There is something endlessly frustrating when a news site launches a redesign that is a barely changed rehash of a large media companies older design.

Few, if any, media companies are backing up their design with user experience science. If the final sites are any indication, we have paid little attention to decades of significant study into UX and reader patterns. We shouldn’t be imitating them.

Instead, we try to determine design based on imaginary user stories and A/B testing. The problem is that when we treat humans as users, we forget to account for designing in a way that matches how real people read. When we A/B test there is the potential to find better designs that still aren’t good.

The first value every site design should solve for is readability. The people who come to news sites are there to read. Yet bad design patterns that challenge readability don’t just abound, they multiply.

The last few years have seen an explosion of low-contrast text, despite it being obviously harder to read.

Lines with too many characters also continue to plague websites, making them difficult to scan and forgetting the basic column-width lessons we learned laying out print newspapers.

The undifferentiated grid is another example of a common design pattern, which experienced growing popularity due to ease of scalability for responsive designs. A series of identical boxes makes no sense when compared to how our audience actually looks at the page.

This isn’t to say complexity is impossible, in fact we should consider it required.

• Abandon the “clean” design and build sites that respect our readers interest in finding the news.
• We can dig into scanpath theory and find opportunities to present visual complexity to inform the reader.
• It is to our financial advantage to do so, driving additional engagement and page depth.

Studies exist to tell us how our audiences interact with pages in a general sense, we tend to ignore it. Understanding how our readers eyeballs work in the general sense means building designs informed not by trends or other news orgs, but by science. Much of that science is publicly available, waiting for us to use.

We can also start borrowing scientific methodologies to better understand our individual audiences and, in the process, connect with them. Eyetracking hardware is dropping in price, and is well within the range many news organizations should consider a purchase.

User studies are another way to take basic UX techniques and use them to improve your site and connect with readers. Reach out to the community and invite them to test draft redesigns or tweaks. Designers and developers should be observing and asking questions.

News organizations can give their audience the opportunity to interact with the people who make the site and learn what their preferences are directly. At the same time, your readership can begin to feel like they have a stake in how in building the site.

A nice after-effect? Making readers feel valued by your organization.

The first step is to use real data, the big kind that comes for complex scientific studies and the small kind that comes from talking design with our readers.

With better tools and connections into the community we can start driving better choices to impact how we build the news. The news media can start looking at atomic, delayed, or personalized news with the confidence that we can build whole new workflows for reportage that create better engagement with our audience.

This piece is for Carnival of Journalism.

Image via.

Collections of Additional Sources

Source: Users, Humans and Eyeballs: Designing for News Readers

The post Users, Humans and Eyeballs: Designing for News Readers first appeared on Hack Text.

What follows is a list of the best articles I’ve read about the new Star Wars film, please suggest more in the comments and I may edit in additions if people point them out. This isn’t everything I’ve read, but you can find that list online too. All links here are from a central site where I’ve archived the pieces, but they will forward you to the original piece.

From here on out, there will be spoilers.

Our Star Wars Holiday Special – The New Inquiry

The New Inquiry’s Aaron Bady takes the inclination to hyper-analyze Star Wars and the very idea of its originality and puts both under the microscope. That makes it the best candidate for perspective to start with before you dive deep into the critics.

Rey is not a role model for little girls (major spoilers ahead) Mike Adamick

Mike Adamick takes on and breaks down what makes Rey different from the endless boy heroes, a trend significantly boosted by the original Star Wars series. This unmissable piece discusses the significant positive impact of Rey as the hero of the new film.

The “Star Wars” fandom menace: The glaring emotional blind spots that power “The Force Awakens” – Salon.com

Lili Loofbourow at Salon takes on the problems of scale implicit in the plot of The Force Awakens. If you’re at all interested in the ethics and impact of Star Wars on the modern media mind, Loofbourow breaks down the tragedy of Star Wars biggest flaw, how The Force Awakens gets away with it and what it means.

How Rey and ‘The Force Awakens’ could change ‘Star Wars’ forever – The Washington Post

What to do when you’re not the hero any more

Both The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg and Laurie Penny for the New Statesman take on how Rey offers a direct challenge to the traditional Hero’s Journey narrative archetype, with Penny sketching it out on the larger cultural stage and Rosenberg diving deep into the mechanics of change in The Force Awakens.

Star Wars Merch’s Sexism Problem: #WheresRey Highlights Dearth in Female Toys – The Daily Beast

Jen Yamato documents the continuing trends in franchising and how they’ve led up to the dearth of Rey toys on the shelves. Throughout, Yamato tracks the rise and possible success of the #WheresRey social media campaign and takes care to illustrate why having more Rey action figures for sale is important.

Dear “Star Wars” fans: I’m super sorry I ruined the whole thing for everybody – Salon.com

Andrew O’Hehir, also of Salon, challenges the idea that any film franchise–much less one as large as Star Wars–requires its fans to jump to its defense.

The post The Best Star Wars Nonrequired Reading of 2015 first appeared on Hack Text.

There have been a lot of things written about “the filter bubble” in the last few years. The idea is that the people we follow, the posts matching what an algorithm thinks you’ll like, and the mobile apps that we use create a sort of illusion of information. We think it’s the whole story, but we’re getting a version of reality that we, or some program, think we want.

There are a lot of people out there who are trying to build the best bubble for you. Some may do it just by being the people you like to follow on Twitter, others (like Yahoo’s News Digest) build a little miniature internet for you, where you read what they think is important and can only use their tools to do so. There are some who are trying to figure out how to break out of the bubble, but not many. The problem is, even given the most open and free web possible, we tend to build the bubbles around ourselves. We all have our own interests and we search out the content on the internet that relates to those interests. Sometimes we don’t even know that there is something else cool out there to ask for.

The usual solution is to follow people or publications that we trust. We follow them and hope that they can do a better job of finding the things we want to read, watch and listen to than we can. Sometimes we hope that algorithms, like Facebook’s, will be able to help.

I’m not saying any of this filtering is necessarily bad. It can, but doesn’t have to, be. I do think it is worth thinking about though, as consciously and as continually as we can. I try hard to build bubbles that deform at various walls, stretching out to weird topics, people and ideas that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to, but even that is hard.

To help me think about all this (and perhaps to help you) I’ve been building sites and tools to help me look at my own information consumption and show it to others. The latest is a little something I call Dropcat, it stands for Drop Categories. I’m opening the source code today and letting anyone check out the alpha version. It has been a fun coding challenge. I’ve picked up a bunch of new ideas and skills putting it together the last few weeks; I’d never really used AngularJS before.

What’s the idea behind Dropcat? Well, it hooks into Chronoto.pe, a site where I broadcast and archive everything I read on the web. Dropcat is an experiment: how can I build a tool for others that will shrink the filter bubble to as small as it can get? The site displays the last few stories in any category that comes off Chronoto.pe. You can select a broad category, or a narrower topic underneath it. Instead of going out to the wider web, you can theoretically just use this single page. If you find a topic you like, you can leave it open, it will automatically refresh itself with the latest stories I aggregate, as soon as they come in.

If you select a category and a child category, I figure that this is the theoretical smallest bubble for filtering the wider web. As a tool, Dropcat could be more useful and I may make it so in the future. Lots more data can be made available about even the posts I have pulled in here, or I could have it automatically pull in a wider set of posts from other sites. There are lots of things it can potentially be, but right now it is just this. I sort of like it that way. Hopefully it is a useful tool in making us all think about how closed off we can make ourselves to the rest of the internet and all the information that is out there.

PS:

This isn’t the first thing I’ve done that plays with this idea of building a myopic web.

• Chronoto.pe archives everything I read and forwards users to the aggregated content while tracking them.
• It is also the engine for a daily email newsletter.
• And a Twitter account that just shows what I’ve read.

The post The Myopic Web: shrinking the filter bubble with Dropcat first appeared on Hack Text.

Salon has always been a website to watch and they are doing great things working with journalism, the mobile web and WordPress. When I interviewed with them, it was clear that they’ve also got plenty of awesome projects still to come. I’m looking forward to joining a great team there.

Since I graduated college I’ve spent pretty much equal amounts of time working development, project management and content strategy. I’ve loved all the various hats I’ve worn since, working with universities, journalists, marketers and developers. The last year at CFO.com was great to exercise almost all the various skills I’ve built up. It meant an opportunity to train journalists in writing for the web; manage the launch of an all new WordPress website; build award-winning open-source code; and even produce editorial videos. I’ve loved it all, but this past year I’ve found myself yearning to throw more and more of my time into web development.

With the move to Salon, I’m looking forward to picking up the types of challenges that will allow me to really advance my coding abilities and build cool things for big audiences on a regular basis. Expect plenty more in this space soon!

I’ll be continuing work on some of my freelance projects as well, particularly PressForward which is on the edge of a huge exciting release.

Thank you to everyone who helped with the job search! Especially the awesome Annemarie Dooling, who both pointed out the job listing and helped connect me to the Salon team.

-Aram

The post Going to work at Salon.com first appeared on Hack Text.

For most of the month of January almost all of my Facebook shares have passed through a new site I set up with WordPress and PressForward. On Chronoto.pe I archive a copy of everything I’ve read and those archives are what I’ve been sharing to my Facebook page.

Why?

Because how Facebook decides what gets presented to you on a daily basis is sort of a mystery. Some posts are more likely to show up than others, some posts will come back to the top of your stream hours, days or even weeks after they were originally shared. Like almost everything that decides what’s important to you on the internet (Google, the most notable of the group) Facebook considers the algorithm it uses to present content a competitive advantage and keeps the specifics of it a secret. We know something about it because of what we see, others have found and Facebook itself provides.

Some Facebook stats are available, but almost entirely they are focused on pages. What about humans? What decisions does Facebook make about what we share?

What did I find?

Today I’m sharing the some of the data I found from my first two weeks of the experiment. This is a pretty short time, so I’m take my conclusions and hypotheses for follow-up with a grain of salt. I don’t have a huge Facebook following, but I think mine is larger than normal, so that might change things to when it comes to how Facebook treats me as an individual.

Over the first two weeks of my experiment, I saw 1,758 clicks on the links I shared, with Google Analytics marking 1,304 Users across that time.

Looking at that data, I got some ideas.

Facebook’s most important measure is probably click-throughs. Achieve more than 25% of the previous day, and people will see your post tomorrow.

With a significant amount of consistency, the count of people who clicked on articles was the most important measure for determining the continuing popularity of a post. Almost every post was clicked the day it was posted and the day after. If the number of clicks exceeded 25% of the previous day, it usually got clicks the day after. If they didn’t, it didn’t get any clicks the following day. I’m assuming Facebook is pretty good at getting people to click on things, so I’m betting Facebook doesn’t present, or rarely presents, content falling below that threshold.

Hypothesis: Likes matter more with very short or very long posts.

In the set of links I looked at, click-through rates seemed to be more closely connected to the Like count when the post was very long (4 or more lines) or very short (1 line). A lot more experimentation is required to confirm this.

Hypothesis: Comments don’t matter.

I had some pretty active comment threads over this period, with variety when it came to the number of different participants. As far as I can tell, the number of comments or commenters didn’t significantly matter when it came to a post’s popularity. Probably a bad sign if you set up a site with Facebook comments in the hope it would increase the site’s popularity.

Hypothesis: Reshares don’t matter (for your thread).

A few of the articles I shared were re-shared by others. The activity on those new posts were still traceable, but the resulting activity didn’t seem like it added to my own post, instead it acted like a new post. Facebook will occasionally aggregate multiple posts around one link into a single thread, it did so with my links at least one time I saw, but the top post seems to always be the most recently posted, which makes it unlikely that anyone will engage with your original post.

Hypothesis: Peak consumption is between 1 and 3pm, but when you share doesn’t matter.

I saw absolutely no correlation between the popularity of an article and when I shared it. Further sharing past the first two weeks towards the present has been about testing this hypothesis by targeting this optimal window, I’ll share those results at a later point but it seems consistent with this idea, that a particular sharing time doesn’t mean much.

Hypothesis: Facebook use is heavily mobile.

This one is pretty much heavily proved out by every media company that reports stats, but it was consistent with what I saw on my page as well. During these two weeks, 60% of clicks were from mobile users. 87% of those users were on Apple or Samsung devices.

Some additional thoughts on the results:

Google Analytics seems tremendously inaccurate. I know this sort of makes a mess out of trying to figure out stats using it, but I have to say it here. GA recorded an average read time on my site of multiple minutes, but every page other than the very rarely visited archive pages forwards users within 1 second. Some of these individual article pages recorded an incredibly high average read time, at least one exceeded 15 minutes. This is impossible.

I have always suspected that the never-ending trumpeting of things like engagement seconds seemed incredibly suspect, and while I don’t have enough data here to stomp around calling bullshit, I’m going to say that those stats are not as accurate as you might think. On larger sites I’ve seen huge differences around time-on-page statistics between different analytics packages, and no explanation why. Whatever differing methodologies these other analytics tools use, I wouldn’t bet my life on the accuracy of any of them.

Analytic reports around new users seemed suspect too. I understand that different devices get counted as different users, but though my friends count of 934 is ego-boosting, the new user count provided by Google Analytics seems too high. By the same measure, the difference between Pageviews and Unique Pageviews seems optimistic considering that every Facebook-based pageview that came to the site would be a self-terminating session.

How?

There are limits to what I can determine on Facebook, but I’ve focused on that most important currency of the modern media world, the Facebook link share. To those not overly obsessed with media or technology this may sound like a boring focus, but Facebook shares and links drive the internet. Facebook posts and chat comprise the majority of social traffic to most major media sites and it seems like they lead overall traffic sources for some.

The first thing I discovered when I started this experiment is that Facebook decides what a link is in a way differently then you might imagine. Once you’ve posted a URL inside that post box, Facebook sends a crawler to that web page and looks first for two properties in the HEAD section of the page.

• canonical

• og:url

It also checks to see if the page is, in some way, forwarded elsewhere though redirect headers.

If any of these three elements are present, Facebook isn’t going to be sharing the URL you put in to the page, it’s going to share a different one instead. The one listed in one of those HEAD meta-properties or the page redirected to. Not only that, it is going to treat it as a different URL, and even that treatment may be different depending on the redirect method.

The first two methods may have code that looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://jezebel.com/be-suspicious-of-the-new-harper-lee-novel-1683488258" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://jezebel.com/be-suspicious-of-the-new-harper-lee-novel-1683488258" />

Now you may not realize it, but you see a ton of 301 redirects on Facebook, they’re created with any shortened link, like the ones provided by bit.ly. They wouldn’t really look like anything if you were able to see them in your browser, but when computers hit those pages, they see a header that redirect them. Those headers look like:

<?php

# via var_dump(wp_remote_get('http://nzzl.me/1xqgPpn',array('redirection' => 0)));

array(5) {
  ["headers"]=>
  array(9) {
    ["server"]=>
    string(5) "nginx"
    ["date"]=>
    string(29) "Tue, 03 Feb 2015 22:34:52 GMT"
    ["content-type"]=>
    string(24) "text/html; charset=utf-8"
    ["content-length"]=>
    string(3) "147"
    ["connection"]=>
    string(5) "close"
    ["cache-control"]=>
    string(19) "private, max-age=90"
    ["location"]=>
    string(55) "http://www.vox.com/2015/1/3/7482623/emerson-spartz-dose"
    ["mime-version"]=>
    string(3) "1.0"
    ["set-cookie"]=>
    string(100) "_bit=54d14d0c-0018d-06e9b-301cf10a;domain=.nzzl.me;expires=Sun Aug  2 22:34:52 2015;path=/; HttpOnly"
  }
  ["body"]=>
  string(147) "




moved here

"
  ["response"]=>
  array(2) {
    ["code"]=>
    int(301)
    ["message"]=>
    string(17) "Moved Permanently"
  }
  ["cookies"]=>
  array(1) {
    [0]=>
    object(WP_Http_Cookie)#344 (6) {
      ["name"]=>
      string(4) "_bit"
      ["value"]=>
      string(29) "54d14d0c-0018d-06e9b-301cf10a"
      ["expires"]=>
      int(1438554892)
      ["path"]=>
      string(1) "/"
      ["domain"]=>
      string(8) ".nzzl.me"
      ["httponly"]=>
      string(0) ""
    }
  }
  ["filename"]=>
  NULL
}

In either case, Facebook will treat this link like whatever URL it is forwarding or pointing to. So though all the links I shared were to my own site, anyone who looked at my wall would see a link, complete with all OpenGraph data, displaying the original article. Once they clicked through, Facebook would send users to my site, where another piece of code would redirect them after waiting 1 second so Google Analytics would record their info. I store all the remote article’s OG data on my own site, but I wouldn’t need to. After FB sees one of these three properties it stops and goes to the page those properties are pointing at, retrieving all the OG information from there.

Things start getting a little weird after that.

People who share your link share the URL you added, not the ‘terminal’ (I’m using this term to mean the page the user ends up on) URL. I examined the people who re-shared my content and I found that their shares led through my site as well. Additionally, when Facebook pulls together a whole bunch of posts into one of those “X and Y others shared a link” aggregation posts, the person whose comment is on top is the one who determines the link. When I was on top, the link went through my system. When others were, it worked differently.

No matter what, Facebook considers your shares as from the terminal site. So my shares are considered by Facebook’s system, whenever I could see, from the terminal site; for example they would show up with the source of nytimes.com instead of chronoto.pe.

Theoretically, this is pretty awesome, it allows link shorteners to do their thing and aggregation sites to properly pass credit on to the origin when they care to do so.

It’s also important to note that this behavior is consistent with how it works on Google+ and LinkedIn.

In reality, there are two big problems here.

The first — and I hesitate to say this because I like the idea of a nice, open and trusting web — what if I was a malicious website builder? I can’t figure out why it isn’t possible set the canonical or og:url properties without the redirect and rake up a bunch of pageviews to a site that shares as one thing on Facebook and is another thing when you click through. I assume it would get reported and found out that way, but there would be a period where it wouldn’t be, right? When I tested this with the Facebook’s Open Graph Object debugger, this potentially malicious behavior seemed possible.

The second is that Facebook treats my meta-data redirect exactly as expected, but it treats the more precise 301 redirect differently (in some cases). Specifically it seems to mark the source as the redirecting page, not the terminal page. Resulting in something like what we see in the below image, where Facebook sources a New York Times article to a bit.ly-based link shortener. This doesn’t happen every time, and I have no idea why it does in some cases or does not in others. It may have to do with when something is shared (Facebook’s caching problems) or something having to do with sharing from Facebook applications. This is worth looking into more and I’ll be playing with it.

The aggregation of posts based on URL displays the top sharer’s version of that URL.

Another thing I noticed while I was playing around with the display of this information? The author value after “By” is only set using a non-Open Graph meta tag.

Specifically:

<meta name="author" content="Jack Healy">

This is really weird. This isn’t an OpenGraph tag. This tag is, according to most reports, ignored by Google. It’s absolutely ignored by search engine optimizers, as it is absent from many of the popular sites about SEO. My third link on a search for it was an article about why you shouldn’t use it. Reuters doesn’t use it properly (They include ‘By’, resulting in Facebook marking things as ‘By By Some Name’. It isn’t documented on Facebook at all. It isn’t in their debugger and it isn’t in their best practices. The use of this tag is a surprise to me and a bit of a mystery. This leads to another question: Open Graph has an author property that Facebook recognizes. What is it doing with that property if it isn’t using it to find author info?

Next!

I’m continuing to share to my wall with this methodology and I’m keeping track of what’s going on. I’m sure I’ll be writing about this again in the near future. If any of the hypotheses I proposed sound interesting perhaps you should try them out, see what happens and tell me all about it.

Note: Awesome code samples provided with the help of a friend’s WordPress plugin – WP Gistpen.

The post Peeking into Facebook’s algorithmic black box first appeared on Hack Text.

1: You could always be wrong.

2: Remember that people criticizing a group of which you are a member are not criticizing you personally.

3: Do not deploy knee-jerk defenses of organizations or groups you enjoy, people can defend themselves until you do the research. Sometimes they can continue to defend themselves after you’ve done the research.

• 3b: The following can almost always defend themselves and are likely not worthy of you excusing them. Consider carefully before penning defenses of these folks:
  – Multi-million dollar corporations
  – Government officials
  – Societies of significant size
  – High profile people acting in insulting ways.
  – Groups in which you are a member of a minority when the majority is acting badly. Everyone already understands it’s Not All … whatever.
  – Groups in which you are a member of a silent majority and the minority is acting badly. If you’re silent about them acting badly, you are in the wrong, or at least not right.

4: When listening to or reading others, believe their experiences and statements first, doing research where you have doubts second.

5: Inaccuracies don’t imply conspiracy or attack in every situation. Nor do some inaccuracies in a larger work invalidate the whole.

6: All personal experiences have validity, even if their experience of something is different than yours.

• 6b: You may disagree with their conclusions, but the experiences happened.
• 6c: No one knows your context, you don’t know anyone else’s context unless they outline it explicitly. Act accordingly.

7: Always follow the principle of least harm. If there are two options and one could potentially hurt someone’s feelings and the other doesn’t, and both get your point across, use the one that isn’t harmful.

8: Criticism of your speech or work, no matter how snarky, is not an attack. Don’t take it personally.

• 8b: Criticism of your work, or others’, does not take away your ‘free speech’. Nor does moderation by others. Nor does others refusing to amplify you.

9: It’s never ‘well, that’s the way it is’. Positive change comes from challenging the status quo.

• 9b: People who challenge the status quo are not attacking you for not doing so.
• 9c: People who don’t challenge the status quo are not explicitly attacking you for doing so.
• 9d: Only you are responsible for your attempt to challenge ‘how it is’ and you should encourage, though not require, others to do so.

10: It doesn’t have to be about you, your group, your interest or your beliefs. Not everything is about you.

• 10b: A conversation that has nothing about you need not also cover you or your particular group. People not talking about you are not automatically inviting you to add on a conversation about you.
• 10c: Talking about ‘not you’ or yours is not a statement that no one should talk about you or yours, nor is it an attack on you or your interests.

11: Whenever possible, amplify other voices instead of paraphrasing, repossessing, or repeating.

12: Everyone deserves the benefit of doubt. Every person deserves your respect of them as a person.

Extra(obvious) rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated.

Jumping to conclusions, from The Phantom Tollbooth.

The post My 12 rules for talking with others on the internet first appeared on Hack Text.

It’s called Response Stack.

The goal is to build stories out of comments and help both the original story and the discussion around it live on. You can see the first story we built with it live on CFO.com.

I’ve long been of the opinion that comments are part of the stories that they run on. Many organizations will give up control of their comments to an external provider, or turn them off entirely. I think that’s a bad idea. The authors of our comments (the non-spam ones) are contributing to the conversation around our work and that means they’re growing it. They deserve our respect and those conversations deserve our attention.

Gawker’s Kinja shows that the comment section as an area where each comment can expand into its own universe. That’s good. That’s not everything. Allowing comments to grow into their own stories on our websites is a great idea, but it’s not really a journalistic one. Journalism sites succeed when there’s a sense of editorial decision-making. There’s a decision to write or to aggregate a story. That decision is a big part of what creates value and interest for readers.

The way some comment systems have reflected that is by allowing editors to select a ‘top comment’. That’s an OK idea, but it breaks the commenting section, it takes a thread of conversation and breaks it up by trying to pull out individual ‘good’ items. I’m not particularly excited about that.

At CFO Magazine, we’ve been thinking about open threads, the life-cycle of articles and how we can help useful or exciting articles continue to live and thrive past their publication date. Out of our discussion came the idea of a reader response post. These aren’t a new idea, but I wasn’t able to find a tool to make building one easy. Nor did I really like the old formats sites had built them in (mostly supplanted by embedded Tweets now).

The initial goals:

• Keep the comments we embedded ‘alive’.
  • Continue to connect comments to their original location on the old post.
  • Replying is easy.
• Make it easy to create response posts.

To accomplish this, I made it possible to embed individual comments and entire comment threads using their ID numbers and made sure that users could continue to click to the original positions or the comments and even reply to them while in the body of the new story.

So, working with our editorial and management team at CFO, and building on work being done by Human Made to develop CFO.com into a better WordPress site, I built a better tool and now we’re opening it up for use by anyone. If you have any problems, just comment here or open an issue on the GitHub repository. If you have ideas, contribute to the project!

Keep an eye out, I’m hoping to make this even easier to use and to expand this tool with more ways to build on your readers’ comments in the future.

How it works:

Response Stack uses WordPress shortcodes to pull comments (and comment threads) into a post from other posts on the same site. To get the shortcode working type the following into its own line in your post:

[responser comment=”id” thread=”depth”] where id is equal to the integer ID of the comment and depth is equal to the integer depth of the thread of comments you want visible.

Readers looking at the comments can even respond to them within the shortcode’s post, submitting threaded replies that will then take them to the original conversation.

You can find the comment id by looking at the hyperlink attached to any comment datetime stamp (on the post or in the comments page of the dashboard), where it will be in the format of http://site/post-link/#comment-CommentIDNumber.

Response Stack assumes you are using default WordPress comments. Support for other commenting systems is to come. If you’d like to add support for your commenting system, contribute to the project GitHub at: https://github.com/CFOPublishing/response-stack/

The post Response Stack: build stories out of reader comments. first appeared on Hack Text.

Is this drought a Suffolk-specific problem or a much larger crisis? And if the answer is the latter, what is holding an increasing amount of students back from being passionate about — and getting involved with — established college media?

 “Are Fewer Students Passionate About College Media?” Dan Reimold, College Media Matters

When I worked in student journalism I saw a drought in college media. Fewer students came in and many were badly informed about being a journalist post-1990.

Participation in campus media outlets is dropping for more than one reason.

In a sense Lauren Rabaino was right about when she talked about professors being behind the times. It is a big issue, but not the only one in the classroom. The problem isn’t just out-of-touch professors, even those professors who were more on top of things found that the structure of higher ed (textbook selections, syllabus approval, chair politics, and so much more) was highly resistant to building an educational program that changed as fast as the field.

University politics are antithetical to teaching fast-changing professions.

When I was a student media professional I saw the college media office unable to work with particular subsets of the journalism program because… ‘politics’. In the end, the entire electronic journalism academic program basically got downsized around the time I left Mason. It’s clear that even if professors figure out what being a modern journalist means, universities don’t get it.

It is incredibly easy and often more effective to do it yourself.

The other big problem is many people have taken on Lauren’s advice. With college journalism orgs suffering dropping ad dollars and funding, the students who do devote their time to college media find themselves underpaid, with huge workloads, and dependent on their flakier peers, often taking up the slack. It’s not a healthy proposition.

Via

With the web, anyone who is truly passionate about journalism can roll their own outlet, promote it and run it for four years with not that much effort. Even better, if they enjoy it, or create something worthwhile, they can take it with them.

At George Mason University we launched a WordPress Multisite portal to try to capture and support that behavior with Student Media’s resources. We saw and helped a lot of young journalists self-start. We were able to leverage the platform to promote student content and find additional contributors. Even then we found ourselves competing with students who wanted to go it alone. Not to mention losing potential contributors who were willing to write for free or less on a larger scale outlet like Patch, College Candy or Huffington Post.

What we did with onMason.com and Connect2Mason was only possible with an abnormally high level of tech knowledge in the student media space at GMU (not just myself, we had a dedicated hardware/servers person and a number of really amazing technically adept students). Even the expertise we had isn’t really enough to take the scale of operations college newspapers enjoyed 15 years ago and move it to the internet. Most universities don’t have that much tech in their student media units and either can’t afford it or are unwilling to pay for it.

Other units have more money and fewer students can afford to work for free.

On the flip side, the growing student life professional sphere usually does have those tech people. Those offices are also more willing to let students have an impact in operations. Folks working in student support units almost always have larger pools of money to pull from and (thanks to content marketing) have many slots to support journalism-like behavior. Because of that, many of these students may have gone in with the full intent of becoming journalists, but been lured away by the promise of something that can actually keep them out of debt.

Which brings forward another component: the rising cost of higher education. Increasing student debt means students worry more about making money and look for higher paying opportunities from day one on campus. Usually college media isn’t even funded to pay competitively against other on-campus jobs . As far as I know, the funding continues to dry up. It isn’t a lack of passion, but an increase in practicality for many students. Especially when student journalists don’t see ‘making the newspaper profitable’ as part of their job.

Was Peter Kaplan the last ‘editor-as-hero’? Is that a journalism role model anymore?

I’m my own example. I was pretty decently paid as a student in college media. If I hadn’t been, I could never have afforded to be involved. I am endlessly grateful that I had an amazing group of college media professionals who valued paying for student work. If I hadn’t been involved in student media, I’d probably never have done anything journalistic. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens that way on many other campuses.

In the end, the model for what makes a successful journalist is changing pretty radically. Columnists aren’t really heroes anymore. No one can point to an op-ed page they respect. Students want to, like Rabaino, run their own journalism start-up. They want to blog so well they get hired by The New York Times, like Brian Stelter. They want to build something so useful it ends up on their favorite websites.

Oh, and they want to graduate without insomnia-inducing levels of debt.

Is college media the place for those people? On most campuses, the answer is no.

It can be, but that would mean college media becoming less of an outlet and more a loosely-attached confederation of students passionate about journalism, whatever form it takes.

The post Where have all the student journalists gone? To HuffPo and HubSpot. first appeared on Hack Text.

I’d like to say I am surprised, but I’m not. This is just one more data point in an ongoing pattern for higher education, when dealing with learning technology.

Perspective: Imagine World of Warcraft, the record-breaking massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Would it make sense (or a profit) for Blizzard  to develop all the concept art, write all the content, record all the music, and then pay another company just to put it together and host it? I think not. By the same note, would it make sense for universities to pay an outside company to provide TAs, have professors write class plans, and then tell all their students that the classes were off-campus and being taught by a guy from Teachers, Inc. because some outside company said they had better classrooms and could teach the university’s content better?

Why doesn’t this make any sense? Because in both cases it is the story of an organization outsourcing their core competency: creating an experience. To say that Udacity (or whoever else) is the perfect solution for all universities (or any university) implies one thing, that all learning experiences are exactly the same. If that’s the case, then bad news if you’re an expensive university, because you just told students that your primary product (education) is exactly the same as the lower-priced guy.

All universities do not have the same learning experiences. They are different flavors, feels and mechanisms built around individual professors, faculty and university values. Your online learning, be it MOOC, LMS, or whatever, should be your core competency. In a world of MOOCs, the best education is king. Unless you’re one of the few big universities, the only thing that can differentiate one MOOC from another is the learning experience’s quality, and you’re not going to find that in a mass market product.

According to IHE, Georgia Tech will spend 3.1 million on Udacity in the first year. Now, I’m pretty sure that money could be used on a far more sound investment, a group of programmers. Instead of these ludicrous amounts of money going to companies like Udacity or Blackboard, they should hire open-source developers. They should build their own tools, or using open-source tools and building on top of them.

There’s no need to run on some external dev schedule, you don’t have to depend on unreliable support systems, and you don’t have to beg for features. If you’re running your own MOOC, you’ll have it in your system. You’ll own it and everything in it. Build it open-source and collaboration with other universities will flow automatically.

The online revolution for education means a big shift in how we judge universities. For the first time, these institutions will begin competing on the worth of their product (education) and not their brands. No matter how you approach MOOCs, that’s going to happen. You just have to look at the rising popularity of rating universities by their Return on Investment to see it coming. When you’re building them yourself, however, at least you can offer a better, and more unique, proposition. Give control up to a company like Udacity or Blackboard? You’re just giving up the whole game.   Hat tip to Mark Sample for pointing out the Inside Higher Ed article.

The post But our professor is in another castle: Universities don’t get MOOCs first appeared on Hack Text.

PressForward, which is hitting beta just in time to complete testing when Google Reader hits the off-button, is a totally open source tool built to run inside WordPress with no extra requirements, server modifications, or messing about in the command line. The system is both an RSS reader and an editorial tool, allowing groups to look at feeds together, discuss them, and nominate them for consideration as part of an aggregation process. You can read all about it at the PressForward website.

Here’s a fresh ZIP file of our latest beta version, ready for upload and testing in your WordPress install.

Here’s the issue forum to report all the bugs you encounter, so that we can fix them.

Give it a try and tell me how it goes!

You can download it from GitHub to install on your own WordPress site (FTP access required).

Instructions for use are found in a Wiki on GitHub.

User support will be in a public Google Group.

The PressForward Plugin was developed for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University by Aram Zucker-Scharff, Boone B. Gorges, and Jeremy Boggs. It is free to use and modify under a GNU GPL2 license.

Oh, and more thanks also to: @joanftroyano, @jeriwieringa and @SashaCA2.

The post PressForward Plugin Beta Now Available! first appeared on Hack Text.