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Donating to Journalism School Is Not the Best Way to Help the Cause of Journalism

From Slate. Donating to Journalism School Is Not the Best Way to Help the Cause of Journalism Against Craig Newmark’s $20 million J-school gift. By FELIX SALMON JUNE 11, 20187:13 PM “In our country right now,” says online-classifieds entrepreneur Craig Newmark, “we are facing a crisis in getting trustworthy news out there.” Newmark wants to do something about that, and so his charitable foundation has written a $20 million check to what henceforth will be known as the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. This news makes Newmark’s friend, the CUNY professor and media gadfly Jeff Jarvis, very happy. It also means that Newmark’s name will grace not only Craigslist, the online-classifieds website he founded in 1995, but also a public journalism school located right next to the New York Times in midtown Manhattan. The cost to Newmark for this gift is zero (he’d already donated the money to his foundation); the benefit, in terms of naming rights and the gratitude of his friends, is substantial. So it’s not hard to see why Newmark did this. Still, it’s worth asking: If Newmark really wanted to help journalism, is this the best way to do it?  One way to answer that question is to look at CUNY itself, with its $1.1 billion budget and history of endowment-related scandals, and to wonder whether any gift to CUNY is likely to be particularly effective. There’s a lot of murkiness surrounding the CUNY J-school, which doesn’t publish any kind of budget or annual report and whose governance is equally unclear. Now that Newmark has his name on a J-school, let’s hope this is only one step in a much bigger engagement with the journalistic world that he helped to erode. Newmark’s gift, we’re told, will fund an endowment for the J-school, and although the official press release says that “Newmark will have no role in determining how the school spends the money,” the carefully placed New York Times announcement makes it clear that he wants the money to go toward scholarships, to make a graduate journalism degree more affordable for nonrich students. The journalism school admits about 100 students per year, 55 percent of whom pay the full fees of $18,550 for in-state students, $30,650 for out-of-state students, and $37,500 for international students. If Newmark’s endowment generates $1 million a year for those students, that should make a serious dent in the amount they have to pay. Given the J-school’s diversity (17 percent of its students are black while 24 percent are Hispanic), that will in turn play some small part in making journalism a bit less white and middle-class. On the other hand, those tuition rates aren’t set in stone. If Newmark’s endowment is spending $1 million a year to subsidize the J-school’s tuition costs, that’s going to make it a lot easier for CUNY to raise the rack rate on the J-school’s courses or otherwise capture some of Newmark’s gift for itself. Newmark’s donation, then, is at best a rather indirect way to improve journalism, and its effects won’t be seen within the journalism profession for at least a couple of years. At the margin, he will have helped a handful of individuals per year go to J-school who might not have been able to otherwise, and he will have reduced the fees charged to maybe a few dozen more. Those students will then graduate into tomorrow’s inhospitable journalism-jobs market, and if they manage to get jobs in journalism, they will surely do the best job they can. Meanwhile, just like all endowments, some 95 percent of Newmark’s $20 million will be invested in stocks and hedge funds and the like. That money will help journalism eventually, perhaps in many decades’ time, but for the time being it’s more likely to help high-paid money managers. That’s the way endowments work: Because they’re designed to exist in perpetuity, they can only disburse a fraction of their funds every year. So given Newmark’s evident desire to give $20 million to help to shore up American journalism, what else could he have done with it? Or to put it another way: What should he do with his next $20 million? Newmark has supported other journalistic causes in the past, including ProPublica, Columbia Journalism Review, the Data & Society Research Institute, and the International Center for Journalists. And indeed he could simply continue to support journalism nonprofits, including places like the Marshall Project, FERN, the Investigative Fund, or any of dozens of others. All of these outfits are devoted to publishing important journalism that uncovers information the public ought to know. Newmark’s money could be truly transformative for these shops: FERN, for instance, which reports on food and the environment, had $800,000 in contributions in 2016, and ended the year with net assets of just $440,000.  Another option, given the effect that Craigslist had on classified advertising, which was once the bread and butter of local news, would be for Newmark to put his money to work in cash-strapped local-news organizations. Newmark splits his time between the Bay Area and New York City; obvious venues for his support in those geographies would be Berkeleyside, Gothamist, and Bklyner, all of which are stretching their dollars far, trying to build sustainable models, and putting any money they’re given to immediate good use in journalism, rather than simply squirreling it away for future decades. There are also still a few alt-weeklies around, and they need all the resources they can get. Alternatively, Newmark could follow Warren Buffett’s lead and simply buy a local news site or paper himself! There are many communities that are woefully underserved by local journalism, and worse off for it; Newmark could single-handedly change that in one or more of those cities and towns. Buffett’s $344 million buying spree netted him 28 daily newspapers between 2012 and 2013, for an average of about $12 million per paper; today, such assets could probably be snapped up for even less. Newmark’s $20 million could go very far. All of these alternatives have the distinct advantage of funneling money directly to working journalists now, rather than indirectly to people who may or may not become working journalists in the future. Now that Newmark has his name on a J-school, let’s hope this is only one step in a much bigger engagement with the journalistic world that he helped to erode. J-school is fine, but there are many places that need his money much more urgently.

How the Media Helped Legitimize Extremism

Author: Miranda KatzMiranda Katz culture 05.25.18 From Wired Magazine How the Media Helped Legitimize Extremism Whitney Phillips' "The Oxygen of Amplification" draws on in-depth conversations with dozens of journalists to illustrate an uncomfortable truth: The media inadvertently helped catalyze the rapid rise of the alt-right, turning it into a story before it was necessarily newsworthy. Hotlittlepotato For the past few years, reporting on far-right extremism and misinformation has been a messy free-for-all. Sure, there have been some attempts to delineate best practices, and certain approaches to storytelling, such as those that seem to normalize neo-Naziism, have come under harsh criticism. But few rules have guided the new genre of reporting—and, to date, no one has taken a hard look at how that reporting may be complicit in spreading far-right messaging and helping the movement grow. Until now. A new report titled “The Oxygen of Amplification” offers an unprecedented look at the fundamental paradox of reporting on the so-called “alt-right”: Doing so without amplifying that ideology is extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. The report comes out of the Data & Society research institute’s Media Manipulation Initiative, and is written by Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Internet Culture. It draws on in-depth conversations with dozens of journalists (including WIRED's Emma Grey Ellis, who reports frequently on the topic) to illustrate an uncomfortable truth: Journalists inadvertently helped catalyze the rapid rise of the alt-right, turning it into a story before it was necessarily newsworthy. Now, there’s no turning back. “We have to deal with the reality of a highly visible, activated, far-right element in our culture,” Phillips says. But there are ways for journalists to do better. It's not that the reporting was done in bad faith or ill-intentioned; many people thought that holding up a light to the hatred of white supremacist groups would force them to go away. But that didn’t happen. “If it were true that light disinfected, the alt-right would not have taken off in the way it did,” Phillips says. Instead, the very act of exposure, combined with stories that unwittingly framed extremism as a victimless novelty, legitimized and empowered an otherwise fringe perspective. The report also details how, even as white nationalism was thrust into the national spotlight, some journalists had trouble taking it seriously. Phillips discusses the impact of “internet culture,” or “meme culture,” on digital natives’ ability to spot extremist content; she describes one former reporter at The Daily Dot who joined a Facebook group called Donald Trump’s Dank Meme Stash and did not at first realize that most of the content was not, in fact, satirical. That assumption of irony is typical of many people raised around internet culture, says Ryan Milner, an assistant professor of communication at the College of Charleston who, along with Phillips, co-authored the book The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Blanket irony, which Milner describes as "watching something from a distance and being able to detach yourself from its reality and its depth and its nuance,” was hard to break—and by the time many journalists realized the non-ironic, non-satirical truth about what was happening, the damage had already been done. Where Does the Media Go From Here? The study is careful not to lay blame place at the feet of individual reporters, instead seeking to address structural flaws in the way many outlets think about extremism and extremists. In doing so, “The Oxygen of Amplification” lays out several criteria for determining newsworthiness, such as: Has a given meme been shared beyond just the members of the group that created it? If not, Phillips writes, “all reporting will do is provide oxygen, increasing the likelihood that it will reach the tipping point.” In the case of the so-called alt right as a whole, that’s exactly what’s happened: in amplifying alt-right ideology even in cases where it wasn’t necessarily newsworthy, journalists made it newsworthy. But by keeping that tipping point calculus in mind going forward, journalists can help avoid the continuation of a vicious cycle. The report’s recommendations also include considering a story’s potential social benefit and considering the harm that reporting the story might cause. A common theme is a simple call for self-awareness: “An enormous first step in the issue is acknowledging that the system is being gamed, and individual reporters reflecting on the fact that they’re part of that system being gamed,” says Phillips. Unfortunately, that might be easier said than done, especially as long as ad-supported journalism is the status quo. (WIRED is supported in part by ad revenue, and in part by subscriptions.) A real reckoning with journalism’s complicity in amplifying far-right messaging would require a fundamental shift in editorial strategy in many newsrooms. Many of Phillips’s recommendations reflect the basic principles of good journalism, but those can also be at odds with the realities of an industry that emphasizes speed and traffic. "It’s all of these other pressures, like time and competition and lack of expertise within an area, that can introduce problems into the content that we produce." —Kathleen Bartzen Culver, University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics, points to one of Phillips’s recommendations—that reporters make an effort to talk with people “who have direct, embodied experience with the interpersonal, professional, and/or physical implications of a given issue”—as an example of something that of course most journalists would aim to do, but that is not always feasible, given time pressures. “I don’t really know any journalists who get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Today I’m going to be unethical,’” Culver says. “It’s all of these other pressures, like time and competition and lack of expertise within an area, that can introduce problems into the content that we produce. But just because we have these pressures doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have conversations like this.” Phillips’s report also describes the “queasiness” felt by reporters who are conscious of the fact that their writing is feeding directly into far-right extremists’ agendas—but who are also rewarded for their coverage. As Roisin Kiberd, a freelance writer for Motherboard, told Phillips: “We’re all damned, because we all profit off it. Even if we don’t make money off it, we tweet and we get followers from it.” Between pressure to build a personal brand, meet quotas, and compete with other publications, the report argues, it is not easy for every writer to take an eminently thoughtful and nuanced approach to the stories they’re assigned, or to reject an assignment outright due to concerns about amplification. “Capitalism does not align with many of those recommendations,” admits Phillips. “If an organization is dependent on advertising revenue, and if these best practices are going to—and they would—result in less advertising revenue, then publishers would have to be willing to take a considerable financial hit to make the appropriate changes to minimize the spread of mis- and disinformation. The bottom line is that people have to be willing to sacrifice the bottom line.” And if they don’t? Phillips doesn’t sugarcoat what’s at stake: “We lose truth, and democracy becomes more untenable.”

Future Journalism

The next big thing in journalism might be algorithm reporters BY REN LAFORME · MARCH 15, 2018 News organizations in the near future may include special-ops teams of investigative reporters who scrutinize algorithms, regularly launch large ephemeral projects to highlight key events, and — thanks to loosened FCC rules under chairman Ajit Pai — find new ownership under a handful of consolidating megacorporations. Those are a few of the issues highlighted in the Future Today Institute’s 11th annual Tech Trends Report, released this morning at SXSW. The Future Today Institute specifically identified 14 trends for news media that have a high degree of certainty and a possible immediate impact. The report urges news organizations to “act now” on these trends. The Future Today Institute was founded by futurist Amy Webb, well known in the journalism industry for her always fun, sometimes dour tech trend presentations at the annual Online News Association conference. Though Webb’s predictions can read as prognostic poppycock, her track record strongly suggests otherwise. Related Training The Drone Journalism School Webinar WEBINAR Innovation 2017: The Cutting Edge in Finding New Digital Audience and Revenue WEBINAR The “act now” trends include: Computational Journalism. Computer-assisted reporting isn’t exactly a new idea (it’s been on FTI’s list for four years and a fixture in newsrooms for decades), but the report suggests “increased demand” for reporters with these skill sets in the immediate future. I-Teams For Algorithms and Data. As algorithms and datasets govern the daily lives of more and more people through government, law enforcement, schools and finance, news organizations need the expertise to analyze them for bias and understanding. Voice Interfaces For News and Books. Alexa and similar devices are now in millions of homes throughout the world. Journalists have a tremendous opportunity to interpret natural human language to offer thoughtful and nuanced answers to complicated questions that users ask of them. Crowdlearning. There are valuable questions hidden in the passive information users provide. Think Google searches, location data and public health-related records. Newsrooms have already started to use this information to inform stories, like when Google Trends revealed residents of the United Kingdom were searching "What is the EU?" in the days after passing Brexit. Digital Frailty. The internet swallows information faster than we can archive it. Any journalist who has published information online knows the feeling of losing archives after a website update or backend failure. What obligation do news organizations have to protect feeble online data? Radical Transparency. Transparency is the new byline. As reporting becomes more complex (think data analysis, algorithms and other complex tools), news organizations have a duty to reveal how they reached their conclusions. Limited-Edition News Products. Temporary podcasts, newsletters, chatbots and text message flurries about topics like weather events, big sports games or elections are increasingly common. They also provide interesting opportunities for revenue, audience engagement and data collection. One-To-Few Publishing. While the industry pushes to scale larger in some areas, niche publications might make more sense. Newsrooms have learned to value loyalty over “drive-by clicks.” Fewer audiences are more “sticky” than those who follow a niche topic. Notification Layers. Once a novelty, notifications now litter the lock screens of devices everywhere. News organizations need to find ways to limit user frustration and stand out among the noise. Transparency in Metrics. We have a lot of problems with analytics data. For one, it’s 2018 and some newsrooms still don’t allow reporters to see data. For another, there’s increasing evidence that numbers from various organizations don’t match up and may not even measure what they purport to be measuring. It’s time for more transparency on all sides of this conversation. Offline Is The New Online. Companies like Apple and Google have configured tools to work in areas without access to data. News organizations that provide similar “offline” experiences are better serving audiences, especially those in rural areas and parts of the world without reliable access to data services. Audio Search Engines. Podcasts have emerged as a major vehicle for news content in the years since “Serial” and others brought them into the mainstream. The problem? Audio historically hasn’t been searchable. A handful of organizations are working to solve that. Video. FTI speculates about three video trends: connected TVs, decentralizing the web and streaming social video. Smart TVs with built-in streaming services will disrupt local broadcast stations and long-form cable news. A decentralized web, where computers can more easily talk to each other, may render tools like Skype irrelevant. And now that just about every major social network offers a streaming video tool, the broadcasting industry is no longer limited by special licenses and is technically leveled. Media Consolidation. Organizations like Sinclair, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter and Amazon have made big splashes in media at the same time traditional organizations shrank. Loosened FCC restrictions and growing stress on media organizations will likely only serve to hasten this trend. The report notes that a handful of other trends, those with a high degree of certainty but with longer-term impact, should “inform strategy.” They include: Natural Language Generation for Reading Levels. Computers will automatically write stories and generate disparate versions for different audiences. Computational Photography. Tools like the new iPhone camera, which blends optical and digital image processing techniques, will become more ubiquitous. Journalism as a Service (JaaS). Rather than reporting solely for our own publications, journalists deliver content that can be used by third parties. Real-Time Fact Checking. Speech recognition and finely tuned algorithms are helping fact-checkers correct falsehoods almost as soon as they’re uttered. Synthetic Datasets. Think lorem ipsum but for datasets. These fill in for real information, allowing researchers to hone algorithms and computer models while protecting privacy. New Video and Audio Story Formats. Mixed reality, voice interfaces and other technologies are providing new experiences and changing how audiences interact with information. Tweaks To Social Network Algorithms. Social networks are taking big steps to correct issues with misinformation and solve their misuse across the globe. The First Amendment in a Digital Age. How do we deal with hate speech and threats online? The issue is only going to get more complicated. Some countries are also having complicated conversations about misinformation and free speech laws. A full version of the report contains 235 trends among 20 industries and is available here. Profile picture for user Ren LaForme Ren LaForme itsren Ren LaForme is the Digital Tools Reporter for Poynter.org. He runs Try This! — Tools for Journalism, which is an effort to find, share and provide training around the best digital tools for journalists.

For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

From the New York Times: For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.  Farhad Manjoo STATE OF THE ART MARCH 7, 2018 Continue reading the main story I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through. But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting. There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by propaganda bots — that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim circulated by many news outlets (including The New York Times) as well as by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn’t true. Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I’ve never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me. Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes — and the more malicious misdirection — that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day. This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist. I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed. It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins. Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father. Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment. We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda. With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we’re entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an “information apocalypse.” And we’re all looking to the government and to Facebook for a fix. But don’t you and I also have a part to play? Getting news only from print newspapers may be extreme and probably not for everyone. But the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them. I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social. Get news. I know what you’re thinking: Listening to a Times writer extol the virtues of print is like taking breakfast suggestions from Count Chocula. You may also wonder if I am preaching to the choir; doesn’t everyone reading this story already appreciate print? Probably not. The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source. I’m nearly 40, but I’m no different. Though I have closely followed the news since I was a kid, I always liked my news on a screen, available at the touch of a button. Even with this experiment, I found much to hate about print. The pages are too big, the type too small, the ink too messy, and compared with a smartphone, a newspaper is more of a hassle to consult on the go. Print also presents a narrower mix of ideas than you find online. You can’t get BuzzFeed or Complex or Slate in print. In California, you can’t even get The Washington Post in print. And print is expensive. Outside New York, after introductory discounts, seven-day home delivery of The Times will set you back $81 a month. In a year, that’s about the price of Apple’s best iPhone. What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it — and you realize how much of what you get online isn’t quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it. Photo  I noticed this first with the deal Democrats made to end the government shutdown late in January. On the Jan. 23 front pages, the deal was presented straight: “Shutdown Ends, Setting Up Clash Over ‘Dreamers,’” ran The Times’s headline on the news story, which appeared alongside an analysis piece that presented the political calculations surrounding the deal. Many of the opinions in that analysis could be found on Twitter and Facebook. What was different was the emphasis. Online, commentary preceded facts. If you were following the shutdown on social networks, you most likely would have seen lots of politicians and pundits taking stock of the deal before seeing details of the actual news. This is common online. On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view. There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news. Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation. Not too quickly. It’s been clear that breaking news has been broken since at least 2013, when a wild week of conspiracy theories followed the Boston Marathon bombing. As I argued then, technology had caused the break. Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap. It has only gotten worse. As news organizations evolved to a digital landscape dominated by apps and social platforms, they felt more pressure to push news out faster. Now, after something breaks, we’re all buzzed with the alert, often before most of the facts are in. So you’re driven online not just to find out what happened, but really to figure it out. This was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me. Now I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie. Another surprise was a sensation of time slowing down. One weird aspect of the past few years is how a “tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory,” as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there’s still a lot of news — but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible rather than a blur of headlines lost on a phone’s lock screen. You don’t need to read a print newspaper to get this; you can create your own news ritual by looking at a news app once a day, or reading morning newsletters like those from Axios, or listening to a daily news podcast. What’s important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones. And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world. They are also unnecessary. If something really big happens, you will find out. Avoid social. This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad. Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today — and every one we will battle tomorrow — is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news. You don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off. Email: farhad.manjoo@nytimes.com; Twitter: @fmanjoo. Farhad Manjoo will be taking a leave of absence from the column to write a book. He will return in June. A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2018, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Yesterday’s News Today: Deep, Informed, Accurate and Inky. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

The W's and the H's

Have You Tipped a Chinese Journalist Today?

Have you tipped a Chinese journalist today? A PR professional explains why companies in China do FEATURED Good media coverage is often bought in China. What’s the reason behind this practice, and how is it affecting the media industry? 15 hours agoBy Yajun ZhangYajun Zhang Today is Journalists’ Day in China, a holiday established by the Chinese State Council in 2000. As a Beijing-based reporter who worked for a foreign media company for four years before turning to the “dark side” of PR, I’ve seen the good and the bad of both Chinese and international media. Now, as an industry outsider, it’s interesting to look at the different ways in which Chinese companies engage with Chinese vs. foreign reporters. I’m a communication specialist who focuses on helping Chinese companies go abroad, so part of my job entails receiving weird requests from clients. Once, a company without any international exposure came to me and asked my firm to guarantee it a cover story in TIME magazine about its CEO. Another company, which was scandal ridden, realized that Google search results about it were turning up very negative, so it asked us to clear up its reputation…immediately. Undoubtedly, these requests were due to their experiences dealing with Chinese media. Money can solve many problems. It’s not quite so easy in the West. While delivering the bad news to my potential clients, I also provided a 30-minute training on the differences between Chinese and international media. It is not fair to generalize and say all media outlets are one thing or another. I want to clarify that the Chinese media I refer to here are mostly those that do business reporting. Here is a common rule for dealing with Chinese media: Connections through money and relationships, or guanxi (关系 guānxi), can play crucial roles in the outcome of coverage. For example, when companies launch a product campaign, part of their budget will be dedicated to giving “red envelopes” (stuffed with money) for the reporters who show up. On average, it’ll be about 500 yuan ($80) to 1,000 yuan ($150) per person, depending on seniority. Working for an American newspaper for four years, I was always the one who begged people to talk to us, so you can imagine how shocked I was when — after a month in the PR industry — I received a phone call from a Shanghai industry reporter criticizing me for not preparing red envelopes for a recent event for him. Meanwhile, he promised that if I prepared the envelopes for all of his reporter buddies, he could guarantee coverage from at least 10 outlets. I was stunned. But after befriending some local reporters, I gradually came to understand the reason for this weird practice. The simple reason is because Chinese reporters’ base salary is very low. An entry-level journalist might make only 5,000 to 8,000 yuan (about $850 to $120) per month. For a reporter with 10 years’ experience, that number might be 15,000 to 20,000 yuan (about $2,500 to $3,100), depending on the publication. Imagine living in Beijing and Shanghai, where the average price of property is 80,000 to 100,000 yuan ($12,000 to $15,000) per square meter. Working as a reporter for a decade, your annual salary is only enough to buy two-and-a-half square meters. Meanwhile, you need to give your child a decent education. You need to take taxis to interview sites. You need to dress like a professional on a vastly higher pay scale, as you’ll need to meet with senior executives from Chinese or multinational companies. It adds up. If reporters want to survive, they need to find other ways. It’s like bartenders and servers in the U.S. — since your salary is low, you learn to rely on tips to supplement your take-home. PR companies understand this, so we “tip” them. I am not defending the practice, just trying to provide some background. Reporters are also restricted by the system they work in. Like their peers in the U.S., many Chinese media outlets face fierce competition for advertisement revenue from social media and online platforms. To survive, companies have turned to easy ways to make money: leveraging their content. Editors complain about being responsible for revenue generation, as they are in the content production department, but there’s no way around it. Some media companies even have an internal PR department devoted to helping clients (other companies) build a “good” reputation. In China, there is little if any firewall between the editorial desk and the business side of the publication. When barriers between sales and editorial become permeable, it erodes many fundamental ethical standards of journalism, including accountability and objectivity. In the short term, the publication can make some quick money, but in the long run, this kind of practice sabotages the reputation of the whole industry. Unfortunately, as in many industries in China, decision-makers are often shortsighted. As a result, regular people are highly skeptical of all media coverage. When people read a newspaper, they often can’t tell if it is real coverage or a puff piece (“soft article,” i.e., 软文 ruǎnwén) bought by a company. Reforming this system means changing the structural base of the media industry in China. This will not be easy. As for companies, nowadays they can name a price for every task when dealing with the media, including publishing articles, deleting negative coverage, or buying publicity. Through purchasing ads, giving gifts, sponsorships, or even through mergers and acquisitions, companies can establish “good” relationships and build alliances with reporters and their organizations. That said, throwing money at a PR problem won’t always work. Companies know that competition to get the attention of big and reputable publications is fierce. Fortunately for the public, there are Chinese journalists out there, especially those representing major publications, who care about their reputation and still care deeply about journalistic credibility. Caixin is one of a few examples of a company doing good journalism in China. Its reporters don’t take red envelopes, and their investigative reporting is considered some of the best in the country. Their reputation is that of idealists, even though the reporters’ salaries are on the low end. I’m sure Caixin is not perfect, but I’ve always felt that it behaves as a media outlet should. Of course, in the U.S., its reporters would simply be practicing basic ethics and doing what’s expected of them. But the reason we heap so much praise on Caixin is because, in China, there are so few like it. By Yajun Zhang Yajun is a recovering journalist and current communications professional. Growing up in China put her front and center to one of the greatest transformations in history. Living in France for a couple of years taught her how to appreciate the good life. Check out the podcast she co-hosts, Wo Men Podcast.

×From the US: The Media New Victims in the 'Billionaire War on Journalism' (newsweek.com) 195 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 05, 2017 @12:06PM from the blogs-vs-billionaires dept. Newsweek offers a new reminder that internet journalism can vanish in a corporate shutdown or be "sued out of existence" -- so it certainly isn't permanent. Writers at the local New York City news sites DNAinfo and Gothamist -- as well as Gothamist's network of city-specific sister sites, such as LAist and DCist -- learned this chilling lesson on Thursday, when billionaire Joe Ricketts abruptly shut down the publications and fired their employees. The decision has been widely regarded as a form of retaliation in response to the newsroom's vote last week to unionize with the Writers Guild of America, East. Worse, for a full 20 hours after the news broke, Gothamist.com and DNAinfo.com effectively didn't exist: Any link to the sites showed only Ricketts's statement about his decision, which claims the business was not profitable enough to support the journalism... The larger tragedy is a nationwide death of local news. Alt-weeklies are flailing as ad revenue dries up. The Village Voice, a legendary New York paper, published its final print issue in September. Houston Press just laid off its staff and ended its print edition this week. Countless stories won't be covered, because the journalistic institutions to tell them no longer exist. Who benefits from DNAinfo being shuttered? Billionaires. Shady landlords. Anyone DNAinfo reported critically on over the years. Who loses? Anyone who lives in the neighborhoods DNAinfo and Gothamist helped cover.

Here is a wonderful essay about a movies about one of the great journalists, from the New Yorker:Cultural Comment The Most Revealing Moment in the New Joan Didion Documentary By Rebecca Mead October 27, 2017 Joan Didion pictured with John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003, and their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who died a year and a half later. Photograph by Julian Wasser / Netflix About a third of the way through “The Center Will Not Hold,” Griffin Dunne’s intimate, affectionate, and partial portrait of his aunt Joan Didion, which premières on Netflix this week, a riveting moment occurs. Dunne, an actor, producer, and director—and the son of Didion’s brother-in-law, the late Dominick Dunne—is questioning Didion about “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her essay describing the hippie scene of Haight-Ashbury in 1967. That essay consisted of a fragmentary rendering of a dysfunctional social world that had been improvised by vulnerable children and predatory grownups, framed by Didion’s elegiac, magisterial summation of a civilization gone off its rails: “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.” It was the work for which Didion was best known and most esteemed in the many decades of literary production that preceded “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the memoir of marriage and bereavement that, when it was published, in 2005, granted her a vast, popular success. In one of several genial interviews, Dunne asks Didion about an indelible scene toward the end of her Haight-Ashbury essay—which, as any student who has ever taken a course in literary nonfiction knows, culminates with the writer’s encounter with a five-year-old girl, Susan, whose mother has given her LSD. Didion finds Susan sitting on a living-room floor, reading a comic book and dressed in a peacoat. “She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick,” Didion writes. Dunne asks Didion what it was like, as a journalist, to be faced with a small child who was tripping. Didion, who is sitting on the couch in her living room, dressed in a gray cashmere sweater with a fine gold chain around her neck and fine gold hair framing her face, begins. “Well, it was . . .” She pauses, casts her eyes down, thinking, blinking, and a viewer mentally answers the question on her behalf: Well, it was appalling. I wanted to call an ambulance. I wanted to call the police. I wanted to help. I wanted to weep. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get home to my own two-year-old daughter, and protect her from the present and the future. After seven long seconds, Didion raises her chin and meets Dunne’s eye. “Let me tell you, it was gold,” she says. The ghost of a smile creeps across her face, and her eyes gleam. “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” This, too, is gold, as Dunne recognizes. (No doubt Didion, who seems never to have faltered in the command of her own image-making, recognizes it, too.) The exchange shows Didion offering a distillation of her art, and shows her mastery of the journalist’s necessary mental and emotional bifurcation. To be a reporter requires a perpetual straddle between empathy and detachment, and Didion’s refinement of that capacity is part of what has long made her a role model—to use that unfortunate but necessary phrase—especially to female writers of slight build, neurasthenic temperament, and literary aspiration. Without empathy, it would be impossible to persuade a skeptical, sometimes strung-out member of the counterculture to lead you to your quarry. (In the essay, Didion makes it clear that she has specifically sought in her reporting to find hippiedom’s youngest enrollees.) But without detachment, how would you ever have the stomach to write anything at all? Wouldn’t you have your hands full with wanting to save the world, or save the child, rather than coolly describing her? This self-division is a skill that every journalist must cultivate, and most of us who practice the trade can manage it to a greater or lesser extent. Many reporters would argue, with justice, that maintaining a professional detachment is their way of saving the world, or at least ameliorating it. Writing about the kindergartener on hallucinogens raises a wider consciousness that we are living in a world in which kindergarteners are partaking of hallucinogens. Fair enough. But what makes Didion’s words to Dunne so compelling is that she offers no high-minded defense of her motivation, beyond that of writing the best story she can write. What we see, instead, is the raw thrill that journalism can deliver to its practitioner—the jolt of adrenaline that one experiences when just the right scene is witnessed, or just the right quote is captured, or just the right metaphor is delivered to the fingertips on the keyboard by whichever of the nine muses oversees the minor art of words written on deadline for money. “The Center Will Not Hold” is worth watching for that moment alone. But the movie, which was produced by Didion’s grandniece (and Griffin’s cousin) Annabelle Dunne, offers many other pleasures and insights, too. The camera roves the books on Didion’s shelves—Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, Doris Lessing, Dante, Beatrix Potter—and shows her puttering in her kitchen, where there is a television on the counter, like people used to have before the news came on their phones. There are the family photographs that show Didion and members of the Dunne family in California, where she spent her girlhood and a significant chunk of her adulthood, and there are family memories that few potential interviewers could offer. In one early moment, Dunne tells Didion that he remembers vividly their first meeting, at a family gathering when he was five years old. He had been wearing a tight, short bathing suit, he recalled, and had been mortified when John Gregory Dunne, his uncle and Didion’s husband, pointed out that one testicle had escaped its confines. “You were the only one that didn’t laugh,” Dunne tells Didion, who sits next to him, beaming. “I always loved you for that.” Didion’s own memories are illuminating, too. She describes one domestic routine of her marriage: John would rise in the morning, build a fire, make breakfast for their young daughter, Quintana, and take her to school. “Then I would get up, have a Coca-Cola, and start work,” Didion says. It is an instructive if not necessarily exemplary solution to the writer-mother’s perennial challenge of combining creative work with being a parent. There are interviews with Didion’s friends, like David Hare, who directed Didion’s dramatization of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the book written immediately after the sudden death of John Gregory Dunne, who keeled over from a heart attack one winter evening in 2003, sitting down to dinner. Hare used the opportunity, he tells Dunne, to insist that Didion eat, her already waifish frame having dwindled still further in widowhood. One surprise that “The Center Will Not Hold” provides is the disparity between Didion’s physical fragility—Dunne’s camera lingers on her hands, gnarled and expressive, and her emaciated arms, which look as if they have been flayed for an anatomist’s dissection—and her voice, which is firm and strong. A formidable sound emanates from this delicate instrument. The film is a model of empathetic reporting: by its end, the viewer’s stand-in is President Obama, who, after bestowing upon Didion the National Medal of Arts, in 2013, holds her antique hands with a carefully calibrated balance of respect and tenderness. Where Dunne’s film disappoints—where it is bound to disappoint—is in its unwillingness to couple its empathy with the opposite necessary journalistic quality, that of detachment. The movie’s final third is concerned with the losses that have characterized the last decade and a half of Didion’s long life. (She is eighty-two.) Having endured the death of her husband, Didion had to contend with the compounded unimaginable a year and a half later, when Quintana died, at thirty-nine, from pancreatitis, having fallen gravely ill only days before her father’s death. Dunne touches on the problems by which Quintana was apparently plagued: Didion speaks of her daughter drinking too much, and confesses that she may have erred in focussing upon Quintana’s happy nature, rather than scrutinizing her daughter’s darker inclinations. But when it comes to exploring the complex range of emotions that any parent might feel after a child’s death—the guilt, the second-guessing, the sense of having overlooked something crucial—Dunne treads lightly. As he said in a recent interview, these were his losses, too—“If I was a more dispassionate, regular documentarian, that would be questions on the clipboard”—and his subject was his beloved relative, one who had entrusted him with her story after allowing no others to approach. Dunne’s empathy prevents him from looking too hard, or too long. “This was always going to be a love letter,” he told the Times. In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion’s encounter with Susan, the acid-dropping five-year-old, extends over half a page. Didion doesn’t just see the child and move on—rather, she interviews her. Susan tells Didion that she recently had the measles, that she wants to get a bike, that she likes Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and that what she would most like to do is go to the beach. Susan also confides that, for the past year, her mother has given her peyote and acid. “She describes it as getting stoned,” Didion writes. On hearing this, Didion tries to ask a follow-up question: do any of Susan’s classmates also get stoned? “But I falter at the key words,” she writes. The encounter is journalistic gold, but it is also human dross. It is an unspeakable moment; it is a story that must be told. In “The Center Will Not Hold,” Griffin Dunne walks in on the girl on the carpet reading a comic book and licking her lips, and he looks away. For the most human and decent of reasons, he flinches from probing the story. Most of us would; most of us do. Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch.”Read more »

Digital Jouralism

Great article on digital journalism: Storybench About Tutorials Articles Reinventing TV For Educators Newsletter Search for: What we learned from three years of interviews with data journalists, web developers and interactive editors at leading digital newsrooms May 26, 2017 Jeff Howe, Aleszu Bajak, Dina Kraft, and John Wihbey Northeastern Share on FacebookShare on Google+Tweet about this on TwitterPin on PinterestShare on LinkedInEmail this to someone Newsrooms don’t follow a standard playbook. They scramble, they adapt, they make mistakes. But are there some go-to tools and best practices worth adopting, whether you’re a data reporter, newsroom manager, or journalism educator? Over the last three years, Storybench, a website from Northeastern University’s School of Journalism’s Media Innovation graduate program, has interviewed 72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers from around the world to provide an “under the hood” look at the ingredients and best practices that go into today’s most compelling digital storytelling projects. There are a bunch of lessons we’ve learned through our interviews – published today in this working paper – that might help chart the way forward, especially for journalism schools. They boil down to three key areas of emphasis: 1) highly networked, team-based collaboration; 2) an ethos of open-source sharing, both within and between newsrooms; 3) and mobile-driven story presentation. As professors at Northeastern, we think it’s worth matching up newsroom needs and emerging practices with educational goals. Certainly, creating modular recipes for the journalism classroom has helped us immensely and we continue to use them in our courses. We hope you will, too. To borrow some terminology from the software movement, it may be worth downloading industry best practices and parsing top digital journalism case studies in the classroom. Download [72.20 KB] The full spreadsheet of interviews can be viewed here. Below, a condensed version of our working paper: Collaborative, Open, Mobile: A Thematic Exploration of Best Practices at the Forefront of Digital Journalism Beset by secular market pressures and presented with a dizzying array of new technologies for news-gathering, publishing and distribution, news media outlets have undergone a sustained period of upheaval. The tools, techniques and approaches involved in data journalism and digital storytelling remain diverse and continue to evolve, and they are often highly specific to the particular journalistic outlet, story or task involved. One of the substantial challenges, and indeed barriers to entry, for professionals, teachers, and students is trying to understand what is important to know in order to advance their skills in a targeted way. Simply put, the field can seem overwhelming in the multiplicity of options, running from different workflow processes to programming languages and applications. There remains a need, therefore, to update and consolidate knowledge of industry patterns as the field evolves and a rough consensus forms around certain procedures and takes hold across a range of newsrooms and affiliated media institutions. As Katherine Fink and CW Anderson noted in their 2014 report “Data Journalism in the United States: Beyond the Usual Suspects,” certain “enabling factors” – the size and resources of news organizations, for example, as well as constraints such as the lack of time, funding, and tools – can influence and shape the practices and operating principles of, for example, data journalists. The process of gathering meaningful data, analyzing it, then developing this output into a compelling editorial product requires extensive labor resources and specialized, often scarce, intellectual capital. Such resource demands and constraints are indeed factors across all areas of digital journalism practice. All this presents a challenge to anyone attempting to generalize a set of emergent “best practices.” However, our survey of current news practices revealed several developments that are lowering the barrier to entry faced by smaller outlets. First, important conferences such as those run by Investigative Reporters & Editors, National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) and SRCCON continue to make it easier for journalists to map out and learn certain fundamental skills. The propagation of this knowledge is creating a positive feedback loop that further accelerates the dissemination of specialized skills and knowledge. Second, an increased adherence to “open source” norms and practices means that both the tools and the knowledge required to produce high-quality digital journalism are freely available. Finally, even the commercial software and hardware required have seen dramatic declines in price. A review of the relevant literature reveals a range of valuable efforts to identify and categorize the tools, platforms and practices that will persist after the digital dust settles. However, current newsroom routines and workflows at the intersection of data-oriented reporting and design/visualization – how stories are “built,” so to speak, from beginning to end – merit more empirical study. Methods Conducted from 2014 to 2017, the interviews corresponded with the release of new journalism projects, graphics, stories, news apps or other media products that came to the attention of the Storybench editors as particularly intriguing or impressive efforts to advance digital and data-driven storytelling. The aim was to unpack the techniques, thinking and applications behind the news products in question. The interviews were intended both as “how-tos” and as case studies in the practice of contemporary digital journalism, graphics and interactives; they sought to reveal the technical dimensions of the projects in question while also probing at the makers’ philosophies behind the production. The newsrooms surveyed included: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Vox, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Bloomberg News, The Boston Globe, PBS NewsHour, Quartz, Berliner Morgenpost, Seattle Times, Al Jazeera, Center for Public Integrity, Mother Jones, The Texas Tribune, the Associated Press, WBEZ, WNYC, WBUR, Monomagazine, Localore, Pictoline, Dadaviz, Corriere della Serra, Portland Press Heraldand The Guardian. Reviewing these interviews in aggregate, we coded recurring areas of emphasis as they related to best practices in digital publishing, such as: Common obstacles overcome (e.g., how to make responsive charts in JavaScript). Techniques learned, adopted and disseminated to others passed on (e.g., Juicer for pulling in social media feeds). Digital tools and frameworks that are being adopted (e.g., the stylesheet language SASS). Makeup of successful interdepartmental collaborations (e.g., a veteran editor working with a digital graphic designer). We then clustered these recurring themes into some broad categories with the idea of providing a general guide to what is actually going on in newsrooms at the present moment. Of course, the results are derived from a non-probability sample of industry practice. But by studying the practices and philosophies of some leading practitioners, we can begin to arrive at some loosely defined, but nevertheless discernible categories of routines and procedures that suggest important shifts in professional norms. Results Based on the interviews analyzed, three recurring themes emerged: Collaborative, open and mobile. Of course, not all of the issues and areas of concern surfaced in any given interview, but the sample was large enough to identify common patterns, which are explicated in the following sections. Collaborative, team-based story-building There is a legend in journalism that the key to digital success is hiring a newsroom unicorn: an individual with a multifaceted skillset who is equally exceptional at reporting, programming, shooting video and designing graphics. In practice, this model is seldom a reality; a far more collaborative and distributed workflow characterized the digital projects featured in the 72 Storybench interviews studied for this paper. There is a legend in journalism that the key to digital success is hiring a newsroom unicorn. In practice, this model is seldom a reality. Successful digital newsrooms employ talented people with diverse skillsets and, perhaps more importantly, construct collaborative environments in which these players can work together as a team. The traditional newsroom Balkanized production into departments – design, photo, research, city, sports, classes – and organized the prevailing workflow according to Taylorist principles in which ideas and always moved in one direction on a kind of information assembly line. By contrast, the successful digital newsrooms revealed in our Storybench survey allow nimble, multifaceted teams to self-organize, coming together organically to produce an editorial product, then gathering up into new configurations according to the dynamic needs presented by both world events and editorial discretion. There is generally an identified “project lead” to coordinate the process, but the creative drive relies on practices borrowed from disciplines like design: brainstorming, human-centered design, iteration, collaboration, rapid prototyping, user testing and an open process that doesn’t shut out ideas or personnel. One example is The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize finalist “Chasing Bayla,” which had a team comprising a reporter, an editor, a photo editor, a video editor and a developer in addition to a project manager with enough fluency to communicate effectively with all teammates to leverage the best each medium had to contribute. Laura Amico, Chasing Bayla’s project lead, is fond of using a mission statement to organize her team: “That way the reporter and the developer can trust one another because they have the same mission even though they ‘speak’ different languages.” The Wall Street Journal’s “How Trump Happened,” which visualized large amounts of polling data and involved a politics editor, graphics editor and a news app developer, and The Center for Public Integrity’s “Unequal Risk,” where editors, reporters and coders worked together to visualize government data and in-depth interviews on workplace chemicals and cancer risk, demonstrate these project management practices and are examples of multidisciplinary teams at work. These patterns suggest that educators, students and professionals looking to gain skills and experience in data, design, visualization and interactive journalism production would be well served to consider the inextricably social nature of the workflow. They might strongly identify positions in the chain of what might be called “networked story-building” where they want to contribute. The new open-source ethos Successful digital newsrooms allow nimble, multifaceted teams to self-organize, coming together organically to produce an editorial product. The data journalists, web developers and interactive graphics editors currently employed in the world’s leading digital newsrooms tend to subscribe to an altruistic ethos not unlike the one shared by the open-source software movement. Although many times these journalistic outlets find themselves competing for the same story, the tools and knowledge required for reporting infrastructure, web development and newsroom workflow tend to be shared across organizations. The wheel does not have to reinvented every time. One open-sourced census map, for example, can help the next newsroom build a better one. As Peter Aldhous, a data journalist at BuzzFeed News told Storybench: “We can stand on the shoulders of great developers and programmers. That’s a really nice thing about opensource tools.” As much as this spirit enables information sharing between newsrooms, it also allows individual journalists like Aldhous to set up a code base where upon they can layer new modifications to produce multiple stories and iterations without starting from scratch. At conferences such as those held by NICAR and SRCCON, specialized workshops held around the world, and websites such as Source, from the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, Nieman Journalism Lab and Storybench, leading digital journalists come together and openly share best practices, step-by-step instructions for building news projects and freely available repositories of the latest tools used to build digital storytelling projects, news apps and newsroom tools. Github, an online repository system for software and web code, has revolutionized the way these people share knowledge and collaborate, in spite of the rivalries their newsrooms may have had. The altruistic and collaborative spirit inherent in this open-source digital journalism community is exemplified in some ways by the very willingness of interviewees to share code and tools with Storybench, which serves as a conduit and forum for connecting with the wider community. Seattle Times’ Oso landslide interactive Examples include the sharing of code from The Guardian’s real-time interactive on primary election results, the Wall Street Journal’s “The Unraveling of Tom Hayes,” and the Seattle Times’ Oso landslide interactive. Among the most revealing and characteristic examples of newsroom generosity on Storybench have been the tutorials voluntarily written by the Wall Street Journal’s Roger Kenny on three-dimensional data visualization and by George LeVines on branding and installing Chartbuilder, an open-source graphing tool itself. One shining example of open-sourced code libraries and collaboration between newsrooms is the sharing and iterations of data-driven documents, or D3, which not only visualize data, but can also analyze and manipulate it. D3 is one of the most versatile script libraries employed by newsrooms. Unlike visualization software like Tableau, D3 is transparent and accessible through a web browser’s document object model (DOM), allowing for simple manipulation, modification and debugging. Newsroom designers and developers are sharing D3 code and best practices. “A little D3 goes a long way,” Jeremy Scott Diamond, a developer with Bloomberg News, told Storybench editors, extolling the versatility of the JavaScript library. Coupled with scalable vector graphics, or SVG, digital newsrooms have made D3 the gold standard for visualizing linear, non-linear and multi-dimensional data using hundreds of D3 visualization packages. D3’s open-source nature has allowed journalists, developers, designers and researchers to contribute code and expand the number of packages available. (See D3js.org for examples.) Other JavaScript visualization libraries used in newsrooms include Highcharts, Leaflet, Sigma, NVD3 and Gephi. “We can stand on the shoulders of great developers and programmers. That’s a really nice thing about opensource tools.” – Buzzfeed News’s Peter Aldhous While many programming languages tend to become obsolete in the space of a few years, for students and journalists wanting to become adept at custom data visualization in the digital newsroom, D3 has evolved into a kind of gold standard. There are of course running discussions about whether or not all journalists should learn to code. Setting aside the desirability or need for uniform training, it is certainly useful to know that training in JavaScript libraries, specifically D3, will serve journalists who want to visualize data for their stories well into the future. Mobile-focused ideation A final recurring theme, and one that likely portends the future in this space, is the impact of mobile devices at a level more fundamental than just customization and re-purposing of news content. Design-centered thinking is inherent in mobile-centered design. As news audiences are shifting to mobile devices, so too are design standards. In fact, the Pew Research Center’s “State of the News Media 2016” report surveyed 40 digital-native news sites and found that for 38 of them, more visitors came from mobile devices than from desktops. With more readers accessing news sites from tablets and cellphones, mobile-focused and responsive design have become a priority in the digital newsroom. Likewise, collaboration between newsroom developers and the editorial department, where mobile design is considered in tandem with coverage, is beginning to flourish. Storybench interviews have revealed several instances where mobile design frames the journalistic process itself. “Mobile was the driving idea behind [the story],” said New York Times designer Matt Ruby, who helped plan – and shared editorial control over – reporter Emily Reub’s mobile-first, flipbook-style article on New York City’s tapwater. Many other media producers have also described how the philosophy of “mobile-first” is redefining the production of journalism, and reshaping the way news producers think about stories. This represents a new and important phase in the industry’s development and one that scholars have yet to analyze fully. For example, Oscar Westlund’s “Model of Journalism” in a mobile context puts forward a multidimensional schema, running from repurposing to customization and humans to technology. To this we might add the dimension of ideation, a further iteration of mobile news practice whereby stories are conceived of and executed as what might be called “mobile native.” There has been a fair amount of attention to what has been called “mojo,” or mobile journalism, news practices, but this new conceptual turn in newsrooms demands more research, particularly relating to how new functionality and affordances are driving the editorial process in a more fundamental way. The philosophy of “mobile-first” is redefining the production of journalism, and reshaping the way news producers think about stories. It is worth noting here that, despite worries that mobile will diminish the range of stories, design constraints may actually represent strengths for journalism, whereby screen size, touch and swipe functions, faster load times and improved browser technology can be leveraged to frame digital storytelling in refreshing new ways. Newsrooms are employing nimble web design frameworks, lightweight “minified” code libraries, and versatile design markup languages like CSS and SASS to more effectively display stories on mobile. Conclusions Journalism in the digital age has always presented a conundrum: The industry has struggled to adapt to secular trends that are eroding its most fundamental business model; and yet the same technological innovations that engendered catastrophic revenue declines have led to startling advances in the actual day-to-day practice of journalism. Unfortunately, our focus on the former has often eclipsed our understanding of the latter. This effect was greatly compounded by the sheer plurality of new platforms, programming languages, tools and approaches that have characterized the last ten years. This effect was greatly compounded by the sheer plurality of new platforms, programming languages, tools, and approaches that have characterized the last ten years. What our source material—the Storybench interviews—reveals is that all the tumult produced by both economic disruption and rapid technological change is now crystallizing into a new set of “standard operating procedures,” three of which we detail in the paper above. Some of these—the rise of an open source ethos, for instance—are more philosophical and cultural in nature. Others, like the adaptation of editorial products for mobile consumption, are more pragmatic and technological in nature. Either way the bottom line is good news for those who work in journalism, as well as those who would study it – the inchoate has given rise to discernible form. The three categories, or areas of emphasis, mapped out here – team-based collaboration; open-source mentality and operations;; and mobile-driven ideation – are intended as a practical guide for understanding an evolving field and where it may be heading. The synthesis presented here is intended, to some extent, to demystify and clarify. Of course, the categories do not encompass all dimensions of computational/data journalism or related visualization/interactive development as practiced in professional newsrooms. But seeing these areas of emphasis more clearly and distinctly is important, as certain routines and workflows in this field differ substantially from those embedded in traditional reporting and editing practice. Further research might look more systematically at the data cleaning and statistical analysis-related aspects of contemporary journalism, where tools such as the programming languages R and Python, Excel, and OpenRefine might feature more prominently. Doig and others have articulated the new possibilities for doing “social science on deadline”[23]; the ways in which this is being attempted analytically in practice, from the perspective of routines and workflows, would be useful. Another promising research opportunity might examine how various institutions of journalism education have adapted to the same emerging practices we identify above. This is of special interest to us, as Storybench itself is an editorial outlet created by the faculty and students within the Media Innovation program of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. One goal of the Media Innovation program was to transform traditional journalistic pedagogy to the rapid changes occurring in the professional sphere; another was to create venues, like Storybench, through which those changes might be studied. While much work remains, we are encouraged by early steps. What becomes clear in speaking with news producers across the current landscape is that this emerging group within the journalism community frequently builds on the work of others, from the sharing of code and the complex workflow of multi-person news teams to the collective improvement of design elements and tools. For journalism professionals trying to manage and innovate at the intersection of design and data, as well for teachers and students engaged in preparing for professional success, it is vital to acknowledge and grasp the networked nature of work done in this space – and the core patterns that may increasingly characterize such journalistic work in the future. For generations, journalists working in newsrooms, particularly at print outlets, have often operated in relative isolation, mostly reporting alone and submitting copy to perhaps one editor. Broadcast outlets have, by contrast, often required extensive teams of reporters, editors, producers, and technicians to build a story. In creating online news products through teamwork, the digital newsroom of today may in some respects look increasingly like the broadcast model. However, what may ultimately distinguish this new paradigm is the degree to which open-source code and cross-institutional sharing and learning permeate the storytelling process. Funding This research was based on a project funded by the Knight Foundation. Jeff Howe, Aleszu Bajak, Dina Kraft, and John Wihbey Jeff Howe, Aleszu Bajak, Dina Kraft, and John Wihbey teach journalism in the Media Innovation graduate program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Tagged collaborative newsrooms data journalism best practices digital newsroom best practices digital newsrooms northeastern journalism storybench working paper Post navigation How to use ProPublica’s Congress API to see where senators stand on issues How one Nascar writer found success through crowdfunding Leave a Reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Subscribe to our newsletter Storybench on Twitter What is Storybench? Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data viz and investigative journalism to VR and digital humanities. In addition to in-depth interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the classroom or newsroom. Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Reinventing Local TV News Project, from Northeastern's School of Journalism, is looking hard at the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggesting new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audiences. Read our inaugural post here. 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Have Journalists Forgotten to Think Like Readers?

 HAVE JOURNALISTS FORGOTTEN TO THINK LIKE READERS? A MODEST PROPOSAL TO SAVE THE MEDIA: TELL IT TO ME LIKE A SIX-YEAR-OLD July 6, 2017  By Caren Lissner   Last week, I was at my desk in a newspaper office in one of the busiest corners of New Jersey, editing a crime story by a young reporter. Her article repeatedly referred to a 36-year-old man who’d just been arrested in Hoboken for “possession of CDS.” When I asked her why she hadn’t used the term drugs even once in her story, or at least spelled out “Controlled Dangerous Substance,” she thought about it and replied, “I guess I just got used to seeing it that way in the police reports.” It was, on a broader level, the same kind of question I’ve had to ask veteran reporters lately, and a question I’ve had the urge to ask when reading stories in even the most established daily media outlets, because I’ve noticed a disturbing journalistic trend—reporters and editors who’ve forgotten how to think like readers. Despite the increasingly complex and crucial stories dotting the national landscape—health insurance policy, North Korea, immigration, Syria—many daily newspapers and wire services are failing to include even a sentence of background early in their stories to give readers the tools to slide further into a complicated issue. It used to be traditional to include at least a “nut graph” soon after a lead in order to orient a reader, but these clarifications and history have been absent from the cover stories I’ve read in major daily papers. I’m not talking about “dumbing down” the news as much as making it more user-friendly, and journalists who fail to do the latter are squandering their brief but real chances to invest new readers. By frontloading stories with complex details and insider jargon, they may only drive consumers back to the memes, soundbites, and fake news that became the shorthand of the last election. To cite a recent ramification of the trend: Just a few months ago, the New York Times reported on a Morning Consult poll that said more than a third (35 percent) of Americans weren’t sure “Obamacare” was the same policy as the Affordable Care Act. The survey was conducted at a time when Republicans were finalizing their “repeal and replace” proposals and the issue was hotly debated in newspapers and on TV. The most puzzled survey respondents were also the ones most likely to be affected by the potential change, including people ages 18 to 29 (many of whom aren’t old enough to remember how insurance worked before the law). As I combed through the last four months of coverage, I found scores of stories in daily papers and other media that failed to ever include a brief phrase such as “sometimes colloquially referred to as ‘Obamacare,’” or include an explanatory sentence somewhere in the story: “The ACA is sometimes informally referred to as ‘Obamacare.’” A mere six to nine words would arm readers with the context for the increasingly complex parts of the story, but I know from my own editing experience that reporters grow weary of repeating the same history in each piece they write, and start assuming everyone approaches the news having read their other articles. This is a crass and cocky assumption, but not one made in bad faith. Journalists who spend ten hours a day researching a subject develop a skewed understanding of what others know. (This is not exactly the same as having a skewed opinion of the public’s political leanings, as happened last year, but it’s a similar issue). While several news sources (particularly those on-line) did publish explanatory stories meant to break down the complexities of the ACA, there’s no telling that a reader got to those first. It wouldn’t hurt for each story to include a sentence or two of context or background near the beginning so a reader stays invested in the debate. The Syrian crisis, for example, reveals an interesting and related media phenomenon: the conflict has been raging since 2011, with more than 400,000 lives lost and more than a third of the population displaced, but Americans’ outrage flares up on social media approximately every six months, then fades again. The periodic pleas for help occur not after a brave foreign journalist files a provocative story, but because of a viral visual. In September of 2015, the media published a photo of three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach after his family tried to flee, his socks and sneakers still intact from when—we’d presume—his parents had painstakingly dressed him that morning. The photo captured the hearts and minds of many until they settled back into complacency for several more months. “In the end,” the boy’s father told the British press a year later, in September of 2016, “the photo did not change much.” Around the time of that quote, in August 2016, an image went viral of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh of Aleppo, his face bloody and caked with dirt, sitting expressionlessly in a chair as he awaited medical attention. The social media outcry lasted another day or two. Four months later, in December 2016, visuals were published of seven-year-old Bana al-Abed, who Tweeted from Aleppo as her city was besieged by bombs and gunfire (her family ultimately escaped to Turkey). Her cries for help were retweeted with desperate pleas from Americans to save the children—and then, five months of relative quiet followed. That was, until the most horrifying videos emerged in early April: footage of kids being gassed to death in the Idlib Province. But rescue workers had been saying for years that Syria was using chemical weapons. It wasn’t that Americans didn’t care, but with their own jobs to do and mouths to feed, they grasped the impact much more quickly from a photo rather than the proverbial 1,000 words. Reporters and editors could do a better job of keeping the public invested in future stories by making the first 100 of those 1,000 words count, so they stay engaged and understand the scope of the ongoing situation. Then perhaps consumers would have a stronger opinion when, ultimately, our country responds with an unprecedented airstrike (which they did two days later)—or whatever is to come in the future. Yet what kind of reporting was going on regarding Syria just a few weeks before the April 4 gas attack? This was the Associated Press update on the Syria situation on March 5, in a general-interest story that ran in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Boston Globe, the Denver Post, PBS.com, NBC, ABC, and other popular outlets: “Five months of multi-sided clashes in Syria’s crowded northern battlefield have displaced some 66,000 people, a U.N. humanitarian agency said Sunday, a day after the U.S. bolstered Kurdish-led forces with a deployment of armored vehicles amid preparations for a push toward the Islamic State group’s de facto capital.” The subsequent paragraphs lacked even a few words of history and context to tell readers that nearly half a million people had died in a six-year war. When newspapers use wire services, they’re using stories often written for an international audience that understands the backgrounds and can picture the geography around foreign conflicts—so individual editors should make the effort to clarify the issue for their readers. The lead paragraph of the Syria story, a whopping 48-word first sentence, at least could have been clarified by slicing the unnecessary words “crowded” and “some.” But here is a plain-language edit: “During the deadly six-year conflict in Syria, the most recent fighting has focused in Syria’s northern battlefield, where multiple groups have grappled for control. A United Nations agency announced on Sunday that in the last five months, 66,000 people have been displaced there—a statement issued the day after the U.S. gave armored vehicles to the Kurds for an impending push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital.” Still too complex? How about: “In Syria’s northern battlefield, once controlled by the Islamic State, multiple groups have spent five months grappling for control. On Sunday, a U.N. humanitarian agency announced that as many as 66,000 residents have been displaced in that time. The statement came a day after Kurdish-led forces, with the help of armored vehicles provided by the US, prepared to push toward a makeshift capital still controlled by IS.” To be fair, the Syrian crisis is a conflict that, unlike some, fails to fall neatly along national, racial, or ethnic lines, so it’s difficult to summarize—but therein lies the challenge for a writer and editor. (It’s also a reason that newspapers should stop cutting their copy-editing staffs, as many have been doing. Thankfully, the Washington Post looked to hire more copy editors earlier this year.) Reporters, with fewer editors to guide them, also must be careful to include background and laymen’s details. Everyone has a bubble or sphere of knowledge. It doesn’t make one person more cerebral than another, but points to differing frames of reference. I’m often amazed by those who can easily recite the rosters of 30 major-league baseball teams and tell me who’s on the DL, when I (embarrassingly) couldn’t name three players in major league baseball—but those details matter; they affect a billion dollar industry. Likewise, media professionals may falsely assume everyone shares their knowledge of government intricacies while they continue walling themselves in by a construction of political terms and legalese. These assumptions are, as we have seen, dangerously shortsighted. As citizens, we should all be able to better educate ourselves so we’re prepared for a critical situation or change in policy. Besides finding and telling important stories, the media has a weighty mandate: to craft those stories in a user-friendly way so consumers will read past the headline. Otherwise, the difficult work of investigating and writing a story sees little readership and thus, little payoff. With news outlets constantly shrinking and some dying out, there’s no part of the country that can’t benefit from more media right now, and no media that can’t benefit from more people engaged in it. So it’s important to write cover stories in such a way that they don’t all sound like “inside baseball.” In the 1993 movie Philadelphia, helmed by the recently departed Jonathan Demme, Tom Hanks’ character—a lawyer with HIV who’s fighting to get his job back—shares a frequent refrain with his attorney: “Explain it to me like I’m a six-year-old.” “Explain it to me like I’m a four-year-old.” Both men are smart enough to know that they need to understand every detail of a complex situation. News professionals, too, need to do a better job of arming readers with the background and context of an ongoing issue, rather than thickening the walls of their bubble. A reader gained is a reader better equipped to face our changing news landscape, and it’s changing so rapidly right now that we need all hands and minds on deck. Caren LissnerjournalismmedianewsnewspapersreportingsimplicitySyriaThe Washingon Postwriting  Caren Lissner Caren Lissner is the editor-in-chief of the Hudson Reporter newspaper chain in New Jersey and has written for Atlantic CityLab and the Washington Post. She's also a novelist and humor writer whose first book, Carrie Pilby, was just made into a comedy film. Her more satirical writing can be found on McSweeney's and in the Rumpus. http://carenlissner.com

Thanks 'Last Kiss' Comics

THIS IS GOOD JOURNALISM FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: How He Used Facebook to Win Sue Halpern June 8, 2017 Issue Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss Oxford University Press, 291 pp., $99.00; $27.95 (paper) Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters by Eitan D. Hersh Cambridge University Press, 261 pp., $80.00; $30.99 (paper) Donald Trump Donald Trump; drawing by James Ferguson Not long after Donald Trump’s surprising presidential victory, an article published in the Swiss weekly Das Magazin, and reprinted online in English by Vice, began churning through the Internet. While pundits were dissecting the collapse of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the journalists for Das Magazin, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, pointed to an entirely different explanation—the work of Cambridge Analytica, a data science firm created by a British company with deep ties to the British and American defense industries. According to Grassegger and Krogerus, Cambridge Analytica had used psychological data culled from Facebook, paired with vast amounts of consumer information purchased from data-mining companies, to develop algorithms that were supposedly able to identify the psychological makeup of every voter in the American electorate. The company then developed political messages tailored to appeal to the emotions of each one. As the New York Times reporters Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim described it: A voter deemed neurotic might be shown a gun-rights commercial featuring burglars breaking into a home, rather than a defense of the Second Amendment; political ads warning of the dangers posed by the Islamic State could be targeted directly at voters prone to anxiety…. Even more troubling was the underhanded way in which Cambridge Analytica appeared to have obtained its information. Using an Amazon site called Mechanical Turk, the company paid one hundred thousand people in the United States a dollar or two to fill out an online survey. But in order to receive payment, those people were also required to download an app that gave Cambridge Analytica access to the profiles of their unwitting Facebook friends. These profiles included their Facebook “likes” and their own contact lists. According to the investigative reporter Mattathias Schwartz, writing in The Intercept, a further 185,000 people were recruited from an unnamed data company, to gain access to another 30 million Facebook profiles. Again, none of these 30 million people knew their data were being harvested and analyzed for the benefit of an American political campaign. Facebook did turn out to be essential to Trump’s victory, but not in the way Grassegger, Krogerus, and Schwartz suggest. Though there is little doubt that Cambridge Analytica exploited members of the social network, Facebook’s real influence came from the campaign’s strategic and perfectly legal use of Facebook’s suite of marketing tools. (It should be noted that internal Facebook documents leaked in early May show that Facebook itself has been mining users’ emotional states and sharing that information with advertisers.) After the initial alarm that an obscure data firm might have wormed its way into the American psyche deeply enough to deliver the election to Trump, critics began to question what Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, called the firm’s “secret sauce,” the algorithms it used to predict a voter’s psychological profile, what is known as “psychographics.” Confessore and Hakim’s article about the firm, which appeared on the front page of the Times, quoted numerous consultants, working for both parties, who were dismissive of the firm’s claims. The mathematician Cathy O’Neil, in a commentary for Bloomberg, called Cambridge Analytica’s secret sauce “just more ketchup.” Using psychological traits to craft appeals to voters, she wrote, wasn’t anything new—every candidate was doing it. For decades, in fact, campaigns have been using and refining “microtargeting” techniques, looking at religious affiliations, buying habits, demographic traits, voting histories, educational attainment, magazine subscriptions, and the like, parsing the electorate in order to understand which values and issues are driving which voters. For a few election cycles starting at the turn of the century, the Republicans had the advantage, developing a database called Voter Vault that allowed party operatives to understand voters in an increasingly nuanced way. During the 2004 presidential campaign, for example, the Bush team surveyed a large sample of these voters to assess their attitudes and behaviors, and sorted them into thirty groups, each with similar interests, lifestyles, ideologies, and affinities. It then placed every other voter into one of these groups and developed messaging intended to appeal to each one. By 2008, however, the microtargeting advantage had shifted to the Democrats, who had developed their own enormous, dissectable database of voters called VoteBuilder, run by the Democratic National Committee, and others run by for-profit companies that had been created to support the party’s candidates. One of these, Catalist, boasts a national database of 240 million people of voting age, with information on each one drawn from voting rolls, the census, and other public records, as well as commercial data covering “hundreds of fields, including household attributes, purchasing and investment profiles, donation behavior, occupational information, recreational interests, and engagement with civic and community groups.” In 2008 and 2012, the Democrats also had more sophisticated models predicting how people with certain attributes might vote. In the course of the 2016 election, the Trump campaign ended up relying on three voter databases: the one supplied by Cambridge Analytica, with its 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans including, according to its website, personality profiles on all of them; the RNC’s enhanced Voter Vault, which claims to have more than 300 terabytes of data, including 7,700,545,385 microtargeting data points on nearly 200 million voters; and its own custom-designed one, called Project Alamo, culled in part from the millions of small donors to the campaign and e-mail addresses gathered at rallies, from sales of campaign merchandise, and even from text messages sent to the campaign. Eventually, Project Alamo also came to include data from the other two databases. A principal force behind these various strategies was Brad Parscale, who served as the digital director of the Trump campaign from the primaries through the general election and who in the late spring of 2016 hired Cambridge Analytica as part of this effort. Parscale, who works out of San Antonio, had designed websites for Trump Wineries and other Trump enterprises. Through that work he became friends with Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s son, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, who Parscale says is like a brother to him. Further binding these family ties, Parscale’s marketing and design firm, Giles-Parscale, recently hired Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, to work on Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. “My loyalty is to the family,” Parscale told the journalists Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, whose Bloomberg article “Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go,” on the campaign’s digital strategy, turned out to be the most prescient piece written about Trump’s stunning upset. In the early phase of the primaries, Parscale launched Trump’s digital operation by buying $2 million in Facebook ads—his entire budget at the time. He then uploaded all known Trump supporters into the Facebook advertising platform and, using a Facebook tool called Custom Audiences from Customer Lists, matched actual supporters with their virtual doppelgangers and then, using another Facebook tool, parsed them by race, ethnicity, gender, location, and other identities and affinities. From there he used Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool to find people with interests and qualities similar to those of his original cohort and developed ads based on those characteristics, which he tested using Facebook’s Brand Lift surveys. He was just getting started. Eventually, Parscale’s shop was reportedly spending $70 million a month on digital advertising, most of it on Facebook. (Facebook and other online venues also netted Trump at least $250 million in donations.) While it may not have created individual messages for every voter, the Trump campaign used Facebook’s vast reach, relatively low cost, and rapid turnaround to test tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of different campaign ads. According to Issie Lapowsky of Wired, speaking with Gary Coby, director of advertising at the Republican National Committee and a member of Trump’s digital team: On any given day…the campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads, testing how they performed in different formats, with subtitles and without, and static versus video, among other small differences. On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations. Coby calls this approach “A/B testing on steroids.” And this was just Facebook. The campaign also placed ads on other social media, including Twitter and Snapchat, and ran sponsored content on Politico. According to one estimate by a campaign insider, the Trump team spent “in the high eight figures just on persuasion.” Remarkably, none of this money was used on ads created from Cambridge Analytica’s questionably obtained Facebook data. Not long after touting the edge it gave the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica began walking back its initial claim that psychological targeting was crucial to Trump’s victory. “I don’t want to break your heart; we actually didn’t do any psychographics with the Trump campaign,” Matt Oczkowski, Cambridge Analytica’s chief data scientist, told a panel hosted by Google five weeks after the election. Because the firm was only brought onto the Trump campaign the summer before the general election, he said, “we had five months to scale extremely fast, and doing sexy psychographics profiles requires a much longer run time.” Apparently, Cambridge Analytica had deployed its psychological targeting techniques during the Republican primaries on behalf of Ted Cruz, but Cruz’s failure to win the nomination was cited as evidence that Cambridge Analytica’s models were ineffective and that the company did not understand American politics. Though Cambridge Analytica came late to American elections, its British parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), has been a client of the United States government for years. SCL has “provided intelligence assessments for American defense contractors in Iran, Libya and Syria,” according to the Times, and developed so-called influence campaigns for NATO in Afghanistan. Also in Afghanistan, SCL engaged in “target audience analysis” for the United States Department of Defense, identifying who was susceptible to American propaganda. The firm’s methodology, according to its website, has been approved by the UK Ministry of Defence, the US State Department, Sandia National Laboratories, and NATO. It seeks “to understand empirically what the right levers or ‘triggers and filters’ in a given population are, based on a penetrating psychological understanding.” SCL is currently seeking contracts with at least a dozen US agencies, and The Washington Post recently reported that it has already secured work with the State Department. Strategic Communications Laboratories may have a special advantage in these efforts now that Cambridge Analytica is largely controlled by Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s major donors. According to The Guardian, Mercer now owns 90 percent of the company, with SCL owning the remaining 10 percent. (Mercer is also the money behind Breitbart News, the website credited with serving up fake and hyped-up articles to incite Trump’s base.) Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, was on the Cambridge Analytica board until he became the Trump campaign’s chief executive. Robert Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, served on Trump’s transition team and has stayed on as a Trump adviser. She now runs Making America Great, a pro-Trump advocacy organization largely funded by her father that is dedicated to creating influence campaigns to push what has been called a nationalist—anti-immigration, anti-government—agenda. Its day-to-day director is Emily Cornell, who stepped down as Cambridge Analytica’s senior vice-president for political affairs to take the position. Alex Welsh Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director, Trump Tower, New York City, October 2016 Meanwhile, as SCL pursues government contracts, Cambridge Analytica is also vying to create influence campaigns on behalf of the Trump Organization, the parent company of Trump’s various business interests. As an unnamed conservative digital strategist told The Guardian, the data from Cambridge Analytica could be helpful in both “driving sales and driving policy goals. Cambridge is positioned to be the preferred vendor for all that.” But weeks before the Mercers set up Making America Great, Brad Parscale had already created his own Trump advocacy group, called America First Policies. The creation of two independent organizations both ostensibly aimed at mustering support for Trump appears to have presaged the fault line that is now emerging between Steve Bannon and the Mercers on one side, and Jared Kushner (and by default Giles-Parscale) on the other. This division was also manifest days after the election as members of team Trump took a victory lap, with Cambridge Analytica’s Nix crediting his firm with the win, and Parscale declaring to the contrary that it was his and Kushner’s overall digital strategy that took Trump over the top. Either way, that rift pulls back the curtain on contemporary electioneering—electioneering in the age of big data and social media, both of which were crucial to Trump’s victory, and were used in innovative ways that are likely to be adopted by other candidates from both parties. As Daniel Kreiss points out in his book Prototype Politics, losing campaigns, especially, look to the winning one “to find models for future action.” There is no doubt that Trump’s digital operation—overseen by Parscale with the involvement of Giles-Parscale, Cambridge Analytica, the Republican National Committee, and scores of contractors—drew heavily on Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection playbook. Recalling that campaign, Kreiss describes how the Democrats repurposed a marketing strategy called “uplift” or “brand lift” and used it to pursue voters they identified as receptive to Obama’s message. They did so by gathering millions of data points on the electorate from public sources, commercial information brokers, and their own surveys, then polling voters with great frequency and looking for patterns in the responses. All this was used to create predictive models of who was likely to vote for Obama, who was not, and who was open to persuasion. It also indicated who would be disinclined to vote for Obama if contacted by the campaign. These models sorted individuals into categories—let’s say, mothers concerned about gun violence or millennials with significant college debt—and these categories were used to tailor communications to members of each group. Kreiss observes that such sorting was necessary because it would have been nearly impossible to create personalized messages for individuals from a labor standpoint…. And…the cost of testing individual appeals to determine whether they were actually successful in order to justify the expense of creating them would have been astronomical. In his 2015 book Hacking the Electorate, Eitan Hersh is skeptical about the value of commercial data in predicting political outcomes—his research shows that public records are crucial. Echoing Kreiss, he writes that “even in well-financed campaigns, there is rarely an interest among campaign strategists to send fifty different messages to fifty different segments of voters.” The Trump campaign, with its “A/B testing on steroids,” turned this conventional wisdom on its head. There were other digital innovations as well. On election day, for example, the Trump campaign bought all the ad space on YouTube and ran a series of five thirty-second videos, each hosted by a different Trump surrogate representing a particular segment of the Trump base. We “learned that putting Mr. Trump on persuasion ads was a bad idea,” Cambridge Analytica’s Oczkowski said in April at a meeting of the Association for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising in Melbourne, Australia. Instead, there was Ivanka Trump, representing mothers and business women; Willie Robertson, the star of the television show Duck Dynasty, to appeal to southerners and hunters; Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, representing law and order and diversity (he is African-American); the former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell to appeal to veterans and their families; and Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, a tough, aggressive guy’s guy. “There was no targeting,” Oczkowski explained. “Every single American who [went] to YouTube that day [saw these ads].” And, he continued, once viewers watched one of the thirty-second videos to the end, they landed on a screen with a polling place locator. “We had tens of millions of people view the videos and hundreds of thousands of people use the ‘find your polling place’ locator. When you’re talking about winning by thousands of votes, this stuff matters,” Oczkowski said. Parscale’s strategy of using Facebook’s “dark posts” also turned out to matter, enabling the Trump campaign to attack Clinton with targeted negative ads that flew below the public radar. Dark posts are not illegal. They are not necessarily “dark.” Unlike a regular Facebook advertisement, which appears on one’s timeline and can be seen by one’s friends, dark posts are invisible to everyone but the recipient. Facebook promotes them as “unpublished” posts that “allow you to test different creative variations with specific audiences without overloading people on your Page with non-relevant or repetitive messages.” Phrased this way, dark posts sound benign, even benevolent. Parscale and his crew had other ideas. Facebook dark posts, used in tandem with more traditional attack ads, were part of the Trump team’s concerted effort to dissuade potential Clinton voters from showing up at the polls. (In March, Cambridge Analytica won an Advertising Research Foundation David Ogilvy Award for its “Can’t Run Her House” ad, which used a clip from the 2008 Democratic primary of Michelle Obama criticizing Clinton.) “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior campaign official told Bloomberg’s Green and Issenberg. One targeted idealistic white liberals—primarily Bernie Sanders’s supporters; another was aimed at young women—hence the procession of women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed by the candidate herself; and a third went after African-Americans in urban centers where Democrats traditionally have had high voter turnout. One dark post featured a South Park–like animation narrated by Hillary Clinton, using her 1996 remarks about President Bill Clinton’s anti-crime initiative in which she called certain young black men “super predators” who had to be brought “to heel.” “We’ve modeled this,” the unnamed senior campaign official told Green and Issenberg. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.” And it did. Democratic turnout in battleground states was weak, which was crucial to Trump’s victory. Tallying it up three days after the election, David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, noted: In Detroit, Mrs. Clinton received roughly 70,000 votes fewer than Mr. Obama did in 2012; she lost Michigan by just 12,000 votes. In Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, she received roughly 40,000 votes fewer than Mr. Obama did, and she lost the state by just 27,000. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, turnout in majority African-American precincts was down 11 percent from four years ago. Trump’s digital team was also aided by the candidate’s unbridled use of Twitter, by WikiLeaks, by fake news generators like Breitbart, and by an army of so-called “Twitter bots,” automated Twitter accounts—many of which are thought to have emanated from Russia and at least one thousand of which the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer claimed to have created. Together, all this sent a river of pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messages coursing into cyberspace, giving the Trump campaign a continually self-reinforcing narrative. And then there was the candidate himself and his blustery, contradictory pronouncements, often pandering to voters’ racially tinged resentments. This might have been the undoing of another candidate, but for the Trump team it turned out to be an asset. “Trump didn’t have a lot of ‘Here is my agenda, here is my narrative, I have to persuade people to it,’” Catalist’s Laura Quinn told me. The Trump world was more like, “Let’s say a lot of different things, they don’t even necessarily need to be coherent, and observe, through the wonderful new platforms that allow you to observe how people respond and observe what works, and whatever squirrel everyone chases, that’s going to become our narrative, our agenda, our message.” I’m being very simplistic, but that was the very different approach that truly was creative, different, imaginative, revolutionary—whatever you want to say. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but winning the popular vote does not automatically lead to the White House, and Trump was never going to try to appeal to the entire electorate. Applying Cambridge Analytica’s algorithms, Trump’s data scientists built a model they called Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory to rank and weight the states needed to get to 270 electoral college votes, which was used to run daily simulations of the election. Through this work, the digital team identified 13.5 million persuadable voters in sixteen battleground states, and modeled which combinations of those voters would yield the winning number. As the campaign wore on, it didn’t look good. The Trump team’s numbers were similar to those being posted by Nate Silver on his FiveThirtyEight website, which showed Hillary Clinton winning handily. Before the election, in a call to reporters, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica rated Trump’s chance of winning at 20 percent. Brad Parscale apparently saw it differently. “You know, I always thought we had a much better chance to win than everyone,” he told NPR’s Rachel Martin. A few weeks before the election, he said he had a hunch from reading Breitbart, Reddit, Facebook, and other nontraditional news sources, and from the campaign’s own surveys, that there were whole segments of the population—people who were angry and disaffected—that were being missed by traditional pollsters and the mainstream media. These were people who may not have voted in the past but would be a stealthy source of support were they to show up on election day. Parscale’s data scientists reweighted their model to reflect this. Once the Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory model took account of this cohort, and showed that the ones who lived in Rust Belt states had the most likely chance of delivering the presidency to Trump, Parscale’s digital team focused all its resources in those last few weeks on these voters. This included sending the candidate himself to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in the days before the election, even though those states were considered by most observers likely to be unsympathetic to him, because the reweighted Cambridge Analytica algorithms were pointing there, and those algorithms dictated the candidate’s travel schedule. “[Clinton’s] strategy was…‘if I turn out enough people in urban areas, Republicans can’t make up those numbers in rural areas,’” Cambridge Analytica’s Oczkowski explained. “Little did she know that almost every rural voter in the country was going to show up in this election.” There are many ways that the Democrats lost the election, starting with the foibles of the candidate herself. If the Republicans had lost, that would have been the prevailing story about them and their candidate as well. That the Republicans didn’t lose can be attributed in large measure to their expert manipulation of social media: Donald Trump is our first Facebook president. His team figured out how to use all the marketing tools of Facebook, as well as Google, the two biggest advertising platforms in the world, to successfully sell a candidate that the majority of Americans did not want. They understood that some numbers matter more than others—in this case the number of angry, largely rural, disenfranchised potential Trump voters—and that Facebook, especially, offered effective methods for pursuing and capturing them. While this is clearly the future of campaigns, both Republican and Democratic, it also appears to be Trump’s approach to governing. Much was made in the last days of the campaign of the fact that if Donald Trump lost, he could take his huge database, Project Alamo, which he owns outright, and start an insurgent political movement or build his own media company. As Steve Bannon said at the time, “Trump is an entrepreneur.” But Trump didn’t lose, and he still owns that database, and it continues to serve him well. In the first three months of his presidency, when only 36 percent of the country gave him a favorable rating, Trump and the Republicans raised $30 million toward his reelection. As a point of reference, this is twice as much as Obama raised in the first three months of his first term, while enjoying much higher approval ratings. What our Facebook president has discovered is that it actually pays only to please some of the people some of the time. The rest simply don’t count.