Christopher Anderson, after noting the conversation that Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer are having on the future of news reporting, and after outlining how a specific story was produced at the Philadelphia Daily News, lays down a interesting challenge to Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer.
Category Archives: Journalism, norgs, the future of news
“A New Media Tells Different Stories” by Bruno Giussani
“A New Media Tells Different Stories” by Bruno Giussani April, 1997:
There are also many other ramifications that the new journalist will have to take into consideration while handling information and exploiting the different tools.
quote First, the behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search. The first group is satisfied which just seeing what’s there – they seek pleasure and surprise. The second group is looking for specific information – their priorities are easy and rapid access, and accuracy.
Second, geography is no longer an issue. Because of the Internet global reach, geographical audiences and ethnic audiences can overlap (for instance, Swiss readers living in the United States access our magazine online) as well as thematic audiences (say, worldwide car racing fans hooking up to an Indianapolis newspaper).
Thirdly, the development of the many different types of intelligent agents will double the human public in all of its diversity by becoming an artificial public. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots: software which behaves according to their owners’ desires.
Forth, we will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
Fifth, we will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques. The first name that comes to mind is, of course, Microsoft, a software company which has recently rolled out a magazine (Slate), launched a TV/Web station (MSNBC), and started projects for local Web guides (Sidewalk). But there are thousands more doing the same, becoming news publishers all the while being car manufacturers or phone companies.
Finally, and it’s an essential point, we are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today – the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard. The digital revolution is giving birth to multiple new forms of devices bringing together the quality of television images, the communication power of telephones, the memory and speed of computers, the selection and ease of use of newspapers. They are spreading out in different shapes and forms and locations: cellular phones with e-mail capability, network computers, videotext, electronic paper, digital wallets, voice recognition, audiotex, pagers, beep-watches, and so on. The future will allow us to access worldwide information, in many different forms, adapted to needs and places
Alternative journalism documenting Fishtown and Kensington
In Episode 6 of “Shadow World”, David S. Kessler took a break from giving interviews to let the location speak for itself – Front and Berks – the Berks El Station.
I can still recall the elderly man following me from the train station, as the sun was setting, when I was just a kid. He propositioned me for a blow job. He said he would pay me money. I walked faster and acted as if I couldn’t hear him. Eventually, he got the hint.
Right around that corner, on a different day, maybe that same year, I was jumped and earned one of the broken noses I’d keep as souvenirs of my days in Fishtown and Kensington.
David S. Kessler’s effort, to me, qualifies as a powerful act of journalism. One that provides insight into a world many of us in Philadelphia are familiar with, but to those on the outside, would have a hard time fathoming.
He spent a year recording short, under five minute, video interviews with those he met under the Frankford El in Kensington. Philadelphia Weekly wrote about the effort last year but you can experience it yourself at undertheheel.blogspot.com.
Another great piece of journalism that documents the true life story of four teens who commit murderer in Fishtown is “Fishtown”. It was was recently published in hardback. You can read more about “Fishtown” at Geekadelphia.
Update 11-30-08: Alfred Lubrano, in the Inquirer, writes about Witness to Hunger, a program of Drexel University that distributed digital cameras to 40 women in North Philly who documented their stories, and in the process exposed realities of living in poverty in North Philadelphia. Make sure to visit the site.
Imagine if the project’s next step was to enable these families to publish to Flickr and YouTube next. It would enable them to reach wider audiences and raise awareness so much further.
How about some realistic expectations, more experimentation, and less punditry about punditry?
Fred Clark offers up his theory as to why things are as dire as they are for the newspaper industry – that the expectation for profit margins has been grown to something unrealistic these past twenty years: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?:
So why oh why don’t we have a better press corps?
Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they’re being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.
This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you’ve purchased newspaper stock, then you’re a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.
Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper — even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market — is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It’s safe, but humble.
Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That’s what’s happening right now with newspapers.
Amy Webb is wondering why so many are arguing about arguments instead of focusing on what really counts (I am guilty as charged unfortunately) : Reshaping the Conversation:
Raise your hands: Who’s got an hour today to learn about the geospatial web? What about reality mining using cellular data? What about semantic tagging? 2d barcodes? Mobile frameworks using advanced SMS?
That’s what I thought.
Here’s the real problem facing our newsrooms. Most people are out there playing checkers while companies like Google and Adobe are playing chess. NOTHING WILL CHANGE in journalism unless the conversation is refocused on what matters most: How can the ever-hastening disruptive change be either met or overcome by adapting technology and creative business models?
You don’t need to knock a man down to argue his ideas
No one is above criticism, but the knock Jeff Jarvis took from Slate from Ron Rosenbaum missed the mark badly. It attempted to paint Jarvis as just another new media guru in pursuit of a buck it at the expense of others. Jarvis responded here. Many of Jeff Jarvis’s ideas are very much up for debate – I don’t think journalists are anywhere near as responsible over what’s happening as much as he does (shortsighted publishers, corporations, management, business and technology changes are *far* more to blame (read “The Innovator’s Dilema” – NOW)) and his tone can be brutal in the face of so much pain (so many jobs lost, so many families thrown into upheaval), but he’s willing to debate his ideas and seek out those of others. The author went personal and attempted to de-legitimize ongoing efforts that Jarvis has been leading that are important to journalism, like the recent conference on the future of news at CUNY or hosting so much relevant conversation on his blog. It’s a shame because argument is needed to address where we were, where we are going, what the consequences are. Blunt, honest talk. The Slate piece was a distraction from that.
Related:
Steve Outing: Do newspapers have 6 more months?
Nick Denton: A 2009 Internet Media Plan
Wired: Poll: Internet, Fox News Are Most Trusted News Sources
Silicon Alley Insider: Record Traffic Not Saving Financial News Sites
Metafilter: Can nonprofit news models save journalism?
Jeff Jarvis: Saving Journalism (and killing the press)
And, because this vid is so fit for the Daily Show, I just have to share it (vegetarians – do NOT click this):
Technology and business model shifts can drive innovation
David Cohn, contributor at Columbia Journalism Review, Seed Magazine and Wired has been exploring the future of journalism for a long time now, notably on his blog, at NewAssignment.net and NewsTrust.net.
His latest effort, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is Spot.us – a service founded on the principal that journalism is a process and not a product.
It’s an interesting effort. It joins other non-profit journalism resources such as NPR and ProPublica in working to solve the funding question that has been consuming those who want to see journalism flourish as business models and technologies shift. In this particular solution – it is YOU who determines what stories you fund directly.
Commentary by Dan Gillmor: Spot.us Launches
Commentary by Beth Kanter: Spot.Us: Community Funded Reporting
By Digidave himself on his blog: Launching The Spot.Us Ship: Community Funded Reporting
And introducing the service at vimeo: Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro:
Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.
And yes, this is me riffing off of a great conversation that was held by Aaron and Arpit at BarCampPhilly.
Social Software Links: Postmodernism, Data Smog Edition
Metafilter: If information is power, then access is empowering
NYTimes: Overfeeding on Information
NYtimes: Spinning a Web of Lies at Digital Speed
NYTimes: The Rise of the Machines
Andrew Sullivan: Why I Blog
Reason.com: Every Man a Derrida
Rough Type: Googling and intelligence
Funding journalism: the way it is, the way it will be
Mark Glaser asked his audience to imagine “a Future Tense for Newspapers”, back in February 2007, inspired by a post by Jeff Jarvis. Among many great responses, I added my own two bits:
The way it is:: Newspapers judge readership size/demographics via subscription numbers and use these numbers to make themselves attractive to classified advertisers
The way it will be: A combination of metrics that combine traffic with online relationships/connectivity statistics will become the new way news sites make themselves attractive to advertisers.
The way it is: Newspapers finance the cost of in-depth journalism via the selling of classifieds.
The way it will be: I have no idea.
This is a problem because newspapers provide the financial, legal, organizational and attention driving infrastructure that acts of journalism largely require.
To lend credence to how much this is a problem, consider the results of Pew’s News IQ Quiz (take it – I dare you – it is short and fun!). Do you think a community so ill-informed can drive its government effectively? Try driving with one eye closed (no don’t do that!).
And it is getting worst.
But hey, don’t listen to me, listen to Google’s Eric Schmidt:
Newspaper demand has never been higher. The problem is revenues have never been lower. So people are reading the newspaper they’re just not reading it in a way where the newspapers can make money on it. This is a shared problem. We have to solve it. There’s no obviously good solution right now.”
As indicated by Bethany Anderson in a conversation Leonard Witt:
strictly speaking, the American public does not pay for its journalism – nor has it ever, really.
Advertising and Classifieds subsidized journalism as a side-effect – not directly.
So I tend to disagree with Leonard Witt when he says that “if advertising and journalism are forever linked, we will not have a problem.”
Advertising never directly paid for journalism. Acts of journalism bolstered the reputations and influence of newspapers, that drew demographics, that advertisers wanted to reach. It was the audience that advertisers were paying for.
Attention driving influence is flowing elsewhere now. Like Twitter (yes, I’m on Twitter now).
Read Jack Shafer in “What’s Really Killing Newspapers”:
You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide. As falling circulation indicates, fewer do. And the newspaper isn’t the only media hub suffering in the new era. Radio, which once served a similar social role with its menu of music, news, and talk, is plummeting.
One of the more interesting research exercises in all this is examining how we got here.
Christopher Anderson is doing a terrific job of that working on his dissertation, “Networking the News: Work, Knowledge and Occupational Authority in the New Metropolitan Journalism” in the Philadelphia area.
His latest posts (from oldest to newest) “Paying For Reporting, Paying For Conversation … a Thought Experiment.”, “Adding Nuance to the Journalist / Blogger Relationship”, “Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: By the Numbers”, “Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: Beyond the Numbers” are must reads.
I say this as a former employee of Philadelphia Newspapers and Knight Ridder.
So if you are interested in the topic, and want to read the thoughts of a non-insider who is doing considerable research in the trenches, go forth and read.
What does it mean when our media re-writes itself?
Boing Boing decided to un-publish, remove from public view, Violet Blue related posts.
What does it mean when our media rewrites itself?
NYTimes: Link by Link – Poof! You’re Unpublished
Boing Boing on the matter.
Violet Blue (NSFW) on the matter.
There are quite a few fellow bloggers who have linked and commented about this – but without more info, it is just conjecture and I don’t wish to add to any of it.
However, I do want to stress the importance of the de-linking – note that the first two pages of Google search results on this subject don’t point to Violet Blue what so ever. You would think they would, but they don’t.
As Rafe states – links are currency on the Web. When we reach a certain level of influence, we’ve earned a responsibility, whether we want to own up to it or not. When we don’t live up to that responsibility, we lose credibility.
Boing Boing, in my book, has lost some.
Related:
Jeff Jarvis: Media is Singular (about time folks come around to this)
Politico: Media hype: How small stories become big news (what happens when new media take on old media mores or old media takes on new media mores or… well.. see above)
Using Our Powers For Good
I recently re-read Rebecca Blood’s 2003 BlogTalk presentation: “waging peace: using our powers for good”. It is worth revisiting by anyone who is a blog evangelist or critic. Taking a look at the daily lack of cross linkage on memeorandum.com, unfortunately, it seems almost prophetic.
…People agree most readily with the things they already believe, and everyone has only 24 hours in a day. Because of these two factors, weblogs are too often enclosed in echo-chambers of their own making.
In the book ‘Data Smog’, David Shenk says: ‘Birds of a feather flock virtually together’ and this is certainly true of weblogs. He goes on to say: ‘The problem… is that people are tuning in and becoming informed–but they’re tuning into niche media and they’re acquiring specialized knowledge. As our information supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease. Technically, we possess an unprecedented amount of information; however, what is commonly known has dwindled to a smaller and smaller percentage every year. This should be a sobering realization for a democratic nation, a society that must share information in order to remain a union.’
Let me add that it’s not just specialized knowledge that we are accessing. It’s news and opinion about current events. The Web has given us the ability to retrieve news accounts from around the world. It used to be that most people got their news from just a few sources. This limited access meant that most of us were evaluating events from a common pool of information about the world, or at least a pool that was common to the people around us. But Web users can choose to get their news from wherever they like. And factual accounts of the same events quite often differ substantially in their wording, emphasis, and in the conclusions they draw. We now have the ability to choose from among news accounts until we find one that we feel gets it right.
Now, I don’t advocate returning to the pre-Web world of local newspapers. But there are consequences to the wide access we have gained.
Democracy depends on groups of people coming to terms with one another, and devising solutions that will address the needs of most, if not all, of its citizens. Even a system like mine, in the United States, where majority rules, cannot afford to completely ignore the needs of anyone not in the winning party. Democracies simply cannot function unless citizens and policy-makers can talk to one another and achieve some sort of common ground in addressing the issues of the day.
However, when people can choose their news and information from an unlimited variety of sources, they usually will choose sources that confirm their pre-existing biases. According to theFolklorist.com, confirmation bias is ‘a tendency on the part of human beings to seek support or confirmation for their beliefs.’ It makes sense, if you think about it. The only basis we have in evaluating any source of information is the set of information–including opinions–that we have already decided is true. Very few people will be inclined to choose primary sources of information that consistently put forth ideas that just seem wrong.
This isn’t deliberate malice. It’s a simple matter of choosing, from the available sources, those that seem most accurate, and those that seem most accurate will always be those that most closely reflect one’s own view of the world. So while the Web, in theory, makes it possible to explore many more points of view than ever before, in practice, few people actually do this to the extent that they can.