore impatient: Overview’s import must be extremely quick or reporters will give up and start reading their documents manually. And each journalist might only use Overview once a year when a document-driven story comes their way, which means the software cannot require any special training. We learned what journalists actually wanted do, and we implemented features to do it. We implemented fuzzy search to help find things in error-prone OCR’d material. We added an easy way to show the documents that don’t yet have tags for those projects where you really do need to read every page. And Overview now supports multiple languages and lets you customize the clustering. We are still working on handling a wide range of import formats and scenarios including integrated OCR. This is what the UI looks like today. Algorithms are not enough Overview began when we saw that text analysis algorithms could be applied to journalism. We originally envisioned a system for stringing together algorithmic building blocks, a concept we called a visualization sketching system. That idea was totally wrong, because it was completely disconnected from real users and real work. It was a technologist’s fantasy. Unfortunately, it appears that much of the natural language processing, machine learning, and visualization community is stuck in a world without people. The connection between the latest topic modeling paper and the needs of potiential users is weak at best. Such algorithms are evaluated by abstract statistical scores such as entropy or precision-recall curves, which do not capture critical features such as whether the output makes any sense to users. Even when such topic models are built into exploratory visualization systems (like this and this) the research is typically disconnected from any domain problem. While it seems very attractive to build a general system, this approach risks ignoring all real applications and users. (And the test data is almost always academic papers or news archives, both of which are unrealistically clean.) We are seeing ever more sophisticated technique but very little work that asks what makes one approach “better” than another, which is of course highly dependent on the application domain. There is a growing body of work that recognizes this. There is work on designing interpretable text visualizations, research which compares document similarity algorithms to human ratings, and evolving metrics for topic quality that have been validated by user testing. See also our discussion of topic models and XKCD. And we are beginning to see advanced visualization systems evaluated with real users on real work, like this. It’s also important to remember that manual methods are valuable. Reporters will spend days reading and annotating thousands of pages because they are in the business of getting stories done. Machine learning might help with categorize-and-count tasks, but the computer is going to make errors that may compromise the accuracy of the story, so the journalist must review the output anyway. The best system would start with a seamless UI for manual review and tagging, then add a machine learning boost. This is exactly what we are pursuing for Overview. Our recommendation to technologists of all stripes is this: get out more. Don’t design for everyone but for specific users. Make the move from algorithmic research to the anything-goes world of getting the work done. Optimize your algorithms against user needs rather than abstract metrics; those needs will be squishy and hard to measure, but they’ll lead you to reality. Test with real data, not clean data. Finish your users’ projects, not your projects. Only then will you understand enough to know what algorithms you need, and how to build them into a killer app.

This is from the editor of io9 a very interesting web site on cutting edge culture,design and ideas. Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity 12 Once you've worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns. For example, there are some stories that will never go viral, even if they are brilliant in every measurable way. That's because they lie in the "valley of ambiguity," which is sort of like the uncanny valley for viral journalism. If a story is circulating in social media, even if it's a fancy character study for the New Yorker or incisive cultural analysis for the Atlantic, it's always chasing the viral tornado. Before the 21st century, stories became popular because people talked about them in other publications, or shared magazine and newspaper clippings with friends. Today, stories become influential if people share them on social media like Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter. In most cases, nobody is going to read a story if nobody shares it. This leaves a lot of writers and readers wondering why the hell some stories go everywhere and some never make it past three likes on Facebook. Here is one theory, based on my own anecdotal experiences and those of many other people I've talked to in the industry. It's not a scientific theory, and you'll notice that the diagram I have used to illustrate it is something that began on the back of a napkin. Still, I think it can help us make sense of the way that virality has changed journalism in the 21st century. Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity SEXPAND RELATED Where Memes Really Come From Though history will probably remember Richard Dawkins as the activist who spearheaded a new atheist movement, there is something far more famous and… Read… Basically, there are two kinds of stories that tend to go viral. On one side of the diagram, you can see the most obvious genre of viral story: the meme, or the single, simple unit of information that we share because it's funny or makes us feel good. The purest version of the meme online is the LOLcat, usually just a picture with a caption, which is the perfect pick-me-up bit of portable content. What the LOLcat shares with self-help guides and human interest stories is an invitation to credulous enjoyment. TED videos, often seasoned with cheery platitudes, become viral for the same reason that grumpy cat pictures do. They don't ask us to think critically — just to enjoy, or be amused and enlightened without the time-consuming labor of skepticism and doubt clouding our clicks. Why do we want to share these stories? Because in some sense they are not open to interpretation. You don't have to worry whether your friends will wonder why you shared this – it's obvious. The same goes for viral journalism on the other side of my chart. These stories, like explainers, how-to guides, Mythbusters-style debunkery, and truth-telling investigative journalism, are in some ways the opposite of a stupid video or a LOLcat. They are about truth, rather than amusement. But in fact, they go viral for exactly the same reason LOLcats do. They are not open to interpretation. In fact, the main goal of a lot of these stories is to clear up confusion the way Nate Silver did during the election in his analysis of polling. A how-to story is all about leading you through a process without getting you lost. A hard-hitting investigative report that uncovers a nugget of genuine truth is the ultimate viral hit. It's a story that promises we can at last know exactly what has happened, or how to feel about something. We want to share these stories because they appeal to our urge to have the definitive explanation of what is true and right. To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media. If you can share a piece of information that's an absolute truth – whether that's how to uninstall apps on your phone, or what the NSA is really doing – you too become a truth teller. And that feels good. Just as good as it does to be the person who has the cutest cat picture on the Internet. So that leaves us with the stories that don't make it. These are the articles and essays that have fallen into the valley of ambiguity – reports on important scientific findings with difficult-to-interpret results, political news with a long and tangled back story attached, and opinion essays that require us to account for points of view that may be unfamiliar or strange. There is no satisfaction in knowing that the Higgs boson has sort of been found, but sort of not. And nobody wants to risk alienating friends with a piece of opinion writing that might or might not be offensive – you're not even sure. Who wants to share a story that can be misunderstood? Nobody wants to take ownership of a political article where there is no truth – only further information, and complex developments that even experts can't agree on. It's not that we don't want to be the bearers of bad news. In fact, plenty of stories that go viral are nasty, negative and mean. We just want to share stories that make us seem like we know something. Most of all, we don't want to say something that we didn't intend. And that is the danger with any story that falls into the valley of ambiguity. We can't be sure how people will take it. We don't want to risk our reputations on a story that can be taken more than one way. More than anything, the fear of a smeared reputation is what creates that dip in virality. Sharing a story means that in some sense we stake our reputation on it. That's why sharing a story is not the same thing as enjoying a story, reading a story, or even learning from a story. I know for certain that there are plenty of stories that get read, but not shared. I have seen the statistics on io9's back end. But when we measure a story's success by virality, which is what we must do in the age of social media, the content of our popular culture changes. We measure success by what people aren't afraid to share with their neighbors, rather than what people will read on their own. Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9, and this is her column. She is also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction.