GAME ON: Journalism, life skills, news literacy.

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

Call it a sign of the times. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced at a press event Monday that Yahoo is taking over four stories of the old New York Times building in Times Square. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined Mayer at the announcement.

Yahoo's 500 New York employees are currently split across three different locations in New York City. By bringing them under one roof, Yahoo is hoping to foster culture and collaboration, Jackie Reses, chief development officer of Yahoo, said in a blog post

She added that Yahoo hopes to grow its NYC staff by up to 60% "with a special focus on expanding our engineering team." There will be room for roughly 200 additional employees in the new office, Mayer said. Read more...

More about Yahoo, Nyc, Tumblr, New York Times, and Business

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

Yahoo has announced a brand new Flickr experience for the desktop and its Android users. Unveiled at a press event in New York City Monday, the new look aims to breathe new life into the once struggling brand.

It's move is so big, in fact, a terabyte of storage is coming to Flickr. This is enough room for each person take 537,731 photos and more than 2,000 in each country.

"You can take all the pictures ever taken and upload them to Flickr... and there would [still be room]," Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Mayer emphasized event had nothing to do with the Tumblr acquisition announced Monday morning Read more...

More about Yahoo, Mobile, Flickr, Tumblr, and Business

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

Any avid Game of Thrones fan can see how Westeros is not too different from a modern corporation. There's a CEO who sits on the Iron Throne; his board of directors sit in the Small Council. Then there are mergers and acquisitions in the form of inter-house weddings. Instead of pink slips, you have beheadings

In a more fragmented sense, the seven kingdoms of Westeros can be seen as competing companies vying for a spot at the top.

Shutterstock saw the many similarities between the corporate ladder and the one for power among the Seven Kingdoms. So it gave each Westeros House a modern corporation to rule over. The war for the crown would be fought out in the marketplace instead of on the battlefield. Here's how they look: Read more...

More about Tv, Game Of Thrones, Watercooler, Pics, and Shutterstock

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

Jaws dropped at the Coachella music festival in 2012 when rapper Tupac Shakur arrived on stage to perform. After all, he died in 1996 from multiple gunshot wounds. Modern technology brought him back from the dead as a life-sized hologram to spit verses alongside his old friends Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre

The virtual stunt begged a question: "Who's next?"

Since Tupac's digital reincarnation, we've seen plans for an Elvis Presley comeback and rumors of a TLC reunion aided by a virtual Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes. And fans aren't the only people wanting to see these ideas come to life

Artists want to make magic onstage with their deceased musical brethrenWill.i.am, whose new music video "#thatPOWER" features Justin Bieber as a hologram, recently revealed which artists he'd like to revive. Read more...

More about Music, Entertainment, Michael Jackson, Celebrities, and Technology

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

Remember GeoCities? The quirky, city-themed web hosting service and early social network that, by 1999, was the third-most-visited site on the World Wide Web? Fourteen years ago, Yahoo acquired it — and with much the same fanfare as the Internet behemoth has done, today, with Tumblr.

There is reason to be optimistic about Yahoo's latest acquisition: ads, audience, coolness, etc. But it's worth remembering GeoCities today — and the cautionary tale it offers. Despite all the cheer about the consolidation between the two Internet giants back in 1999, Yahoo proceeded, essentially, to raze GeoCities Read more...

More about Yahoo, Quiz, Tumblr, Geocities, and Business

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 - By Pekka Pekkala: For the last two years I have had an opportunity to participate in an ambitious global research project: how journalistic startups are making money in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and five other countries.

The project is called Sustainable Business Models for Journalism. What did we find? First, bad news: there?s no single, easy solution or amazing new business model that solves all the problems that traditional publishing models have.

But looking through some of the very grassroots operations around the globe, you find some similarities among the sites. Probably the most comforting lesson from these young and old entrepreneurs is the fact that there?s probably no need for an amazing new business model. Journalism is just going through a transformative period from a monopolistic, high-revenue and low competition model to a highly competitive global marketplace. And the ideas and advice we got from these entrepreneurs was not that much different from the advice you find in traditional business literature, startup manuals or even biographies of successful companies.

Here are some general conclusions from the 69 startups we interviewed.

Find your niche. Whatever you do, don?t do the same things as the others do. Or if you do, make sure you do it better in one way or another. Be faster. Or broader. Or more in-depth. Slower. Whatever you do, do it somehow differently than the others. As Ken Fisher from ArsTechnica.com says, don?t try to be 30 seconds faster with the same bloggy content that?s going to be on five other sites in 10 minutes.

Be passionate. Running a website is hard work and you can?t do it with a 9-to-5 attitude. If you truly love what you do, it makes the long hours more tolerable and gives you a competitive edge: you?re willing to work an extra hour. My personal guess is that the readers can smell the passion as well. Especially in France and, surprisingly, in Japan, the divide between ?us? -- the free journalists -- and ?them? -- the established media -- seems to be a strong driver.

Keep it small and agile. The old model of publishing was to design a publication and then hire people to do it. The new model is to have one or two people and see what kind of publication they are able to create.

You are the brain of your own business. Many of the journalists interviewed for our study said they hoped that someone else would do the business side of things for them: contacting possible advertisers, selling the ads and doing all the planning and calculation. David Boraks from DavidsonNews.net said it well: if you are starting a small business and you have a vision how to do it, you can?t turn it over to somebody else and expect it to happen the way you want it to.

Ask for support (aka money). If you know you?re doing a good thing, don?t be afraid to ask for support. Advertisers, especially local or niche ones, might actually like what you do. If they are passionate about candles and think your site about candles is worth reading, they are probably more willing to advertise on your site. If your readers can?t live another day without your passionate and unique candle reviews, they probably are willing to somehow give you money. ?People are just looking for a way to support you,? says Doug McLennan from Artsjournal.com

These are just a few notes from our complete report, which you can read or download here. The website Submojour.net has all the case studies.

Pekka Pekkala is a visiting scholar at USC Annenberg. He is working on a book titled ?How to Keep Journalism Profitable? with a two-year grant from the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. Folow him on Twitter at @pekkapekkala.

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 - By Daniela Gerson: Emma asked if I would write her a recommendation for AmeriCorps. Usually, I would have said yes without hesitation, but this request struck a nerve. The recent college graduate was among a dozen or so young adults who wrote about their predominantly immigrant community for the news site I edit, Alhambra Source. She told me that she wanted to join AmeriCorps to serve a city across the country that the federal government determined was in need. My instinct was that this was not the best use of her skills: She could probably make a more meaningful contribution reporting on her own Los Angeles community.

That conversation started me thinking about the need for a program in the style of AmeriCorps ? or Teach for America or Peace Corps ? for journalism in under-reported and diverse communities. Call it Reporter Corps. The service-learning model would train young adults in journalism and teach them how their government works, pair them with a local publication in need of reporters, get them some quality mentors, provide a stipend, and set them loose for six months or a year reporting on their own community.

Just about a year after my conversation with Emma, I am very pleased that the first class of six Reporter Corps members started this month at Alhambra Source, with support from USC Annenberg and the McCormick Foundation.

Broadly speaking, the Reporter Corps goals are not that different from AmeriCorps, the national service-learning umbrella program that supports 80,000 people annually:

• Get things done
• Strengthen communities
• Encourage responsibility
• Expand opportunity

But unlike AmeriCorps, which addresses education, environment, health, and public-safety needs, Reporter Corps focuses on news and information needs. If journalism is a public service crucial to democracy, the demand for such a program is clear: Local news coverage ? despite a recent flourishing of online community sites ? has been in decline for years.

In many immigrant communities and less affluent areas, the result has been that mainstream reporting has all but disappeared or been reduced to sensationalism. Alhambra, an independent city of about 85,000, lost its local newspaper decades ago. More recently, the Los Angeles Times and other regional papers have slashed their coverage of the area. Local television rolls into town when there is a murder or the mayor?s massage-parlor-owning girlfriend flings dumplings at him in a late-night squabble (yes, that happened). The Chinese-language press is active, but very few decision-makers can read it. All of this, in turn, has contributed to a population with low levels of civic engagement.

Despite, or perhaps due to, the lack of quality news coverage, I found a ready supply of young Alhambra residents interested in reporting opportunities. Students navigating a depleted community college system or recent college grads un- or underemployed and facing the lowest employment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds in 60 years came to the Alhambra Source eager to contribute. Although they had limited journalism experience, in many ways they have proven to be natural reporters for a multiethnic community. They are all immigrants or children of immigrants, speaking Arabic, Cantonese, Spanish, Tagalog and more. As a result, they can cross ethnic and linguistic lines better than many reporters. They also often have a deeper understanding of what stories matter to fellow residents, from the challenges of not being able to communicate with your parents because you?re not fluent in the same language to the need for a local dog park.

For the first class of Reporter Corps, we selected six high school graduates ? four in local community colleges, and two recent college graduates ? based on their connection to the area, growth potential, and passion to improve their community. In the spring we plan on expanding the project to work with another USC community news site, Intersections South LA.

The approach appears to fall into a larger trend in youth media initiatives to work increasingly with high school graduates rather than solely younger students.

?Within the youth media groups we?re hearing more and more a thirst that involves the grads. The job market in many of the neighborhoods these groups are active in is really abysmal. Some go to community college, some don?t,? said Mark Hallett, the senior program officer for the journalism program at the McCormick Foundation. ?Neighborhoods aren?t finding coverage.?

Across the country, local news sites are working in diverse ways to put this population to work. Many have small internship programs. In an example similar in spirit to Reporter Corps, New American Media has teamed up with the California Endowment to work with 16- to 24-year-olds in California communities such as Fresno, Coachella, and Long Beach for youth-led media efforts.

The Endowment also funds some successful high school journalism programs, such as Boyle Heights Beat in East L.A. (which is also affiliated with USC Annenberg), but Senior Program Manager Mary Lou Fulton notes, ?it requires a greater investment in teaching, mentoring and support.?

Unlike high school students, who tend to be busy and sometimes lack maturity or real-life experience, grads often have an excess of time and more advanced critical-thinking skills. "For these youth, this work is a part or full-time job, meaning they are able to spend more sustained time on reporting and develop deeper community relationships to inform their reporting,? Fulton told me via e-mail, noting that all of the students in their programs also receive either an hourly wage or stipend. ?All of this increases the chances that the content they create will be more timely and have greater depth."

What if we united efforts like this on an even larger scale ? with the vision that Teach for America applied to failing schools in the 1990s ? and adapt it to local journalism? Would the nation see a boost in engaged citizens, more young people at work, new jobs, and ? we can dream ? even new models for how local news outlets can make money? We see Reporter Corps as a step in that direction, with a focus less on taking smart, highly achieving young people and placing them in at-need communities, and more on training young people to report on their own communities. Whether or not participants go on to become professionals, they will be exposed to new opportunities in the government, legal, education, and social service sectors. In the process, local news, often considered a dying art form, might just be reinvented and reinvigorated by their energy.

Alhambra Source and Intersections South LA are cornerstone projects of the new Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative at USC Annenberg, which aims to link communication research and journalism to engage diverse, under-served Los Angeles communities. USC Annenberg professors Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Michael Parks spearhead the Alhambra Project, and Professor Willa Seidenberg directs Intersections South LA. Daniela Gerson heads the initiative and edits Alhambra Source.

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 - By Andrew Lih: Unsurprisingly, but sad nonetheless, Newsweek announced the last weekly print edition of the magazine will be December 31. Starting in 2013, it will join the ranks of U.S. News and World Report as an all-digital publication, leaving TIME Magazine as the only popular U.S. weekly still on the newsstand.

Printed Newsweek was in bad shape. According to The New York Times, it went from 3,158,480 paid circulation in 2001 down to 1,527,157 this past June. Barry Diller signaled earlier this year that IAC wouldn't keep bleeding money to keep Newsweek alive.

Of course, we've seen this trend before. The advent of the web in 1994 killed the last prominent news monthly when LIFE magazine stopped printing and went to nothing but special editions in 2000.

Today, social and mobile media have taken it one step further, making the U.S. newsweekly an aging relic. It's easy to focus on the losers in this game, but a number of folks have thrived in this same space. It's not too late for Tina Brown and The Daily Beast to learn from successful peers.

Fundamentally, news lies at a triple-point that attempts to balance three goals: speed, accuracy and depth. Hitting the mark with any two translates into success. It's a bonanza if you can hit all three.

Who has learned to adapt to the acceleration of these factors in a digital age, and who should Newsweek look to?

Slate

This is quite sobering, given that The Washington Post Company bought Slate in 2007 and subsequently dumped Newsweek in 2010. Since then, Slate has become an outlet of respected cultural and political commentary that has seen widespread linking across the Internet. It has effectively taken up the mantle of the old The New Republic magazine, as many of the same people and ideas have wound up on Slate's site. For deep and timely analysis of legal affairs, it doesn't get any better than their top notch writers, such as Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon.

But Slate has transcended its written-word roots. Slate's weekly Gabfest podcasts represent the best audio news programming around, covering culture, politics, sports and women's issues. The occasional Gabfest live shows at college campuses and cities around the country attract huge crowds and recently it has made the reverse jump & emdash; moving from online into traditional media by spawning a Gabfest Radio hour on WNYC public radio in New York.

It may be the best organization mastering speed, accuracy and depth at the same time.

The Atlantic

Here's a news monthly that has managed to find relevancy in the digital age with a top notch blogging crew that includes veteran James Fallows. The publication figured out aggregation and embraced popular culture in a highbrow way with the launch of The Atlantic Wire, which has attracted a whole new audience in recent years. It bucked the trend of paywalls by tearing down its subscription-only system and has reaped rewards since.

How much? Mashable reported that in December 2011, "traffic to the three web properties recently surpassed 11 million uniques per month, up a staggering 2500% since The Atlantic brought down its paywall in early 2008."

Not wanting to stay still, it is recruiting young tech savvy folks, such as their recently announced Digital Technology Internship program that seeks computer science majors to help "collaboratively solve problems with innovative technical solutions."

The Economist

This one is straight-up competition: Newsweek pitted against another old-school newsweekly. The Economist is the rare beast - a print publication where subscription has grown in the digital era, to around 1 million subscribers. While this is technically below Newsweek's numbers, these are highly coveted subscribers: roughly two-thirds of American subscribers make over $100,000 a year, and the income from subscriptions makes up the bulk of revenue.

Why has this particular print newsweekly survived? In the microblogged, instant punditry age of social media, readers appreciate the depth and accuracy it brings, even at the expense of speed. The Economist has made a niche of being a dense, weekly digest with thoughtful consideration of the week's events away from the immediate gratification of tweets and updates.

The new platforms

It's still early, but contrast Newsweek's move with the launch of two high-profile efforts the last few months that are pushing the boundaries of news content:

• Quartz from The Atlantic Media Company was created with a "tablet first" design, clearly inspired by the iPad and emerging mobile devices with larger screens.
• Cir.ca from Ben Huh of the Cheezburger Network aims to provide "rolling" news coverage primarily for iPhone and mobiles.

There are a number of ways Newsweek can learn from these examples. Invest in an innovative platform or concept by bringing in people who can implement prototypes, fail, and iterate. Get younger contributors in house and let them play in the sandbox. Start getting into audio or video podcasting to get your star contributors seen and heard. Don't stick with what's commodity. One of the rare highlights for Newsweek the last ten years was Fareed Zakaria's insightful commentary that helped explain non-American viewpoints to Americans. Get more unconventional analysis into the mix.

The Newsweek brand has clout and has the potential to be reborn as relevant to a new audience, but not if it remains a staid subsection of The Daily Beast.

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 - By Gabriel Kahn: In a media landscape defined by disruption, television news has pulled off a remarkable feat: it?s basically unchanged.

Sure, we?ve gotten more news choppers and better graphics on weather and politics. There are a few interesting TV news apps. But, for the most part, your local TV news broadcast looks much as it did a decade ago. It?s pretty much locked into its time slot of 5 p.m. or 10 p.m. You sit, you watch. The anchors work their way through weather, traffic, sports and the smattering of local stories brought to you from the roving news truck. If you stick around long enough, maybe there is a great story at minute 22.

But what if you could harness all the emergent technologies to reshape TV news into a brand-new product, one that maximizes audience engagement, personalizes broadcasts to your interests and allows you to dig deep into digitized news archives?

We recently put that question to a group of technology executives and TV news professionals during a day-long workshop at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. The guest list included Cisco, DirecTV and several tech startups, as well as ABC, CBS, Univision, Frontline, the Los Angeles Times and Reuters. The goal was to see if we could come up with ideas for products that would take your TV news to the next level. We did. But first, why hasn?t this happened already?

One of the big problems for TV news, especially local news, is that, well, it still kind of works. Yes, national news broadcasts grab only about half of the 52 million viewers they had at their 1980 peak. But they are still making money by owning a coveted audience of mostly seniors.

Meanwhile, local TV news is, by many measures, thriving. It often accounts for as much as half of a station?s total revenue. Many local TV stations are producing upwards of five hours of live TV news a day. Some are even expanding. Around 74% of Americans either watch or check a local TV news web site at least once a week, more than any other news source. Though news snobs may snicker, Americans also rate local TV news as their most trustworthy source, giving it higher grades than 60 Minutes or NPR.

But success can breed complacency. And in an environment of constant upheaval, there is no clear path toward successful innovation. At the same time, the costs of doing nothing are sky high. Just ask any newspaper executive.

There are a few areas where TV news cleans everyone?s clock. On the local level, it?s weather and traffic. There are plenty of easier and even more accurate ways to get traffic updates, but TV news puts a narrative behind that backup on the freeway (it?s the jackknifed tractor-trailer which slammed into the guardrail) and serves up aerial views of the scene as well.

Also, for a live event, nothing beats TV news. Whether it?s the runaway balloon boy in Colorado (a hoax, it turns out) or coverage of a DC-9 dropping flame retardant on a wildfire in Southern California, TV news produces can?t-look-away coverage.

But it?s also shackled with issues that make it such a poor fit in an access-anywhere, news-on-demand environment. During the eight hours we spent cloistered together in a room, our group of TV news folks and techies pretty much agreed on the shortcomings.

First, there?s a total absence of viewer control when it comes to TV news. They are still producing a one-size-fits-all broadcast, which feels increasingly anachronistic to the viewer.

Also, appointment viewing ? with the news stuck in a time slot ? clashes with packed schedules and increasing competition for mindshare. I might DVR a sit-com, but news off the DVR gets stale quickly.

The good news is that there are solutions to both of these problems. And solving them might also help TV news crack another problem: how to directly connect with its audience.

One scenario the group came up with is an app that would allow viewers to build their own broadcasts throughout the day. As soon as the sun comes up, the app pushes out a list of five video stories. Viewers can choose which ones to put in their playlist and which ones to discard. As the day moves forward, viewers are given more choices. Some come from pushed breaking news alerts; others come from the viewers? own social network or favorite topics. The playlist is dynamic.

Whenever the viewer has a free 20 minutes, he or she can watch the tailored broadcast on the device of choice ? phone, tablet, computer or regular TV. The stories that play are the latest on a particular topic, so if you selected a story on the debt ceiling in the morning, then you?re greeted with the most up-to-date version when you decide to watch.

The goal is to create a news package that is both customized and curated. Those two characteristics often appear to be at odds with each other. But it was clear from our day-long exercise that customers want both.

Another prototype that came out of the day was a news interface that allows you to pause the broadcast you?re watching in order to go deeper into a particular topic. After watching a two-minute piece on Syria, the viewer can choose to go back in time and learn more about the rebels, the Assad dynasty or other aspects of the story by instantly accessing a broadcaster?s digital archives from a list that pops up on the screen. When the viewer has had his or her fill, it?s back to the regular broadcast.

Other ideas for innovation emerged from the discussion. As usual, the technologists saw a sea of possibility while the news folks saw a wall of obstacles, such as content rights and a newsroom culture resistant to change. But the takeaway from the day was that TV news, if it chooses, has the potential to radically enrich the way it engages with its audience. Let?s hope they seize the opportunity. So stay tuned.

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 - By Andrew Lih: As Wikipedia becomes an increasingly dominant part of our digital media diet, what was once anomalous has become a regular occurrence.

Someone surfing the net comes face to face with a Wikipedia article -- about himself. Or about her own work.

There's erroneous information that needs to be fixed, but Wikipedia's 10-year-old tangle of editing policies stands in the way, and its boisterous editing community can be fearsome.

If a person can put the error into the public spotlight, then publicly shaming Wikipedia's volunteers into action can do the trick. But not without some pain.

The most recent episode?

The case of Pulitzer Prize winning fiction writer Philip Roth.

His bestselling novel "The Human Stain" tells the story of fictional character Coleman Silk, an African-American professor who presents himself as having a Jewish background and the trials he faces after leaving his university job in disgrace. Widely read and highly acclaimed, the book was reviewed or referenced by many famous writers, such as Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin of the New York Times and the noted Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [1] [2] [3]

The Broyard Theory

But there was a standing mystery about the novel.

After the book's release in 2000, Roth had not elaborated on the inspiration for the professor Silk character . Over the years, it had become the subject of speculation, with most of the literary world pointing to Anatole Broyard, a famous writer and NY Times critic who "passed" in white circles without explicitly acknowledging his African American roots.

In 2000, Salon.com's Charles Taylor wrote about Roth's new book:

The thrill of gossip become literature hovers over ?The Human Stain?: There?s no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who passed as white for many years.

Brent Staples' 2003 piece in The New York Times wrote that the story of Silk as a "character who jettisons his black family to live as white was strongly reminiscent of Mr. Broyard."

Janet Maslin wrote the book was "seemingly prompted by the Broyard story."

It was such a widely held notion, the Broyard connection was incorporated into the Wikipedia article on "The Human Stain."

An early 2005 version of the Wikipedia entry cited Henry Louis Gates Jr., and by March 2008, it relayed the theory from Charles Taylor's Salon.com review.

The view was so pervasive, a list of over a dozen notable citations from prominent writers and publications were found by Wikipedia editors.

Wikipedians researching the topic came across articles as secondary sources that drew parallels between Silk and Anatole Broyard. The references were verifiable, linkable prose from notable writers and respected publications. The core policies of Wikipedia -- verifiability, using reliable sources and not undertaking original research -- were upheld by using reputable content as the basis for the conclusions.

Roth Explains It All

However, information from Roth in 2008 changed things.

Bloomberg News did an interview with the author about his new book at the time, "Indignation." Towards the end of the interview, he was asked a casual question about "The Human Stain:"

Hilferty: Is Coleman Silk, the black man who willfully passes as white in "The Human Stain," based on anyone you knew?

Roth: No. There was much talk at the time that he was based on a journalist and writer named Anatole Broyard. I knew Anatole slightly, and I didn't know he was black. Eventually there was a New Yorker article describing Anatole's life written months and months after I had begun my book. So, no connection.

It might have been the first time Roth went on the record saying there was no connection between the fictional Silk and real-life writer Broyard. It seems to be the earliest record on the Internet of this fact.

Fast forward to 2012, and according to Roth, he read the Wikipedia article for [[The Human Stain]] for the first time, and found the erroneous assertions about Anatole Broyard as a template for his main character. In August 2012, Roth's biographer, Blake Bailey, became an interlocutor who tried to change the Wikipedia entry to remove the false information. It became an unexpected tussle with Wikipedia's volunteer editors.

Unfortunately for Roth, by the rules of Wikipedia, first-hand information from the mouth of the author does not immediately change Wikipedia. The policies of verifiability and forbidding original research prevent a direct email or a phone call to Wikpedia's governing foundation or its volunteers from being the final word.

Enter The New Yorker

Frustrated with the process, Roth wrote a long article for the New Yorker, detailing his Wikipedia conundrum. He provided an exhaustive description of the actual inspiration for the professor Silk character: his friend and Princeton professor, Melvin Tumin.

?The Human Stain? was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.

And it is this that inspired me to write ?The Human Stain?: not something that may or may not have happened in the Manhattan life of the cosmopolitan literary figure Anatole Broyard but what actually did happen in the life of Professor Melvin Tumin, sixty miles south of Manhattan in the college town of Princeton, New Jersey, where I had met Mel, his wife, Sylvia, and his two sons when I was Princeton?s writer-in-residence in the early nineteen-sixties.

Good enough. But the problem arose when Roth attempted to correct the information in Wikipedia with the help of Bailey, his biographer. He wrote:

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the ?English Wikipedia Administrator??in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor?that I, Roth, was not a credible source: ?I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,? writes the Wikipedia Administrator??but we require secondary sources.?

Thus was created the occasion for this open letter. After failing to get a change made through the usual channels, I don?t know how else to proceed.

The frustration is understandable. That someone's first-hand knowledge about their own work could be rejected in this manner seems inane. But it's a fundamental working process of Wikipedia, which depends on reliable (secondary) sources to vet and vouch for the information.

Because of this, Wikipedia is fundamentally a curated tertiary source -- when it works, it's a researched and verified work that points to references both original and secondary, but mostly the latter.

It's garbage in, garbage out. It's only as good as the verifiable sources and references it can link to.

But it is also this policy that infuriates many Wikipedia outsiders.

During the debate over Roth's edits, one Wikipedia administrator (an experienced editor in the volunteer community) cited Wikipedia's famous refrain:

Verifiability, not truth, is the burden.
- ChrisGualtieri (talk) 15:53, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

By design, Wikipedia's community couldn't use an email from an original source as the final word. Wikipedia depends on information from a reliable source in a tangible form, and the verification it provides.

Reliable sources perform the gatekeeping function familiar in academic publishing, where peer review guarantees a level of rigor and fact checking from those with established track records.

But even with rigorous references, verifiability can be hard.

Consider Roth's New Yorker piece, where he says:

?The Human Stain? was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.

Compare that to the 2008 interview, when asked, "Is Coleman Silk, the black man who willfully passes as white in "The Human Stain," based on anyone you knew?" Roth said, "No."

This would seem to contradict the New Yorker article. This doesn't make Roth dishonest. Rather, Roth likely interpreted the question differently in a spoken interview as to whether he knew anyone who "passed" in real life, as Silk did in the novel.

The point of all this?

Truth via verification is not easy or obvious.

Even with multiple reliable sources -- a direct transcript from an interview or the words from the author himself -- ferreting out the truth requires standards and deliberation.

As of this writing, Roth's explanation about the Coleman Silk character has become the dominant one in the Wikipedia article, as it should be.

However, the erroneous speculation about Anatole Broyard was so prevalent and widely held in the years before Roth's clarification, that it still has a significant mention in the article for historical purposes. There's still debate how prominent this should be in the entry, given that it's been flatly denied by Roth.

Lessons

Roth's New Yorker article caused the article to be fixed, but getting such a prominent soapbox is not a solution that scales for everyone who has a problem with Wikipedia.

After a decade of Wikipedia's existence as the chaotic encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," its ironic that its stringent standards for verifiability and moving slowly and deliberately with information now make those qualities a target for criticism.

Wikipedia has been portrayed as being too loose ("Anyone can edit Wikipedia? How can I trust it?") and too strict ("Wikipedia doesn't consider Roth a credible source about himself? How can I trust it?"). The fact is, on balance, this yin-yang relationship serves Wikipedia well the vast majority of the time by being responsive and thorough -- by being quick by nature, yet slow by design.

It continues to be one of the most visited web properties in the world (fifth according to ComScore), by refining its policies to observe the reputation of living persons and to enforce accuracy in fast-changing articles. Most outsiders would be surprised to see how conscientious and pedantic Wikipedia's editors are to get things right, despite a mercurial volunteer community in need of a decorum upgrade and the occasional standoff with award-winning novelists.

Andrew Lih is an associate professor at the University of Southern California?s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism where he directs the new media program. He is the author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world?s greatest encyclopedia, (Hyperion 2009, Aurum UK 2009) and is a noted expert on online collaboration and participatory journalism. This story also appeared on his personal blog.

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 - This continues a series on advice for new top editors in Digital First Media newsrooms. An effective newsroom leader understands how much creative control and authorship means to journalists. My grandmother, Francena H. Arnold, was a novelist who once rejected a publisher’s suggested story line, saying, “I could no more write someone else’s story than […]

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Monday, May 20, 2013 -

I have long been fascinated by The Voice of San Diego, a membership-based investigative news site in Southern California. Their model is one from which many news organizations can learn — they were doing memberships long before paywalls were cool, they understand the importance of covering specific niches in a community, they have a strong focus on watchdog investigations, and they’ve always made reader engagement core to their journalism. Today, the organization has relaunched its website with new software that uses technology to help amplify those goals. They realized that their old CMS was holding them back, and relaunched a spiffy new design in a move from which the rest of us in the new industry could surely learn (but I’m biased).

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 -

Next week, the musical world will experience a huge event: eight years after their last album, master of dance music Daft Punk will drop their much-hyped album, Random Access Memories. Music website Pitchfork has honored that with an amazing, immersive feature that evokes the immersive nature of the buzzy New York Times piece, “Snowfall.”

Offering a rare glimpse into the largely private world of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and it achieves it best with strong visual elements that only new media can provide. Taking advantage of HTML5 and GIFs, the layout of the piece flows smartly and shows a lot more editorial flair than the standard feature.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 - This continues a series on advice for new top editors in Digital First Media newsrooms. Sometimes a new editor inadvertently squelches staff creativity and initiative by telling staff members what they should be doing and how. An editor can communicate priorities and stimulate staff creativity by asking, rather than telling. Whether you’re asking about general […]

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 -

The Tribune Company is looking at potentially selling its newspapers, and one Indiegogo project from The Other 98% wants to “put the ‘free’ back in ‘free press’” by crowdfunding the money to purchase the media conglomerate. The price tag? Oh, you know, only $660 million. Today they are just over $60,000, with 30 days remaining in the campaign. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Friday, May 17, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Thursday, May 16, 2013 -

Journos covering all things green can land a byline at the website of Audubon, one of the nation’s oldest continuously published magazines. The advocacy magazine promotes the mission of saving birds, wildlife and habitat and serves as the flagship publication of the National Audubon Society, one of the oldest environmental groups in the country.

The mag’s website covers the same nature-friendly topics as the print mag, and editors are open to hearing from freelancers who want to write Web content and establish a relationship with the pub. In particular, they would love to receive more multimedia pitches, like videos, slideshows and audio pieces. 

For more info, read How To Pitch: Audubon.

The full version of this article is exclusively available to Mediabistro AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, register now for as little as $55 a year for access to hundreds of articles like this one, discounts on Mediabistro seminars and workshops, and all sorts of other bonuses.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

---

Read the full article

Thursday, May 16, 2013 - This continues a series on advice for new top editors in Digital First Media newsrooms. A Digital First editor leads a lot of change in a newsroom. So you need to be sure that your staff receives the training to execute the changes you are leading. I help with this in my visits to the […]

---

Read the full article

Thursday, May 16, 2013 -

---

Read the full article

Thursday, May 16, 2013 -

Yesterday, the New Yorker launched an anonymous tip box. Excuse my skepticism, but I’m not sure why any newsroom wastes their resources on those things. (Sorry, boss!)

Instead of being a useful, secure tool for the public to use as a means of contacting an organization, tip boxes are in reality just a kitschy, spammy, and not particularly secure design element. I get why we have them — to make a show of transparency — but how many leads have you ever gotten from the tip box?

Every time I glimpse one of the notifications from ours in my inbox, I half expect the Syrian Electronic Army to pop out. But it’s usually an insult, jibberish, or a well meaning publicist with a request to cover an event entirely unrelated to the theme of our blog.

The key element here is safety. No one in their right mind– or at least the kind if people you’d want to be conversing with concerning a potential story– is going to try to contact you via the tip box. It’s like calling someone on a landline: intrusive and unlikely to result in a timely connection. It’s called email, or at this point, even a Twitter DM. 

If it weren’t for the disturbing news this week about the Justice Department’s seizure of AP’s phone records, maybe I could find room in my heart for the tip box. But if phone records aren’t safe from our own government, why would anyone leak something through an online tool such as the tip box? Perhaps I’m still just in shock and feeling vicariously betrayed, but the digital anonymous tip box is akin to the charming little crinkly noise my Kindle makes on my iPad. It’s a cute reminder of the more idealistic days of yore — the ones we like to think existed or hope for. But it’s all sort of a farce, isn’t it? 

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

---

Read the full article

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - This guest post by Sue Burzynski Bullard continues a series on advice for new top editors in Digital First Media newsrooms. A piece of advice someone once gave me became my rule to live by as an editor: “Always do what you say you’ll do.” Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But the transition from being responsible only […]

---

Read the full article

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - iPads and other tablets are being used every day for productivity tasks once reserved for laptops. Walt Mossberg looks at apps that attempt to emulate the features of Office.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 - This continues a series on advice for new top editors in Digital First Media newsrooms. Daily news meetings are an important place for editors to emphasize priorities. If a morning meeting focuses on the next day’s newspaper, that will be the focus of the staff’s energies. A Digital First editor should place the focus, especially […]

---

Read the full article

Thursday, May 9, 2013 - The June 10-21 Multimedia Institute is an intensive multi-platform training program designed to equip journalists, educators and other professionals with skills in visual storytelling, data visualization and social media.

---

Read the full article

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - Walt reviews Start8 and Pokki, two products that restore the Start Menu to WIndows 8.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - Visual communications expert Alberto Cairo shares his slideshow presentation on the art of infographics.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 -

For about three years, I have been using WordPress.com (a free blogging site) to create a syllabus for each one of my courses. I first tried it in 2007, and now I’m totally sold on the practice. (See two examples: graduate course; undergrad course.)

One of the best features for students: If you choose a WordPress theme that is mobile-ready, your students can very easily check their deadlines, assignments, etc., on their smartphones, from anywhere.

You can also update your syllabus from your smartphone. There’s an app for that: IOS and Android.

So how should you start? First, set up a free WordPress.com account. Everything you need to know is here: WordPress Basics.

You can always delete a WordPress.com blog — you can create and maintain multiple WordPress.com blogs under one single username. Your first blog can be a little testbed for you to get to know WordPress as a blogging platform, if you aren’t using it already. Then after you feel up to speed, launch a new blog and make that one your syllabus.

If you are using WordPress, there’s no reason to wait. Just launch a new blog before your next course begins, and set it up as the syllabus!

What to put on the ‘Pages’

Most WordPress themes make it easy for you to show the titles of “Pages” as big navigation buttons on every page of the blog. I’ve settled on a standard short list of Pages, based on some standard sections of a traditional syllabus.

About This Course: Key details at the top, such as the room number, meeting times, and contact info for the instructor. Those are followed by an informal description of the course (longer than the university catalog description) and reasons why a student might want to take it.

Course Schedule: This is the page that students will be checking all the time during the semester. It includes the day and dates for all class meetings, all deadlines, assigned readings, etc. However (and I feel this is very important), it does not include details about any of the work. It has an outline format and large headings for each week, making it very easy for students to use.

Required Work: For me, this is a really important part of the package, because it bridges between the skeletal Course Schedule page and the full-fledged descriptions of assignments, which will be posted on a weekly basis after the course gets under way. The Required Work page lays out the percentages or points for all assignments and provides a rationale for each type of assignment (e.g., blog posts, presentations).

Syllabus: Standard boilerplate items that do not change much, or at all, from year to year, such as the course description, attendance policies, honor code and accommodations for students with disabilities.

I’m sure for various kinds of courses, the instructor might want to add or subtract pages from this list. The way you organize it is quite important — you’ve got to be thinking about how students use documents and text. Not many of them are going to read everything!

What to put in the sidebar(s)

The Search box should be at the very top — typically on the far right side. Find it in the WordPress Widgets list, in the Dashboard list under “Appearance.”

A “subscribe by email” link is very helpful to some students (although not all will use it). Also in the Widgets list — “Follow Blog.” I always put this immediately below the Search box.

Sidebar links in WordPress default to one category: “Blogroll.” But you can change that (Dashboard > Links > Link Categories). I like to provide separate categories for links that are:

• Specific to this particular course
• Recommended, or generally useful for students who would take this course
• Specific to our department, college and/or university

For a class in which students keep their own individual blogs, I use RSS (see Widgets) to display each student’s most recent post in the sidebar.

What to put in the footer

Most students will not look at the footer, so don’t put anything vital there.

How to post assignments

Most students like a predictable structure in their courses, so I make it clear to them which day of the week they can expect to see a new post on the course blog. Usually I say Monday, but I post on Sunday night. If I post anything on another day, it should be optional.

Most posts are specifically related to one single assignment. If there are a lot of details, I use subheadings and bullet lists. WordPress makes it easy to post links to resources, and I also like that students can ask questions directly on the assignment post, by leaving a comment. If students are creating something that can be linked to, you can require them to post their link in a comment on the assignment post.

With careful use of WordPress categories, you can make it easy for students to promptly find the latest assignment even if you are adding other kinds of posts as well.

How to use categories effectively

The categories for “Posts” are different from the categories for “Links.” You can easily set up a few key categories (Dashboard > Posts > Categories) such as:

• Assignments (my most-used category in every syllabus blog)
• Recommended (or, Resources)
• In the News
• Events

I think it’s sensible to limit the number of categories to the minimum you can tolerate. It doesn’t help anyone to have lots of categories that each have only one or two items. You can always add unlimited tags (such as topic names) to any post.

What to print for the first class

If the class meets in a computer lab, I can condense the printed document down to one page, providing my contact information, the URL of the course blog, and a few other details. We can go over the full syllabus online during the class.

If the class meets in a regular classroom, I will hand out a four-page version on the first day, and that will include a brief version of the Course Schedule and Required Work pages. It also includes my contact information and the URL of the course.

---

Read the full article

Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - It should be an easy time for laptop buyers, but the market is still pretty confusing and frustrating. Walt offers his guide to buying a new laptop.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - Journalists, technologists and civic leaders talk trends and implications for the future of data journalism.

---

Read the full article

Sunday, April 28, 2013 - In non-TV news organizations today, we see mostly one of two choices for video (or both of these): iPhone (more than any other phone or small device) DSLR (various models) All the smaller video cams seem to have fallen out of favor. Only TV and feature-length documentary makers use high-end video cameras. What does this mean for teaching in j-schools? Some great minds in multimedia journalism education have been discussing that on the Facebook group "ONA Educators," in response to a question posted on April 25, 2013. With permission of those named, here is what they said.

---

Read the full article

Friday, April 26, 2013 -

In the semester now ending, I taught a course in coding for journalism students. You can see the detailed course schedule online.

Here are all the PowerPoints I showed in that class. You can view them on SlideShare or download them there.

• Beginning jQuery – Part 1 – Part 2
• Introduction to the DOM
• JavaScript 101
• Responsive Web Design
• Design Concepts/Web Design
• HTML5 Canvas
• Python – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
• Bonus: Learning Python (rationale)

The class went well. The students seem happy with what they have learned and done. They had had a basic intro to HTML and CSS in a previous course, where they built two very simple Web sites.

---

Read the full article

Thursday, April 25, 2013 -

These are the most-viewed posts on this blog in the past 30 days:

1. 10 examples of bespoke article design and scrolling goodness
2. 10 Rules for Visual Storytelling
3. Advice to journalism students: Forget grad school!
4. Recording phone interviews: A solution that works
5. Get started with Web coding. Part 5: How to use Git and GitHub
6. List of requirements for a digital story designer
7. Best social media tools for journalists
8. Why does anyone major in journalism?
9. How to shoot video interviews
10. Get started with Web coding. Part 1: HTML and CSS

Enjoy!

---

Read the full article

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - The Samsung Galaxy S 4 is an evolution of prior Samsung models and despite some improvements, it still is especially weak in the software Samsung adds to basic Android.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 -

It’s hard work making sure a journalism curriculum remains relevant.

Here are “four essential components to the new curriculum for teaching news and communication,” according to Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute and co-author of The Elements of Journalism (2001):

1. “Teaching of technical skills (how to use different platforms and technology). …”
2. “Journalistic responsibility (including history, values, ethics, community, material that always made journalists better). …”
3. “Understanding of business (how to understand audience metrics, revenue, entrepreneurship). …”
4. “The intellectual discipline of verification … a more conscious, disciplined and clinical approach to what we once called knowing how to report, think and write …”

I think every j-school in North America (including the one where I teach), and probably the world, falls short. We need to ask ourselves why.

One suggestion, which Rosenstiel and others have made, is to partner up with other departments in the university — such as computer science. Some j-schools have done this in one way or another, but it’s not going to work (or work well) in every college and university. Some schools don’t have a computer science department. Some computer science departments will not allow non-majors into their courses. There are computer science departments that have no courses relevant to data-driven journalism or journalism code.

When it comes to hiring new faculty, or adjuncts, to teach the skills on Rosenstiel’s list, we run into other stumbling blocks. In small college towns, the adjunct pool may be limited — and lacking in 21st century skills even more so than the tenured faculty. In colleges and universities all around this continent, budgets have been cut and teaching positions eliminated. New hires on the tenure track are increasingly required (by the top levels of the university) to have a Ph.D., which limits who may be hired.

A common response to all of this is for professors, adjuncts, deans and chairs to throw up their hands and say, “Well, what can we do?”

The clichéd deafening silence often follows the question.

Students deserve better. Regardless of what they think journalism is when they tick the box to become a journalism major (and regardless of whether they’re paying Ivy League prices or in-state tuition at a public university), they deserve to be taught skills, techniques, and ways of thinking that will carry them through the challenging times at hand and ahead. They deserve to have every teacher — tenured, adjunct or freshly pressed Ph.D. — looking at what’s new, what’s happening today, now (what happened in and around Boston last week, for example, as seen in the mainstream news and in social media) and incorporating new methods for reporting, for storytelling, and for engaging the audience into all of their classes.

Don’t forget Rosenstiel’s item No. 3. It’s not about business journalism — it’s about the business of journalism. When students are thinking about getting a salaried job at a major media organization, they’re thinking old school. Many of them need to be pushed to open their eyes and see what’s in front of us now. It’s our job — their journalism teachers’ job — to push them.

---

Read the full article

Thursday, April 18, 2013 - Alberto Cairo on the art of infographics and the ethical dilemmas that come with the field of data visualization.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - No only did social media help citizens learn about the Boston Marathon explosions quicly, but terrorism experts said the proliferation of photos and video on the web through social media may also help authorities identify the perpetrators of the attack. “All the media provides a tremendous asset for the forensic evaluation of the explosion event,” [...]

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - Christopher Mims, writing in Quartz, says that Vine is the perfect tool to capture the trauma of the Boston explosions, and could become the tool in the future that captures the most iconic “images” of events like this. He uses this Vine loop as his example: Boston Marathon explosion from the news vine.co/v/bFdt5uwg6JZ — Doug_Life [...]

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - A great collection of photos from the explosions gathered by the Wall Street Journal using Storify. [View the story "Social Media Photos of the Boston Marathon Explosions" on Storify]

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - Here is the full thread. Great use of Reddit by an eyewitness.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - “Compared to past breaking news events, today we saw an increased level of maturity from social media and technology-enabled reporting that may provide a glimpse of what breaking news coverage can be in the future,”  says David Holmes in PandoDaily

---

Read the full article

Friday, April 12, 2013 - Catherine Bracy of Code for America wants to bring 21st century technology and innovation to the public sector.

---

Read the full article

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - Facebook Home, a new suite of software Facebook is introducing for Android phones, aims to take over phones right from their lock screens.

---

Read the full article

Monday, April 8, 2013 - Do you ever wish you had a library of over 42,000 books in your classroom? Project Gutenberg makes that possible without forcing you to put all of your desks in the hallway. The Project Gutenberg site houses over 42,000 digital copies (eBooks) of classic texts and provides access to more than 100,000 digital texts through their partner and affiliate sites.

---

Read the full article

Monday, March 18, 2013 - Do you enjoy following twitter chats but always feel a step behind because of the slow rate of refresh on your everyday twitter client? Twubs can help. Twubs is a browser-based twitter application that tracks hashtag conversations in real time.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - Adjustments to U.S. tax policy should make it easier for social entrepreneurs and philanthropies to launch and finance non-profit journalism startups. Good luck to them. Raising capital and sustaining news startups, regardless of tax status, will still be difficult.

---

Read the full article

Friday, March 1, 2013 - Video creation is a great way to present information in the classroom. GoAnimate provides a fun, animated alternative to traditional video projects.

---

Read the full article

Monday, February 25, 2013 - Using PowerPoint-style presentations in the classroom is nothing new and is a fairly common method of presenting information. Nearpod builds on that paradigm by broadcasting the presentation to mobile devices and web browsers and injecting interactive components.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - The experience at the extraordinary Hunt Library is so encompassing, so collaborative that it’s apt to make gatekeepers everywhere a little uncomfortable. So complete is the remaking that traditionalists and visionists alike wonder if The Hunt should even be called a library.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - Incrementally changing their broken business models won't save legacy publishers. They need to build an audience-centric approach to serve their communities and make money.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, February 12, 2013 - Whimpers won't save the news business. Our goal: reinvent it. Join us in an initiative that brings "the people formerly known as the audience," social interaction and personal technologies to solutions that foster journalism, unify knowledge and profit the changemakers of an informed society.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, February 12, 2013 - Print newspapers need to go beyond breaking news coverage and headlines when they report big events because their readers know what happened long before the paper is printed.

---

Read the full article

Thursday, October 4, 2012 - After six years, 520 posts and who knows how many words, this is the last thing I’m going to write on this blog.  It’s a decision I’ve been thinking about for almost a year and I’ve kept putting it off, partly because I still had things I wanted to figure out and share with you, […]

---

Read the full article

Monday, September 17, 2012 - The first thing to realise is that the secret is not to come up with a new idea. There is rarely such a thing. Instead, the secret is to look at a space with people, or businesses already established, and see what they’re doing wrong. Then invent something that improves on what they do. Whether […]

---

Read the full article

Monday, September 10, 2012 - Tumblr followers might have seen this video I discovered (via Maria Popova’s ever-excellent Brain Pickings) last week. It’s a short profile of the history documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, a man whose technique and style has become so recognisable, he’s even had an effect named after him. Burns has a difficult job: make stories from the […]

---

Read the full article

Monday, September 3, 2012 - One of the first and best bits of advice I’ve ever been given has been this: write everything down. Writing an idea down – making it physical on the page – engages your brain in imaging how that idea might happen. As the words form on the page, you think about logistics, treatments, audiences. It […]

---

Read the full article

Monday, August 27, 2012 - Most of us, either through our upbringing, education or profession, have an aversion to making mistakes. Most of us too are governed in some way by a fear of failure. Fair enough, but we live in a world, and work in an industry, where change is afoot and where innovation is desperately needed. This comes […]

---

Read the full article

Monday, August 13, 2012 - It’s more complicated than a one-word answer, of course, but data and online community work (developing communities and engaging users) seem to be moving from niche ‘extras’ to core essentials in much of journalism. The word ‘data’ has been creeping into advertisements for reporters. “Experience of data journalism” in a vacancy on Health Service Journal [...]

---

Read the full article

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - Delicious.com has killed its network — the social in social bookmarking — since its relaunch by AVOS. Well, put it in cold storage, at least.  But you can revive it yourself — to some extent — thanks to the power of RSS. The network still seems to be operating, and you can see the links [...]

---

Read the full article

Monday, October 3, 2011 - 27 Next-Gen Journalists Produce foodsafety.news21.com All elements of a six-month News21 investigation into food safety are now available to be republished widely under the Creative Commons agreement, requiring credit only to Carnegie-Knight News21. Last week major media partners began publishing select stories from How Safe Is Your Food?, the 2011 national News21 project involving 27 [...]

---

Read the full article

Thursday, July 28, 2011 -

It was one of those rare cases where the mechanics and the message seemed to align neatly, and once we began speaking to experts in the field of sweatshop labor it became clear that there was a huge amount of relevant content that we could bake into the game mechanics. 

---

Read the full article

Friday, July 22, 2011 -

---

Read the full article

Monday, June 13, 2011 -
Spent is a game about short-term personal finance, or the daily need to pinch pennies just to keep food on the table and provide a small levee against emergencies. Although the game's loose causal chain between decision and consequence (coupled with the emphasis on text-based delivery of information) provides a less pure procedural rhetorical model of poverty, it is nevertheless effective given an assumed target audience of middle-class teenagers and young adults. For many this game will merely serve as an exercise in sensitivity to the plights of the less fortunate (a balm to relieve conservative semantic engineering), perhaps inspiring a small donation at the end of the game. Instead of seeing Spent as a "call to action," it might be okay to settle for the more feasible--yet no less daunting or important--goal of educating young adults who are about to make decisions about whether to take out loans to go to college, keep an unwanted pregnancy, drop out of high school, or enter the job market.
Spent asks its players to make a number of difficult decisions, mostly centered around family responsibility (paying for a child's advanced placement classes, school lunches, and trips to the museum) and ethical gray space (paying for a fender-bender or hitting and running). There are also a couple of choices, such as whether to get dental care for a root canal, that leave constant reminders of delinquency in the form on threatening icons above one's current funding. Unfortunately, many of these decisions have no direct feedback into the system. I've played through a number of times, and my failure to pay for the root canal or the bumped fender never came back to haunt me. Many of these decisions, such as whether or not to smoke a cigarette to relieve some stress, simply open up factoid screens that give insights into how people enter into unhealthy living or get themselves into legal trouble--they're disguised trivia questions rather than actual choices.

---

Read the full article

Friday, June 3, 2011 -

You Shall Know The Truth is a timed hidden object game developed by Jonas Kyratzes for the Wikileaks Stories project. You play a spy sent by the U.S. intelligence community to retrieve leaked documents and biometric data on an unnamed Wikileaks employee from his or her apartment. It's a difficult game, not in that it's particularly trying to find all of the mission-targeted data before the timer runs out but because it adds a dark, humorous edge to a genre of casual games that traditionally has no ideological bent. It is also contradictory and perhaps difficult to take seriously at times, but, taken as a whole, it's a complex work with a novel take on the intersection between politics and play. Check it out before reading on, because there are spoilers ahead.

You Shall Know The Truth is a twisted fantasy. The apartment where the game takes place is sparse and messy. There's a creepy tinge of voyeurism to the exploration of the space, your cursor slowly scanning back and forth over living room, office, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. At times the line between real-world intelligence worker and cartoonish TV spy becomes blurred; the text on non-mission-critical items constantly undercuts the competency and rationality of the CIA, and it's hard not to imagine the player-character foaming at the mouth and cackling while combing the apartment's every carpet for biological material. Because the player is sent to retrieve information that we already know to have been leaked, we understand that, in some way, our mission is doomed to fail. 

The game's timer is set to 999 seconds, and, though I might be wrong here, this means that it's long enough to allow the player to process every object in the apartment without running out of time. This also means that the game is dropping hints for us that it isn't actually about finding hidden objects. Nevertheless, you don't know that the first time you play it. Every object in the room has a different progress ticker, and you feel a decent amount of pressure while waiting for the ticker to slowly count off. This waiting screen briefly describes the object you've clicked on and justifies why you'd want to look at said object. You Shall Know The Truth is currently the only Wikileaks Stories game that actually includes information about specific leaks, paraphrasing their content during the verification process of mission-targeted items.

It's a clever way to weave this information into the game, giving you something to read while the progress counter ticks off. One could criticize the game for not making this text permit any other interaction besides cold reading, and it's certainly possible to stare at the progress counter instead of engaging with the content, but we can assume that anyone who might take the time to play a Wikileaks Stories game would care enough to take a look. I'm an impatient gamer, especially when a mission clock is involved, but it worked for me--I learned about a good number of leaks that I hadn't read about in other media sources (and the cable codes are included, making it easy to Google for more information elsewhere).

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 -
Obviously it's wonderful to see indie developers who haven't engaged with the genre in the past sticking their toes in the water (or their necks on the block), but it's impossible to ignore that the most timely and nuanced entry in the series thus far has come from Paolo Pedercini, a grizzled veteran. That boy has had to roll his eyes through enough of my insufferable critiques in the past, so we'll only be looking at the latter two this week and next. If you're unfamiliar with the project, Joel Goodwin's blog Electron Dance is a great place to start for links to all the games, brief analysis and comparison, and a lengthy interview with Jonas Kyratzes (one of the two Wikileaks Stories project coordinators).

Damian Connolly's Wikileakers is the most recent of the three currently-extant Wikileaks Stories games. It's clearly the most accessible, and it has, perhaps, been written off as overly simplistic. And we can see why: it's more cartoonish than the previous Wikileaks Stories games, it uses Internet slang ("pron"), marijuana jokes, and cheap one-offs at the President, and it hinges on a somewhat conservative score-chasing goal structure. There's no gray area here: Assange is our hero (as pointed out by Goodwin, it's the only game that features him as the player character), and the "propaganda model" media is trying to keep him down.

Players control a pixellated Assange as he runs back and forth in what appears to be an FBI lobby, dodging lasers and bombs. The former represent corrupt media sources, while the bombs drop from a crane ominously labeled "PR" (the bombs themselves alternately accusing the man of being a terrorist and sexual deviant). Lasers constantly track Assange, stopping briefly to intermittently fire. Players can mouse-click to place single a block labelled "free press" that will obstruct exactly one laser shot before disappearing. While the first two media lasers bear American flags, Swedish and Australian media sources are added as the player's score increases.

What's most interesting to me is the source of this political skinning: I keenly remember similar auto-tracking lasers from the number of times they've killed me in my favorite masocore platformers, N+ and Super Meat Boy. What's different here is the size of the level and the acrobatic capability of my avatar. In SMB, lasers and rockets can be avoided because of their placement inside narrow corridors filled with blocks to hide behind. In N+, while the levels might be rectangular and open, I can slide and jump off of walls and blocks at high speeds to throw off the lasers' tracking. 

Even though Assange is our hero here, the game recognizes that he is no superhero, no ninja. The man is only human, and his ability to dodge attacks from the media is suitably, metaphorically limited. And the precious "free press" shield is hardly any help at all--after a few attempts at the game I found the most success by just ignoring it and focusing on my dodging. As with many editorial games, curious micro-rhetorics arise through accident or, perhaps, clever design: here, I found that the husks of dropped PR bombs would actually protect me from half of the lasers if I jumped over them at just the right time. I enjoyed the idea that botched attempts at slander would end up shielding Assange in the future. 

But what does it say that, in Wikileakers, Assange is essentially trapped in this tiny space with so little room to breathe? It might be read as a spatial metaphor for the intense amount of public scrutiny the man has attracted. But couldn't there be a cynical counter-reading? I found myself unable to ignore thinking of the box that even Assange's supporters have placed him within. In order to maintain the idea of Assange as unalloyed hero, we're forced into a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from accepting that any of the nasty rumors about his personal life, or questions of his ethics more generally, might in fact have some truth to them. 

The game is difficult to beat. I doubt we're looking at a typical rhetoric of failure here, because that wouldn't exactly mesh with the reality of Assange's success in distributing the cables, but I definitely didn't have the patience to stick with it and reach a happy ending screen. That said, the score itself is a matter of concern for me. It seems to imply that the Wikileaks cables would stop flowing were Assange taken out of the picture, which we know to be quite untrue. Again we see this somewhat absurd notion that Assange is an Atlas of sorts, upholding truth alone, unaided by a perfectly capable staff---itself seeming like a capitulation to the very overexposure of Assange that the game hopes to critique.

Disconnected from the time of its release and the purpose of its umbrella project, this game is as capable a playable editorial cartoon as any. In fact, it's more polished and enjoyable to play than most (sporting the social media integration that we're coming to see more and more of in newsgames). But this is the kind of game we'd expect to see a week or two after the announcement of the Wikileaks Stories project. How are "democracy and truth served" by such a simple game, once we'd had three months to read and reflect on the issues that Wikileaks and Assange had raised? We must take seriously the question whether or not just any game made about Wikileaks should be considered a proper part of the Wikileaks Stories project. 

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - The Columbia Journalism Review asked me to pen a response to the new report on digital news economics, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism.” Here are my thoughts. Tweet The Columbia Journalism Review asked me to pen a response to the new report on digital news economics, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism.” Here are my thoughts. “The future of journalism will be a tale of smaller and smaller organizations making a bigger and bigger impact,” asserts Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger.com. I couldn’t agree more. They will rise and fall, collaborate and compete, succeed and fail—and be replaced by new startups. So what does this mean for the business of digital journalism? For one thing, it means we have to do business in dramatically different ways—not just collecting money differently. So here are three places to start. Many of these things are already happening and could add to “The Story So Far.” Identify the players and mind the gaps: Traditional news organizations should take more cues from independent news startups. Value sells. And value derives from engagement and from unique kinds of content. Identify the gaps in news coverage and find ways to fill them. This may mean you create a niche product but it could also mean you enter a news partnership with another journalistic outlet that is covering something you’re not. Instead of trying to cover twenty areas poorly, pick six to eight and own them. Partner with other news creators locally or nationally for the rest. Make sure you know who’s doing what in your community. Map the media assets that you have. Know who the emerging power players are. I have found it shocking how some traditional news outlets are not paying attention to their own news ecosystem. As far as they are concerned, they are the only game in town. Yet we are beginning to see hyperlocal sites (not just Patch.com) expanding to start new sites in nearby towns. Nurture the nickels, not just the dimes. Multiple revenue streams begin to add up. Some of the independent news startups are looking at more than just grants and/or advertising. They are cultivating consulting income (web and social media development), content syndication, niche products, and event income that can include registrations fees and corporate sponsorships. These events can produce new kinds of knowledge networks in communities and open the doors for different kinds of support. While there is much fretting about how new online news outlets have not fully taken the place of traditional news organizations, the fact is that many hyperlocal sites are covering communities that never had much, or any, coverage before. And a growing roster of statewide investigative journalism initiatives are doing some remarkable accountability journalism—and sharing it with other news organizations in their states. Incubate your competitors. A radical thought or a new opportunity? Nurture not just what’s good for your company but also what’s good for the community and give it buzz. Make your competitors your collaborators. Pull a J-Lab. It may sound counterintuitive but invest $150,000 in a greenhouse fund to nurture the best of your local news providers with micro grants tied to collaboration opportunities. I guarantee you will raise the bar for everyone and begin to connect the news silos that are cropping up. Put out a call for collaborative enterprise stories. Since last fall, J-Lab helped to seed fourteen Philadelphia stories that are running on multiple platforms with only $70,000 in funding from the William Penn Foundation. You can do this, too. Take those empty desks in the newsroom and turn them into them into co-working spaces. Invite community site founders to work alongside you and even pay a token rent. See what ideas that proximity fosters. Know and nurture the ideas in your community before they blindside you. Develop citywide Networked Journalism initiatives. For instance, J-Lab’s Net-J pilot project, funded by the Knight foundation, helps support a community manager at a mainstream news organization and provides small stipends to at least five local news sites willing to try collaborating for a year. The Seattle Times has grown its network from five hyperlocal sites to thirty-nine sites; The Charlotte Observer from five to sixteen. The Portland Oregonian just launched its network with seven smaller news sites that want to partner. As we learned in a recent survey to gauge Seattle readers’ perceptions of these networks, eight in ten of the 996 respondents said they valued both the network of partners and The Seattle Times itself for making it easier to connect with community news. Times editors said the partnerships had bolstered their brand, even if its website did not see a direct traffic gain. Once you start erecting an infrastructure that helps all media, you are in a position to leverage different kinds of support. Initiate a different “ask.” So far in the digital journalism world, we have asked people to be advertisers or to be subscribers. We have asked them to be donors or funders. We have asked them to be citizen journalists or poorly paid professional journalists. We have asked them to rate and share our stories. We have not asked them to do something that might have more appeal: to be “media players”—media players who are charged with being good stewards of a robust local news and information landscape. It rang so true to me when Batavian editor Howard Owens explained, in “The Story So Far,” that many of his local advertisers don’t care about click-throughs, they just want to support the community. We’ve heard that from many startups. What would such civic stewardship begin to look like? It could take the form of participating in a knowledge network—a series of events in which people meet and learn about civic issues, literary news, legislative priorities, and fun folks in town. It helps if your events generate some water-cooler chitchat. Don’t laugh: The Texas Tribune has brought in more than $500,000 in event revenue in the last two years. Many of its events are now the place to be, and the Tribune is breaking news that others news organizations find they must cover. Media players could also belong to statewide Journalism Trusts, donating funds, advice, and their non-journalism expertise (event production, anyone?) to foster robust news and information. Check out the early Vermont Journalism Trust. Asking people to participate in ways that don’t require professional journalism skills helps re-channel energies and dampen concerns about authority or the accuracy of amateur journalists. And it gets a different kind of attention from prospective funders. To be sure, the business of digital journalism gives us much to wring our hands about, as the Tow Center report attests. But having judged several journalism awards contests this year, I’m seeing some of the strongest entries coming from new journalism sites, not the traditional players. I’ve just finished vetting another 378 proposals from women media entrepreneurs; the ideas are enormously varied and the applicants’ skills run deep. What I see missing from so many of the conversations about how we garner support for the future of journalism is the recognition of the low-hanging fruit growing in many communities—independent news entities that are going to continue to launch. We need more new thinking that validates and engages them in the overall enterprise.

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - How do you tell the story of 5,000-some inmates who will spend their entire lives in Pennsylvania prisons, with no chance for parole, because they are convicted of murder? Tom Ferrick, founder and senior editor of Metropolis, an independent news startup in Philadelphia, sought an enterprising way. Tweet How do you tell the story of 5,000-some inmates who will spend their entire lives in Pennsylvania prisons, with no chance for parole, because they are convicted of murder? Tom Ferrick, founder and senior editor of Metropolis, an independent news startup in Philadelphia, sought an enterprising way. “The Ballad of Red Dog” captures the narrative arc and delivers an emotional tug of the story of Haywood Fennell, now 60, a model prisoner who’s been in jail since 1968 for a murder committed when he was 17. And it’s all done in seven panels of illustration by Jacob Lambert, whose work occasionally appears in Mad Magazine. The Ballad of Red Dog, as Fennell is called, is a graphic novel (or at least a non-fiction short story) published yesterday as the cover story in The City Paper and last month on Ferrick’s site. J-Lab funded it with a $5,000 Enterprise Reporting Award from the William Penn Foundation. “I was interested in the narrative arc of the story of what happens to a lifer when ... they realize they’re never going to get out of here,” Ferrick said, referring to Fennell’s current abode, Graterford Prison. Distilling Fennell’s story to its essence entailed hours of interviewing, tracking down the prosecutors, and searching for documents by Ferrick, who sharpened his journalistic chops as a respected reporter and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer (where I used to work). And it included five hours of interviews at the crowded, pre-cast concrete, barbed-wire facility where Fennell will likely die.  Pennsylvania is one of several states that have life sentences without parole. “For years, I have been reading or writing stories about young men - sometimes in their late teens or early 20’s - who end up being sentenced to life in prison for murder, usually over some trivial matter - a fight over a girlfriend, an insult to their manhood, or in Red Dog’s case, a petty robbery, that went awry,” Ferrick wrote in his blog. But he was less interested in the crimes than in the life passages of these prisoners as they go from being macho young men playing basketball and lifting weights, to middle-aged inmates to prison elders.  “How does that shape their behavior?” Ferrick asked. Ferrick reached out to Bill DiMascio, head of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, who gave Ferrick the names of three lifers to profile.  DiMascio visits these prisoners and is known to ask:  How much punishment is enough? As with any story, it got more complicated as Ferrick dove into the records and found a moment in 1992 when Fennell might have gotten parole for being an accomplice, and not the actual do-er. So he returned to interview Fennell some more. Illustrator Jacob accompanied Ferrick for the first interview at Graterford, a two-and-a-half-hour session.  “I think Jacob did a wonderful job.  He captured Red Dog’s look.” And the report succeeded in its goal: to tell a story in a new narrative way.  

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - April 6, 2011 Contact: , , J-Lab (202) 885-8100 or Heidi de Laubenfels, The Seattle Times (206) 464-8556Washington, D.C. - In a survey to gauge reader perception of The Seattle Times’ collaboration with local news websites, eight in 10 respondents said they valued both the network of partners and The Times itself for making it easier to connect with community news, J-Lab reported today. Although the network has had little promotion, more than half (51%) of the 996 respondents said they knew about the partnership before taking the survey. Respondents who reached the survey via partner sites were more aware of the partnership (61%) than those from seattletimes.com. Another 77 percent said they would take advantage of the partnership in the future. The online survey, conducted over two weeks in March, sought to determine whether online news consumers in the Seattle region were aware of the partnership, which has grown from five sites in August 2009 to 39 sites today, and whether it helped them meet their information needs. The Seattle journalism network is one of nine partnerships around the country supported by J-Lab with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “We worked with The Seattle Times to field this survey, not knowing what we’d learn. We’re extremely encouraged by the feedback from the community,” said J-Lab director Jan Schaffer. The respondents comprised a voluntary sample, with roughly half accessing the survey from seattletimes.com’s home page and half accessing it via links on five of the participating sites. For The Seattle Times, the partnership means presenting headlines from partner sites on seattletimes.com and incorporating links to the partner sites. More than half the respondents (54%) said they used links from the Times to go to partner sites. Others accessed the Times’ site from the individual community sites. Although The Times is driving traffic to its partner sites, it also appeared to get the greatest benefit from the collaboration: More than half the respondents (52%) said the partnership improved their opinion of seattletimes.com strongly or somewhat. 84 percent said they valued the partnership for supporting improvements in community journalism. 78 percent said they valued The Seattle Times for making it easier to connect with community news sites. “It bolsters our brand, even if we are not seeing a direct traffic gain,” said The Times’ Deputy Managing Editor, Heidi de Laubenfels. A majority of the respondents (79%) said they would be willing to support the network as readers; some would donate, advertise or sponsor an activity. Respondents feel that the community news partnership is a valuable undertaking, improving community journalism. Participating partners were the West Seattle Blog, Capitol Hill Seattle, My Edmonds News, My Ballard and Three Sheets Northwest.  Breaking news is the most commonly sought community news topic, followed by “go-do” types of information about local events and activities. Events and activities are more popular on the partner sites, however. More than 324 of the 996 respondents gave their impressions of the partnership in free-form text boxes. Positive comments outweighed negatives by more than 10 to 1. The positives liked the cooperation among the sites and thought it benefited them as readers.  Negative remarks complained that the partner sites were giving up their independence to The Times or that The Times was giving credence to news not always produced by professional journalists. The open-ended responses urged The Times to expand the network geographically, provide more partner headlines on its homepage and to make it very clear when a link takes them off seattletimes.com. More than three-quarters (77%) of the respondents were comfortable clicking away from a site to a new page. Half, however, prefer to have the link open in a new tab. About Knight Foundation The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation advances journalism in the digital age and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950, the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote informed and engaged communities and lead to transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org. About J-Lab J-Lab helps news organizations and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life. It also administers the Knight Citizen News Network (www.kcnn.org and www.J-Learning.org), the New Voices community media grant program (www.j-newvoices.org), the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism (www.j-lab.org), and the McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs initiative (www.newmediawomen.org). Read Jan Schaffer’s take in her Blogically Thinking post.  

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - With nine Networked Journalism projects started around the county, we wondered if anyone in those communities had even noticed that independent news websites were partnering with a mainstream media organization in town. Tweet With nine Networked Journalism projects started around the county, we wondered if anyone in those communities had even noticed that independent news websites were partnering with a mainstream media organization in town. So 18 months into this experiment, we enlisted The Seattle Times to conduct an online survey to gauge the perceptions of its readers.  Since August 2009, The Times has grown its network from its initial five partners to 39.  In short:  Readers have noticed. They like it. They want more.  And they like The Seattle Times for spearheading the collaboration.  Roughly half of the respondents came to the survey through a link on seattletimes.com; half through a link on the partner sites. See the results of the 966 surveys here. Seattletimes.com is spending a lot of effort to drive more traffic to the smaller local sites in its community than it is getting in return. So what’s the value? By a considerable measure, The Times seems to be getting a significant brand lift by collaborating with local news startups and other news creators. 84 percent of the respondents said they valued the partnership for supporting improvements in community journalism. 78 percent said they valued The Seattle Times for making it easier to connect with community news sites. “It bolsters our brand, even if we are not seeing a direct traffic gain,” said The Times’ Deputy Managing Editor, Heidi de Laubenfels. Some of the most interesting feedback came in the 324 open-ended comments the respondents offered.  They fared 10-to-1 positive vs. negative in favor of the network efforts.  Many were protective of their community news sites. To be sure, many appreciated being able to see partner headlines on the homepage of seattletimes.com and link directly to stories they would not get in The Times itself. “The links on The Seattle Times for the community news partners are the main way I access these sites… I love how easy it is to see the headlines from these community sites at seattletimes.com,” said one. As interesting were how many respondents followed links to The Times from the partner sites. “I’m not a Seattle area resident, so I wasn’t a Seattle Times reader at all until I started reading Three Sheets Northwest,” said another. The collaboration even seemed to dampen some lingering bad feelings towards the Times:  “The West Seattle Blog is my source for what’s happening in West Seattle… I am one of those people who cancelled her subscription [to the Times] in 2001, after the strike. While I am not planning on re-subscribing, I must say that this partnership has lessened my animosity towards the Times,” another weighed in. “There is simply no way you could provide this level of neighborhood detail using your own resources, so it is a smart use of reliable, existing media - benefits you, the other sites & the readers - a win for everyone!” read another of the positive comments. Negative comments reflected concern over whether links to sites with content not produced by professional journalists “devalued the credibility of any real news outlet that wants to consider themselves a serious news source. And, it just seems lazy as well,” said one objector. And then there was: “Keep your corporate conservative bias and your dirty fingers out of our neighborhood blogs!” It was clear that committed readers of the hyperlocal news sites valued them and wanted to see them stick around.  Maybe an element of protective collaboration is just what the emerging news ecosystem needs these days.  

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - The best way to drive innovation is to expand the definition of innovation. It needs to be more than new tools.  To be sure, developing new apps or platforms is very cool.  And these things often make journalism more efficient to produce and less expensive to distribute. Tweet [This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks how we can drive innovation and encourage organizations like the Knight Foundation and the Reynolds Journalism Institute to help seed it.] The best way to drive innovation is to expand the definition of innovation. It needs to be more than new tools.  To be sure, developing new apps or platforms is very cool.  And these things often make journalism more efficient to produce and less expensive to distribute. Often, too, we tend to label as innovation new skillsets (digital literacy), or mindsets (multi-platform production.) I would like to see us all, not just the Knight Foundation and the Reynolds Journalism Institute, embrace innovations in journalism conventions, processes, and relationships. In convening a couple dozen young journalists eight weeks ago to “Re-Imagine Journalism,” we stepped into a mother lode of frustrations about commoditized news and “muffin-top” journalism (metrics-based stories).  Let’s try some innovations that remove the tension between what people want and what they need. In exploring the possibilities around collaboration vs. competition, J-Lab has come to realize you can incentivize surprising possibilities.  One of our Networked Journalism pilot sites, the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, just launched a website, Pipeline, to collaborate with other information partners on the biggest economic, business and environmental story of its times - the controversial removing of natural gas embedded in the Marcellus Shale. And hot off the presses is news from another site. A survey to determine whether Seattle residents noticed or valued the network of 39 sites coalesced by the Seattle Times found astonishing recognition with very little promotion:  51 percent of the 996 respondents were aware of the partnership and 84 percent said it was a good thing.  How do we raise the bar to take this to the next level? Finally, while many journalism awards programs honor “good journalism,” I’d assert that it’s equally important to award innovative changes in the processes of journalism: How we do our stories. Consider how last year’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations honored Sunlight Live for aligning multi-faceted streams of information to cover the health care summit.  We honored ProPublica’s Distributed Reporting efforts for innovations in systematizing the process of crowdsourcing to execute their impressive stories.  And we recognized Longshot Magazine for flipping an entire magazine in just 48 hours using little more than Twitter to collect 1,500 submissions in one day. There can be innovation all around us if we just pay attention to, and sometimes incentivize, the possibilities. (And while you’re at it, apply for this year’s Knight-Batten awards. Deadline is June 6.)  

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 -

---

Read the full article

Friday, March 25, 2011 - Using Tweetdeck, you can hide tweets if they contain words you specify — and, conversely, set up filters like a search, to show only tweets showing specific keywords. There are two main ways of doing this and, on the day of the iPad2 goes on sale in the UK, I’m using ‘iPad’ as the keyword [...]

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - Users can now link to and highlight individual sentences and paragraphs in stories on the New York Times site, notes TNW Media: “While it could be a tad complicated for an average reader, it’s a great tool for writers and bloggers who frequently link to NYTimes stories. [...] To simplify things, if you hit your [...]

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - The University of North Carolina’s “Powering a Nation” site won the large group multimedia project Gold Award in the annual College Photographer of the Year Awards for the second consecutive year for its coverage of energy issues in America. Additional, Syracuse University took the Silver Award in the same category, for its “Apart from War” [...]

---

Read the full article

Friday, November 12, 2010 - James Murdoch highlights the revenue potential but also the risks of iPad apps, in an interview at the Monaco Media Forum: “Our flagship newspaper products are now the iPad apps,” Murdoch said, and they pose a greater risk. “The problem with the apps is they’re much more directly cannabilistic of the core print product than [...]

---

Read the full article

Sunday, October 3, 2010 - Five years ago, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation issued a challenge to the nation’s top journalism schools: Take the best students. Put them with expert editors and give them time and resources to report in-depth stories that are both multimedia-rich and journalistically excellent. That’s what [...]

---

Read the full article

Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - Two Arizona State University fellows and a team from North Carolina’s “Power a Nation” has received more awards for 2009 Carnegie-Knight News21 content in recent contests. The 2010 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Student Magazine Contest (pdf) honored two ASU students for their work on “Latino America,” tied to the Carnegie-Knight News21 [...]

---

Read the full article