Doc Searls Weblog

Below is my live blogging, in outline form, of the final presentations of work by NYU graduate journalism students in Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 class, which I’ve served for three semesters as a visiting scholar. Open Studio was the name of the event.

I wrote and posted it with Fargo.io. Blake Hunsicker, on the left, also talked up Fargo and outlining in his talk.

Mike Rothman, one of the students, asked me to live blog the event. Jay also asked me to shoot pictures there. So I got off to a bit of a slow start as those two obligations collided a bit. My notes gradually improved after the first couple of presentations, including Mike’s. Apologies for the slow start.

I finally got into a full groove during Josh Benton‘s closing talk.

It’s now 1:36 in the morning, so I’ll stop editing at this point and pick up the rest after I’ve rested.

Meanwhile, it was an absolute pleasure and privilege to participate in this class. I’ll miss everybody, but I’m also glad to know how well they did and how much better they’ll do as their journalism careers take off.

Links:

• Studio20’s Tumblr
• @Studio20NYU
• @JayRosen_NYU
• The Twashtag: #studio20

Jay’s guidance: “Your presentation needs to rock”
Patrick Hogan (@phogan)

• Geeks and Glass
• Alas, was busy shooting pix and doing other stuff. Will fill in later.

Mike Rothman (@TheRealRothman) with ABC News

• Live Blogging is his topic, and what I’m doing now.

Cecelia Bittner (@MCeceliaBittner)

• Problem: Can networks of people help in reporting a beat?
• Partner: Fast Company
• “A generation of women with the world and all its knowledge at their fingertips.”
• Hashtag: #FCMobilize
• High correlation between tweeting actively and moving conversation forward. Branch and Facebook were fails.
• “Not worth a reporter’s time to force connections.”
• Nice graphic of a Mobilizing Machine

Nuha Abujaber (@nuabu) and Mélodie Bouchaud (@Meloboucho)

• Problem: Keeping ‘city life’ coverage current with the way users communicate now.
• Using short videos and stills to augment the print magazine.
• Like the many variations on TONY (time out new york), e.g. TONYpreview, TONYnow, OnlyTONY.
• “Fifteen seconds is enough…”

Simran Khosla (@simkhosla)

• Partner: Pando Daily
• Problem: Adding data specialists to a newsroom doesn’t spread data journalism fast enough
• Solution: data visualization-based stories “We thought visualization first…Doing the chart starts the article.” Helping the data journalist. e.g. with tutorials.

Derick Dirmaier (@derickdirmaier), Jesse Kipp (@JesseKipp), Johannes Neukamm (@JFNeukamm)

• Problem: With “Snow Fall” the innovation came after the story was completed. Can’t we do better?
• Partner: Creativist, digital mag Atavist
• “Snowfalling” became a term used in newsrooms. Style followed. “The aesthetic was more important than the story telling.”
• “Story Wars” with scroll kit, hi, sStory, Cowbird, Maptia, Creativist…
• The solution: Profoundly Digital Reporting. PDP.
• So they entered the Mongol Rally.
• Captured motion, audio, video. stills, traced the route, 20k miles.
• Design tools are storytelling tools.
• PDP 1) Platform 2) Open Source Tools 3) Photo/Video/Audio Editing software 4) Data Visualizations
• Preview titled Traverse.
• 3 persepectives — Jesse’s notes, audio tracks, navigation elements
• You get a feel for the experience of the Rally, with a map slider. TimelineJS, GeoJSON, D3 Libraries…
• Not all stories are profoundly digital.
• New genre of journalism: opportunity, not a threat.

Blake Hunsicker (@BlakeHunsicker, BlakeHunsicker.com)

• Problem: Most people are coming in the middle of the movie: How do we catch them up?
• Partner: Syria Deeply
• Solution: a Deep Reader.
• Went to Turkey, working on ways journalists can explain. “We don’t get much out of what the news tells us… updates but no context. Where to start?”
• Need for onramps. Ways to become acquainted.
• Used an outliner: “I came to this after digging Fargo.io, Dave Winer’s outliner. (Which I’m writing in now, here.)
• Deep links, annotated comments, expanding, contracting, telescoping to whatever depth you like. You can read two minutes’ worth, or half an hour.
• FAQ — Syria according to Syrians: “their stories, more than those told to us by pundits or politicians…”
• Takeaways: 1) Repuurpose what works elsewhere 2) Explore how to change a deep reader as news develops 3) Work with good people

Boryana Dzhambazova (@BoryanaDz)

• Problem: We’ve got a core group of dedicated fans: what do we do with them?
• Partner: Narratively
• Narratively was born as a kickstarter, has grown dramatically since. Fanatical fans, which are also a core market.
• Introduce a paid model. Membership perks: e.g. personalized search, read later feature, notifications of upcoming themes, ability to comment, ebook collections, member-only events
• Model: Pay what you want, as with Radiohead.
• Many pitches come from aspiring writers. So turn a burden into an asset. Hence a fan club page where writers can pitch to other writers, with winners getting hired off submissions. Includes real-time editing.
• Nice archive of timeless and beautiful stories.
• Weekender: archived stories. Much higher than industry average open rates.
• Assignment room. New approach to navigation and browsing. Go by theme, editor, writer, notes…

Danielle J. Powell (@DanielleJenene)

• Problem: Repurposing TV documentary by putting it on line is lame: there has to be a better way.
• Partner: Aljazeera America (@ajam)
• Disruption in cable news. More media used online. Cord-cutting. Meanwhile TV is still the king of news.
• Harmony where there is disruption. Add value.
• Worked with @ajam on Faultlines, a documentary series.
• Create harmony:
• 1) Identify content that complements rather than mirrors
• 2) Take other content into account, stuff that can stand alone, and add value.
• Content that works:
• Background — explains, like deep reader
• Conversational — e.g. live tweets
• Follow-up — info not seen in episode, or current after broadcast
• Visual — infographics, instagram.
• Key: production process that takes multiple platform into account simultaneously
• talk digital and map out projects from the pitch
• collect digital assets
• Viewer+ : turn viewers into both viewers and readers, commenters, etc. Expand beyond cable, for example to where it’s not available.

Speaker: Josh Benton of Nieman Lab

• Jay: “Josh is almost as obsessive as I am.”
• Topic: The Year in Innovation. Twenty slides/topics
• Mobile
• Customizing Breaking News. Out of NBC. Can mute some topics, e.g. Miley Cyrus. All about interrupting you properly. Breaking news is not the same for every brain. The app will evolve over a year.
• Still lots of news used on desktops and laptops. Still just for Mac and Safari. Still a way off from this being generalized.
• You get an inbox, everybody gets an inbox. Latest: Instagram direct. Move your sexting from SnapChat to Instagram. “I cannot tell you how terrifying” this is. Too many inboxes. The more we move to closed networks, the more problematic access becomes for journalists.
• Reporting: building beats beyond geography. Buzzfeeds fascinating. Building a beat structure from scratch. Construct reporting structures from the ground up.
• Global cooperation. Level of what we have now was impossible in the past. You can make it work now. Example: offshoring. New thing: “collaboration fatigue” 86 journalists in 44 countries.
• (A fire alarm went off. Ignored. Interesting: not news… not anything.)
• Robot reporting. Algorithmic, that is. (There are no good pictures of algorithms, but are of robots.) LA Times had a story with a map up in seconds or minutes (8 in this case), thanks to an algorithm that picks up news from data sources. “Our robot friends are allies and helpers.”
• Incentivizing truth. Rise of politifact, et. al. People are more likely to believe false negatives based on ideological bent: believing wrong info about the other side. “What if we gave small rewards” they remember X was not the case. Rewards raises likelihood of admitting they don’t know. We talk about polarization. But there is potential for seeing a thinner layer of wrongness.
• Presentation. Snow flurries following Snow Fall, which was so big, intense and developed that everybody now has one. Or more. Remarkable that these can now be produced at a high rate. Nicely designed articles are one side effect of the flurries. Stories get more special presentation than in the past. Future will feature nicely designed articles than full-blown Snow Falls.
• Adding structure to comments. Venn-ish diagram of overlaps in responses to the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage. Gives people a moment to pause before issuing vitriol.
• Infinity comes to radio. NPR’s infinite player. (Not many knew about it, me included.) Creating a radio-like experience that leverages content backlog, and gives NPR a way to see what people like. Pandora-like “more like this” and “less like this.” Mention of PRX, with the Remix service and app.
• Responsive and unloved redesigns. One code base that works for all formats. Great solution to terrible mobile websites. Led to a lack of info density on websites. So you have one giant story, with a few other items. Take a moment to consider that it is possible to think too much about mobile. 85% will still be on a tablet or desktop, not a smartphone.
• Social. Event Parrot (@eventparrot): a Twitter experiment. Permission to be interrupted by Twitter, for news. “By the way, Mandela just died.” An interesting moment because news orgs have invested in Twitter, which is mostly non-prejudicial. But::: when you live on somebody else’s platform, you run risks.
• The triumph of the morning email. e.g. Quartz. 2013 had the rise of the stream. Design choices toward the steam, and a counter-movement toward digest-y summary by email. Qz has story after story online, yet has a success with the daily email.
• Everybody has a TinyLetter. A little mailing list for newsletters, in addition to other methods. Reporters now work not only for publishers, but for their own “brand.” The idea is to personalize communications with readers or audiences.
• New York Times’ Fourth Down Robot. Real-time notification of success rates in those situations. Punt or not? Remarkable that this is a twitter account and a news service. Find how your team’s coach made a poor decision.
• News video for social and mobile. e.g. Now This News. Mobile/Social. Looks like MTV in 1983. Seems a bit alien at first. They can create, on the spur of the moment, create a :15 video for Instagram and :06 for Vine.
• Money. Paywalls 2.0: Build the paywall you want. NYTimes set the pace, made it okay for everybody else. We can assume that others will follow the Times’ moves in 2014. They got 750k people to pay. Nice, but slowing. And can you get revenue from those not subscribing. They plan a super-premium level, with access to Times events. Editors will come over and wash your car. Headed toward lots of pay products.
• A local television paywall. WCPO in Cincinnati will be the first to put up a paywall. Vetting for Scripps. Hiring dozens of new journos to work there. Until now local TV has not been nearly as disrupted as other news orbs. Many potential problems. Uptake, for example.
• The Boston Globe’s Airline pricing. Already has comfort with many Web products. After investing in responsive design, they came out with an iPhone app, that’s just $4 month. The bet is that if you pay $4 for iPhone, you won’t pay $15 at all. So it’s like airline seat pricing this way. Trying to undercut their own model.
• Packaging. Putting content in new containers. e.g. The Guardian’s robot newspaper: the long god read. Have a small batch paper that culls successful pieces from the last week, algorithmically, and then lays it out, again algorithmically, in a form that works for readers in a coffee shop. This is the seed of an idea that will have other applications in the future.
• Today’s paper. e.g. NYTimes’. If the President gets shot mid-day, it won’t be in here. In this sense it’s like the print paper. It’s a reaction to the constant stream of content, which is still in NYTimes.com. With this you know hundreds of thousands are reading the same thing. (Also, presumably, not personalized.)
• Retro Report. Stories covered 20-30 years ago. e.g. Garbage Barge. 12-minute videos. Bracing reminder that coverage is often terribly mistaken. Nice to see archives put to use. The archives are there.
• Civil Beat’s Law Clinic. An Omidyar project that covers stuff differently. What can a news org be and stand for in a different way? One answer: fighting for the readers. A legal aid center for a constituency. Civil Beat will provide help in the form of real legal assistance. Example of a forced rethinking of what a news org does. Fulfilling information needs in a different way.
• Overall, optimistic.
• Started Nieman Lab in ’08. Been uphill since then. Continued growth and institutionalization. Seeing that old dogs as well as new ones have new tricks.