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Old media knows the relationship with its audience has changed, but it is still not quite sure how to deal with it.
links for 2008-05-27
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Monthly Archives: May 2008
It’s mine ya’hear. Mine. All mine: Ownership and innovation
From Flickr user Andyi
It’s Carnival of Journalism time and Ryan Sholin steps up to the plate to host. He helpfully suggests a question to chew over for this months meeting of j-minds
What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?
Great question?
A lot of people have already posted great suggestions so some of the following may be repetitive (still it’s better to add a voice then stay quiet in agreement isn’t it)
So, the question. What should they stop doing? My answer: Stop trying to own everything.
We have an interesting problem in journalism at the moment, we don’t know who we are. Ask anyone in your newsroom what the function of journalism is, what is it for, and you get a number of different answers. (I know, we have tried) All of them are challenging or challenged by the ‘new’ media landscape.
You may answer, we are the fourth estate, we tell the audience what other people don’t want them to know. But a new media advocate may say that the audience can do that for themselves now, and (often) better.
You may answer that it is to entertain. That’s a great one for upsetting ‘trad’ journalists. Remember sonny, this job isn’t about fun.
For every defining action there is an equal and opposite old media reaction.
So given that we aren’t sure what we are or why we do what we do anymore, we revert to what we know best. Consolidate and protect. We strengthen the fortifications and move as much of the ‘community’ in to the city walls as we can.This isn’t just illustrated in attitudes. You can see the very real evidence of this all around us in the industry.
If a news org wants to do user generated photography it doesn’t use flickr or Photobucket. It builds it’s own photo sharing service. If it wants to run a blog, does it use Movable Type of WordPress. No, it builds its own blogging platform.
Why? Because then they can own the conversation.
This ownership thing, it must happen on our terms, is the single biggest problem the industry has right now and that stops innovation.
When it comes to technology, ownership encourages imitation and stifles innovation. When it comes to staff, ownership means the structures are there to support the company not the individual. They pay to own the innovators and then stop them innovating (hey, at least they aren’t innovating for anyone else). And when it comes to audience, ownership means taking and never giving.
So what do we do about it.
I think the first thing we can do is look at the ownership mindset. We need to try and educate people to a couple of simple points:
Ownership and control are not the same thing. You can be seen as owning something but not have control. That can be positive or negative.
Ownership is temporary: You’ve all heard the term no one owns the news. That’s been interpreted as meaning that we need to monitise it in a way that makes the maximum amount of profit in the shortest time. No. It actually means you need to keep turning out stuff that people want to see and so keep coming back.
Within the news rooms we can do one simple thing: Give away the one thing that you do own – time.
Give everyone in the newsroom playtime. I’ve said this again and again and other organisations like Google have so obviously benefited from it. Give every member of your newsroom staff a day a month (maybe) where they can explore, learn and develop skills. That doesn’t need to be on the web. It could be learning photography. Learning to dance at a local community center. It doesn’t matter. The key thing is that you only expect one in return – they share that experience. There is no budget line. If you get a story from it – bonus. If a great idea comes out then even better. But everyone shares.
If you asked me what the function of journalism is I would say that its ‘to be part of the society we live in and contributing to a greater understanding of that society by sharing information.’
That’s not about owning
From Flickr user occ4m
links for 2008-05-21
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“The British Board of Film Classification launched a new voluntary online ratings scheme today, extending its established ratings labels such as U, 15 and 18 to digital downloads and video games.”
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“I didn’t like the way the thing is presented, but that’s not important, it’s just a place for videos that will be embedded someplace else, just like before. But this is another proof that video and citizen Journalism are becoming mainstream.”
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The AP 1-2-3
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The focus of this guide is to illuminate painstakingly the differences between these recorders. The products in this article are listed in order of price, starting with the least expensive.
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The LA times have created ” a fully integrated department in editorial that will serve our site and our newspaper, combining our print photo, Web photo and video operations into one new department: Visual Journalism.”
Chinese voices
Image by thenez via Flickr
My department has an outpost in China and Matt (our man in china) sent word of a project based on Google groups that his students have been involved with called Life and Death, Love and Pain: Snapshots of Sichuan Earthquake
On the site, one of the people working on it explains the motivation for the work
we have started translating some stories about the 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan, China, where some of our hometown is. These trivial stories are not published by the mass media, yet they are all examples of admirable human spirit and emotion.
This included translations of chinese blogs and reports.
An interesting insight and worth a look
Interesting and motivating stuff
I’m involved in two days of an exciting Meld project and as part of that I am showing ( or may mention) a number of bits of technology and services. I needed a place to put the links to access them and thought I would share them here.
It’s all stuff that has made me go ‘wow’ and/or made me think ‘that would be great for journalists if…’. Of course there are lots of other things – the blog really helps collect and remember them – so if you have things that fall in to the ‘must see’ inspiration. I’d love to see them.
I love this stuff as it offers an interesting way for ugc to be contextualized and then inhabited. Nodes of content – photos – that each has their own story used to build up a bigger picture. The very definition of the way CJ should work .
A couple of links here to the original Photo tourism applet and then the Photosynth version in a similar vein. Also a neat demo of the Seadragon technology…
and the TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas around Photosynth.
360 video
I love the Google street view stuff and this builds on the concept. Immersive media have a very impressive looking bit of hardware (although low-fi versions are around) and a few examples that, perhaps, hint at the uses a journalist may find in interacting with this stuff if not generating it themselves. (look about 2mins in)
News/editorial games
Okay, breakout with news headlines may make MSNBC’s claim to have invented a whole “newly invented genre of ‘news gaming’” a bit hard to swallow. But it is good fun.
Games have started to seep in to journalism consciousness. A version of the Neverwinter nights has been used to train journalists and the games ideas that sprang from that project
But it isn’t all just retro-gaming or journalism training. Editorial/issue games are more and more visible.
Whether it’s highly polished stuff like The Political Machine or influenced by single issues that resonate like Police brutality, September 12th or the raft of issue games from Persuasive Games.
There are loads of serious games out there covering the kind of stories and issues that journalists are. This is where I really think we need to be exploring much more.
Wii news channel
Speaking of games. I know there are other consoles out there but I just got a Nintendo wii. The news channel is pretty straightforward in what it does (streams AP content) but the way it does it is pretty cool. Putting journalism in an environment (like throwing the digital newspaper on the gaming lawn) seems to me an area that is being neglected in the msm’s attempts to ‘own the platforms’.
And the old wii, like the iphone and PSP, is getting platform friendly content.
Digital narratives
Interactivity and multimedia are part of the reason why the web has become so popular as a journalism platform. Seminal work like OnBeing and The Final Salute show just how good journalists are at telling stories and giving stories a voice. Of course other storytellers have embraced the platform. The work of Jonathan Harris is a particular favorite of mine. Lots to learn and learn from in all areas.
Visulisation
Journalism is getting in on the act with visulaisation whether its infographics with an extra edge or projects using Google maps, tag clouds or something fancy like the Spectra Visual Newsreader app (Kudos to MSNBC for getting another mention).
General shots of stuff.
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- The Political machine
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- Time Tube
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- The Work of Jonathan Harris
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- Visualising Google news
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- Oil God
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- Police Brutality
I won some money
I have won some money (well, funding) to do some research. This is both good (it’s always nice to win) and scary (more for the research community than anyone else.
Sandbox (see their site to get an idea of what they do as Iwould just make a hash of explaining it) offers grants for people in the University to enagge in ‘research activities that are interdisciplinary and collaborative’
Here’s what I put in.
Are the people who represent the community part of the community?
The media have traditionally claimed the role of the fourth estate, framing and advocating issues and debates for the public; gathering information on the basis that the majority do not have the resources themselves. But new media driven, content creation (perhaps best defined under the catch all phrase citizen journalism) has challenged the traditional media’s primacy in this role by putting the means to source and distribute information in the hands of the audience.
This change is forcing many media organisations to redefine the relationships they have with the communities they are supposed to represent.
The same technology that challenges these relationships has also had a profound impact within the traditional media. The production process has become increasingly ‘digital’ in the way the information is collected, processed and distributed. This, in turn, has resulted in a reduction of the number of journalists and editorial staff.
So the balance between the numbers of editorial staff within the media and the number of people in the community (the audience) who are generating content is at tipping point. Many in the community question the ability of the mainstream media to reflect their interests; the community they live in.
This paradigm shift is often referred to as a change from lecture to conversation.
In an effort deal with this change, many media organisations have embraced the concept of community as a strategy. By offering blogs, community forums and other forms of social interaction the aim is to become a central part of the conversation. In the print media this is best illustrated by one media groups aim to convert their newsrooms in to community hubs – the central point for a community to share information.
But does creating a ‘virtual’ hub really create a focus point for community or are the media, in their daily practice, physically too isolated to be recognised as part of the community?
The project
The aim of this project is to map the movement of journalists in the local community by taking reporters from print, radio and TV and providing them with GPS enabled devices to track their movements throughout normal reporting day.
The aim then would be to compare this with the data created from the social mapping projects within Sandbox and see where the two overlay.
In essence it’s an audience research project that provides an interesting exploration of news agendas – that of the professional reporters and the stories they either elect to cover or are sent to cover – and those issues reflected by communities participating in city media – their ‘news’ agendas.
The project would then attempt to develop a matrix that visually demonstrated when and where the news agendas of local communities and those of professional media organizations coincide, with a view to examining the range of elements that lead to this juxtaposition.
Conducted in this way the research can explore ‘randomness’, and ‘proximity’ to breaking news as a value that impacts news agendas (and says something about reseources too).
The next logical stage of this research is to begin to map other stake holders in the process – politicians.
Now I just need to do it.
External microphone and the N95
Many of you may remember the Reuters MOJO project a while back that had an Nokia N95 at its heart. One of things that most interested me about the thing was the special audio adaptor that Nokia built for them. I remember at the time thinking that it would be cool to have one.
I don’t know why this came back across my radar again but I stumbled on this video (via this post) that offers a nice easy low-fi alternative. It’s an idea that’s been around for a while but given that the N95 still seems to be the phone of choice for the mobile-j, I thought I would share in case anyone hadn’t seen.
Beware the digital native.
Here is a little quote to start the post.
“If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly.”
Responding to the general discussion about who is working the digital news vein, Pat Thornton has posted another take on the problems with management pointing out that Management should reflect demographics (AKA management can’t be just a bunch of old white guys)
The only way to expand into new demographics (mostly younger) is to have people in those demographics in management and actively consult younger staffers about what they want. No more guessing.
Honestly, how else are newspapers going to expand their audience if they don’t have people they are trying to court making decisions?
It’s a good post and I have swapped a couple of comments with Pat about the problems I have with his point. OK, I say problems. In the main, there isn’t a lot to disagree with. News organisations don’t look like the community they serve and that is a problem. Who could argue with that?
The transparency that digital platforms create means that people look directly at us and if they don’t recognise what is looking back then they leave. That’s tied directly to the thorny issue of diversity in the newsroom.
Can you only (afford to) be a journalist if you are a privately educated graduate with the resources to take the salary hit? Why are there not more black and female journalists and managers and influencers in our news organisations? All serious and systemic problems to chew over and try to resolve.
But I don’t think this is the nub of what Pat is saying and what he finds frustrating. This isn’t about diversity, it’s about innovation.
Young and smart or old and predictable?
In the main he seems to be suggesting that only young people (30 – 40) are really innovating online citing the creators of Amazon and Google as examples of young ‘Web titans’. Lets have more of them in decision making positions:
Let’s say you have 10 top editors. At least one should be a digital native. How many newspapers can honestly say that?
Can’t argue with that. Some bright people, young or not, wouldn’t go a miss. But I do have a problem with the term Digital Native. Why? There is no such thing as a digital native. And it’s dangerous to assume there is.
The natives are restless
In the past it’s been easy to see the move of the mainstream media to the web as some kind of land rush. Hell, I’ve even referred to the move in negative terms as a form of Rachmanism. The logic would follow that there was an indigenous people or sitting tenant of the web that was somehow deposed. Now that would be a digital native.
Of course the logic doesn’t follow. Yes, there where early pioneers – even a founder – but no incumbent population
So what is this digital native thing all about? Who are digital natives?
According to the alleged inventor of the phrase Marc Prensky:
They are native speakers of technology, fluent in the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet. I refer to those of us who were not born into the digital world as digital immigrants. We have adopted many aspects of the technology, but just like those who learn another language later in life, we retain an “accent” because we still have one foot in the past.
He was using this in an academic framework talking about the need to embrace new technology in teaching as kids do in life. Of course the big flaw in this is that in journalism, as in education, not all kids/young people are fluent in that way especially when it comes to J-students. As Mark Comerford points out.
My j-students are often rigidly locked in to an analogue vision of the industry, see print as their future and do not easily understand the principals of conversation contra lecturing that many of us propagate as the (only) future for journalism. The have some degree of technical knowledge (though that is often over-estimated) but no great conceptual grasp of the shift from analogue to digital.
And the diverse, dynamic and fast changing nature of that conceptual change means that the landscape is too fluid to sustain any long standing definition that could sustain anyone being called a native.
Going native
So what we need to talk about here are not digital natives but people who have gone native (or better still the enthisiastic adoptor that Sarah Hartley talks about.) Picking up on Pat’s theme, I want to see enthusiastic adoptors of any age get a chance to change the way things are done and make newsrooms look more like the community they serve. It is essential that we get more of that diversity that is so vital both commercially and socially.
But I don’t want a tribe of digital natives springing up creating digital divides – old/young, get it/don’t – because rather than having the keys to the digital kingdom, all that the attitude really tells me is that they have gone really native. And when that comes with claims that having more of them is just what you need to get the job done…
‘Ten divisions of those men’ might sound tempting but that was a quote from Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.
Perhaps the best example of what can happen if you go too native
