Sohaib Athar wasn’t a journalism major, and neither are you
The story of Sohaib Athar is an especially important anecdote precisely because he was accidental journalist.The value of social media isn’t as much about giving a microphone to people who seek it, but about amplifying unheard voices.
In the great debate about the future of journalism and the relevance of journalism schools, the Athar anecdote supports my belief that *every* college student should take a course in journalism. Whether they practice the profession or not, many of them will be “brothers in the crowd” — to borrow a phrase and a scene from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
At those moments, we don’t need journalists as much as we need people — like Athar — who practice journalistic thinking.
‘Fake’ MLK quote small hint at pernicious popularity of lies
Making its rounds on Twitter recently has been a “fake” quote attributed to Martin Luther King: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
Some people — most prominently Megan McArdle at The Atlantic — thought it just didn’t sound right.
The problem is that you can’t prove he didn’t say it. A couple of people have tried, and have come up with a good partial explanation. But disproving something you can’t see is nearly impossible. This is a great example of a problem often faced by reporters — a problem that’s becoming even more vexing with the development of social media. As it turns out, people say a lot of stuff that just isn’t true.
A quick Google search of the quote turns up more than 10,000 results — almost all from Twitter, Tumblr, Blogspot or WordPress posts written since the death of Osama bin Laden. But as I try to teach my journalism students, popularity does not equal accuracy. Ten bad sources aren’t as useful as one good source. Google says that some date as far back as Feb. 1, 2001, but that may be a default date on the Tumblr micro-blogging platform. In any case, date-based search on Google is useless for this effort. (Similar searches on Bing and Technorati were also not effective.)
My favorite explanation, by tech writer Frederic Lardinois, points most of the quote to King’s 1963 book Strength to Love. He found that the one-sentence quote used on Twitter could also be found as part of a longer quote on other social media sites. Most of that quote — but not the first sentence — is directly from Strength to Love. But that first sentence remains a black swan. I can’t prove that King didn’t say it. But I can’t prove that he did. And I can’t figure out where or when in the contemporary digital folklore that the quote originated. As a recently popular book points out, just because you’ve never seen a black swan doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Europeans had only seen white swans. Until a black one showed up in Australia in 1697.
Taken as an isolated incident he harm from this misquote is pretty abstract. At worst it becomes George Washington’s cherry tree — a story that everyone hears, that has its accuracy questioned, but that cannot be disproved. It muddies our understanding of history and it contributes to a changing narrative that we tell about ourselves, our history and our heroes.
The problem in the era of social media is that these misquotes are rampant and pernicious. Fabricating the words of political nemeses has become an acceptable and common tactic. Check out the archive of fact-checking that Snopes.com has done on fake quotes attributed to a variety of political lightening rods from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton. There is a library of fake quotes and fake legislation that gets distributed via e-mail and social networks. They’re complete fiction. It’s bad enough that political leaders — from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton — make up stuff all the time and assert it as truth. But it’s as if we’ve suddenly corrupted the value of the First Amendment by acting as if the answer to bad speech is not less speech but more bad speech. Lies are no longer combated by the often difficult-to-ascertain truth, but by more easy-to-fabricate lies.
It’s possible that the person — and it was one person — who decided to “upgrade” the actual King quote with an additional line was unconsciously mashing up King with another speaker. There’s plenty of historical precedent for that practice. Or perhaps she just incorrectly remembered the real quote and didn’t look it up in the book before she posted it to her blog. That happens all the time. I swear my wife told me to get chicken at the store yesterday. She swears she wanted me to get fish.
This happens all the time, and double-checking things that we “know” is probably the hardest habit for my reporting students to acquire. Good reporters — like good scientists — don’t care so much about what you know as they do about how you know what you know. We want to see it. I teach my students that “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” and I play for them a bit of Marvin Gaye — “believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear.”
The real problem for our nation is the intentional lies that are spread — and spread in a very smart way that adds to the malice of the act. My favorite is the YouTube video that shows Obama talking about “my Muslim faith.” Here’s the clip…. and here’s the whole clip. The 12-second clip — both totally accurate and totally incomplete — has been viewed nearly a million times. The full clip has been seen nearly two million times. But how many looked for the second after watching the first?
With the advent of democratic media distribution anyone can report what they see and hear. But who will look at the world around them and wonder what is unseen? And who will take the time not just to doubt, but to check it out?
“Bringing OpenBlock to Rural America” is a Knight News Challenge Finalist
I posted an earlier draft of this proposal already, but here is the full version of the proposal that has been selected as one of the finalists by the Knight Foundation in their 2011 Knight News Challenge. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks to everyone who has helped spawn and cultivate this project. Every conversation has me more excited about what we’ll be able to do for rural newspapers in North Carolina and across the country.
Describe your project
We will build a not-for-profit clearinghouse of data from state, county and municipal governments in North Carolina and deploy them through pilot OpenBlock installations at the websites of nine rural newspapers in the state. The datasets will include public records of particular interest, such as crime reports, real estate and restaurant inspections.
We have already conducted research, funded by the McCormick Foundation, that indicates deployment of OpenBlock on the websites of small and mid-sized papers could provide significant digital revenue potential – given the interest readers have in understanding their communities. But that the main barrier to implementing OpenBlock is a lack of technical expertise at small papers as well as the high cost of ongoing data collection.
At the end of our 27-month funding period, we will have reduced the costs of acquiring, aggregating and publishing public data at community newspapers. We will also have developed one or more revenue models that demonstrate how meeting the information needs of a community can also be good business, even in small towns and rural counties of fewer than 75,000 people.
Rural news organizations are struggling to move to the digital age in part because their staffs are so small that they don’t have the capacity to identify, digitize, re-aggregate and map all the various public records available at the state and local level into databases that can be accessed intelligently by both reporters and the public.
This project tackles the lack of capacity at rural papers from two directions. It will create a centralized clearinghouse of state, county and city schemas and datafeeds that could be easily used in OpenBlock. It will also create compelling editorial content that will draw new, young readers to community information presented in a format and medium they want. Audiences for this kind of editorial product are loyal. They generate repeat visits by returning to seek updates on crime especially. And they also generate page-views and increased time-on-site as they search and sort the information.
We expect through this project to lower the costs of data acquisition and organization through a variety of methods that we will be able to assess and compare. In some cases, volunteers will pick up CDs of data from county offices. In others, journalists may scan and upload PDFs of hand-written police incident reports. In still other cases, people would key into a database the information on those PDFs. This job is so big that no single small news organization could do it. But with the support of a not-for-profit organization that provides centralized technical, editorial and advertising expertise, we could create a model for gathering valuable public records from rural America. To individual communities, these records are necessary to foster an informed civic dialog and healthy economy. But in aggregate, these records may also be able to shed light on trends in rural America that would otherwise go unreported.
This project will demonstrate one way that universities can support and advance journalistic activity – by providing a launchpad for new ventures that draws upon broad faculty expertise and student workers to lower the costs of professional, independent public affairs journalism and by absorbing some of the risk associated with new editorial product development.
Knight funding will get us off the ground and put us in a position to be a self-sustaining not-for-profit company, serving North Carolina journalists and citizens and providing a model for other states and regions to adopt.
Improving Delivery of News and Information to Geographic Communities
In small towns and rural America, the local newspaper is more than just a source of information and an engine of commerce. More importantly, it fosters and builds geographic community and sets the agenda for public policy debate. By making public records readily available and well-organized, we will support decision-making and accountability in local and state government.
This project most clearly improves the delivery of news and information to geographic communities by helping rural community newspapers make the transition to the digital age and remain relevant for younger audiences that are less informed and engaged in their own communities.
We expect several community newspapers to incorporate crowd-sourcing – a technique once known in their newsrooms as “neighbors editors” – into the process of data acquisition. Where this happens, we expect an increase in civic and community engagement. – first, by forming a network of knowledgeable volunteer citizen-journalists and by creating greater demand for truly open government records.
Unmet Needs
In many cases, data that is readily available in GeoRSS or at least CSV format from big cities is simply not available even in print from rural governments. For example, journalism students at the University of North Carolina working last semester to gather and organize public records in two rural counties for an OpenBlock application met with a number of obstacles – ranging from significant photocopying fees to inappropriate redactions and denial of access to public information.
Even when acquisition of public datasets is relatively simple – for example, public health restaurant inspections — someone must request that data from a specific county be exported in fielded data format. It is inefficient for each rural news organization to make separate requests for this data in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties. In these cases, our centralized organization would outline an initial request for the data for each county.
When Rick Thames, the editor of The Charlotte Observer, reviewed our proposal, he offered his enthusiastic endorsement. “There is no question but what this would fill a need,” he said. “Small papers can’t do this sort of work on their own. So, sadly, it just isn’t getting done. What a gift this would be for those communities. A very worthy effort that would be warmly received by the editors and publishers of every small and mid-sized paper that I know.”
What’s New?
Currently there is no tool or service that can efficiently gather, format and publish public records on rural news organizations’ sites. In part, this is a technology problem that may soon be overcome with the alpha rollout of OpenBlock later in 2011. But a much bigger piece of the problem is the data itself – neither OpenBlock nor any other technology has the ability to obtain public records as fielded digital data and create a newsworthy user interface for all the various types of records that a news organization might need.
Without a project like this there is no indication that OpenBlock will be a viable option for papers in rural communities.
What Will Change?
By the end of the project, we will have …
1. About 95 up-to-date feeds of local government data in standardized, fielded formats such as GeoRSS. These feeds will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike license. By providing public information in this format, we will lower the barriers to North Carolinians interested in researching trends or patterns in public policy and we’ll provide the raw material for the development of mashups or entrepreneurial applications we haven’t even thought of yet.
2. Nine community newspapers using OpenBlock to publish fresh, local government data to their audiences. These newspapers will be on the frontlines of a statewide effort to get complete and current government datasets in open, machine-readable formats. They will demonstrate multiple approaches to implementation that will be relevant to others’ during the broader roll-out.
3. Identified new revenue opportunities structured around the presentation and analysis of this data that will support their journalism.
4. Journalists and citizens interested in public policy issues will have a new tool for analyzing trends and patterns in rural issues such as environmental stewardship, public health, crime and justice, education, and economic development. Community newspapers will be able to more easily compare the experiences of their communities with the experiences in other places across the state.
5. A cost-effective model for building similar independent, not-for-profit data repositories in other states.
6. Most importantly, we will have raised public awareness of open government and we will start seeing rural counties and towns publish public data in standardized, machine-readable formats on the Web.
Why are you the right person?
This project would be tested in North Carolina and rolled out nationally. While the Raleigh-Chapel Hill area is a hub for information technology, the state has a high percentage of rural counties (roughly 70 out of 100) and a strong tradition of quality community news organizations.
The project builds on extensive and longstanding collaborations between the University of North Carolina and North Carolina Press Association.
“WOW! This is an interesting and ambitious project and I know there will be many Carolina newspapers that will want this service,” Beth Grace, the director of the N.C. Press Association, told us. “At a time when papers have lost staff and have had to postpone in-depth/investigative and trend reporting, this could bring some of that information back to papers and their readers. The North Carolina Press Association stands ready to assist — we can work with you to help assess what records most papers –and importantly, their readers — would want.”
This project will address a critical need that’s been identified through the work of UNC Knight Chair Penny Muse Abernathy with three rural papers, and in partnership with professor Ryan Thornburg, whose students have already begun collecting digital public data in these rural counties. The project was funded by the McCormick Foundation to develop sustainable business models for community news organizations.
“Our newspaper has worked with Ryan Thornburg for the past year as we try to figure out how to take advantage of OpenBlock for Whiteville.com,” said Les High, the editor and publishers of The Whiteville News-Reporter. “As is the case in most rural communities in this state, the public information we plan to display is not readily downloadable to the site. This project would provide an important community service to residents of all of North Carolina’s 100 counties – bringing the benefits of the digital highway to even the most remote areas. And just as important, OpenBlock could well be an important source of new revenue for community newspapers everywhere. This is a very important first step in making OpenBlock economically feasible for small papers to implement and use.
A database of local information – and we believe OpenBlock is the best solution at this point — is a central component of the financial strategy in the digital age. Yet, the obstacles in collecting and digitizing loom as a barrier to successful implementation.”
What tasks/benchmarks need to be accomplished to develop your project and by when will you complete them?
The project has three phases, each with its own tasks and benchmarks. We have developed a detailed timeline and budget that are available immediately upon request.
Phase I is underway with funding from the McCormick Foundation to install the OpenBlock codebase on a virtual machine, to format, ingest and publish two datasets from North Carolina local governments, and write a public report on the technical risks of the project.
The report and any code we develop will be shared with the OpenBlock community. We will publish this report by April 15. (We understand this is before funding would be available from the Knight News Challenge.)
This summer, with Knight funding, journalism students and community newspaper reporters around the state will conduct a census of public records. We will pay participants to complete forms describing the location and characteristics of state and local datasets.
At the completion of Phase I, we will publish a directory of the datasets and a report that describes the economic cost to journalism of governments not publishing data in machine readable format.
Phase I will end September 30, 2011.
Phase II: The focus in this Phase will be on reducing the costs of deploying OpenBlock at rural papers as well as the costs of acquiring, organizing and maintaining data feeds that can be easily integrated into the OpenBlock application.
By the end of this Phase, we will install eight additional OpenBlock sites, publish relevant data feeds and make them freely available under a Creative Commons non-commercial, share alike license.
We will also design, test, iterate and document sample data-collection processes for a variety of scenarios we expect to encounter during the statewide deployment of OpenBlock installations. The documentation will be critical to news organizations across the country as they plan and budget their own efforts.
Phase II will run from October 2011 through September 2012..
Phase III: During the final phase of the project we will focus on generating for community newspapers revenue models that will be used to support and encourage the continuing maintenance and development of our OpenBlock installations.
During this phase we will begin a phased, statewide rollout of OpenBlock to community newspapers and we will have a comprehensive, statewide collection of public records feeds available from our clearinghouse.
Phase III will also see the incorporation of a not-for-profit organization that will house the project after the end of the grant. It will be funded with the annual membership fees from community newspapers at which we have installed OpenBlock. This organization would also maintain the clearinghouse of public data, some of which may come from places where we don’t have media partners. Finally, it will provide editorial guidance to anyone interested in using the data to create their own data tools or to write stories about trends or patterns revealed by the aggregated data.
Phase III will run from October 2012 to August 2013.
How will you measure progress?
We will measure progress primarily by meeting our benchmarks on deadline and within budget. We will recruit partners, successfully install OpenBlock at community news websites, and collect and distribute feedback from partner newspapers.
We have developed a detailed timeline and budget that are available immediately upon request.
Ultimately, we hope to see a statewide movement to support laws and systems that make government documents and data more easily accessible to North Carolina citizens. With those public policy shifts, we believe we will see more and better public affairs journalism as well as faster and more equitable resolution of civic debates.
The risks of our project fall into three categories: data acquisition, data management and publication, and revenue generation.
Data Acquisition — The goal of the project is to reduce the cost of acquiring current and complete local government data in small communities. The costs now make widespread deployment of the OpenBlock application prohibitive for small publishers.
Challenges to low-cost data acquisition are technical, political and legal. The technical problems are all surmountable – at some cost, perhaps higher than we hope. In our early going, we anticipate many data sources that will require manual entry. The risks with these data sources will be accuracy and efficiency. We hope to test various quality assurance methods across our nine initial sites.
But the real challenge we believe will be reticent government agencies and uncooperative vendors with government that make their money through government contracts for digital data storage and management.
Our experiences with student efforts to collect digital, fielded data in rural communities give us a pretty good idea of the type of challenges, if not their scope. For this project, we intend to employ reporters within each community to leverage their community-based knowledge and relationships to help overcome these challenges.
Through conversations with attorneys for the N.C. Press Association, we don’t see any legal reason that we cannot gather the data we need for the feeds to be editorially meaningful.
Data Management and Publication — This project depends significantly on the successful alpha launch of the OpenBlock installations at The Columbia Daily Tribune and The Boston Globe. We anticipate these Knight-funded launches to happen late Spring 2011.
To mitigate this risk, we have already consulted with developers to help us more clearly see the technical challenges that might stand between data collection and our goal of deploying the OpenBlock application at nine community newspapers by the end of August, 2012.
As we understand it now, the technical challenges involve scraping data, developing locally meaningful schemas for various datatypes, the development of a simple user-interface for data editing on the backend, and customizing the front-end look and feel of OpenBlock to match the websites of existing community newspapers, many of which use the commercial TownNews CMS/service.
To ensure this is adequately addressed by those with sufficient technical experience to assess and solve these problems, we will hire a qualified and cost-effective group of developers to help us.
Revenue Generation – Community newspaper publishers will participate in this project only if we can demonstrate a positive return on their investment. While Foundation support is essential to the launch of this project, sustaining it will only be worthwhile if we can help small newspapers generate revenue. On the cost side, we quickly discover the most efficient strategies for data acquisition and maintenance. On the revenue side, Penny Abernathy has been working with three small newspapers to develop sponsorship models that we believe will yield enough revenue for publishers to justify the annual cost of the service.
How will people learn about what you are doing?
There are three critical audiences for this project. First, is a national audience that we will reach through trade websites and conferences as well as the OpenBlock community that is being so well nurtured by OpenPlans and its Knight-funded efforts.
In North Carolina, we have a statewide audience of newspaper publishers, editors and engaged citizens. Our affiliations with the N.C. Press Association, the N.C. Open Government Coalition, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina will help us identify partner newspapers and datasets that are editorially significant.
Our most important audiences will be the local news site users and advertisers. We expect and need these citizens to become consumers of public records and advocates for digital, fielded government local government data. In many cases, we also expect that these audiences will also be our collaborators and key elements of the data collection workflow. For these audiences, the local newspaper partners will be our most important channels of communication.
But even if one of the risks we’ve outlined prevents us from creating a self-funding not-for-profit, the journalism community at the end of this grant will have several hard deliverables that will be used to guide further efforts:
- A description of state and local datasets in one of the nation’s most populated states. (August 15, 2011)
- A Paper that describes the economic cost to journalism of governments not publishing data in machine-readable format, compared to the costs of the governments – and taxpayers – to do so. (September 30, 2011)
- A clearinghouse of state and local government datasets, in open, machine-readable format. (September 30, 2012) A handbook of data collection processes suitable for six different public records request scenarios. (September 30, 2012)
- Nine installations of the OpenBlock application at community newspapers. (July 2011 to August 2012)
- Scraperscripts, schemas and other contributions to the OpenBlock Project. (April 2011 to August 2013)
Social Media and News Judgment in the Classroom
When I walk into the classroom to teach my introductory news writing students at UNC, I remind myself that I’m giving a map to people who have always driven sports cars, but never out of their neighborhood.
Some of the students are younger than Mosaic, and throughout their lives, their access to information technology has outpaced their understanding of it.
The answer to the question of “What is news?” for many of them is “Whatever my friends share on Facebook.” And that means popularity — and for many of them it’s popularity among a narrow subset of people who look, act and see the world similarly — trumps all the traditional news values of impact, proximity, prominence, timeliness, emotional appeal, oddity and conflict.
But rather than try to replace one with the other, I’m trying a technique that I hope will use their familiarity with social media to get them to think more about their audience. Try the following and let me know how it works for you, too.
1. Have the students organize their Facebook friends into various lists, using traditional news values. So, for example, students might organize their friends by geography, share experiences, relationship status, number of friends they have, frequency of posting, or a combination of those. Instructions for Creating a Facebook List
2. Throughout the semester, your students are already required to read the news. But this technique also asks them to share the stories they read with their friends on Facebook. Instructions for Sharing a Link on Facebook
3. The key is that they can’t share a link with ALL their friends. They have to pick no more than two lists with which they share each story. This gets the students thinking about how different audience value different information. Or how different audiences value the same information, but for different reasons. Instructions for Sharing Links With Specific Lists
4. Finally, with each link that a student posts she is required to “Say something about this link …” It doesn’t count if the annotation is merely a re-phrasing of the facts in the story. And it doesn’t count if the student merely writes about why she likes the story. The annotation must answer the question “So What?” for that particular list. The goal here is get students to change their belief that writing is about self-expression into a journalistic mindset in which writing is selfless expression.
Journalists have to give audiences what they want and need, and often must go to great lengths to explain to them why they need it. This isn’t paternalism. This is a service, and it’s the same one that attorneys and physicians and financial advisers provide. The choice remains in the customer’s hands. But we — as journalists — have a professional obligation to provide the best advice on the most relevant information possible.
Grading: You have two choices for grading this assignment. One option is to get a Facebook account and require that all of your students friend you and put you on every list they’ve created for the class. That way you’ll be able to see what they’re doing and use your own rubric to score their efforts. The other option is to have the students write a weekly reflection about their experiences sharing stories with their friends. What did they share with whom? How did they describe it? What didn’t they share? Why not? What responses did they get from their friends?
(For the sake of ease, you may consider creating a mock version of this assignment in which students simply write Word documents using imaginary friends, imaginary lists, imaginary stories or use an imaginary social network. But do not do that. It smacks of being phoney. And students — and journalists — hate phonies.
Top 10 Best Things About David Broder
The future of news looks less bright today with the death of David Broder, one of the best journalists of the 20th century. I had the change to work with him at The Washington Post, and all I can think about today is how much I’d enjoy replaying the last 50 years of his life, the last 10 of mine and putting us at the same news organization again.
Here are the Top 10 Best Things that the students in my journalism classes need to know about Mr. Broder.
10. Be a reporter first and an analyst second. Long after Mr. Broder was a television talking head, a syndicated columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, he knocked on the doors of voters in the Ohio River Valley.
9. Respect democracy. Mr. Broder believed in the value of public service and respected the sacrifice of candidates and elected representatives. I saw him treat the most influential members of both parties as human beings rather than targets, even as he probed them with smart, aggressive questions. I suspect the esteem in which he held public service allowed him to have high expectations that required tough questions.
8. Do not be driven by the “scoop.” By the time I had the chance to meet Mr. Broder, political journalism was already on its way to being driven mostly by the ability to deliver small details before your competitors could put together a cogent narrative. But even then, he cared more about being able to explain the story than break it.
7. Write plainly. Mr. Broder’s columns, news stories and books are a pleasure to read for their precision and economy of words. His prose seemed to be designed to make people feel smarter than they really were rather than dumber.
6. Work hard. I suspect that if given the choice between a deadline and party, Mr. Broder would choose the deadline every time.
5. Clean up your office. Seriously. Mr. Broder’s was a death trap. The La Brea Tar Pits of political reporting. Nobody’s perfect, after all.
4. Try new things. Mr. Broder was doing live online discussions with washingtonpost.com readers in 1998. What’s your excuse?
3. Have a sense of humor about yourself. During one of those early online discussions, the website’s political editor sent him an email of thanks and encouragement. Mr. Broder’s response is one I hope to get made into a t-shirt one day: “Did I do something bad on the Internet?”
2. Be an optimist in a world of cynics and naysayers. Mr. Broder cheered for the Cubs. He never tried to convince anyone that the world was worse than it is, and nor did he try to convince them it was better.
1. Take the kids to lunch. When I’m 81, inshallah, I’ll still remember the lunch I had with Mr. Broder. Just he and I. He had lunch with me not because he wanted anything from me. Not because he owed me anything. But because I asked for his time and he was kind enough to offer it. It was sometime around the 2004 election and we talked about his 1981 book, The Changing of the Guard. I had been wondering what the book would look like if it were a series on washingtonpost.com about yet another generation of political advisers and candidates. We talked about how it could be interactive and multimedia. He let me ask questions and make statements that alternated between naive and presumptuous. But he never checked his Blackberry, never looked around the room and never interrupted.
Mr. Broder had so many wonderful characteristics that I try to emulate. Being a great journalists is just one, and far from the most important. He was a great journalist because he was so much more. And I hope that the future of journalism can yield many more in his mold.
The Non-Linear Inverted Pyramid
This post is excerpted from Chapter 12 of “Producing Online News“, from CQPress.com
When news producers begin to get into “that data state of mind” they are trying to achieve both a business goal—ubiquity of their news organization’s information and influence, and a social goal—efficient use of information. If one person has a piece of information and can share it at no cost to everyone else, other people shouldn’t have to repeat the work that went into acquiring that information. The DRY principal of programming when applied to news creates a sustainable news ecology. The energy that is used to gather a fact needs to be expended only once. After finding information from a trustworthy source, journalists can spend all of their energy on analyzing and providing relevant context that adds value to the piece of information. Within a news organization, journalists can also reduce, re-use and recycle content. Consider the way that hyperlinks in a story make news consumption and news production both more efficient.
Often in news stories the audience wants to know more about specific people or organizations than just their names. In print journalism, reporters provide this information in an appositive immediately after the name of the person or organization. For example: “Irwin Collier, an economy expert for North American at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University, pointed out that [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, who has backed the package, holds a majority in parliament.” Online, by linking the words “Irwin Collier” to a biographical page about the expert—a page that would not be limited to the cursory information presented in the appositive example—the sentence would be almost half its original size.
Once you begin thinking of facts as pieces of organized data, you are ready to start thinking about how you might “program” information as a nonlinear narrative, one that doesn’t proceed in the usual order from top to bottom, but instead might update or rearrange pieces of information dynamically depending on the conditions and context of the audience.
The inverted pyramid has long been used in journalism as a metaphor to describe the traditional structure of a basic news story—the most important information is summarized in the lead, with details of decreasing importance following in each subsequent paragraph or section. For an audience that skims articles rather than reads them, the inverted pyramid remains one of the best ways to construct a news story for the Web. But by using links, online journalists can turn a news story built as an inverted pyramid into a story presented as several inverted pyramids. While printed inverted pyramids are linear, online inverted pyramids can be nonlinear.
In a linear inverted pyramid, every reader starts in the same place—the first paragraph—and ends at the last paragraph, taking the only logical path between those two points. This is a perfectly accept- able way to write news stories both online and off.
But some news events lend themselves to a nonlinear story structure, which breaks apart the traditional news narrative and creates several paths of links the audience can choose to follow. By establishing links from the lead to various elements of the story, and also links among those story elements, journalists can craft a nonlinear narrative that helps each reader more quickly find the specific information he or she wants.
Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer of online news, wrote in 2006 that for journalists to take full advantage of the Web’s hypermedia, they first needed to abandon what he calls “the story-centric world view.” Using as his example a newspaper story about a local fire, Holovaty wrote on his blog:
“[W]hat I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire— date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive—with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.”
By breaking down a story into its atomic pieces and using hyperlinks to reconnect those pieces, readers can explore different aspects of the story, each at a level of detail chosen by the visitor. In nonlinear storytelling, journalists gather the input and information as usual, but then tell the story using links that allow the audience to drive the experience.
How to do article comments, make UI decisions. Firefox style.
Data — which were once know casually in newsrooms as “facts” — are invaluable when making decisions about your site’s user interface, and when explaining your decisions to an often impolite customer base. Here’s a great example from Alexander Limi of the Firefox Web browser’s user experience team.
I’ve been wondering why Firefox 3 doesn’t have that cool little RSS subscription button in its address bar anymore. It used to be there. Now it’s gone. A quick search for rss address bar firefox 3 brought up a link to the Firefox support site. There another Firefox user had posted an obscenity-laced version of the same question I had. And the question yielded this reply from Limi:
Brevity. Politeness in a response to rudeness. And… facts. (Alexander: if that whole “working at Google/Mozilla/creating your own internationally known open-source CMS thing doesn’t work out for ya, you’ve got a job in my imaginary newsroom anytime.)
1. Unlike too many newsrooms I’ve seen, Mozilla appears to be making user-interface decisions based on … well, data about the users’ experience. If you’re making decisions in your newsroom based on an editor’s war stories, a designer’s favorite color palette, or even an expert’s advice, then stop. Use smart guesses for decisions that can be easily reversed, but base your big decisions only on cold, hard, relevant, current data.
2. Note the empathy. “Brother, I’m with you on the RSS thing. But you and I are weirdos and/or not everyone is as smart as us. So, we do things for them.” I tell my students that newswriting isn’t about self expression; it’s about selfless express. Same with user experience.
3. This should be point 1. But this is a real response, from a real person, with a real name, and with some level of authority and responsibility. This isn’t from the “Department of People Who Deal With User Complaints”. So I trust it, and am more likely to trust the brand.
4. No whining. There’s no “You get the dadgum browser for free, so eat your vegetables and like it. “There’s no deleting the obscenity from the original question. No scolding. Just a factual, brief and polite response. And all of those things increase my trust in Limi. He’s a social Big Boy and that causes me to presume that he is a Big Boy in his work product as well.
If comments aren’t working on your news site, following Limi’s formula will start you back on the path to success.
Written by Ryan Thornburg
June 1, 2011 at 8:52 am
Posted in Chapter 11, Producing Online News
Tagged with Alexander Limi, comments, Firefox, interactivity, Mozilla, RSS