@NMK: Dan Gillmor: New genres of journalism online

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 June 2007 at 14:13
Tags: Blogs, Mashups, NMK

Dan Gillmor asks “who’s a journalist?” in a media space where all sorts of people — like academics, corporations, and NGOs can — publish instantly on the Internet.

“One of my personal clichés”, Gillmor says, is that “journalism is moving from a lecture to a conversation”. But the first rule of conversation is to listen. Journalists tend only to be good at listening to sources, but need also do better at listening to feedback from their audience. While this is happening more and more, it is still “freaking out” many traditional journalists.

Recent developments in online story-telling show that there are plenty of new things that are fundamentally journalism, even if they are not the type of things that conventional reporters might recognise as a typical story.

Database journalism, like that practiced by Adrian Holovaty at WashingtonPost.com, is a new way of telling stories. Journalism.

He points out a mashup, built by an American estate agent to point out properties sold for less than their assessed value (a sign of house-price inflation). Is this journalism? Yes, and why aren’t news organisations doing this instead? Journalism.

Is a map tracking the location of potholes in local streets, generated by reports from people in the community, journalism? Yes. It tells a story about local road maintainance. Journalism.

Is a satirical mashup of Tony Blair singing “should I stay or should I go” a form of journalism? It’s certainly comment of some sort.

Gillmor also raises his concerns about user-submitted photographs. It’s now routine for news organisations to call for readers’ pictures, but this can risk encouraging people to put themselves in harm’s way. The German tabloid Bild has called for people to send in paparazzi-style pictures, which raises serious privacy issues. However, random acts of journalism, like putting up pictures of newsworthy events on Flickr, is now a routine part of the news stream.

Citizen media is not a new phenomenon, he says, pointing out the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. But today there is a new equality and a quantitative difference. If that event had happen today, or at most within a few years, there would be dozens of high-definition cameras, all of them linked to digitial networks along the street in Dallas. But what if the people on the 9/11 airplanes, who were making voice calls on their mobiles, had been sending us real-time footage of what was happening, he wonders.

He quotes Clay Shirky saying that the cost of failure in experimentation in new media is approaching zero, allowing all sorts of people to come up with new projects.

Organisations need to allow people to fail in attempting to innovate, he concludes.

In the question and answer session, he points out that today’s culture of online openess means that in an election within 20 years, a person will stand for President of the United States despite having made online disclosures about him- or herself that would easily disqualify them today.

More: Gillmor gave a similar presentation at the BBC yesterday, which Robin Hamman blogged.

All the news that’s fit to Twit

Posted by Martin Stabe on 21 March 2007 at 13:54
Tags: BBC, British Press Awards, CNET, CNET News.com, CNN, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mashups, New York Times, Press Association, Wired, twitter

Just in time for its first anniversary last week, the Twitter has gained a huge surge in attention to go with accelerating growth in its user base.

The service, which combines social networking and blogging, allow users to send 140-character updates detailing what they are doing at the moment. Users can chose to have their friends’ messages delivered directly to an instant massager account or mobile phone via text message.

Helped by a flurry of adoption among the digerati at TED and SXSW conferences, Twitter has become the current darling among the usual early-adopter crowd — and has frustrated some by slowing down tremendously as a consequence.

Twitter invites users to reply to the question “What are you doing right now?” It then sends the responses — by RSS, IM or, crucially, mobile phone — to all of those friends who have signed up to follow that user’s messages.

Inevitably, this invitation has meant that the service is being used primarily for communicating the most banal aspects of everyday life — and this has led to a Marmite-like devision of opinion among the online commentariat.

Some A-list bloggers are contemplating shifting most of their everyday writing to the service. Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis, for example, announced that “90% of my blogging is now on Twitter”, prompting howls of disapproving comments from some of his regular readers.

While the enthusiasts can’t get enough Twittering, its detractors are equally unflinching.

“Of all the masturbatory ego-fluffers on the Web, nothing chafes me worse than Twitter,” complained Steve Bryant of eWeek. “Not content with blogging — itself a microchunked, short-form version of diary keeping — we’ve taken to journaling the minute-by-minute factlets and factoids of our bite-sized lives.”

Like the blogging naysayers, the Twitter-haters are absolutely right when they complain that 99 per cent of the communication produced with the service is utter rubbish. Even the closest of friends are probably not interested in receiving a text message every time one of their mates farts.

But by focusing on the banality of most Twitter messages, the service’s critics are guilty of the same logical error as those who dismiss blogging because of the stupidity they observe in many bloggers: they confuse medium and message, technology and content.

Twitter may be encouraging its early adopters to use the service in a relatively banal form of content, but technology adoption never works out quite as the developers of new services imagined or even intended.

The technical idea underlying Twitter is interesting: It is a gateway service that lets users easily post and receive between three normally incompatible short-messaging services: web site comments, instant messaging and SMS text messages.

And like many of the Web 2.0 sites, Twitter has been clever about encouraging such unintended uses, by providing an API that makes it easy for skilled users to find innovative uses for the service.

Anil Dash of Six Apart, put it well when he wrote on his blog: “The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect. “

And that is certainly happening. US presidential hopeful John Edwards is using Twitter to keep supporters abreast of his campaign.

One user has created service that automatically provides service updates for the London Underground.

And of course, many people have seen the potential of the service for distributing news alerts. The Press Association announced last week that it would be using Twitter to distribute updates of Gordon Brown’s budget announcement today.

PA’s experiment is not the first attempt to use Twitter as a vehicle for distributing news, but what’s unusual about it is that it is being produced in-house rather than by their enthusiastic readers.

A few months ago, Twitter user Mario Menti created a mashup that ports the latest headlines from CNN and the BBC into Twitter, allowing users to receive headlines and links to breaking news headlines on their mobile phones by joining the publication’s network of Twitter friends.

A similar service have appeared for Google News headlines. Blogger Dave Winer created a Twitter headline service for Wired after a journalist at the magazine suggested it on one of the magazine’s blogs. The New York Times has both an official Twitter account and another one produced by Dave Winer. There is what looks like an official Twitter feed for technology site CNET News.com.

While I was writing this post, my phone chirped with a Twitter message from Guardian blogs editor Kevin Anderson revealing that something Twitter-related is afoot at Graun towers as well.

Of course, we’re not beyond jumping on the Twitter bandwagon ‘round here. Next Monday evening, you’ll be able to get the British Press Awards winners on your mobile phone as they are announced. Just follow the user ‘pressgazette‘ on Twitter.

Update: Even political blogger Guido Fawkes seems to be Twittering.

Update 22/3: The Guardian’s Twitter feeds, created by Ben Hammersley, are ‘guardiannews‘ and ‘commentisfree‘. Simon Dickson notes that Nick Robinson’s frantic budget micro-blogging for the BBC might have been a good use for Twitter (a bit like PA’s experiment, perhaps).

Update 23/3: Jack Lail ponders the journalistic applications of Twitter.

8 comments

182 responses to the Freedom of Information consultation

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 March 2007 at 20:46
Tags: BBC, Crown Copyright, Ethics, Freedom of Information, Guardian, Investigations, Journalism, Mashups, NUJ, foi, foia

The Government has received 182 responses to its consultation on the Freedom of Information Act fees regime.

We know about five of these so far. One submission is Press Gazette’s petition, signed by more than 1,250 journalists who oppose the Government’s plans. Another is the Guardian’s strongly-worded defence of journalists’ use of FOI. The BBC has also made its opposition plain.

FOI campaigner Heather Brooke’s submission is posted on her blog. It’s a forcefully-worded piece which is notable for introducing two very practical arguments to a debate that is usually dominated by abstract polemics about the public’s “right to know”.

First, Brooke assaults the Government’s frequent claim that Freedom of Information Act introduces a net cost to the public purse and the economy as a whole. Instead, she makes a strong case that FOI — combined with a more liberal system for the re-use of public-sector information — would boost the economy by fostering a stronger private-sector information industry like the one in the United States. More transparency would also save the Treasury money in the long run by making public record-keeping more efficient and exposing waste.

Second, and perhaps more interesting to readers here, she argues that a strong Freedom of Information regime would improve British journalism overall, by encouraging “responsible, informative journalism, leading to an informed and civically engaged electorate”.

First, Freedom of Information means more accurate, factually-based reporting, including analytical computer-assisted investigative journalism:

The polemical style of much British journalism is due in large part to the difficulty obtaining official information. It is noteworthy that the UK lacks any organisation devoted to computer-assisted reporting – a type of investigative journalism that is well developed in the US and Scandinavia where freedom of information laws are much stronger and well-developed. I have worked with several organisations to try and build up this type of analytical journalism in the UK but the difficulties are enormous. …

Regular readers will know that I completely agree with her about this.

Brooke also makes the interesting argument that greater access to legitimate sources of information would reduce the need for journalists to resort to dubious or illegal methods for obtaining data:

If the government wants to encourage legitimate reporting techniques then it needs to provide an efficient and timely mechanism to make this type of reporting cost effective. This mechanism should be the Freedom of Information Act. In the US, the federal FOIA combined with strong state FOI and public records laws means there is no demand for an information black market. Having worked as a journalist in the US for eight years, I never once came across a reporter who had used a private detective to gather information. There was simply no need. All the information needed was available in the public domain.

By contrast in the UK, trying to access information legitimately couldn’t be more time-consuming and difficult. Obstacles are constantly put in one’s way and everything the government does encourages the creation of an information black market economy. Now we are going to jail reporters who access information illegitimately, but a more effective solution to this problem would be to create incentives to use legitimate information gathering tools. The main way of doing this would be to make the FOIA more effective.

The NUJ made similar noises about encouraging investigative journalism through Freedom of Information in a Parliamentary committee on media regulation this week. Its own 10-page response to the consultation has also been submitted.

I look forward to seeing the other 178 submissions. I hope I don’t need to file a request …

University project automates newscasts

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 October 2006 at 16:00
Tags: Journalism, Mashups

Who needs human newsreaders when you’ve got videogame characters to front the evening bulletin? A project at Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory is developing on a fully-automated video newscast and it does just that.

The project, reported by the television blog Lost Remote, combines resources available online to create a fully-automated newscast.

The News at Seven finds news stories on the web and then presents them visually using a videogame character Alyx Vance (from the first-person shooter Halo 2, obviously) and text-to-speech software to create a virtual newsreader. It also presents relevant images in the background and reads out bloggers’ commentary on current stories.

There are clearly some kinks left to work out. At one point, the videogame character-turned-presenter reverts to form, whips out her sidearm and dispatches a baddie off-camera.

Ananova would never do that.

While Geraldo Rivera famously packed heat while reporting from Afghanistan for Fox News, the introduction of actually discharging handguns to commit gratuitous acts of violence in the studio may put off some viewers.

Don’t believe the last paragraph? The video is available for download (37Mb .wmv) from the researchers’ site.

AOP: Tim O’Reilly on “Publishing 2.0″

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 October 2006 at 11:42
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Craigslist, Google, Journalism, Mashups, Nature, Online, Second Life, UK AOP, Wikis, Yahoo

Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media is now giving his keynote about “Publishing 2.0″. The title of his talk, like the title of this blog, is obviously a reference to “Web 2.0″, a term O’Reilly is credited with coining.

One thing that Web 2.0 companies have in common, O’Reilly says, is that they are making money from software, but not by selling software. They are using the Internet as a platform. It’s no longer an add-on to the PC.
The big change in the industry is about “harnessing collective intellignce” which is only possible on a network. That is the essesnce of Web 2.0.

Yahoo!, the orginal aggregator, let tried to create a catalogue of the best material on the web. Google, was the first search engine that didn’t just look at documents, but also what people were doing with documents, though PageRank. Google works and gets better every time someone creates a link to an online document.

EBay is people coming together. Amazon doesn’t have a clever breakthrough. They just work hard on it. They get their users to add value to the site over and over, making them better than their competitors.

Early map publisher Mapquest didn’t realise that users add value. They saw it as database publishing.

Web 2.0 is the era of asymmetric competition. Google plays by different rules. They are an advertising player. Previous models didn’t work, so now Yahoo has to compete on Google’s terms.

Craiglist is the best example of this. Craig Newmark recently boast that his company, with just 18 employees, is the seventh-biggest site on the interent, just below News Corp with 38,000 employees.
The biggest competition for O’Reilly technology books is people searching online. As a consequence the mix of books in the publishing business is changing. They are  oublishing far fewer reference books. Tutorial books, which can’t be done well online, now more important in their mix.

O’Reilly  shows a slide showing an IBM visualisation of the history of a single Wikipedia entry. Over time, more and more people contribute to an entry that originally was largely written by just one individual.

Then he shows an Alexa graph comparing the online Encyclopedia Britannica against Wikipedia. Britannica is a flat red line while Wikipedia is growing rapidly.

Sites can be either designed to get network effects like this, or they can be designed in a way that does not encourage such effects.

Flickr is a good example. He shows a Flickr tag cloud and compares it to Shutterfly, a “Web 1.0” photo uploading site. After uploading new photos, Shutterfly invites users to give friends access to them. On Flickr, by contrast, the default option is to make the uploaded photos public. Users have to chose to make them private. Think about the choice of defaults that encourage network behaviour.

We are seeing computer programming as journalism, commonly called Mashups. He mentions Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org web site (a favourite of this parish). Holovaty’s previous project was LJWorld at the Lawrence Journal-World, a small paper in Kansas, which gave local community groups the ability to create content. Both projects, says O’Reilly, are good examples of the power of seeing computer programming and user-generated content as journalism.

Digital rights management: you have to think about not having too much of it. The correct approach to DRM is like taking a cat to the vet: hold it loosely, or it will claw you. Apple defeated Sony in the music space by holding DRM loosely.

We have to be players in the workd of mashups and UGC. The web will continue with or with out us, more and more in a network world. “We have to figure out how to become players in that world, or we’ll be left behind,” he concludes.

In the Q&A, O’Reilly is asked who in traditional media “gets it”. He says Nature publishing group is doing some amazing work in this area, with open peer review and have figured out how to keep things behind the firewall while also exposing it to search engines. The BBC and Washington Post are also very good, he says.

Simon Waldman asks whether O’Reilly will shift more into an ad-funded model from paid-for books. He says the Safari service is subscriptions and is not the third-largest channel for sales. Thirty per cent of the pageview come from books that are not selling as books. It’s an example of Chris Anderson’s long tail theory and a huge shift to content that wasn’t being monetised at all previously.

Bill Murray asks about UGC as journalism. Much UGC is created by a tiny fraction of the user base. So what is the role of the traditional editor?

O’Reilly says Wikipedia is an example. They have traditional editors, but are just using a different set of tools, but there is an editorial role. Google, similarly, has supervisors for content, particularly to weed out spam.
We’re seeing the age of the computer-aided editor, and the function is that of the person who is doing the curation of content has much more powerful tools.
Will consumers become cynical about publishers’ self interest in soliciting their UGC?
O’Reilly says yes. Some will completely miss the boat and there will be lots of cynicism. Think back to the early days of the PC and all the companies that no longer exist. As a result of that, should we have discounted the personal computer?

“The companies are bubbles on the wave, they are not the wave,” he says. We’re moving towards a global platform and you have to figure out how to be part of it. Eventually, the industry will consolidate and innovation will move elsewhere. But we are just seeing the very beginning. Imagine when every divice you carry records its location all the time. Some insurance companies are using this data to set rates depending on where you drive. Somebody owns that data and needs to manage it.
The web is just a phase. It’s really about the “Internetisation of everything,” he says.

What will be Web 3.0? Two things are candidates for that moniker, says O’Reilly. Sensor-powered network, which contains devices rather than human-powered “bionic software”. These applications made humans components of the application.

Another candidate is virtual worlds, like Second Life. Electic Sheep is a company that only has offices in the virtual world. In the physical world they are scattered around North America and meet virtually only opn Sheep Island in Second Life.

That’s where the next AOP conference is going to be held, Torin Douglas jokes, closign the session.

1 comment

Do old media risk becoming irrelevant?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 March 2006 at 09:44
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Citizen journalism, Financial Times, Journalism, Mashups, Podcasting, Reuters, Wikis

On the essential reading list this week is the speech by Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer at last week’s Online Publishers Association conference. In the speech, which was later published in the Financial Times, Glocer explained why “old media must embrace the amateur“. (Also available from Reuters as a Word document [DOC])
Refering to Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, Glocer argued that people akin to today’s bloggers or “citizen journalists” have always existed: “The difference now is the scale of distribution and the ability to search”.

Glocer advises media organisations to become “seeders of clouds” who produce high-value new content, “providers of tools” that allow news consumers to recombine disparate content as they see fit, and become better “filters and editors” who provide a valuable service by finding the scarce valuable droplets in the information deluge.

Old media, Glocer says, have a choice: “integrate the new world or risk becoming irrelvant”. FT.com will be holding an online Q&A with Glocer about his views next Wednesday and are currently inviting readers to e-mail their questions for Glocer to ask@ft.com.

In a related item on on the must-read list, journalism’s best-known advocate of these participatory media, Dan Gillmor, has begun writing a series of articles for BBC News Online. The former San Jose Mercury News columnist, author of We the Media, and director of the Center for Citizen Media explains the tools whose widespread diffusion he sees as the democratising of media production: blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games and mashups. It’s a nice overview of these terms.

Mashups come to Europe

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 February 2006 at 10:57
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism, Mashups, United States

“Mashups” — online projects that combine two or more data sources to create new applications — are one of the hot trends in American online journalism, and now they are coming to Europe.

One celebrated mashup is the ChicagoCrime.org, a web site which uses geographical data from the Chicago police about where crimes committed and allows users to plot them with Google’s mapping tool. The journalist who produced the Chicago Crime site, Adrian Holovaty, has since moved on the Washington Post, where he lead a mashup project that allows users to examine the voting records of members of Congress back to 1991. The Post now has a whole section on its web site dedicated to mashups. This week, mashup enthusiasts gathered at Mashup Camp, an “unconference” in California, to trade ideas and experience.

Now the idea is spreading to Europe, accroding to Steve Outing at the Poynter Institute.

A version of the crime mapping tool has debuted in the Netherlands. Misdaadkaart.nl maps crimes reported throughout the Netherlands, not just in the major cities. So far, it has 20,000 entries. The site was produced by Rob Jan de Heer, who told Outing: “From a journalistic point of view, this will appear to become very handy to, for instance, determine in what city most of a certain type of crimes are taking place, or even within cities which are the most criminal or safest neighborhoods.”

In the UK, the mashup trend has been more subdued, usually not produced done by journalists. But there are some wonderful projects out there, such as TheyWorkForYou, a mashup of Hansard that is far more usable than Parliament’s own web site. It was built by the same people who made UpMyStreet and several similar projects.

Another project, recently highlighted in the Guardian, is British web designer Dom Ramsey’s Local Knowledge site. The site links Google maps with BBC travel news, geotagged photos from Flickr, and even data from speed cameras.
With the Freedom of Information Act having made public datasets more easily accessible, hopefully we will see news organisations doing more innovative investigative work in this area. Let’s just hope that Crown Copyright, which limits what can be done with information obtained under FOIA, won’t stiffle creativity.