NewspaperShift – MediaShift

How One Newspaper Launched an Online Rap Show To Boost Sales

Holly Robertson — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 11:05:02 +0000

A version of this piece originally appeared at The Splice Newsroom.

As newspaper sales stagnated, the Phnom Penh Post began looking for ways to appeal to more young Cambodians.

Koam Chanrasmey, the 28-year-old head of the newspaper’s video department, searched for inspiration. He found it in online clips of newscasters rapping the news in countries like Uganda and Senegal, but felt the approach had to be carefully considered before it could be introduced to conservative Cambodia.

“Rap is not Cambodian culture, it’s African-American culture,” he says. “But we could see the increasing popularity of rap among young people, and felt it was a different way of engaging the young people with reading the news.”

“We took that idea and [decided] let’s see what we can do in Cambodia to fit the Cambodian audience.”

The Phnom Penh Post has distinct English- and Khmer-language editions, with the latter known as Post Khmer. This is also reflected in their respective social media channels. The first clip, rapped entirely in Khmer, was posted on the Post Khmer Facebook in March to a generally warm reception from its followers.

Some anonymous users reacted with negative comments, accusing the rap news presenters of “destroying Cambodian culture.” But Chanrasmey tells Splice that the team values the positive comments, which ranged from “I never thought Cambodians could do this kind of thing” to “I never consume the news except for this; I like listening and dancing to the music.”

The online rap news show had gained about two million total views, with the highest to date surpassing 200,000 for an episode focusing on the bizarre case of an immigration police officer who staged a fall in front of a barely moving car. He was dubbed the ‘Poipet flopper’ by local media and earned the ridicule of Facebook users.

“When we started with the first episode we got 40,000 views and then we kept going up to 100,000 views [per episode],” Chanrasmey says.

Taking a break

But despite also drawing a spike in social media followers, the experiment in news delivery went on hiatus in September. One of five shows produced by the Post video team, the rap news series failed to attract an advertiser, while others have achieved financial viability—the travel, food and ‘Who is Who’ interview segments all have regular or semi-regular sponsors.

Episodes are time-intensive to produce: over the course of a week a composer creates original backing music, editors choose the stories, and the rapper duo creates rhymes to match. By Saturday morning, shooting is underway and editing follows in the afternoon.

Young people cheer at a Hip Hop contest in Phnom Penh. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Every element is carefully considered, according to Chanrasmey, from the time of posting—“normally we get more views at noon time”—to the thumbnail that accompanies the videos, in an attempt to draw in an audience aged 22 to 35.

“We want to have both female and male [viewers], but we ended up having majority men, like 95% men,” he laments.

Anything but politics

But while Chanrasmey says the video team aims to “engage young people to look at quality news and help them to shape their future,” politics has been off limits.

Cambodia’s authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen has been in power for more than three decades. A government crackdown ahead of elections in July has seen the country’s opposition leader, Kem Sokha, jailed on treason charges, his political party forcibly disbanded and most of the opposition’s senior leaders flee abroad. The media has not escaped unscathed: the independent Cambodia Daily newspaper was closed down in September, while U.S.-funded radio broadcasters Radio Free Asia and Voice of America have been forced off the airwaves.

The focus of rap news, then, has been on topics such as international news, business, entertainment and crime. And while Chamrasmey hopes to revive the segments, any relaunch would have to navigate a tense political environment.

“We don’t want those kinds of feelings around the stories. We think we have another purpose, to provide positive news.”

Holly Robertson is a freelance journalist based in Cambodia and an editor for The Splice Newsroom. Her work has been published by The Washington Post, Guardian, BBC, Columbia Journalism Review and VICE, among others.

The post How One Newspaper Launched an Online Rap Show To Boost Sales appeared first on MediaShift.

The Struggle to Keep Science Reporting Scientific

Rick Weiss — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 11:05:22 +0000

Markian Hawryluk, health reporter at the Bend (Ore.) Bulletin, recently posted a sad tweet. “With today’s layoffs at the Oregonian,” he wrote, “I may be the last full time health reporter working for an Oregon daily newspaper.”

His update was not entirely surprising; the words “journalism” and “job security” rarely go together these days. Newsroom employment at the nation’s daily newspapers is down 40 percent compared to a decade ago, and an additional drop of about 30 percent is projected by 2024. That’s a lot of former reporters looking for work. But as a former science and health reporter, I also pity those who are still at their desks — especially the general assignment reporters and others now increasingly tasked with covering this specialized beat.

The fact is, there is more science to cover than ever before but fewer full-time, dedicated science reporters to cover those stories. That’s why some organizations, including SciLine, the one I lead, are working to build bridges between journalists and scientists. And it’s why, more than ever, academic scientists and other experts need to step up to the plate and share their knowledge with reporters and the public, and keep the flame of factual evidence alive.

Changing Newsrooms

In its heyday back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, reporting on health and science was a well-supported calling. Dozens of newspapers had dedicated weekly science sections, and many of the reporters writing for them had master’s or even doctorate degrees in the disciplines they covered. Today the vast majority of those dedicated sections have disappeared, and the corps of specialist staff reporters who filled their pages has shrunk considerably. That means when science news breaks, as it does nearly every day, it is increasingly covered by generalists—many of them freelancers paid pennies per word—scrambling to cover the gamut of discovery, from colliding neutron stars to gene editing to cybersecurity.

Of course, you don’t have to be a full-time health, science, or environment reporter to do a good job covering these topics. But journalists accustomed to covering local news or politics are less likely to ask such science-critical questions as, “Did the sample size adequately power the experiment?” “Was the design double-blind?” and “Did the results achieve statistical significance?”

They also don’t have relationships with trusted scientific experts upon whom they can call, on deadline, to make sure they have the details right or for historical context (“Is this really an important ‘first,’ as advertised?”). And unlike their predecessors, they often have not just one but three or four deadlines per day. Who has time for fact checking?

Science in the Post-Truth Era

This journalistic trend comes at a precarious time for science and for trust in factual truths generally. The past year has seen a disturbing increase in the willingness of not only lobbyists and columnists but even government officials to impugn and undermine well-documented scientific evidence. At the same time, thanks to the internet, it has never been easier to generate and propagate obfuscating or even flat-out false information.

So what is a general assignment reporter to do when her editor points to a press release from a respectable research university claiming (as one recently did) that blueberries can help fight cervical cancer, or when a competing news organization throws up a headline (as recently occurred) that the recent cloning of monkeys is “paving the way to human cloning”? How should a reporter covering a local water board meeting assess a passing mention that tiny amounts of lead are leaching from older pipes? For that matter, how should a national political reporter approach a presidential tweet suggesting that the recent cold snap undermines evidence of global warming? Are these stories even worth reporting? And if so, how to get them just right?

From SciLine.org

These are the kinds of questions that I and my colleagues respond to every day at SciLine, a philanthropically funded, free “matching service” that makes scientific experts available to U.S. journalists on deadline or as needed. Hosted by the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science, SciLine was created to address the problem of there being more news than ever in the domains of science, health, and the environment, but fewer reporters with the time or resources to cover these increasingly complex beats well. In conjunction with programs sponsored by other non-profits, like the Poynter Institute and the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, which among other activities train general assignment reporters how to think more scientifically, SciLine is part of a resurgent recognition in journalism of the importance of anchoring even the most politically divisive stories with methodically derived evidence, whenever possible.

Sharing Scholarship

None of these services could be provided, of course, without an invaluable but currently hobbled resource: scientists at the nation’s universities and research centers. Invaluable, because this is a community of extremely knowledgeable individuals dedicated to understanding how the world works, many of whom are excellent communicators and virtually all of whom wish that the public and influential decision makers would take better advantage of what they’ve learned. But hobbled, because there is little in the way of rewards for them when they take time out from their research and teaching to share their knowledge and insights by speaking to—or helping to train—the media. There is also a dearth of funding and support to help scientists themselves improve their communication skills, so they can explain their research findings in media-friendly terms and, equally important, convey the joy and beauty of discovery and the value of evidence-based decision making.

A handful of universities have begun to incorporate public engagement in their criteria for academic advancement. But many more need to recognize their public responsibility not just to allow — not even just to encourage — but to actually help train a large and diverse swath of their science faculty to enthusiastically share their expertise with the media and the public.

The days of scientists hunched over their lab benches or isolated in their field research and hoping the public will fund them but leave them alone are over. With support from their academic institutions, and with help from organizations dedicated to building bridges between them and journalists, scientists can and must help keep truth on an even keel at a time when ideology and opinion are so ascendant in the news.

Rick Weiss, a former Washington Post science reporter, is director of SciLine.

The post The Struggle to Keep Science Reporting Scientific appeared first on MediaShift.

Why ‘Dialogue Journalism’ Is Having a Moment

Tiffany Lew — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 11:05:01 +0000

Turn on the TV today, and chances are you’ll see political commentators sparring. Log on to Twitter and you’ll see the latest heated tweet from President Trump. We’re living in a time of overwhelming connection thanks to the interwebs, but chances are, we’re not nearly as connected to those those who don’t hold similar beliefs.

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.

Why Paywalls Won’t Save Journalism

Mollie Bryant — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 11:03:52 +0000

A version of this piece previously appeared at Big If True.

Paywalls aren’t new or groundbreaking, but Nick Thompson, Wired’s editor in chief who implemented a paywall at the magazine today, seemed to suggest otherwise in several interviews on the topic. Paywalls are essential to journalism’s future, he told Nieman Lab.

“We don’t know exactly how the web will develop, which platforms will become big, but we do know that having a direct monetary relationship with your readers is one way to insure that you have a stable financial future,” Thompson said.

To be fair, Wired’s new subscription package is a helluva deal. For $20, readers get a year’s worth of the magazine’s print and digital products, including online access. To sweeten the deal, the package offers a rarity in online subscriptions – no website ads. That means no standalone ads thrust in your face like a jack-in-the-box while you’re mid-sentence. What a concept!

Changing expectations

After the internet’s rise caused media organizations to put their work online with no expectation of compensation, they inadvertently created a generation of news consumers who expect content to be free. Building paywalls has been a belated solution to that, because to complicate matters, as subscriptions drop and readers turn to free online content, Internet advertising is a poor revenue substitute for the print kind. Some readers are surprised to learn that online ads don’t pay as well as print ads used to – and I say used to, because devalued online ads has shrunk the value of traditional ads, as well.

All of that is par for the course if you’re a journalist. Newspapers and magazines are more than familiar with the advertising and subscription situation, and so far, one of their only solutions has been to get into the paywall game. When it comes to content, the first one’s free, ladies and gents, but after that, you gotta pay.

What struck me while reading Thompson’s comments, however, was his notion that relying on advertising has led to “slideshows, rehashed news and clickbait,” and paywalls create incentives for strong journalism. In other words, paywalls are the mother of improved journalism.

Today I bumped into some Twitter comments from Jason Pontin, the former editor of the MIT Technology Review, who expressed the same sentiment and then some. Paywalls do create better content, he said.

“Everyone knows it who has ever run a media business or its editorial department,” he said. “Those who deny it are ideologues like (Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review’s chief digital writer), who believe publishers must serve a fictitious class of readers who ‘can’t afford’ journalism, and a breed of ‘chief content officers’ like (Lewis D’Vorkin, editor in chief of The Los Angeles Times) … who want the largest possible audience to feed ads.

“But no publisher, not even the owner of a national paper like (The New York Times) has a general obligation, separate from their duty to their business and journalism, to serve the general good.”

Pontin said a lot there, and all of it contradicts my experience as a reporter, as a news consumer and as a human who has known people living in poverty. I’ve written on Big If True a little about how the journalism industry itself has impacted my career, but now seems like the right time to get into how paywalls impacted the journalism that my colleagues and I produced.

From personal experience

Each of the three newspapers I worked at either had a paywall or simply didn’t put content online for free, in the case of the small-community daily I worked at.

Paywalls did not save our newspapers. Paywalls did not improve the content. Paywalls did not stop staff from being laid off or positions from being eliminated through attrition. Paywalls didn’t stop reporters from feeling pressure to have a story go viral – even if it was about something that you’d rather not have your name attached to.

The New York Times Building (KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty Images)

A paywall didn’t stop one of the papers where I worked from running a weekly slideshow of a bikini contest that took place at a bar auspiciously named Midnight Rodeo. A banner across our homepage teased to the slideshow, so the journalism we were taking so seriously and that multiple female reporters were working painstakingly to produce was wedged above or below T&A.

A paywall didn’t stop the papers I worked for from favoring “quick hits” over the kind of journalism that takes time to put together – which is most journalism – or from cutting or whittling down beats that didn’t lead to enough pageviews.

This is 2018

Although Pontin and others who have worked at large media organizations might argue that the local papers I worked at simply have always had fewer resources to produce in-depth and high-quality journalism, the reality is that no matter the size of your market, things aren’t what they used to be. It’s not the 90s any more. Staff levels at every newspaper are a shadow of what they once were. Just ask the New York Times copy desk.

And paywalls at prestige publications haven’t exactly stopped them from running click bait, either, and pageviews undoubtedly play a role in the types of stories and topics to which they devote their resources. After all, pageviews are today’s single-copy sales.

To one of Pontin’s last two points: While subscriptions are inexpensive and don’t require a tremendous amount of wealth, they do require a person to have some money, and people who can’t afford food or a place to live can’t afford to pay for journalism. To suggest they either don’t exist or that they aren’t entitled to high-quality journalism is cruel and unnecessary.

And to his final point, that no publication has a duty “to serve the general good”? I’d like to know another reason why we’re here.

Our business model, built on declining ad revenue and paltry subscription numbers while continuing to make cuts to editorial teams, is fucked. It’s the direct opposite of a business model. Without a radical philosophical change, this situation is not going to get better. Heavy-hitting decisionmakers at national publications are doing the rest of the nations’ journalists quite a disservice by suggesting this approach to journalism is sustainable for any news organization.

So, I want to reiterate: Wired’s new subscription package is a helluva deal. But it’s not going to save print journalism.

Mollie Bryant is a reporter and editor for Big If True. She can be reached at bryant@bigiftrue.org.

The post Why Paywalls Won’t Save Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.

Why Small Newsrooms Do the Best Data Journalism

Bettina Figl — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 11:05:35 +0000

Turns out you don’t need a big newsroom to do award-winning data journalism.

For my research on data journalism in small newsrooms, I talked to heads of data teams in Germany, Austria and the UK. I found that size is no barrier to innovation. Data journalism is all about team work, and smaller newsrooms can be at an advantage when it comes to integrating data teams. The small, traditional newsroom Berliner Morgenpost had an almost fairytale-like success story with its efforts in incorporating data journalism.

Enthusiasm from the bottom up

Julius Tröger started working for Berliner Morgenpost’s online team in 2010. It’s a small team of just eight reporters, and the entire newsroom of this local newspaper in Berlin comprises less than 100 reporters and editors.

At the same time, Tröger started studying computer science. In 2011, he did his first data journalism story on the parliamentary elections in Berlin. With the help of another journalist, he programmed an interactive map where users could select the results of their own polling station. One year later, Tröger went to the U.S. and interned at The Guardian’s and ProPublica’s data teams.

When he returned to Berliner Morgenpost, his editor-in-chief realized how useful his new skills were and reimbursed Tröger for his travel expenses. He began concentrating solely on data journalism, and said to his editor-in-chief: “I can do a little bit of programming, but I need a programmer.” He got one, and began to create Morgenpost’s data team in earnest.

Recognition from inside and outside

When the small but growing data team won their first journalism awards, including the European Newspaper Award and the Axel Springer Prize, they received a lot of attention from the world at large and from others at the Morgenpost. At first, colleagues with traditional newspaper background were surprised, as Julius Tröger recalls: “They were like ‘Oh, online journalism is more than copy and pasting?’”

Some of the more senior reporters and editors began showing interest in collaborating with the data team, and became co-editors of data-driven stories. “Today, we are totally integrated” into the newsroom, “but during the first couple of years, we were a foreign body,” Tröger says.

Julius Troger of Berliner Morgenpost (Matthias Piket)

In 2014, Medium Magazine awarded Tröger the title “journalist of the year,” and Berliner Morgenpost’s interactive team was featured on the cover with the caption, “Nerds in Newsrooms.”

All of this took place within just a few years. So how did they do it? And do small newsrooms like the Morgenpost have an advantage in creating data journalism teams?

Advantages for small newsrooms

1) Better communication. “The big advantage is that we all sit in one newsroom,” explains Tröger. “In bigger organizations, people are more spread-out…You might have fewer resources and less journalists [in a small newsroom], but in big newsrooms you won’t hear about what others are doing.”

The Guardian’s former editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger points out: “If you have got a leader who is committed to innovation, it should be easier to turn around a small newsroom, because you can have better conversations.”

2) Easier to collaborate and experiment. Small newsrooms are a better playground for experiments: Reporters often need to take initiative and show results before leaders take notice. Julius Tröger left his comfort zone of copy-and-paste online journalism and made an effort to learn more about data. It was only once he started doing his first data stories and won awards that his editorial board got interested.

“We can take time to [experiment] and try things out,” says Tröger. “When big newspapers like Sueddeutsche Zeitung or Spiegel Online don’t have output for a while, or if they fail, there will be a loud outcry. With us, it is the other way around. Nobody knows us, nobody cares – until we do something that stands out.”

Megan Lucero is the head of the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Bureau Local, which was founded last year. The Bureau Local helps local newspapers build expertise in data journalism. “It is much easier for smaller newsrooms to change and introduce new things,” Lucero says. “It is great to be a smaller organization, because you can pair up with academics and researchers.” Lots of communication around work flow and deadlines is the key to success, according Lucero.

Megan Lucero of the The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s
data team (Image courtesy TBIJ)

Even without the support of a network like Bureau Local, the data journalism community is usually very helpful and responsive. Many of my interviewees stated that if they get stuck with a data project, they would seek out and offer help to one another – even beyond company borders. “Coopetition,” collaboration between competitors, is common practice.

3) Change can happen faster. Data start-ups like Bureau Local have another big advantage: They don’t have a “long-grown resistance against data,” as Peter Sim, a data journalist from Austrian investigative non-profit Dossier, told me.

“Small and new newsrooms can focus on establishing a data-supportive culture from the beginning. There are no fights between print and online, they are more flexible in working together and in choosing topics,” Sim points out. “In bigger, well-established newsrooms, there is usually no awareness of data journalism, neither among staff nor the editorial board…Change in bigger newsrooms happens, often, very slowly.”

4) More permeability. Smaller newsrooms often have less rigid divisions between departments. Digital strategist Nic Newman explains: “Previously, small companies couldn’t afford [data teams] and were always two steps behind. But you don’t need big teams anymore, one person with multiple skills can do it alone–it all comes down to the creativity of one or two people.”

Today, Berliner Morgenpost’s interactive team consist of five full-time journalists and two part-time developers. Other newsrooms send their journalists to intern at the Morgenpost to learn and start their own data units. Since January 2017, the data team has developed data-driven stories for the Funke Gruppe, and their stories have been adapted for local outlets like Hamburger Abendblatt. Berliner Morgenpost’s interactive team has received 50 journalism awards.

Bettina Figl is a reporter for the daily national Wiener Zeitung in Vienna, Austria. She specializes in longform, features and digital journalism while covering stories about education, politics, social issues, and feminism. In fall 2017, Bettina Figl was a journalism fellow at University of Oxford, where she did research on data journalism in small newsrooms at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The post Why Small Newsrooms Do the Best Data Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.

Here’s How One Japanese Newspaper Is Moving Robo-Journalism Forward

Tim Hornyak — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 11:05:25 +0000

A version of this piece appeared at the Splice Newsroom.

In another step forward for robo-journalism, a regional newspaper in Japan is rolling out an artificial intelligence system that automatically generates summaries of news articles for distribution across a range of media platforms.

The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun teamed up with Fujitsu, Japan’s largest IT services company, to create the software based on technology developed by Fujitsu Laboratories. Staff at the broadsheet have been producing summaries manually, a task that takes up to five minutes per article. The software creates summaries instantly and with greater accuracy than a different summarizing method that begins with the lead and stops when the word limit is reached, according to Fujitsu:

“The system uses a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to pick out the most salient parts of the article, scoring each sentence in terms of importance.”

During a trial, it was trained on a dataset of 2,500 articles from the newspaper as well as their manually compiled summaries.

“By pairing the original articles with the summaries and defining that as reference, or teacher data, we built an ‘important sentence extraction model’ that evaluates the content importance according to individual sentences, as well as a ‘sentence-shortening model’ that maintains sentence structure while deleting unnecessary words,” says Masato Yokota, a director at Fujitsu’s State Infrastructure and Finance Business Group.

The software can work with articles written in Japanese or English. It was built with a web API that can be easily inserted into the existing editorial workflow. A “summary” button activating the API was implemented into the editing screen for the paper’s cable TV news, Yokota said.

A screenshot of the AI system from its trial period shows the original article in Japanese (left), an automatically generated ranking of sentences by importance (center), and the summarized text (right). (Courtesy the Splice Newsroom)

Robots vs. Journalists

First published in 1873, the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun is one of Japan’s oldest dailies. Headquartered in Nagano, northwest of Tokyo, it claims a morning-edition circulation of 487,000 copies and distribution to 61% of households in Nagano Prefecture.

“The third-wave AI is set to become a trend of great relevance, and now is the time to make concerted efforts in improving the newspaper production workflow as well,” says Hiroshi Misawa, the paper’s managing director.

The Shinmai, as it’s known, plans to roll out the system in April for its cable TV news summary service, with an eye to speeding up news updates.

The summarizing AI joins a host of other automated news applications sometimes described as automated or augmented journalism. Heliograf, the Washington Post’s own news bot, produced about 300 briefs on the Rio Olympics of 2016, and has since covered U.S. elections and high school football games; it produced about 850 articles in its first year, according to Digiday. The Associated Press worked with AI firm Automated Insights to deploy software to cover earnings reports.

The Fujitsu pavillon at the Mobile World Congress 2016. (Manuel Blondeau/ AOP.Press/Corbis via Getty Images)

“Through automation, AP is providing customers with 12 times the corporate earnings stories as before (to over 3,700), including for a lot of very small companies that never received much attention,” AP global business editor Lisa Gibbs was quoted as saying in a 2017 report.

“With the freed-up time, AP journalists are able to engage with more user-generated content, develop multimedia reports, pursue investigative work and focus on more complex stories.”

Tim Hornyak is a freelance journalist based in Tokyo. He is the author of Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots.

The post Here’s How One Japanese Newspaper Is Moving Robo-Journalism Forward appeared first on MediaShift.

Lessons From ‘The Wall,’ USA Today Network’s Collaboration on Border Security

Dale Blasingame — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:05:52 +0000

A version of this piece previously appeared on Medium via the Center for Cooperative Media.

When it comes to collaboration, newsrooms often have mental barriers to overcome. Concerns such as who will be in charge, lack of focus and general disinterest or distrust of working with others are some of the most common issues that come into play.

But one of the largest journalism collaborations of 2017 — based on a proposed physical barrier — proved that working together can produce stronger results. That collaboration yielded The Wall, a project that involved the Arizona Republic, USA Today and journalists in the USA Today Network from around the country. Together, they spent six months reporting on core questions about Donald Trump’s push for a wall along the 2,000 miles of the United States border with Mexico. The project was a massive feat of organization, communication and journalistic cooperation that taught participants crucial lessons in coalition-building, including the importance of goal-setting, getting the right mix of skill sets on your team, and embracing the roller coaster ride to come.

When Nicole Carroll, the editor and vice president of news at The Arizona Republic, joined her reporting staff at a Donald Trump rally in Arizona in the fall of 2016, one particular thing stood out while her group was standing in the press corral: the repeated chants of “Build the Wall!”

They noticed the chants didn’t just sound like a slogan — they seemed to be a true, motivating factor for so many people at the rally.

“We wondered how much people really understood (or didn’t) about the border itself, the current fencing on the border, the reality of the terrain and distance involved,” said Josh Susong, news director at the Arizona Republic who served as a lead content editor for The Wall. “We began brainstorming some specific stories that would answer these questions from specific locations, a list that grew as other southwest newsrooms joined the team.

“We were confident most of the country had never seen the border and didn’t know about life in cities near it. Our questions evolved into a process of seeking out unknown stories from the border and unintended consequences of border security and a border wall.”

A helicopter carrying the USA TODAY NETWORK team takes off from Lajitas International Airport in Texas as it continues its journey along the border. (USA TODAY NETWORK)

A multi-platform project

The Wall featured a variety of different storytelling methods: print publication, digital publication, documentary videos, virtual reality, an interactive map, podcasts, chatbots, live storytelling nights and a newsletter. The journalists boarded a helicopter to fly, film and observe every foot of the border with Mexico, from Texas to California. They also drove the entire border.

Reporters and photographers interviewed everyone from human smugglers to families and farmers along the border. They spent time with Border Patrol agents, vigilantes and ranchers. Story topics included deaths of those attempting to cross the border, deaths of agents protecting the border, drug trafficking and concerns of Native Americans along the border. The newsrooms also dug into the effects of the wall on prices of goods like produce, and found out from a smuggler that a new border wall will allow him to charge more for his services.

The audience can watch aerial footage collected of every foot of land along the border, explore the most current and comprehensive map of current border fencing and visit Big Bend National Park and other spots along the border with a Vive VR headset.

Susong said the idea for storytelling on multiple platforms was a goal from the very beginning. Annette Meade, Innovation Manager in the Gannett Innovation Lab, was a lead project manager who helped track all the technical elements of the project and ensure the technology efforts matched the content efforts.

In all, the project included a fully interactive map with about 20 hours of aerial footage of the border, a seven-chapter story about the journey, 14 additional stories about the consequences of the wall, 14 mini-documentaries and an explanation of the history of the border itself.

Special immersive views of key points along the border were built for virtual reality using the HTC Vive system. The project staff talked about the stories behind the stories in a 10-part podcast series that featured an interactive chatbot that could automatically send listeners more details about a story. And the audience joined the conversation for live storytelling events in three states.

Building a coalition

The first planning note about the project went out on December 30, 2016. Editors at USA Today Network’s southwestern properties, led by Carroll, helped flesh out the project idea and generated a list of likely storylines to pursue.

Two months were spent pitching and refining ideas with all stakeholders, including people in editorial, digital, video, marketing, advertising and corporate communications. Detailed documentation, including an 80-page deck, was put together for Carroll and others to help pitch and explain the project to the people who worked in all those different parts of the organization, and whose expertise and support would be needed.

In total on its credits page, The Wall lists nearly 130 individuals who contributed to the project, including reporters, photographers, graphic artists, videographers and designers.

Reporting came from more than 30 journalists in the field, primarily from USA Today Network’s newsrooms in Palm Springs; Phoenix; Las Cruces, New Mexico; El Paso and Corpus Christi, Texas; with more support from newsrooms in Ventura, California; Detroit; and D.C., Susong said.

The Wall also involved a documentary editor and executive producer from Detroit, who led the video process. The network’s emerging tech lab spearheaded the VR process. The digital team included developers and staff in Virginia, New York and elsewhere. The project did have help from outside the network — Jam3, a digital design and development agency, assisted with early work envisioning the framework and digital navigation. Aerial Filmworks managed the helicopter shoot. Finally, Arizona State University students were hired to help review the aerial footage. An in-house development team then linked the map to the video.

Arizona Republic photographer Michael Chow (left) and reporter Dennis Wagner (right) interview rancher John Ladd at the border. (USA TODAY NETWORK)

Taking advantage of the network

The Wall, according to Susong, was perhaps the company’s biggest example yet of the strength of the company’s national network of journalists. He said the Arizona Republic had collaborated before on many things, particularly breaking news, but never anything on this scale.

One of the first tasks was developing the project idea with editors in all of the southwestern locations. Local editors brought in the staff they knew were best qualified to use local connections to help determine local storylines.

While reporting in the field, the majority of the work was done in teams — partly because they were capturing documentary video. Each visuals team had at least two people, plus at least one local reporter. Most of the field shooting was done by four visuals staffers from the Arizona Republic.

“We weren’t parachuting in to do this story,” Carroll said. “We live and work here. Many times, our journalists got access and interviews because they were local. For example, we were having a hard time getting access to the border patrol in southern New Mexico. Our reporter from Las Cruces made the request and the team got in. She grew up in New Mexico’s Bootheel area, and had been covering the area for years.”

Communication for collaboration

As you might imagine with a project of this size, communication was key. Some of the technology used included:

Developers did much of their work using Slack.
Some teams used Basecamp work groups to stay connected.
The project used a shared spreadsheet to determine budgets for content. It listed every possible piece of content in all of their various forms, including every fence photo with geo-coordinates. Susong said the spreadsheet had 20 tabs and thousands of lines of entries by the end of the project.
Project leaders from across the country held regular conference calls during the year of planning and reporting. At first, the calls were every two weeks but that changed to weekly and almost daily as launch date approached. Susong said one of the most important parts of these calls was to know for sure who owned a decision on the content — issues like whether a story lived or was killed, whether there was time to shoot more interviews, and progress of digital features.
Video editors and producers shared physical hard drives to complete work. The dozens of hours of aerial footage alone had to be downloaded and processed to these hard drives during overnight hours each night while the helicopter wasn’t flying. The drives were then shipped or driven back to the newsroom. Susong said the logistics were intense, and Emmanuel Lozano, a video producer, ran this process — which included flying and driving the entire trip.

Editorial process and launch

Story text was edited inside the network’s proprietary CMS by the local editor for that reporter on-site, but Susong worked with those editors to set the theme and structure of each story. He also served as a second editor to make sure the pieces of content shared a common editorial style and voice.

A similar model was used for other platforms. With video, for instance, Kathy Kieliszewski, photo and video director at the Detroit Free Press who served as the executive producer for The Wall videos, helped set the theme and standards.

Stories ultimately went through one of the network’s top copy editors, Melissa Galbraith, a digital producer at the Arizona Republic. Galbraith also wrote most of the cutlines for the hundreds of photos and, along with Susong, wrote most of the display copy for the stories.

Carroll and Kevin Poortinga, the vice president of innovation at Gannett, along with Susong and Meade, met twice at USA Today’s headquarters with leaders from across the network who were helping to support and promote The Wall, including the graphic artists who built the map, the virtual reality team, social media managers, print and digital planners, and many more. In addition to the many other points of coordination, the in-person check-ins were critical.

“These series of connecting points helped keep many people in the loop on what the project was about, what was coming and how they could support it and promote it when it was finished,” Susong said.

In print, all of the USA Today Network’s 109 newspapers nationwide ran a version of the project launch story on their front page.

After that, all the network’s newsrooms were free to use as much of the content as they could. The Arizona Republic ran every word produced over the course of two weeks. The Corpus Christi, Palm Springs and El Paso newspapers ran most or all of the stories in their pages as well. USA Today ran most of the pieces in its print edition, including a double-truck print version of the map.

This screenshot shows the landing page for the project The Wall, at thewall.usatoday.com.

Online, every newsroom in the country featured the same digital pieces, which were all housed at thewall.usatoday.com. Some were featured on the home pages of local sites. In addition, the network’s storytelling studio coordinated three live storytelling nights, which took place in Phoenix, Indio, Calif., and El Paso, Texas, where men and women from across the southwest shared their first-person experiences of living on the border.

Cost and metrics

Cost is always a consideration when working on a project of this size. The Arizona Republic declined to disclose much money was spent on the year of reporting, but Susong said the network did receive more than $30,000 in grants to complete some components.

With so many moving parts, tracking success of the project was another challenge. Susong said the short-term, quantitative goal was to hit 5 million pageviews, which they’ve already surpassed and are now closer to 6 million pageviews.

In a collaboration this detailed, it could have been easy to lose direction. Carroll said they often had conversations about the scope of the project, but they always insisted on staying focused on the wall — not immigration, DACA or any other related issue in the news. The coalition also celebrated short-term wins like getting a key interview or solving a technical issue.

In the end, a project of this scale was only possible because of combining resources and working together with others.

“There is power in collaboration,” Carroll said. “We were able to do far more together than we could have ever attempted as individual organizations.”

Lessons learned

We asked leaders of The Wall to share some of the key lessons they learned from the collaboration that will help them in such projects in the future. Here’s what they said:

Nicole Carroll, vice president/news and executive editor, The Arizona Republic and AZCentral.com:

Have a clear goal, and make sure everything you do supports that goal. In this case, we wanted to educate America about the impact, cost and feasibility of a border wall. We wanted to be as transparent as possible, so people could see the information for themselves and hear directly from those impacted. As we made decisions, this gave us guideposts: “Should we/could we map every piece of the current fence?” (Yes, this educates our audience.) “How can we be more transparent?” (Let’s do behind-the-scenes podcasts.)

Be mindful about the team. Projects like this are powerful career-development and skill-building opportunities. We made sure to have a mix of veteran and newer journalists, from many different areas and backgrounds, to have diverse voices and approaches, to give opportunities to a wide group of people.

Annette Meade, innovation director, Gannett Innovation Lab:

Understand the skill sets and experience of the people who are working on the project and make sure that tasks/timelines match up with those skills. If you have a person on the team who is less experienced or new to this kind of project work, build time in to allow them to learn along the way. Check in with them as often as needed and embrace the fresh viewpoints or ideas that they can bring to the process.

Tap resources from around your organization. Your core team is likely to be relatively small, and they won’t know everything about everything. Pull in the best people you know to address specific areas, like SEO.

Allow enough time for QA/testing. Anticipate the worst-case scenario, where development gets backed up a few days (or more), and plan accordingly when you build in QA time. Then just to be safe, add in a little more time. We seldom see projects that allow too much time for QA/testing; it’s usually just the opposite.

Kevin Poortinga, vice president, innovation, USA Today Network/Gannett:

New long-distance relationships: Rough but so worth it. Not only did we wrestle with multiple time zones, we also wrestled with new-to-each- other work styles (and this was without the benefit of in-person happy hours to talk it out). We prevailed, and we’re so much better off now for future projects, as it immensely eases that outreach going forward. In this company, we should all fight to rotate who we work with at least a few times each year to extend our networks.

On such a large project involving so many players and stakeholders, it’s going to be a roller coaster of an experience. As much as you want the process to be a smooth, straight A-to-Z ride from both a process and people perspective, it’s going to look a lot more like this:

It’s best to be upfront about this, and set expectations about how you’ll have the necessary discussions along the way.

Josh Susong, senior news director, The Arizona Republic/AZCentral.com:

Appoint one person to know the location of all the digital/visual media.We relearn the value of this on every big project we do. In this case it was Emmanuel Lozano. Whoever it is, somebody needs to own knowing where every visual thing lives, to feed the many designers, developers, social planners, etc., who are all looking for the one last extra image of .

Kathy Kieliszewski, photo and video director, Detroit Free Press

When producing a documentary, a lot of time is spent on pre-production — building sources, navigating new territory and chopping through red tape. With this film, we were able to leap past that in a lot of ways by utilizing the institutional knowledge of the network’s news organization along the border. That’s given us an incredible leg-up in telling the stories of how the proposed border wall could impact those communities.

The Wall was awarded a $7,000 grant by the Center for Cooperative Media as part of an open call to fund collaborative reporting project, which was made possible with support from Rita Allen Foundation and Democracy Fund.

Dale Blasingame is a senior lecturer in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. He teaches digital journalism courses, including classes covering the fundamentals of digital media, web design and publishing, digital media entrepreneurship and social media analytics. Prior to teaching, Blasingame spent nine years as a TV news producer and won two regional Emmy Awards.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. The Center is supported with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Democracy Fund. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.

The post Lessons From ‘The Wall,’ USA Today Network’s Collaboration on Border Security appeared first on MediaShift.

The New Publishing Economy: An Optimistic Case For the Industry in 2018

Jeanne DeWitt — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 11:05:10 +0000

Twenty-one years ago, almost to the day, the New York Times embraced the “World Wide Web” and launched an online version of its daily newspaper, part of its “strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry.”

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.

Jeanne DeWitt leads U.S. and Canada Sales at Stripe, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Prior to Stripe, Jeanne was the Director of GSuite SMB Sales for North & Latin America at Google, then lead go-to-market strategy as the Chief Revenue Officer of Dialpad, a communications startup.

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

Will Comment Sections Fade Away, Or Be Revived By New Technologies?

Trent Erickson — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 11:05:58 +0000

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.

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.

Moving forward

When news organizations look at the pros and cons of comment sections, they generally come to two conclusions. Some decide to ditch their sections and engage readers differently. Others elect to keep them, and invest time and money to improve them.

Trevor Adams, the senior editor at Halifax Magazine, chose option one. Earlier this year, his lifestyle magazine cut its comment section.

No one seemed to care.

“Not one person said, ‘Hey, where did your comment section go?’,” says Adams.

This didn’t surprise him at all — his magazine’s comment section was rarely used. And when it was, it often “vandalized the story” with statements that were sometimes inaccurate and other times hateful.

Adams also found that people were commenting on the magazine’s Facebook and Twitter far more than in the comment section.

Many news organizations have made this migration to social media. When they close the dedicated comment section, they’re simply being pragmatic, Batsell says. “They’re deciding to go where the fish are, and the fish are on social media increasingly.” Organizations like NPR closed their section for this reason.

And Adams says nothing is lost when this happens. “I don’t see any news outlets’ comment section doing something that their social media isn’t already doing better.”

Other news organizations see things differently.

The CBC values its comment section because it has the ability to create a national conversation.

Jack Nagler works at CBC as the director of journalistic accountability and engagement. His job is to manage the corporation’s relationship with readers across the country.

“What better opportunity is there for folks to come together and find out what each other thinks than to be able to comment on stories and engage in debate?,” he says.

Seeing value in comments doesn’t mean being blind to their flaws. The CBC is constantly experimenting to make its comment section more productive. At times it’s used reactive moderation, when comments are moderated after being publicly posted. Currently it uses proactive moderation, when comments are screened beforehand. It’s tried adding accountability by forcing commenters to attach their names. And it’s tried closing comments on sensitive topics like indigenous or transgender issues.

These strategies have been tried by news outlets across North America. They often make comments more civil, but there is still room for improvement. And improvement requires time and money.

The Coral Project is the result of a great deal of this money – $3.89 million U.S. The financial basis for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Mozilla to build on was granted by the Knight Foundation, which funds U.S. journalism and arts initiatives.

The Coral team conducted interviews in 150 newsrooms in 30 countries to identify common problems with comment sections.

“The real problem with comment sections is that we don’t know what we want from them,” says Andrew Losowsky, the project’s lead. “We go in with no strategy, and what we get back is what happens when you just say, ‘Do whatever you like’.”

Civil and on target

The project aims to clarify what sort of comments a news organization wants. Instead of leaving readers to comment in a blank box, Coral software can prompt readers by offering a specific topic or question. Trials by the Washington Post have found that this keeps comments more civil and on topic.

The project also wants to make it easier to highlight quality comments. Losowsky says that while news organizations are quite good at removing comments which break site rules, they’re not so good at showcasing quality comments.

Coral plans to change this with software that allows news organizations to see a commenter’s history. They are able to see how often a user comments, how many likes or replies they get, and the average length of their comment. By searching using parameters like these, editors can much more easily find quality comments to feature. Losowsky says this kind of encouragement is key to building a community of readers.

The Post started using Coral software earlier this year. Since then, 15 other newsrooms in the Americas, Europe and Australia who have also installed the software, which is free to use. The project’s software is free because people at the project, like Losowsky, think that the more newsrooms with functioning comment sections, the better. They could play a crucial role in improving journalism’s relationship with the public.

A 2016 Gallup poll put U.S. public trust in journalism at its lowest point in polling history. Only 32 percent of people had a great or fair amount of trust in the news. One of the hopes of the Coral Project, Losowsky says, is that readers will feel a part of the news-making process, and so will have more trust in it.

“Trust isn’t a thing that you sell once and then you’re done. It’s a relationship that requires ongoing interaction.”

Trent Erickson is in his final year of journalism school at the University of King’s College. When he’s not at his desk writing, you can find him zipping around the streets of Halifax and Toronto on his bike. Reach him at trent.g.erickson@gmail.com.

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

Here’s How We Can Reinvent Local News

Mark Effron — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 11:05:54 +0000

The local news business is in serious trouble. Newspapers are in decline, their sites and papers no longer filled with investigative reporting, daily coverage of city council meetings and local budget shenanigans. In many places, the only reliable alternatives for any kind of daily local news is the local television newscast.

Yet even that staple — and its business model — is being challenged like never before. If the situation isn’t terminal, it’s serious.

The latest Pew survey confirms this: local TV news viewership is falling — and fast. Only a fourth of college-educated Americans regularly watch a local TV newscast. For those with a high school degree or less, it’s less than fifty percent.

The patient is not yet on life support. So it’s important that those who run local television stations — and those of us who care about local broadcast news — try radical experiments to to revive the genre now before it’s too late to reverse the continuing and accelerating degradation of the local news ecosystem.

The way we were

At a time when news is everywhere and on every platform, why is preserving the local news important? This was a system that worked well for decades: Strong local stations added pictures to the news that people read in their morning papers and heard on the radio. These stations also provided strong dollops of consumer, investigative and weather coverage. Local newspapers—which were robustly staffed—helped set the agenda for the local market, and local stations to some degree depended on newspaper resources to point them in the right direction. As the executive who oversaw local news for many years for the Post-Newsweek (now Graham Media) stations, almost every morning news meeting that I attended paid some attention to the agenda set by the local paper.

A professional, robust local TV news operation in the ’80s and ’90s could count on a committed, large audience that, to a significant degree, reflected the demographics of the market. The commercials that were sold around these newscasts provided solid budgets for expansion of newscasts and beats.

Few winners, many losers

Now, in 2018, we’re left with a newspaper industry that has a few national winners (The New York Times, The Washington Post) and many local and regional losers. But even the New York Times admits its commitment to local has lessened now, because it sees its neighborhood as the world. When I was a local news director a few years ago at Tribune Media’s New York station, the New York Times website was one of the last places I’d look when local news broke.

Now, digital disruption has fully enflamed the local television scene, where—as the Pew survey reveals—the audience that’s left is poorer, less educated, and older — not a prescription for success. Local television news still feels much like it did when I first joined my first local station in the late 1970s. Sure, the graphics are slicker, and social media is more embedded into the writing and the storytelling, but the conventions are the same: anchor lead-ins to recorded packages, live shots, and newscast teases across the commercial break that has the audience singing along because they’ve memorized all of the hoary conventions of local news.

It’s no wonder that my students at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media hardly ever watch local news on television. In fact, for a course I teach on TV news production and writing, one of the assignments is to watch a local newscast—it’s the only way I can assure that they will have seen what it is I’ll be teaching.

One of the reasons we still teach it (along with digital storytelling, documentary, and other disciplines) is that there’s still a need for producers, writers, and reporters to fill thousands of better-paying jobs covering news at local television stations. We used to be aghast at what producers would make in small markets; we’re less aghast when we compare those salaries to folks making less but working more at many digital operations.

News collaborations are one way to strengthen the local news universe. The Center for Cooperative Media here at Montclair State, for example, has done more than any organization in conceptualizing a future of digital collaborations and projects. The Center recently published a collaborative database with information about almost 100 news collaborations from over 800 organizations.

But I worry that these collaborations, though valuable and successful, don’t scale up to a mass audience. TV, though hobbled, is still the way most Americans get their local news. The inescapable truth is that throughout our nation’s history, local news has always been a commercial enterprise, fueled by capitalism and competition, and focused on many demographics.

What can we learn from cable news shows like Fox News Channel’s “Hannity”? Shown here, Tom Brokaw and Sean Hannity on set in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images)

An experiment that just might work

So what can be done? Some large local operators like TEGNA are playing with new formats and ideas—more in-depth storytelling in some cases, hiring comedians to add dash to morning newscasts in others. Sinclair – poised to be the largest operator of local stations once it completes its acquisition of Tribune Media – borrows from Fox News in imposing a right-of-center slant to its newscasts.

As someone who once ran news coverage for both a major group and a major cable news network this is what I would do:

I would prevail upon senior management at the company to let us do full research and development at an underperforming station in a decent-sized market, one without union restrictions that forbid employees from shooting and editing. There would have to be full buy-in and acknowledgement from the corporate level to the station management level that normal benchmarks for success (ratings and revenue at the top of the list) would not be held against the station managers for a period of two to three years. Without that incentive to succeed (or fail) wildly, this experiment would be doomed; we’d end up with some version of the incrementalism that got us into this mess. We would endeavor to emulate companies like Alphabet and Amazon in taking big bets and going all in.

Then, we’d start from scratch, asking ourselves (and researching) who are our target audiences? What platforms are best to reach these targets? What programming best works on each platform? What kind of skill sets do our journalists need to succeed?

Other questions: What kinds of sales categories and formats (both digital and on-air) are not being served and what kind of products can we create to serve them? What can we learn from Vice Media (up-close, in-your-face passionate reporting) and cable news (up-close, in-your-face passionate discussion) that’s transferable to our new local entity? (Hint: Passion works.) What valuable beats (and advertisers) were lost when the local newspaper slimmed down?

At the risk of jumping ahead without fully researching the above, here’s what I might anticipate:

A fully developed local news brand — NOT the old call letters or channel number.
A central, agnostic-to-platform news creation team: producers, reporters, writers, assignment editors.
For television: a belief that viewers still like interesting personalities. I’d go full-bore here, with emphasis on smart, opinionated, and yes, passionate journalists.
Digital sites (website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and whatever comes next) that push out the journalism in formats appropriate to the platform). Develop hyper local sites digitally.
A redefining of what TV newscasts should be: Less focus on run-of-the-mill news, and more focus on the beats that the newspaper used to own. Don’t give up on more attractive demos! Also, question everything: writing style, teases, length of stories, etc. Throw out old research!
Partnerships and collaborations with existing digital journalism sites where it makes sense.
Aggressive marketing; on air, on line, on social.

The risks of this approach are many. What if we fail? What if our profit margins decrease? What happens to my career if I’m part of this experiment?

But I maintain the risks are outweighed by the chance to reinvigorate a force for civic engagement and involvement that has helped keep communities informed since local news became profitable back in the ’60s. Anything less is just an inexorable march toward a test pattern.

Mark Effron, a veteran broadcast and digital news executive at companies such as MSNBC and New York Public Radio, is currently a professor of Journalism and TV and Digital Media at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media, where he oversees the School’s News Lab.

The post Here’s How We Can Reinvent Local News appeared first on MediaShift.