It’s about time to infuse feminism into data science and visualization. At least, that’s what Emerson data visualization and civic tech professor Catherine D’Ignazio says based on her research into what an intersectional feminist perspective on data could look like.

“We’re in this moment when big data and visualization are being heralded as powerful new ways of producing knowledge about the world,” D’Ignazio said at a recent talk hosted by the Northeastern University Visualization Consortium. “So whenever anything has lots of power and is valued very widely by society, we just want to interrogate that a little more and say ‘Is it being valued equally?’ and ‘Is it benefitting all people equally?’”

She and her research partner found that the field has major problems with inequality, inclusion and quantification. Those who have the resources to collect, store, maintain, analyze and derive insight from large amounts of data are generally corporations, governments and universities. This creates an imbalance between who data is about and who has access to that data.

D’Ignazio says this issue is compounded by the fact that women and people of color are underrepresented in data science and technical fields in general, a trend that is worsening. She also highlights skewed quantity and quality of data that is collected about various groups of people. For instance, there are very detailed datasets on gross domestic product and prostate function, but very poor datasets on hate crimes and the composition breast milk.

“Even when there is institutional and political will to collect data, data on sensitive topics — such as domestic violence, war crimes, sexual assault — is often highly flawed because there is powerful incentives for institutions and individuals not to report, not to collect, not to come forward,” she said.

So how do we take a feminist perspective on the design of visualizations? D’Ignazio cited six points that might bring us there.

1) Examine power and aspire to empowerment

A big part of instilling feminism in data studies is to think critically about who makes visualizations and reflect on what strategies for teaching and engagement could broaden the data community.

“Data viz is uniquely suited, I think, to addressing the intersectional and structural forces that shape our current power imbalances,” D’Ignazio said. “But the key thing is that it has to be in the hands of people who are not blind to those power imbalances. It has to be in the hands of the people who see those and see those worthy of mapping.”

When a group of white male researchers partnered with poor, inner-city black youth in Michigan to work on data visualization, for instance, the result was a revealing map of where commuters run over black children — a topic that may not have been looked at more closely without the collaboration.

“This idea of examining power means basically just tuning your subjects and form of data visualization to explicitly focus on systems of inequality,” D’Ignazio said. “This idea of examining power raises this idea of perspective — so data visualization by whom, for whom, with whose data and with whose values?”

2) Embrace pluralism

“Objectivity is stronger when there are multiple perspectives at the table,” D’Ignazio said to launch this bullet point in her list. Every person’s view is a partial view, so an important first step is to minimize the focus on organized visualizations and welcome multiple perspectives in the design process.

She pointed to the anti-eviction mapping project in San Francisco, an ongoing project mapping the housing crisis in the Bay city. With no singular ‘big viewpoint’ visualization and more than 80 visualizations nested on its homepage, the website is messy. But that is part of the point.

“Their website is not only about the output,” D’Ignazio said, “but it’s also about the collective organizing and the movement building and teaching people along the way in their community about how to collect data, how to produce maps and how to use those maps situated in that context to advocate for tenants’ rights and other things like that.”

A map from the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (Courtesy MIT Center for Civic Media)

3) Consider context

The idea of considering context means to determine data’s context even when it’s not provided — a practice that is important to getting any story right.

“There’s this idea that with enough data, the data can speak for itself,” D’Ignazio explained. “But data doesn’t speak for itself. It can’t. And it’s important that it doesn’t speak for itself, in particular with data that relates to people who are not members of the dominant group.”

For example, data about sexual assault on college campuses collected through the Clery Act, which mandates colleges publicly report annual campus crime statistics, would indicate that Williams College in Massachusetts has rampant sexual assault problems while Boston University has relatively few cases.

Emerson’s Catherine D’Ignazio

“The truth is actually probably closer to the opposite of that statement, but you can’t know that without understanding the context of the data,” D’Ignazio says, explaining that when students investigated the phenomenon they found some schools had higher rates of reported sexual assault because they had more resources devoting to enabling survivors to come forward.

4) Legitimize affect and embodiment

Though traditional wisdom pertaining to data visualization emphasizes simplicity and condemns embellishments, feminist theory and contemporary visualization research shows that this minimalist approach is “basically just wrong,” D’Ignazio said.

“Humans beings are not a pair of disembodied eyes attached to a brain, but we’re actually these bodies and we think and we feel and we like to laugh, we like to be surprised by things, we like to listen to stories, we like to be affected by the world.”

So, by expanding the idea of what counts as data visualization and what senses those visualizations tune into, the data field can have a broader impact with more visceral and memorable messages.

5) Represent uncertainty

The key point D’Ignazio makes here is that the data community needs better methods for showing the limitations of knowledge and representing uncertainty. Relating to feminism, this circles back to the idea that knowledge is partial, so any given visualization does not represent the whole picture.

“Our current conventions of visualization work against showing uncertainty,” she said. “Things like clean lines and shapes reinforce this idea that data visualization is always true.” So, a feminist approach to data visualization looks at ways to make people feel the uncertainty, whether through using sketched lines instead of clean lines or movement and animation to show different scenarios.

6) Make the work visible

Finally, D’Ignazio said that the labor of collecting, cleaning, curating and storing data, as well as analyzing and producing data visualizations, is often rendered invisible. Brainstorming ways to make this labor visible is essential for making it equally accessible to the public.

A feminism-driven approach to data viz is especially important now considering the massive power the field has. Data looks true, it looks whole, it looks scientific and it contributes to an appearance of neutrality, D’Ignazio said. She cited feminist researcher Donna Haraway, who characterized this power as “the god trick,” or seeing everything from no perspective: Data is “the view from nowhere.”

But D’Ignazio cautioned that this view is dangerous: “We have to remember that the view from nowhere is always a view from somewhere, and it’s usually the view from the body that’s regarded as the default.”

Paxtyn Merten is a journalism student at Northeastern University.

The post 6 Things Data Visualization Can Learn From Feminism appeared first on MediaShift.

In a polarizing moment when trust in media and the government is low, a number of new projects, now sometimes called “dialogue journalism,” from organizations including Spaceship Media, Hello Project and the Seattle Times are focusing on bridging communities and pushing diverse viewpoints.

Dialogue journalism, a term coined by Spaceship Media, uses engagement projects to tap into nuanced audiences, providing them with a platform—such as a Facebook group or a video call—to encourage sometimes difficult conversations. Journalists are present to help guide the dialogue, fact check and use the platforms as a launch pad for stories.

These projects attempt to use journalism to bring together a diverse set of backgrounds, whether it’s race, voting preferences, sex, geographical location, or other factors. Rather than focusing on “coastal elites,” they aim to reflect a spectrum of thoughts and experiences amongst a wide range of Americans.

Creating New Dialogues

It’s not everyday that you see Trump voters from Alabama and Clinton voters from California in the same, direct conversation. That’s what Spaceship Media did in one of its first projects.

Spaceship Media, which launched after Trump’s election, organizes those private conversations in Facebook groups, by partnering with various news organizations, as a part of their seven-step system of dialogue journalism. Within those private groups, journalists fact check to keep any claims on track and objective and help steer the conversation. They then follow up with published articles (e.g. from the partner publications) on what participants learned or larger topics that came from the group. The conversation doesn’t stop within the private Facebook group, but rather, it’s used for story ideas. 

“We’ve bet on that people do want to talk across difference,” says Jeremy Hay, a co-founder of Spaceship Media. “People want to engage with people who they have different beliefs and opinions from, and journalism can play an important role in making sure that happens.”

They brought together these two groups (of 50 women) who are often pitted against one another, and put them in a private Facebook group. Spaceship Media organized a callout in the Alabama Media Group publications and social channels, and networked in the Bay Area with the help of a freelancer who did outreach via social media channels. In the Facebook group, they talked about issues ranging from immigration to Black Lives Matter to abortion to holiday traditions.

“When people take these experiences where they can’t talk to their cousins, aunts, or in the workplace, it doesn’t feel good for anyone,” says Eve Pearlman, a co-founder of Spaceship Media. “So by using journalism to create these extended dialogues, we give people a place [a private Facebook group], which feels much better.

When the Facebook group closed at the end of the month-long project, the majority of them created their own to further the discussion. While nobody changed their minds about their choice of candidate, the women began to see why those from other states may hold such different views. For instance, health care costs have risen more rapidly in Alabama under the Affordable Care Act than they have in California. Support for the ACA was high amongst the California women, but was a major concern for Alabama women. “Those numbers you posted were out of control,” said Monica Rowden, a Bay Area clinical social worker, said in a discussion about healthcare premiums.

Building Empathy

The Seattle Times created a one-off multimedia project, “Under Our Skin,” that grew out of journalists’ questions about how they cover race in a climate of police shootings and protests dominating the headlines.

The goal was to “foster a conversation around race and the varied perspectives Americans have,” says Michele Matassa Flores, managing editor of the Seattle Times. They hoped people would “open their minds and question their own attitudes.”

It features in-studio videos of 18 people of different racial backgrounds talking about their reactions to terms, such as “institutional racism,” “all lives matter,” and “white fragility,” with the aim to create a feel of a conversation amongst strangers.

For instance, responses to the phrase, “all lives matter,” elicited nuanced reactions. “That’s white privilege,” says Tariqa Waters, a black visual artist. Whereas Mark Olsen, a white student at Northwest University says, “I think some people perceive it (Black Lives Matter) as not being helpful; people walking on the freeways and smashing things.”

The project has been used in classrooms, workplaces, churches and government agencies and more. It won an Online News Association award for Explanatory Reporting at a medium-sized newsroom, which considers the quality of the journalism and the digital production and design of the coverage. The judges said “the material allowed the audience to come at things from all different angles in a clear engaging way.”

The “Under Our Skin” Seattle Times feature (Image courtesy the Seattle Times)

Focusing on Overlooked Communities

Sometimes, the process of organizing groups of people can get complicated. Yvonne Leow, a journalist and the founder of Hello Project and GoatTalks, partnered with AJ+ in the aftermath of Trump’s election for a series of videos that virtually brought together people of different backgrounds to discuss various topics that were being covered in AJ+ videos, including the election, homelessness and North Korea. The project, which received a $15,000 grant from the Jim Bettiger Newsroom Innovation Fund to partner with AJ+, featured direct, 20-minute, one-on-one private video calls so that people would feel safe having honest conversations. These strangers were organized via google forms shared through AJ+’s large digital audience.

“I was seeing a lot of divisive rhetoric from both sides and more importantly, realizing the bubble I was in,” says Leow. “I was interested in seeing other perspectives and if other people were also interested in that.”

“The goal was to give the audience a chance to take the conversation out of the comments, and then have them fill out a survey afterward to see if this changed their minds, or was more effective or interesting than arguing in the comments,” says Alexia Underwood, previously a senior producer at AJ+ who helped organize the project.

However, scheduling these strangers to find overlapping time to sit down and talk big ideas proved to be a problem: Not enough people signed up and even when people were successfully matched, oftentimes, they wouldn’t show up. They weren’t able to move forward with the next phase of the project—a media product out of the conversations.

“There was the question of how we were going to use this information in the newsroom; was there a production component or information gathering component,” says Underwood. “Could the surveys be used to learn something intrinsic or interesting about our audience, or were they there simply to provide a value add to users who enjoyed the AJ+ video experience and wanted a further opportunity to chat about it with a stranger? Because the logistical side of things never panned out, we weren’t really able to move forward very far with the project, but I think that if the logistics hurdles were a little lower, then it could in theory be an interesting conversation forum about issues that our audience cared about.”

Another learning experience for Leow was realizing the importance of knowing the community you’re serving.

“It’s much more about the quality than the quantity or the scale,” she says. “It’s about walking away with that connection, not just the arbitrary comment. The goal to see each other as people, and less as usernames.”

They drew upon a potentially large audience, but the community they were serving wasn’t obvious and focused enough. Something more targeted and impactful, says Leow, would be bringing Bay Area people together to discuss homelessness and the housing crisis, for instance. She realized that sometimes journalism work can make a bigger impact with a smaller, more defined audience.

What’s Next For Dialogue Journalism

Spaceship Media is currently working on a larger-scale project, The Many, which will also take place in a closed Facebook group, but will focus the conversation on thousands of women across the country with personal stories and political discussions.

Leow is currently helming By the Bay, with the goal of demystifying local issues and politics. Topics include how you pass a law in San Francisco and why the city is facing such a housing crisis. They’re still building the tool, but users will be allowed to contribute facts in order to create “hubs of local information.”

“I can’t say this is something that needs to be done over and over again, because who knows what will happen 10 years from now,” says Leow. “But I think the idea is to tap into their [community] needs and think of ways to better serve them.”

UPDATE (2/20/18): After the publication of this story, we received a note from the co-founders of Spaceship Media, Eve Pearlman and Jeremy Hay, who asked us to clarify that Dialogue Journalism is Spaceship Media’s seven-step process of creating, moderating and reporting on journalism-supported conversations across social and political fault lines. You can read more about the genesis of Dialogue Journalism in this Neiman Lab story.

Tiffany Lew is a multimedia journalist based in California. Her work has appeared in publications including AJ+, Mic, Scholastic, Fusion, Frommer’s, and The Hechinger Report. She’s a graduate of Columbia Journalism School. Follow her on Twitter: @tiffjlew

The post Why ‘Dialogue Journalism’ Is Having a Moment appeared first on MediaShift.

Except for the moment when we almost published an article about comedian Kevin Hart’s plans for his wedding anniversary, the first test of FactStream, our live fact-checking app, went remarkably smoothly.

FactStream is the first in a series of apps we at the Duke Reporters’ Lab are building as part of our Tech & Check Cooperative. We conducted a beta test during Tuesday’s State of the Union address that provided instant analysis from FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker. Overall, the app functioned quite well, with only 2 glitches and mainly positive feedback.

Our users got 32 fact-checks during the speech and the Democratic response. Some were links to previously published checks while others were “quick takes” that briefly explained the relative accuracy of Trump’s claim.

When President Trump said “we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history,” users got nearly instant assessments from FactCheck and PolitiFact.

“It is not the biggest tax cut,” said the quick take from FactCheck.org. “It is the 8th largest cut since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product and the 4th largest in inflation-adjusted dollars.”

PolitiFact’s post showed a “False” Truth-O-Meter and linked to an October fact-check of a nearly identical claim by Trump. Users of the app could click through to read the October check.

Many of the checks appeared on FactStream seconds after Trump made a statement. That was possible because fact-checkers had an advance copy of the speech and could compose their checks ahead of time.

Working Out the Kinks

We had two technical glitches – and unfortunately both affected Glenn. One was a mismatch of the URLs for published Washington Post fact-checks that were in our database, which made it difficult for him to post links to his previous work. We understand the problem and will fix it.

The other glitch was bizarre. Last year we had a hiccup in our Share the Facts database that affected only a handful of our fact-checks. But during Tuesday’s speech we happened to hit one when Glenn got an inadvertent match with an article from the Hollywood rumor site Gossip Cop, another Share the Facts partner. So when he entered the correct URL for his own article about Trump’s tax cut, a fact-check showed up on his screen that said “Kevin Hart and Eniko Parrish’s anniversary plans were made up to exploit the rumors he cheated.”

Oops!

Fortunately Glenn noticed the problem and didn’t publish. (Needless to say, we’re fixing that bug, too.)

What’s Ahead For FactStream

This version of FactStream is the first of several we’ll be building for mobile devices and televisions. This one relies on the fact-checkers to listen for claims and then write short updates or post links to previous work. We plan to develop future versions that will be automated with voice detection and high-speed matching to previous checks.

We had about 3,100 people open FactStream over the course of the evening. At the high point we had 1,035 concurrently connected users.

Our team had finished our bug testing and submitted a final version to Apple less than 48 hours before the speech, so we were nervous about the possibility of big crashes. But we watched our dashboard, which monitored the app like a patient in the ICU, and saw that it performed well.

Feedback

Our goal for our State of the Union test was simple. We wanted to let fact-checkers compose their own checks and see how users liked the app. We invited users to fill out a short form or email us with their feedback.

The response was quite positive. “I loved it — it was timely in getting ‘facts’ out, easy to use, and informative!” Also: “I loved FactStream! I was impressed by how many fact-checks appeared and that all of them were relevant.”

We also got some helpful complaints and suggestions:

Was the app powered by people or an algorithm? We didn’t tell our users who was choosing the claims and writing the “quick takes,” so some people mistakenly thought it was fully automated. We’ll probably add an “About” page in the next version.

More detail for Quick Takes. Users liked when fact-checkers displayed a rating or conclusion on our main “stream” page, which happened when they had a link to a previous article. But when the fact-checkers chose instead to write a quick take, we showed nothing on the stream page except the quote being checked. Several people said they’d like some indication about whether the statement was true, false or somewhere in between. So we’ll explore putting a short headline or some other signal about what the quick take says.

Better notifications. Several users said they would like the option of getting notifications of new fact-checks when they weren’t using the app or had navigated to a different app or website. We’re going to explore how we might do that, recognizing that some people may not want 32 notifications for a single speech.

An indication the app is still live. There were lulls in the speech when there were no factual claims, so the fact-checkers didn’t have anything new to put on the app. But that left some users wondering if the app was still working. We’ll explore ways we can indicate that the app is functioning properly.

Bill Adair is the Knight Professor for the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University and the director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. He is the creator of Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact and worked for 24 years as a reporter and editor at the Tampa Bay Times. He is the author of The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation.

The post An Experiment in Live Fact-Checking the State of the Union Speech by Trump appeared first on MediaShift.

That’s a lovely idea, but in reality, the newsroom is often a lonely place for the social team. Rather than being fully engaged in the editorial process, social media teams—or possibly just a lone social media editor—are scrambling to publish content on Facebook, churn out copy, and follow analytics moment by moment. Exercising creativity and collaborating with other teams get lost amidst budget cuts, time constraints and the real pressures of the day-to-day newsroom. That’s a problem, because it limits the potential of social media at a time when the news industry needs to focus on experimentation.

Below, a breakdown of what needs to change and why, as well as possible fixes.

There’s No Editorial Guidance

Most social media teams don’t have a point person the way a writer has her editor, or an editor has her CEO. Chances are, the team is leading itself, adapting to the demands of daily news trends and the whims of staff writers, video producers and business managers.

An American Press Institute study found that a decade after the introduction of Facebook and Twitter, most newsrooms continue not to appreciate the journalistic potential of social media. This creates a silo around the social team, which often finds itself doing miscellaneous tasks.

“The three of us who do social media full-time are also responsible for curating and troubleshooting our mobile app, monitoring the wire, answering phone calls from customers, searching for user-generated content during breaking news and coordinating requests for retweets from [other newsroom] accounts,” one social media team member is quoted as saying in the study.

Social Teams Do the Housekeeping

The daily tasks for social teams generally include following social channels, drafting copy for breaking or trending news, and manually scheduling social content. The most common activity for social media team members is “posting links” — but is this a good use of time, especially when there’s little to no time left over for thinking about large-scale engagement or broader strategizing? When social teams are seen as just link-posters or taskmasters, rather than creative, non-traditional journalists, their position in the newsroom becomes mentally and morally isolating.

When I worked as a social media producer for Al Jazeera’s AJ+, the team had a good deal of journalism experience. Yet we were only tasked with repetitive, last-minute video uploads and tweet drafting. We sometimes felt that we weren’t considered “real” journalists. But we managed to create some complex, nuanced work, like a Medium series of user-generated personal essays on the question, “Where are you from?” and a Facebook group that documented incidences of hate in the U.S. These projects were accomplished when we carved time out for them, or worked off-hours.

A Vanity Fair tweet from 2015. (Photo credit should read (MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images)

Invite Us to Important Meetings

Social teams often aren’t brought into the fold on projects until the final stages, when it’s time to promote online — despite the fact that a project may have been weeks or even months in the planning. 

When I worked as the lone social media person at an education news nonprofit, I often found myself having to remind management to include me in project meetings. Sometimes I’d realize a relevant meeting was going on and would walk in halfway through it. 

Invite your social media team to join the process earlier. We can help.

What Needs to Change

In order for social media teams to thrive and live up to their journalistic potential, here are a few things that need to happen:

1) Management needs to build in time for the team to collaborate with other departments, bounce ideas off others in the newsroom, conceive of big engagement projects, and exercise multimedia skills.

2) The social media team’s workload should include more than manually scheduling content throughout the day. Algorithms often dictate their responsibilities, forcing the social team to think in terms of the number of times content is posted per hour or day, rather than longer-term engagement projects.

3) If newsrooms want to attract exciting, well-rounded candidates who stick around, they should be sure to create a clear path for advancement within social media. As it is, that path is unclear: Do you move into audience development, where you’re working with data strategy and moving away from editorial work? Do you transition into web producing where you hone multimedia and coding skills, but focus less on engagement? There must be a conversation about this.

4) Digital leaders with solid backgrounds in social media are few and far between, so the team is often left guiding itself. This means management needs to be keenly aware of the importance of including the social team in meetings–it will result in a more seamless process from conception to publication.

When newsrooms decide to really rethink the social media team’s role in the terms above, they will be tapping into a resource they could have been using all along.

The post Why Social Media Editors Should be Better Integrated into Newsrooms appeared first on MediaShift.

Nearly two decades later, news organizations are still figuring out how to adapt to the digital age, and it’s going to get more complicated for them in the years ahead. Thanks to the rise of ad blockers on desktop and mobile, the ads-based revenue model that has dominated the media industry over the last decade is showing signs of wear; and this month Facebook dealt publishers a major blow by announcing an overhaul to its news feed algorithm that would de-prioritize content from brands and publishers.

But while some were quick to paint the news as a doomsday scenario, all is not lost. New high-tech tools and platforms have emerged that may offer a lifeline to an industry that’s been treading water for decades.

Better yet, these tools aren’t just providing a short-term fix; they’re allowing entirely new business models. Online subscriptions and marketplaces have emerged that will change the way we create and consume content online, and pave the way for more sustainable companies to emerge in the years ahead.

The Rise of Subscription-Based Businesses

It’s one of the more obvious solutions — because it’s a model the publishing industry has historically used to great success when print reigned supreme — but an increased willingness among consumers to pay for digital news subscriptions could counter the disruption in revenue for media companies, and allow them to build deeper relationships with readers in the process. Deloitte predicts that by the end of the year, 50% of adults in developed countries will have at least two online-only media subscriptions, and by the end of 2020, that number will double to four.

Wired is one of many media publications planning to experiment with a paywall. Commenting on the announcement, Bob Sauerberg, chief executive of Condé Nast, said, “…If you have distinct content that is unique and special, there’s a massive trend toward subscription-based businesses.”

Bob Sauerberg (Photo by Desiree Navarro/WireImage)

But it’s not just the big names. Niche subscription-based publishers like Sinocism (Bill Bishop’s daily China newsletter), The Second Arrangement (Kelly Dwyer on the NBA), and The Hustle (daily tech and business news) are also betting on the value of specific, high-quality content. The Hustle, in particular, has already seen impressive traction. With more than 500k subscribers and a 40 percent open rate — nearly twice the industry average — it plans to expand its services in 2018.

By leveraging new tools and services, publishers small and large can quickly spin up new subscription offerings and reinvent their business models in real time.

Media as a Marketplace

Subscription models aren’t the only thing catching on among journalists and publishers. As mainstream media companies like Buzzfeed and Mashable continue to narrow their focus and eliminate jobs, many talented reporters are looking for new places to leverage their expertise, reach their audiences and, of course, make an income.

Medium, which distributes subscribers’ fees based on the number of claps writers receive on an article, is a great example. Purple, meanwhile, allows writers to create their own text-message subscription channels. For self-publishing, Substack gives any writer the tools — including hosting, publishing and billing — to become as successful a writer as Bill Bishop, who boasts more than 30k daily email subscribers. And for one-off publications, there’s Issuu’s recently launched Digital Sales.

Of course, as writers publish on these new platforms, they will also get paid in news ways. Technology companies are rising to the occasion, building back-end infrastructure that helps facilitate the exchange of payment from reader to platform to publisher. So, just like Lyft can instantly pay drivers at the end of a shift (rather than weekly or bi-weekly), publishers adopting the marketplace business model can offer increasingly attractive revenue options for creators on the platform. And these startups are showing signs of growth similar to their on-demand counterparts, helping fuel a shift in both user behavior and the economics that underpin an entire industry.

There’s still a long road ahead for the media industry, but for the first time in a while, technology isn’t disrupting publishers; it’s making it easier for them to experiment with alternative revenue models and deliver content in new, creative ways. Those concerned with the long-term stability of creators, publishers and journalists should view Facebook’s recent announcement as a turning point for the entire industry — one that will see the New York Times and others continue to adapt and enjoy another two decades of success in the internet economy.

The post The New Publishing Economy: An Optimistic Case For the Industry in 2018 appeared first on MediaShift.

“Engagement reporters” are journalists who combine the power of community engagement with traditional news reporting to do journalism that aims to authentically serve the community and reflect their interests and needs. They’re not audience engagement editors and they’re not news reporters — they live in both worlds.

These roles are relatively new and still somewhat unclear, and the structure depends on the newsroom’s engagement mindset. But they add value to newsrooms by engaging with the audience throughout the reporting process and encouraging a focus on serving the community.

I interviewed 12 journalists that fit this role in newsrooms across the U.S. to better understand how engagement reporters fit into newsrooms and the value they add to news organizations. Here’s what I found:

These roles are not clearly defined.

The journalists I spoke with fell into three different categories: those whose positions were explicitly defined as a combination of reporting and engagement; reporters and editors who also had some responsibility for engagement on the side; and journalists whose primary focus was engagement but worked closely with reporters to carry out those strategies.

Journalists in all three groups mentioned the difficulties of time management and a lack of defined responsibilities. Sarah Fentem, a digital producer who works on audience engagement at WFYI/Side Effects Public Media, said her newsroom created a 12-foot-long timeline to figure out how staff roles intersect.

“I think what the timeline did make us realize is there needs to be more connection points within the duration of making a story — it can’t just be something that happens at the end or even completely separate from the news process,” she said. “One difficulty with this, though: engagement likes to plan, and news is sort of a plan-averse world. It would be great to build events, etc around an upcoming story, but many times reporters don’t know what the story is yet.”

Some newsrooms’ organizational structures are more clearly defined. At nonprofit investigative outlet ProPublica, one of the first newsrooms to adopt the “engagement reporter” title, these hybrid journalists work alongside reporters to build communities around specific investigations. Engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo has spent much of 2017 embedded in the publication’s ongoing investigation of maternal health, working to reach as many women as possible, collaborating with reporters on stories and even planning an in-person event.

ProPublica’s Adriana Gallardo

“It allows us to be a little more creative with the ways we build an investigation,” Gallardo said. “I’m in constant communication with [the women who survived], asking what other questions they have…why aren’t more women talking with us? We build them into the investigative project and give them agency within the project.”

The newsroom’s mindset toward the audience makes a big difference.

Building a series of successes helps encourage an audience-first mindset in the newsroom, Byard Duncan, an engagement reporter with Reveal from the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, said.

“Set realistic goals and always be clear about what your objectives are,” he said. “The more small wins you get, the more receptive people – inside and outside of your newsroom – will be.”

Other journalists said their staffs understand the importance of the audience, but not everyone was clear on what engaging with them should look like. “It’s always hard to be an agent of change in a newsroom,” said Summer Moore, digital and audience engagement editor at the Times of Northwest Indiana. “Some staffers are more willing to work with you and learn new things. Others are not and that can be challenging.”

Having full buy-in from newsroom staff is essential to successfully carry out engagement efforts, from the perspectives of editors, engagement team members and journalists in hybrid positions. Journalists said they valued the support of management, especially when they were optimistic about audience participation and understood the value of engagement.

These positions add value to newsrooms.

The combination of engagement and reporting helps news organizations be part of their communities more organically. Ann Elise Taylor, a news editor at the Standard-Examiner in Ogden, Utah, said the most rewarding part of the job was the execution of an audience-driven reporting idea. When a large fire caused 1,000 homes in the area to be evacuated, the newsroom complemented its breaking news coverage by asking the audience to send in their questions about the fire so they could answer them in FAQ form.

Summer Moore of the Times of Northwest Indiana (Image courtesy NWI.com)

More than 50 people responded, and the FAQ story was one of the most-read of the week, with an average engaged time of six minutes. “There’s nothing more rewarding than producing a piece of journalism that really helps people,” Taylor said.

Because of ProPublica’s focus on building communities during reporting, Gallardo said, their goal is to reach the right audience, not necessarily the largest audience. Because the methods are tailored to fit specific investigations, their team has to experiment with what works for each one. In the maternal health project, they wrote a piece with advice for expecting moms, almost completely sourced from women who’d given birth and shared their stories. “These hybrid positions and ability to reimagine a story in different ways can help a story be more relevant to the audience,” she said.

When journalists are immersed in the reporting and engagement worlds, they’re able to move through them seamlessly, Duncan said. Multiple journalists said the versatility of hybrid jobs also builds trust within the newsroom, because other staff members know they have a deeper understanding of journalism than social media.

“I like to tell journalism students that what we’re doing hasn’t really changed that much from ‘old-school’ journalism,” Kayla Epstein, an embedded social media editor at the Washington Post, said. “We still need to be accurate. We still need to be fast. We still need to respond immediately and creatively to the biggest stories of the day. We still need to have fresh angles and know how to push a story forward.”

Taylor Blatchford is a senior at the Missouri School of Journalism studying international and investigative reporting. She’s currently a teaching assistant at the Columbia Missourian and an editorial assistant at Investigative Reporters and Editors. In the past, she’s reported for Politico Europe, the Charlotte Observer and MU’s student newspaper, The Maneater. Outside journalism, you can find her in the mountains, befriending dogs or cooking.

The post What ‘Engagement Reporting’ Is and Why It Matters appeared first on MediaShift.

A version of this piece appeared at J-Source.

The New York Times and Washington Post are two of the world’s most influential newspapers. Every day, they battle over sources and jostle for a better story. So it’s extraordinary that the two rivals have teamed up to create software to run comment sections.

The alliance began in 2013, at a news industry conference where Aron Pilhofer, the Times’ interactive news editor, and Cory Haik, the Post’s executive director of emerging news products, bumped into each other. The two shared troubles their papers were experiencing with comment sections and decided to work together to fix them.

That conversation would grow into the Coral Project, a collaboration between the two journalism giants, and later Mozilla with its open-source software know-how. The New York-based project aims to use this software to improve comment sections.

In 2015, Andrew Losowsky, a journalist, became the project’s lead. He says, “It came down to everyone seeing the problem, and the problem being too big for any one organization to solve.”

But why keep them at all? Comment sections can give a voice to the voiceless and hold institutions and individuals accountable. They can help journalists write better stories. But now – because of abuse by commenters, the dominance of social media, and the cost of hiring moderators – ­­many high-profile news outlets such as the Toronto Star and Vice are shuttering their comment sections.The future of comments is uncertain. But clues as to what the future might look like can be found both in the ways news organizations use comments today, and in how comments have been used in journalism’s history. 

Useful, useless or just plain ugly?

Before comment sections, there were letters to the editor. Both give readers a chance to share their knowledge and opinions, a journalism norm hundreds of years in the making.

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, a journalism professor at Cardiff University, wrote Journalists and the Public in 2007, a book about the history of letters to the editor. In it, she identifies two functions of letters to the editor: “Debates over specific issues in the paper on journalism ethics and … engagement in broader public debates.” Modern comment sections also perform these functions.

Letters from the public have been published in papers since the 1600s. They have had a section of the paper devoted just to them since 1851, when the New York Times pioneered the practice.

After hundreds of years, letters and comments from readers are probably here to stay. The question now is whether online comment sections will be the main way readers share their ideas.

Jake Batsell, a journalism professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, says that comment sections are a great way to facilitate the changing relationship between journalists and readers. He explored the issue in his 2015 book Engaged Journalism: Connecting with Digitally Empowered News Audiences.

In this evolving relationship, readers can question a news outlet’s ethical decisions. They can debate each other. And readers with specialized knowledge can add value to an article.

“Journalists need insights from their audience,” Batsell says. “They don’t know everything.”

Audience members can also point journalists toward story ideas. A 2011 study in the Newspaper Research Journal, an American publication run by journalism professors across the country, found that 22 percent of U.S. journalists sometimes got a story idea from comment sections.

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And from a business angle, loyal commenters are more likely to buy a subscription.

As compelling as these reasons are, there are serious problems with comments. For one, comments can get ugly.

A 2015 study in the Howard Journal of Communications, published by Howard University in Washington D.C., found that commenters are quick to polarize even neutral topics. One-quarter of all articles that do not deal with race have at least one race-based comment.

Another problem is that many comment sections are underused. For example, Bloomberg Business ditched its comment section partially because “less than one percent of the overall audience” was commenting.

Even if the comment section isn’t often used, it’s still expensive to run. News outlets are businesses, no matter how civic-minded they are. For comment sections to survive, they must help pay the bills – or at least not add to them.

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Moving forward

The post Will Comment Sections Fade Away, Or Be Revived By New Technologies? appeared first on MediaShift.

Dana Branham: When I got to The Daily, we published five days a week in print, and that was our focus. Now, we’ve dramatically changed the way we think about our work, and we’re truly a digital news operation.

Seth Prince: I’d been through something similar to this at The Oregonian. It’s tough, of course, but it’s doable. The particularly heartening part, I’d say, is that it’s an easier process in more nimble newsrooms like those we commonly have in college media, where students are already more digitally inclined and less rooted in tradition for tradition’s sake. However, here are some of the things that were holding us back.

Branham: We knew we needed to move past being bound to print, but we still had certain obligations to the way we always did things that made it hard to move full speed ahead.

Prince: So, first, here’s how we used to look online and in print.

Prince: This next sentiment has helped us orient people around the necessity of change. We, as a group, tried to free ourselves from fear of letting go of what was and instead embrace an experimental mindset. The goal, across that process, has been to grow an audience — who reads or views our work, who wants to buy advertising around that work — and generally to create something of real and measurable value for our community.

Prince: And this is where we are, all glow’d up.

Branham: Look at that shiny new website.

How OU Daily Started the Change

Prince: This question above was front of mind throughout. My old boss said it to me early in my career, and I’ve said it to students endlessly. I hoped the idea behind it helped them feel liberated to experiment by setting some goal for what that experiment would produce.

Prince: OK, here it is in one slide. Now we’ll go a bit deeper on some of these steps.

Prince: There’s this article I tell students about from time to time about a running phenom named Mary Cain and the idea of the progressive-overload principle.

Branham: Seth sent me this article sometime during the spring of my freshman year, and I remember reading it in my dorm and being like, “Whoa, I do not run and I don’t know how this applies to me, but I feel inspired.”

Digital in the Crucible of Breaking News

Prince: We had a series of escalating news events that first year that allowed us to practice progressive-overload and have students see the discoveries they could make. First, a student killed his whole family. Then, a rock star got really mad at us. And finally, a racist fraternity chant became national news.

Branham: It was the first time I remember that we truly treated news as incremental — we broke the story on a Sunday night, wrote updates literally through the night (Seth can attest to a 3 a.m. GroupMe conversation about a star football player’s Snapchat rant), and ran a live blog and live video streams of how things unfolded that following Monday, breaking out separate posts when the news merited it.

Prince: Beyond the students learning they could, in fact, own a huge national story, another cool discovery came about. They had no time to think about print. Editors naturally separated themselves in terms of digital-focused workflows and — this was key — we still had plenty to make terrific print editions.

Demolishing Newsroom Silos

Branham: Then the best part of my career at The Daily happened: I signed everyone up for Slack.

Branham: Seriously though, Slack was a game-changer for us in the way we handled breaking news. We had all the right people in one place, could get in touch easily and quickly on all of our devices, and in breaking news situations, we had channels set up for just editors, just the news staff, the entire staff, and so on. It became a place for us to yes, share fantastic GIFs, but also to have real-time ethical debates and talk through our values even when we weren’t all together in the newsroom.

Resizing, Rethinking the Purpose of Print

Branham: Daily staff had wanted to cut down on print days since I joined as a freshman, and my sophomore year, we got the OK to move down to two days a week. We’d promised the student body, the pub board and alumni that they’d be seeing a dramatically different Daily, not just the same one they were used to but less.

‘Legos Not Bricks’: Innovating Through Engagement

Branham: I think some of our best digital strides have been thanks to the addition of an engagement desk and an enterprise desk. We started with the engagement desk — I was its first editor my sophomore year, which was great. We learned to be better listeners, more tuned in to the OU community, which made our coverage smarter and more reflective.

We started 9 a.m. Slack meetings — those have evolved from a conversation about what people around campus were talking about and how we could make sure our daily coverage was reflective of that — to now, where we workshop smart SEO headlines as a group. We thought hard about how to get news to OU students in a way they’d want to read it, which means we’re not bound to writing traditional stories, and we’re better for it.

Prince: Shortly after taking this job, I went to ONA14 in Chicago. It was on the heels of the NYT Innovation report, and one of my favorite quotes from that was, “We have to build the newsroom out of legos, not bricks.” That thinking informed a lot of the spirit behind these moves — formally creating engagement as part of the operation and trying to find a digitally sustainable version of enterprise.

Regarding enterprise, in particular… It happened in three drawn-out phases. First, we kind of broke some bad habits through understanding via metrics that readership was poor when we did things certain ways. Then we took on more of a producer mentality where we went harder and faster online. As that grew audience, we then came back around and began to more consistently build in enterprise work that originated online.

Also, we wanted to Snow Fall (an online design concept that originated with The New York Times) but didn’t know how from a presentation standpoint, and we had to quit building our best stuff for print. That led us to find a partner on campus, Adam Croom, a former Daily student who now works as the director of digital learning at OU, to help go back and reimagine how one of our best enterprise stories could be presented. Dana and I sent him the pieces and a rough concept we had in mind and asked him to just run with it. He came back, wowed Dana and I with what he’d dreamed up, and we swiftly called a meeting of the editorial board to show them where we could go next. I remember seeing face after face light up at the thought of their best work being presented in more compelling, immersive ways.

Months later, we launched our projects site on WordPress and dropped our first attempt at Snow Fall, on wait times to see a mental health professional at our campus health clinic.

As the newsroom began to find a rhythm of getting projects published in that space, we circled back and redesigned our main website — run on TownNews’ CMS — for the second time in three years.

Focus on Addressing the Audience

Branham: This part feels pretty simple once you’ve added up all the other parts: we’re trying to take advantage of big news moments while consistently growing our core audience. For us, that means OU students, faculty, staff, alumni as well as people who live in and around Norman, Okla.

Prince: One other detail here: knowing how vital social is to our success, we’ve not let that grow organically. We have made a conscious effort to go into certain platforms and especially with certain stories to invite people who liked one piece to come back to get our coverage more regularly.

Prince: These past few years have been some of the most fun I’ve ever had in journalism. Not because of where we wound up, or whether we can stay at this peak. But because of all the people and energy and enthusiasm that contributed to getting here. Because of what we learned in the process, both for The Daily and its audience. And most important, because of what our students walk away with as they go forward in their careers and remember these moments and what went into making them happen.

Branham: It’s been so rewarding to look back at what The Daily used to be and just be blown away with how far we’ve come. The things we’re trying now are things I never could’ve imagined when I started here. I hope y’all are able to have those moments — where you just look back and think, ‘wow’ — then keep pressing on.

Dana Branham concluded her career at the OU Daily and started in January as a one-year breaking news intern at the Dallas Morning News. She’s previously interned at the Tulsa World and the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Seth Prince is the digital adviser at the OU Daily. Now in his fourth year at the University of Oklahoma, Prince is working in the newsroom he started in as a college student years ago. In between, he spent 14 years at The Oregonian in a variety of roles, from copy editor to sports editor.

The post How the OU Daily Transformed into a Digital-First Newsroom appeared first on MediaShift.

On their own, these are powerful elements for storytelling. Combining them into a social virtual reality app like Spaces, however, means a new world of possibilities. What is Facebook Spaces, and how could we use it for journalism? I set out to gain insights about this app in the context of telling stories, and as I discovered tips and practical uses, I also learned more about limitations when using this technology.

During a social virtual reality workshop in November at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, I put on an Oculus Rift headset and listened to verbal directions on how to use the two Oculus Touch hand controllers. My eyes veered all over as I soaked in this 360-degree, cartoon-like world. I clutched controllers that felt too big for my hands, yet gave me a vague sense of security and stabilization.

I clumsily acclimated to the gesture-based controls. I created an avatar, took some photos with a virtual selfie stick and spoke to one of my colleagues, USC professor and Annenberg Media Digital News Director Laura Davis. Even though we were physically far apart, being in Spaces made us feel like we were right next to each other.

“Honestly you really do forget about the world around you,” Davis said. “It was a discombobulating experience to come out of it. You really do get lost in the world and in that place.”

Emma Pierre, a USC student at the workshop, agreed.

“I feel like I just woke up from a dream. If I had this at my house, I would never leave,” she said.

“I feel like this technology is great for interacting with people you may not interact with,” Pierre added. “You can go to places other people have created.”

Space for Creativity

At USC, Davis and I had been talking to the Annenberg Media emerging platforms student team about the possibility of launching a storytelling project in Spaces. I had seen a preview of Spaces when I attended Facebook’s developer conference earlier in 2017, and I was fascinated by it. We discussed a plan with students, but we all knew we needed to try out Spaces and understand how people used the technology before we moved forward with launching a journalistic project in a social VR environment.

So, I organized the day-long event in November to explore the platform, expose faculty and students to social VR experiences, and think about how we could use it for journalism and storytelling. I reached out to Facebook, and the organization sent three members from the Spaces team to USC’s event. The team conducted sessions ranging from an intro to Facebook Spaces to best practices for VR storytelling.

This was helpful as we explored using Spaces for storytelling. Our emerging platforms student team at USC had previously seen a few experiments that didn’t go exactly as planned, including Slate’s launch of a weekly talk show in Facebook Spaces called “Conundrums.” We also saw some of the criticism Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced when going live in Facebook Spaces touring a hurricane ravaged area of Puerto Rico. When the Facebook founder appeared as a cartoonish avatar in front of real images of devastation, many felt the outcome was insensitive, if not offensive.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook comment: “When you’re in VR yourself, the surroundings feel quite real. But that sense of empathy doesn’t extend well to people watching you as a virtual character on a 2D screen. That’s something we’ll need to work on over time.”

At Annenberg Media, we were discussing several ideas for Facebook Spaces, including a possible project dubbed “Open Spaces.”

We wanted to see if newly released virtual reality technology, specifically Facebook Spaces, could break down geographical, psychological and demographical barriers to engage communities around possibly sensitive topics.

Another idea was around the concept of “Origins,” where students would look at where people came from and how it has shaped their lives.

After seeing how others were using Facebook Spaces and trying it out ourselves, we learned a few things.

Social Virtual Reality Tips

Know the product and the audience: It’s great that a social VR tool is built into the huge audience Facebook has fostered. You must have an Oculus Rift with Touch controllers to use Spaces (although you can join in via Facebook Messenger if someone in Spaces calls you), or it will also be compatible with HTC Vive, according to a recent announcement. When you experience Spaces, you can open up 360 photos and videos, and it feels as if you are inside those visuals. Knowing about all of these parameters helped us in shaping future projects. There are also more products in the social VR arena we haven’t looked at yet, like AltspaceVR.

Use it: We already knew that a product has to be experienced before planning out a project, but that notion was even more evident with Spaces. Using Spaces was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. (Some may recall Second Life, which features an online virtual world you can explore with a customized avatar and identity. Spaces takes that a step further with Oculus and hand controllers to make you feel like you ARE the avatar).

It takes some getting used to: I fumbled with the controllers at first. It was also weird not to have any actual legs for your avatar in Spaces, but you get used to it after a while and almost forget about it.

A virtual selfie stick and capability to go live on Facebook are some of the features of Facebook Spaces. (Photo: Amara Aguilar)

There’s potential here: Social VR combines social media, 360 content, personal interaction, capabilities to go live, share and more. The Facebook team mentioned three principles to keep in mind when it comes to product: Keep it simple, straightforward and human. By using the platform, I found there is huge potential for Spaces to create community and connect people in a more personal way, especially those who are physically separated. Annenberg Media emerging platforms editor Drew Schwendiman said, “It has the potential to allow people to join in a conversation from around the world. They don’t have to be in the same building as you as long as they have access to the technology, the internet and a Facebook account.”

Proceed with care, but don’t be afraid to try new things: As with any technology, sometimes journalists can try something, and it doesn’t go as planned — or totally fails. I think that’s OK; however, it’s important to keep in mind, with this technology specifically, that cartoon-like avatars could be seen as a not-so-serious way of approaching serious content. Emojis and GIFs can be viewed that way too, although I have seen serious journalistic storytelling done with GIFs. We learned that with social VR, we really need to think through perceptions and how we use the technology in order to tell stories with care.

More tips: A few tips the Facebook team shared with us: Give control of the story to the audience, create an emotional connection to the location, and promote use of authentic interactions and details.

We’re still figuring it out: We are still planning to use Spaces in some way next semester at Annenberg Media and are very excited about the possibilities, but learning about the technology, using it and brainstorming through our ideas has allowed us to take a step back as we prepare to step into our first journalistic experiences in Spaces.

Amara Aguilar is an associate professor of professional practice in digital journalism at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She teaches courses in mobile and emerging platforms, social media, design, digital news project development, among other areas. She loves journalism, Star Wars and all things tech.

The post Social Virtual Reality Tips for Facebook Spaces appeared first on MediaShift.

At the Computation and Journalism Symposium, which took place October 13 and 14 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., I sat down with three co-panelists to talk about the exciting new tools they’re building for collaborative journalism.

We discussed everything from the New York Times’ new comment moderation software to experiments in more transparent investigation. Below are a few highlights from our conversation. A note on the panelists: Corey Haines is Chief Technology Officer for the engagement startup Hearken, while Amy Zhang experiments with new forms of online discussion in her research as a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Michael Reifman recently joined the New York Times, where he’s a senior engineer on the community team.

Reading (and Fixing) the Comments

Comments have been around for years, and they still matter.

The New York Times has been experimenting with automatic comment moderation through a partnership with Google Jigsaw, the Alphabet incubator that builds security technology. Until recently, a human moderator had to look at and approve almost every comment that appeared on the Times website. Now, thanks to their new software, certain comments are auto-approved while other, potentially troublesome, comments get deferred for review by human moderators.

One big challenge with a system like this is that readers don’t always know what constitutes a problematic comment, and a phrase or word that’s appropriate in one setting might be totally inappropriate in another. How does the Times’ auto-moderator filter for context, and how transparent is it about its process? Reifman admitted that it’s a bit of a “black box” and says that the Times is proceeding “with caution.”

But why have comments at all? Corey Haines, whose startup builds engagement tools for public media and small-scale publishers, wondered whether comments – even well-moderated ones – are necessary.

“If we want to provide a place for community, a threaded stream is a pretty bad way to build community,” he said. “If you’re saying you want comments to be like a forum, then build a forum.”

But Zhang, who builds experimental tools that reframe online discussions, suggested a few ways that a new generation of comments could break into more collaborative territory.

“I don’t think there’s a distinction between ‘forums are one thing and comments are another thing’,” she said. Zhang pointed to experiments like “designing how the comments are shown, letting people organize, summarize, annotate, direct comments to some people not others” or even “breaking up the audience” as ways to completely change the commenting experience by offering more control to readers and more value to journalists.

“There’s a richness of engagement that we’re missing and that can be [achieved] by providing better tools to users and to moderators,” Reifman said. He said the main focus for the Times right now is achieving scale, but that in the future, they’re looking at letting readers search and explore comments.

Zhang pointed out that if there’s a need to summarize and organize comments, readers might be willing to do it, Wiki-style.

The Coral Project, a collaboration between the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Mozilla Foundation, recently rolled out a new tool called “Talk” to their first partner, the Washington Post. According to Coral’s website, Talk is a “a streamlined system that can improve how people behave and interact in the comments space, and allow moderators to more easily identify and remove disruptive comments.” In a demo on the Coral website, the community’s guidelines appear at the top. Readers and commenters respond to each other’s comments by clicking a “Respect” button rather than a “Like” one, since research has shown that a “Respect” button encourages readers to engage with diverse points of view.

Tools like Talk and auto-moderation might help organizations create more valuable discussions, which in theory could create more space and better avenues for richer collaboration.

Engineering Empathy

Good technology blocks offensive comments and online harassment. But great technology addresses why harassment exists in the first place. Or, as Zhang explained, there are ways that thoughtful commenting interfaces might encourage greater empathy among collaborators.

In an experiment, Zhang and her MIT lab asked readers to annotate news article with “moral framing.” The researchers drew on Moral Foundations Theory, which organizes human thinking around five core sets of moral values (watch Jonathan Haidt’s TED talk about the theory).

The goal of the experiment, Zhang says, was to get readers “to think about the underlying moral values that are being deployed in an argument” while reading a set of articles about immigration. By thinking about others’ core moral values as well as their own, it would hopefully be easier for readers to contextualize moments of disagreement.

Larry Birnbaum, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern, asks a question during one of the panels at CJ 2017. (Photo by Seong Jae Min)

Zhang says the research team saw an increase in empathy in their test users after a week of framing discussions in this way. (NewsFrames has a fuller explanation of the experiment and its results.)

From a news organization’s perspective, tools that encourage empathy could help promote more diverse and productive conversations around the news. For readers, it helps them collaborate with the process – even after the fact – by emphasizing that journalists, like anyone else, have points of view that can be debated.

Transparent Reporting

One of the big problems with comments, according to the founders of Hearken, is that readers only get to engage after a story is published. But what if they could engage from the start, including helping the newsroom decide what stories to cover and how? That’s the premise behind Hearken, or as Haines said: “How do you change the culture to bring the audience into the process?”

When a radio station in Michigan wanted to do a series on mental health, Hearken helped them build tools that let the station ask readers what they wanted to know about the topic before the series even began.

Asking questions can help news organizations target their stories in an era when clickbait articles make it hard to figure out what readers actually value. Metrics like time on site and pageviews are “passive signals,” said Zhang.

“People are being inundated with information and don’t have the tools to manage all the clickbait that’s coming at them,” she said.

Hearken is also working on a new tool that will let readers ride along while a story is being reported, offering feedback along the way. Variations of this idea exist at other outfits, as well. The Dutch journalism outlet De Correspondent refers to it as “being open about the new things you’re learning as a journalist” and the end result, they say, is that stories are more accessible.

The goal behind these tools isn’t to reinvent journalism, but to acknowledge that in an era of distributed information and diverse perspectives, the best defense against misinformation is a partnership between journalists and a media-literate population. When it comes to core values, collaborative journalism takes two-way trust as a given: journalists and audiences have something of value to offer each other. News organizations and media companies are still working on building the right tools for that level of trust, as well adopting the right mentality, but hopefully they’re getting there.

Anika Gupta has been a product manager, user researcher and travel writer. Her product work focuses on collaborative journalism. She lives in Washington DC. You can find more info about her at digitalanika.com or @DigitalAnika. 

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