His post says, in so many words, "wah wah wah the crowd is acting like a crowd! Don't they know that they are a crowd? Won't they please stop acting like a crowd?"

Here's my response: Yes, Alexis, it is. Yes, Alexis, they do. No, Alexis, they won't. Welcome to the 21st century!

Below are the three mini-rants that his post inspired in my brain.

Rant 1: Gawker Did It Better

His isn't the first critical take on /r/findbostonbombers. The fine folks of Gawker, who are professionals when it comes to giving Reddit the often-deserved middle finger, already published one and theirs was hilarious. It pointed out all the ridiculous theories buzzing around the web that came from that crowd in language that I can get behind.

Most importantly they link to a brand new blue robe guy meme template.

See, that kind of response reflects the special unique, inappropriate complexities of the Internet.

Rant 2: Fix your own home before calling out strangers

Having worked in a newsroom for essentially a year I know first-hand that journalists are amazing. The folks at The Boston Globe are doing hard work, and they are doing it professionally. There are many others doing work with an equal level of integrity.

But boy, there are so many organizations that seem like they don't. I won't even try to list all the instances of public speculation and incorrect statements that came out of "reputable" sources since Monday.

Want to know what is more dangerous than a bunch of random people talking on a website? Media outlets with an actual audience spreading false information. Also, media outlets directing global attention to a bunch of random people talking on a website. We can let that one slide I guess.

Rant 3: You Lie!

Your post describes an angry mob with no capacity for reasoning or self reflection.

Maybe I'm just naive here but it seems to me that as far as mobs go, a reddit / 4chan mob is reasonably honest with itself. This is a point that Alexis decided to casually ignore (and then throw into a footnote in a way that somehow still misses the point).

Go look for yourself. Most contributions to that subreddit yesterday were one of the following:

1. Questions about the appropriateness of the conversation.
2. Reminders that nobody there knows anything.
3. Aggregations of relevant information put out there by the media or FBI.
4. Laughter at how stupid the media is for pointing everyone to their subreddit in their articles about how the community is a bad idea.
5. Someone pointing out things about a picture that sound like a wacky conspiracy theorist.
6. Others making fun of those people for pointing that stuff out.

There will inevitably be a few users who take themselves really seriously and act like they know what they are talking about. Those people will be instantly up-voted to the top because everyone knows the internet is serious business. OH WAIT NO THE OPPOSITE OF THAT.

The other point that was completely ignored is the fact that there are clear rules plastered on every page. These aren't just guidelines, they are rules enforced by mods and the core community. If you don't follow them, your posts get removed and your account can get banned.

Note: I said yesterday because as of today any images that aren't potential pictures of the FBI's released suspects will be immediately deleted.

My Advice

No hard feelings are intended to Alexis; he raises valid and important concerns. The problem is that his tone was not one of thoughtful dialogue, it was one of condescending aggression. Writing rants online isn’t a productive use of time… Who would do that…

…

Anyway, here's my advice to anyone who wants to be constructively critical of Internet activity. Depending on what you think it represents you should either:

1. Lurk moar.
2. Stop feeding the trolls.
3. Realize you won't stop people from communicating with one another, give up, and go play video games instead.

As for blue robe guy? Well, he's only internet famous because people on Gawker and The Atlantic keep writing posts about him. You heartless bastards.

This post is not about Quizzler, it is about my quest to answer the question “why are we building this from scratch?” It’s about observed realities regarding cross-newsroom collaboration, insights from upper management of The New York Times, and some major hurdles for open source in legacy media organizations. Prepare to explore the deep, dark, and relatively unspoken depths of technological openness in newsrooms.

We want something similar to…

I was introduced to Quizzler back in August. That first meeting was generally uneventful; we sat in a room. I listened to Miranda Mulligan skillfully duke it out with the project’s newsroom sponsor to explain that no, the first version won’t have custom “you are a 95% Vampire” sharable Facebook messages. I listened to the sponsor vocalize concern that there would never actually be a second version. I decided that both of them were probably right.

Eventually someone said something so shocking that I literally spat out my drink and fell out of my chair at the same time. It wasn’t intended to stand out—I don’t even know who said it. Ready? Brace yourself. Here it is: “Have you seen the Academy Awards tool by The New York Times? Eventually we will want something similar to that.” No wait that wasn’t it.

The New York Times is the parent company of The Boston Globe. They own the Globe in the same way humans own their children.

OK here’s the exchange.

Me: “Can we use some of their code?”

Someone: “We would have to pay them for that.”

Me:

Their response implied two things. First, that The New York Times would charge their kid for the digital equivalent of food. Second that the anticipated costs were high enough that it would be cheaper to rebuild this tool from scratch (again) than it would be to explore the possibility of reusing existing code.

Before you call child protection services, hold on. The situation is complex.

EDIT: To be clear, I quickly learned that the Times would not have charged us a dime.

Actually, this sounds completely reasonable

“Meh.” you say, “so The Boston Globe and The New York Times don’t share code, what’s the big deal?” A fair response, but trust me when I say the deal is big. If the deal was a rapper it would be notorious.

Here’s why: Starting from an existing code base instead of starting from nothing is often the difference between “having time to innovate” and “not.” If you are using technology as a core part of your business and you aren’t set up to experiment then you’re doing it wrong and you will become obsolete.

Borrowing code is kind of like being airdropped into the middle of a marathon; sure, you have to take a moment to figure out where you are and what direction to go, but now you have time to run in circles laughing like a crazy person before winning the race.

There’s more! If you borrow code then you are more likely to be familiar with what the rest of the world is doing. If you share code then you are going to build your systems with an emphasis on reuse and extensibility (i.e. correctly). If you regularly borrow AND share code then you are building a community around whatever it is you do.

What I’m trying to say is that if newspapers can buy into the mantra of openness—even just internal openness—they can kill about thirty birds with one stone.

But they usually don’t.

Why not? Are they idiots?

There are many reasons these organizations don’t trade bytes, none of which have to do with the original “we would have to pay for it” claim.

Reason 1: Wildly Different Technology Stacks

I lied to you earlier when I said the Globe was like a child to the Times–they’re more like middle-aged lovers. They didn’t grow up together or meet in college. They are two independent entities that recognized their love later in life, which means they have fundamentally different infrastructures.

One uses Java and PHP, the other uses Python, Ruby, and NodeJS. They have incompatible content management systems. They disagree on deployment policies, quality control processes, needs, and third party libraries. It’s like they come from two stubborn families that speak completely different languages and eat very different foods. They aren’t going to start casually sharing cook books.

Reason 2: Internal Politics

If a full team dedicates three months to creating a new public-facing interactive, will they want to just give it away? If you are a manager do you want to rely on favors from an external team to accomplish your goals? If you are a coder do you want to be judged for the quick last minute hacks you had to throw into the project?

The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is “hell no.”

Reason 3: Moving Costs and Learning Curves

Most technologies are dirty piles of duct tape with a shiny chrome finish. This makes them difficult to deploy and hard to understand. This is especially true among newspapers.

Packaging code in a way that strangers can use could take hours, days, or weeks depending on how much the developers cared about portability when they built it. I’m basically describing the difference between moving a campsite and a home. Newsroom developers don’t tend to have camping on the brain when rushing to meet looming deadlines.

Words from On High

Fine, so there are real reasons that code sharing between the Globe and the Times is a lost cause, but what does that mean for the industry? If financial allies with serious resources don’t share code, what are the chances that other newsrooms around the world will look outside their walls for help? Maybe this is why so many open source journalism tools are gathering dust.

I talked to Rajiv Pant (CTO) and Marc Frons (CIO) of The New York Times about code sharing and the role of open source in their company. For context: the Times is very progressive compared to other newsrooms when it comes to innovation and openness. They have a blog dedicated to their open source inititatives, there is a suite of APIs that provide civic data, and they do a good job of telling people about what they do.

Unfortunately they are also leading an industry that is forced into “deadline driven technology” and without a supportive institutional strategy, open source and reusable code are just nice-to-haves. Developers must ask themselves if they have time to meet the organization’s needs while also contributing to open source. Sometimes this means the same tools get built multiple times, but such is the nature of deadlines. Plus, as Marc was quick to point out, reinventing the wheel can be a good thing so long as the new one is slightly different.

Source: The Wheel Superstore. (Illustration by Lyla Duey)

But wouldn’t it be nice if all these new wheels could be used again and improved upon over time? Rajiv identified three factors that a project needs in order to be realistically used again by an organization like the Times.

Your code has to be…

1. Established – Is it safe to rely on your creation? How long will your project stay active, and how long after you move on will it stay useful?
2. Extensible – Your solution won’t meet all needs. How easy is it to improve? What kinds of features can be added?
3. Easy to Integrate – Will this play with existing systems and tools? Can it be skinned to look like it belongs?

In short, it doesn’t matter how powerful you think your code is: if it is difficult or risky to adopt, it will stay an orphan.

None of those points should come as a surprise, but they should probably be considered gospel to anyone developing anything—open or closed—in any newsroom. Just ask yourself “would the Times use this if they needed it?” If the answer is yes then you’ve made something that will last; otherwise you might as well get out the broom now.

Note: Since I’m sure you are worried, the Times doesn’t actually charge the Globe for code. And yes, we are writing Quizzler from scratch.

At face value it just looks like a live feed of C-SPAN’s Closed Captions. This alone is actually pretty cool if you think about it, especially if you are a deaf political junkie who sits far away from the TV and can’t read the closed captions.

Of course there is more. The real excitement comes when you contemplate what’s happening to get those words to appear on your screen.

This system unlocks and syndicates a real-time dataset that used to be a pain in the ass to access. Now anyone can build applications and visualizations that update before those crafty politicians have even finished making their points. This post explains why Opened Captions is worth hacking with, what it takes to use it, and how it works.

What is it Good For?

The Internet is filled with real-time updates triggered by online activity, but it still feels like magic when we see automatic updates driven by the real world. Opened Captions makes it easy for programmers to use live TV transcripts as an input.

Note: version .001 only supports a single channel (and my server is pointed to C-SPAN). Eventually the protocol should expand to allow multiple channels.

Let’s consider C-SPAN. If a computer knows what is being said on C-SPAN this very second, it can do things like:

• Change the background of your email client to reflect the issues being debated right this moment on the senate floor.
• Generate modified, more amusing, transcripts by replacing key words and phrases with Tolkien lore (i.e. C-SPAN for Middle Earth)
• Search through lyrics and generate a C-SPAN medley for you to rock out to while voting.
• Send SMS messages 24/7 commanding you to “drink” when certain phrases are spoken on air.

There are also possibilities that aren’t ridiculous. For instance, you could make tools that…

• Improve the transcript by automatically adding contextual information, such as definitions and histories thefted from Wikipedia.
• Send emails with transcript snippets whenever a specific representative or state is being discussed on TV so you know what’s going on.
• Parse out paraphrases of known fact checks and insert a credibility layer over the transcript feed (real time fact-checking).
• Draw parallels between what is being said on TV and what is being said on Twitter.

I could go on and on and on. There is just so much potential!

The Backend

Behind the stream is a first stab at a distributed architecture for Closed Captioning live-feeds. Opened Captions servers can pull a CC stream over a serial port, or (more likely) they will connect to an existing Opened Captions server and pull the stream from there. What that means in de-jargon is that anybody can set up a server that does exactly what mine is doing, even if they don’t have access to hardware, software, or a live TV stream.

When I say exactly, I mean it — your new project runs the same code as mine, and will serve the feed too. People can connect their servers to yours in the same way you connected yours to mine. Practically speaking this architecture means a few things:

1. Once your amazing mashup gets popular it won’t break my server. Your application is syndicating the captions to your users. I serve the captions to you, you serve them to the world!
2. Your server creates a fork of my stream. Want to modify the text so the politicians sound drunk? Add extra layers of information to the message payload? Translate the captions to Klingon? Go for it. If your tweaks happen server side then others can build their apps from your stream to modify it further.
3. You don’t have to rely on anyone else for the Closed Captions. If you want to spend some extra time setting up your own scraper you can point your server to that source instead of a third party. You have total control.

Check ‘Em

Wondering if this is worth your time? Well, it doesn’t require much of it. The service takes about two minutes to set it up if you already have Node.js and Git installed on your computer. Here’s a video to prove it:

Installation instructions can be found in the readme and you can always get in contact with me through the blog or on twitter.

He goes on to explain that he is a journalist writing about Tor. He also tells us that he bets that the CIA and the Italian Secret Service are going to have moles there. What he obviously meant to say was “I work for the CIA and I’ve been watching you now for quite some time.”

It’s possible that he didn’t actually work for the CIA. His name and photo checked out under the website he claimed to write for. It was probably just a one-time job. Even if this isn’t true, even if a network of government spies didn’t track my position across Europe just to meet us in a restaurant, his comment set the tone for my weekend in Florence.

Tor is serious business.

What the hell is Tor?

Did I mention Tor yet?

Tor is a program that makes you anonymous. This means that, for better or for worse, the big brothers, neighborhood hackers, and ad agencies of the world can’t tell what you are doing on the Internet without going through a lot of effort and expense.

Is that too abstract? Here are some illustrative statements. *Taps the microphone*

• A Tor user walks into a bar, the bartender says “who are you?”
• How many Tor users does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only a few, but you’ll never know who did it.
• I used Tor last night and now my wife says that she doesn’t even know who I am any more.

I’ll be here all night.

If you use Tor you become Spartacus. Tor takes everything you do, makes it look exactly like what everyone else is doing, and gets random computers on their network to do the talking for you. Ta-da! Now it is practically impossible to pin an action on you.

The Original Need

I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that this idea was invented by The U.S. Navy. You would have? Oh.

Put on your paper sailor hat and I’ll explain. Imagine you are the king of the Navy and you’re going to war with your fleet of a thousand brand new Navy cars (I don’t really know how the Navy works). Being king, you are in the most important car of all because you’re calling the shots. You don’t want the enemy to know which vehicle is yours. You also don’t want them to know who is receiving orders because that could give away your tactics.

“I know,” you say, “I’ll encrypt everything so that they can’t see the content. Then they won’t be able to tell that my broadcasts are more important than others.”

Unfortunately for you, the enemy has fancy technology. They can’t decrypt messages but they are able to track where everything comes from and where it is going. They can’t tell what you’re saying, but they have all they need.

After about 5 minutes you think you’re doing well. Half of the enemy cars are already on fire! Yours explodes. “How did they do that?” you say in the afterlife. “Easy,” responds god, “they were able to see that your car was sending out the most messages. They knew exactly where you were.” Then he slaps you with a piece of linguini and drifts away.

To prevent this from ever happening again the Navy decided to invent the concept of an “Onion Network” (not to be confused with The Onion Network). Now instead of having packets go directly from point A to point B, each one randomly hops around the fleet first. Because of encryption, the enemy can’t tell the difference between a new message and a “hop” message — they all look the same. It’s like running an invisible sprinkler in a thunderstorm.

Suddenly nobody but the sender and the recipient can figure out the end points of a message chain. Even the middle men (the ones doing the hops) don’t know the path. Each piece of the hop — each “layer” of the message — is encrypted with a different key, so the only thing a relay knows is who gave them the package and where it should go next.

Onions have layers too, that’s why this setup is called an Onion Network. Get it? It’s like Shrek!

Trolls use the Internet, Ogres use Tor. (Illustration by Anne Buckwalter)

What’s it Good For?

Tor has applications in the real world. You can buy drugs and guns, share illegal pictures, and hire assassins. Oh wait, I’m just describing Tor’s reputation (more on that later). Seriously, there are a lot of important situations where people have moral and compelling reasons to want anonymity.

Here are a few:

• Protecting witnesses and victims of domestic abuse. Anyone who wants to be able to access the internet without being discovered by a third party can use Tor to defend against their stalkers.
• If you don’t like being tracked by your government, Internet Service Providers, or search engines.
• Providing truly anonymous tips. There are times when people need or want to share information against the wishes of powerful and potentially dangerous forces (e.g. mafias, governments, or corporations).
• Safely bypassing censorship. If you live in Syria, China, or The United States of RIAA/MPAA, you might use Tor to access content from the outside world more safely.

These kinds of reasons explain why organizations with very good reputations, like the Knight Foundation, are devoting resources to Tor.

The Dark Web

What I’ve just described is a spin on the way people access normal information online. If you point Tor Browser to Google you will see the same old Google, it’s just that now Google doesn’t know who you are. That’s powerful enough, but there’s more: Tor also lets you see hidden content on the Internet.

Using Tor is like entering a cheat code into real life and playing the lost levels. It is the digital equivalent of platform 9 and 3/4. This secret section of the Internet is possible because Tor users can serve content anonymously too.

If you don’t know much about how the Internet works, believe me when I say that if a web site’s location is hidden it becomes essentially impossible to access. It would be like trying to visit someone’s house without knowing anything about where they live — not even the country. Tor gives you a blindfold and leads you there. You still don’t know where the house is, but at least you can visit.

Anonymous sites are accessed through something called an “onion address,” which is made up of a series of random letters and numbers. For instance, this is a “clean” version of Tor’s wikipedia: 3suaolltfj2xjksb.onion. Feel free to try clicking the link, it won’t work (Unless, of course, you are using the Tor browser).

Note: even if that link worked you wouldn’t see any terrible images. However, you need to use your brain before you start actually clicking around if you don’t want to get really upset.

That random looking string is used to find the server within the Tor network. Because the addresses don’t point to a real address on the Internet, there is no way to fully access this content without Tor. There are services you can use to get there without using Tor, but you lose all benefits of anonymity and content is often censored.

Onion addresses are the most fascinating part of Tor, albeit the most potentially disturbing. Rest assured that they don’t all lead to child porn, guns, and drugs. For example there is a secret version of Twitter, a bunch of blogs, a search engine, and an email service. There is even a secret version of 4chan (called Torchan), which I won’t link to because that one does lead to child porn and drugs.

These types of content networks—ones that are served on top of the normal web so that you need special programs to reach them—are known as the Dark Web. Not necessarily because the content is darker (it is), but because it is hidden from view and can’t really be searched and scraped as reliably.

Implications of The Dark Web

Most uses for Tor become more potent with onion addresses. Anonymous servers are just as protected from higher powers as anonymous users. If Amazon suddenly started selling illegal drugs they would get in trouble. If a Tor marketplace started selling illegal drugs, the law would have to figure out a way to find them first.

This power applies to legitimate uses as well. If a government official wanted to contact The Boston Globe with a corruption leak, he or she could use Tor to create a gmail account anonymously. The government could then subpoena Google, and Google might be willing to give away the information they have. They won’t know much, but now things like account access patterns and full email logs would be fair game.

If the official had used Tormail then even Google wouldn’t know what happened. The government would have no course of action because there would be no service provider to ask. Every journalist in the world should be able to agree that there is no good reason for a watchdog to trust the organizations they are watching. Why should you trust in corporations and governments to keep sources safe?

Tor has a reputation because it has a lot of criminal content, but the social good that it supports is just so important (criminals will always be criminals). I’m working on a game called Torwolf to simulate a few situations where Tor would be effective (if you have played Werewolf or Mafia, you can start to imagine what the game will be like). In the mean time, read up on Tor if you’re curious. Better yet, go try it out.

IMPORTANT EDIT: while Tor is much better than nothing, it is neither foolproof nor perfect. If maintaining anonymity could be a matter of life / death / imprisonment, then you need to know more than what I could fit into the scope of this overview. This paper is a good starting point, but seriously, spend some time researching on your own.

By now you may have read four different accounts of my program, but if you make it through this one you will be rewarded with Internet gold. My backstory is fast. I started this process later than the others because I had to graduate first. I’m only two months in, which means I’m about 20% complete.

In that short amount of time I have already:

• Blown my tech stipend on the new hotness and become the envy of everyone around me.
• Moved to an entirely different state and bought a kitten.
• Toured Europe for three weeks with my wife (and it wasn’t considered vacation).
• Been monitored by the CIA at the Tor Hackathon in Florence.
• Broken the law in Berlin by infiltrating an old abandoned spy building under the leadership of Cole Gillespie.
• Watched In Bruges in Bruges.
• Raided The Guardian, The BBC, and Mozilla’s London HQ.
• Drank a Tactical Nuclear Penguin.
• Worked with the other fellows to dream up complete iterations on two home-brewed projects (Torwolf and Newsquest).
• Dreamed with my peers and started moving on dozens of ideas including Raspberry Pi crisis cams, time-lapse Internet radio, and magical data extraction APIs.
• Contributed to the infrastructure that supports The Boston Globe.
• Challenged and questioned policies and processes at The Globe.
• Learned first hand about the politics and hurdles within news organizations (I call this “the real world.”)
• Regularly met with VIPs at The Globe, The Guardian, The MIT Media Lab, and The New York Times, to absorb their insights about the state of journalism.
• Maintained strong ties with the people of my past by arranging a formal ongoing relationship with the Media Lab.
• Not been sued or fired yet.

You’ll notice that this list contains a mixture of productivity, fun, and life. This is because fellowships are not just paychecks, they are about personal growth as much as personal output. This one is no different, as shown by the fact that I’ve spent almost half of my time traveling around the world.

If you are saying to yourself “holy crap that’s sweet” you are absolutely correct. In fact, one point of this post is to help you understand why The Knight-Mozilla Fellowship is one of the most rewarding jobs on earth right now and that you should apply this week.

There are some things you should expect if you make it in.

1) You will understand why the news industry is struggling to survive, and why there is hope

I decided not to use this post to talk about my observations and insights about journalism. I already write about that subject on this blog. This item still gets top billing because it defines our mission. We are trying to publicly understand, question, observe, and create in the context of news. There are so many chances to do all four of those things. Not a day has gone by where I haven’t been exposed to something new — a new idea, a new problem, or a new opportunity.

2) You will become unemployable (in a good way)

This now makes two positions in a row where I’ve heard my colleagues say that our work has made us unemployable. This isn’t because employers won’t want to hire us, it’s that we are being spoiled. We’re getting so used to creative freedom, security, and special treatment that simply doesn’t usually come with a traditional job. It’s a good problem to have.

3) You will be challenged, and you will be special

You are being thrown into an organization that may have a vision for you to work with, or may expect you to invent a vision of your own from scratch. Either way your time is going to be your own and you will be expected to make great use of it. This kind of freedom is difficult to cope with, especially when people have high hopes for you. People will throw you questions to ponder, ideas to critique, and problems to solve and you will need to prove yourself.

In return you get to ask anyone anything. You will get to bend the rules and do things that other people around you might have to fight hard to accomplish. If you are interested in something, you will be able to work on it. If you have a question or concern you will be able to get an audience with the CTO or the chief editor. Nobody else at your organization has your title.

4) You will make friendships that last the rest of your life

It’s a cliche, but it’s for real: one of the most rewarding parts of this is the people. You won’t just be part of a community, you will be part of creating a community. It started last year during a week long hackathon in Berlin, where I met dozens of people who I still see all the time. That sense of comradery continues to dominate this experience, and of course it also includes the people in your newsroom.

For the next round of fellows there won’t be a Berlin event, but you will still get to be a part of an 8 person group for almost a year in addition to becoming immersed in a young community of passionate people. You will drink whiskey in foreign countries with friends, share stories of trials and tribulations in workplaces half a world away from you, and find yourself in areas you never would have entered alone.

And with that I think I promised you a reward… I present to you the Amazing Spinning Gridinoc!

ALSO: Please come talk to the folks in the OpenNews community by signing into on our chat room below. Just come in and say hello!

There are many reasons why he might have said this, but two stand out. For one thing I had just given a presentation about NewsJack, a media manipulation platform that I created from Mozilla’s Hackasaurus with Sasha Costanza Chock. When NewsJack was released it was immediately met with a Cease and Desist from the New York Times (note that The Times is the parent company of The Boston Globe).

It is also possible that he was inspired because I had just confessed on stage that one of my first thoughts when walking into The Globe’s headquarters was “I wonder what it would take to bring down this organization.” I’m betting it was the juxtaposition.

The Backstory

An evil newspaper editor?

Assuming you’re a competent villain, whatever you end up targeting should be important. Not only that, but the target will reflect your personal passions and expertise. Try the mental exercise yourself and share the results. I dare you.

For example, to take down a newspaper you could…

• Open up their paywall (if it exists), steal their content, and make it freely visible to the world without giving them any form of recognition or compensation.
• Eliminate their productivity, either by instigating a massive strike or by hiring away all of their employees.
• Scare away their advertisers so they lose a significant revenue stream and can no longer pay their bills.
• Destroy their infrastructure (printing presses, websites, etc), thus disabling their ability to ship product.
• Corrupt their editors and slowly replace key actors with your henchmen so that the paper becomes your mouthpiece.
• Buy sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

A super villain’s master plan needs to be intricate enough to be interesting and difficult enough to be impressive. Blunt ideas like “take down their website” or “steal all their money” are a bit too obvious. It must also be simple enough for a diverse audience to understand. If nobody can figure out what you did, why it was sinister, or how it actually worked then it is hardly going to make headlines. Finally, it can’t be a series of bee stings; the evil needs to be condensed enough that it could fit in a tweet.

The Plan

My evil plan didn’t take long to imagine (given my recent work). If I were evil and wanted to destroy a newspaper I would ruin their brand’s credibility. This could be accomplished in many interesting and convoluted ways, but the “how” isn’t the point, the important question is “why?”

A media product will die miserable and alone unless it differentiates itself from the rest of the Internet. Luckily, newspapers have something that the chaff doesn’t: they have the capacity to create trustworthy information experiences. They are the ones with paid reporters asking the hard hitting questions, they have the editors and the internal fact-checkers, they don’t have an agenda and aren’t trying to manipulate me! right?

You could tie yourself to a bungee cord, close your eyes, and jump off a cliff… or you could read the New York Times.*

Well, maybe. As a reader I don’t know where content comes from or how much journalism went into it. All I have is faith in their brand. I trust that the sources I read are doing their jobs. That faith didn’t come from nowhere. I might have liked what they had to say in the past, or I saw my parents reading their paper, or their brand has a strong reputation. Regardless, I am now far more likely to trust what they have to say than I am to trust, for example, what my crazy friends like to read.

Just to drive this home: given the way content is presented today I could read the exact same article on the front page of the New York Times, Fox News, or the Huffington Post and my decision to trust it would be more strongly influenced by my opinions of the publisher than by the content itself.

To drive it home a different way: hijacking a newspaper’s credibility is as simple as imitating their brand.

Save the Day

The wheels are turning and it is already out of my control! IP lawyers are powerless compared to the forces of the anonymous web! But seriously, brand is a really fragile way to differentiate on the Internet. So what’s a newspaper to do?

Take a page from Apple and redefine the way people consume content. Train your readers to expect a certain experience not just from your website, but from every source of news. Make sure that experience is either expensive or impossible for alternative sources to replicate. Newspapers need to make their readers expect proof of everything. People should feel uncomfortable trusting information without explicit, functional credibility.

Newspapers have journalists doing research, checking facts, and taking names. They have multiple people and multiple systems touching every piece of content before it gets published, so why does the product usually end up being a bunch of words with prose-based evidence?

News organizations need to make the world hold information to their standards.

Like I said earlier, it makes sense that this particular plot and solution are coming from me. I dedicated my thesis to credibility layers — interfaces that lead to credible information experiences based on more than faith and trust. There are many paths to differentiation. Some are evil, some are entertaining, and some could even change the world.

* Drawing courtesy of Lyla Duey

At least I’m not the weird new guy wearing dress shirts that don’t really fit any more; I’ve upgraded to button down T’s.

Update: Matt Stempeck has told me “it isn’t your fault, but nobody in the world can pull off the button down T.” This is why I usually let the Internet choose my wardrobe.

The Trilogy

Over the next ten months I’ll rotate between the three key technology groups at the Globe. I’ve given them battle-clad nicknames for the purposes of this post.

• Round 1: Front Lines. I’m starting on the product team, working under Mike. This is where people work on longer term product-level projects. This includes things like the two web sites (BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com), the Content Management System (what people actually use to write articles), mobile experiences, and comment systems.
• Round 2: Special Ops. My second rotation will be for the Interactive News team (NewsDev for short), working under Miranda Mulligan. They work on more targeted technology projects such as reporter tools or interactive interfaces.
• Round 3: R&D. I’ll end my run working in the Boston Globe’s Media Lab / R&D department under Chris Marstall. This is where the more “cutting edge” / “insane” / “impractical” / “highly creative” work gets done. I really like the idea of this being my capstone rotation since it feels the most in line with my darker past.

Each of these groups has a different set of responsibilities, constraints, and skills. It seems like the Chris’s group (R&D) has the most freedom but isn’t as likely to ship full blown features and systems that get used by millions. Mike’s team (Front Lines), on the other hand, pushes out code that will support the newsroom and the world. As a result they need to keep their eyes on reality — they can’t take as many risks.

Miranda’s (Special Ops) gets to be somewhere in the middle simply because of the nature of user-facing interactivity and the fact that many of their projects are “reusable one-offs.” For instance, if an interactive feature didn’t scale it would be very unfortunate, but at least the entire organization wouldn’t collapse in a fiery heap of paper. The same could not be said for the code that renders the front page of Boston.com.

Free Developer… like Free Beer?

I was jovially introduced to most people as the free developer (“You’re not free any more! Mwahahah”), although I’m hoping to do more than just hang out and crank out code. I’m coming in with some ideas in mind and a general mission, but narrowing that down into something actionable became a lot easier after seeing my fellow fellows this weekend at the Knight Civic Conference.

• Understand pain points, identify opportunities, and communicate. I heard battle stories from the other fellows and immediately understood that one purpose of the OpenNews experiment is to unearth those stories and put them into the open for discussions. The entire industry needs to know examples of what works and what doesn’t, even if there are a few worms under the rocks.
• Stay creative, pursue wild and crazy projects, and share that creative spirit with everyone around me. I’ve just come from one of the most forward thinking places in the world, but the Lab isn’t defined by skill sets and brains. What makes the lab great is the attitude, approach, and the ability to fail effectively. There is no reason why some of that spirt can’t be transported to the globe (in fact some of it is already here.)
• Stay grounded and write awesome code. At the end of the day I am also a developer! I want to learn some new technologies and create some great projects. The key for me here is that I want to make stuff that will have applications both inside and outside of The Boston Globe.

And so this is my hopeful breakdown of the next 10 months:

1. 30% on immediate needs of the Boston Globe, like new platforms and systems.
2. 30% on my own fleshed out ideas, like Truth Goggles, or The Meta Meta Project.
3. 30% on wacky ideas like Newsquest or ATTN-SPAN.
4. 10% on reflection, in blog posts like this.

I see a parallel between the three groups I’ll be working in and those three major chunks, but I’ll be aiming to do it all, all the time. If you were at last weekend’s OpenNews hackathon at MIT you know that I’m feeling multithreaded.

It takes three screens and two laptops to be multi threaded.

Thing #1: there are about 150 students and 200 “other” people spread across 25 research groups, 3 floors, and 2 buildings. In other words it is possible for any given individual to completely ignore at least half of the lab. In an attempt to fight against anti-socialism, our community has a tradition called Friday Tea. A different group hosts the entire lab for an hour long hangout every Friday afternoon. This usually involves snacks such as cookies, chips, or whatever the group finds on foodcam that morning. Sometimes there are activities, but mostly there is tea.

Thing #2: my group, Information Ecology, is notorious for being completely filled with lovable trolls. This reputation is deserved, which is reflected by the fact that when we host Friday Tea we use the opportunity to run social experiments on our peers.

Experiment A: The Occupy BTea (Lab)

It was November 4th and the world was protesting all around us. Our group’s crusty old PhD, Matt Hirsch, had just sent out an announcement for the Media Lab community:

The Information Ecology group is hosting tea this afternoon in the BT lab. Come occupy space with us at 4pm.

There will be 99% value brand plain vanilla duplex cookies, and 1% cake, which will be taken by the guest with the most expensive lobbyists.

The cake is not a lie.

Matt had taken the lead on this week’s ML Tea, and instead of doing something normal like buying a bunch of delicious cookies, chips, and popcorn, he picked up some off brand vanilla Oreos (the kind that sucks all the moisture out of your mouth) and a single, tiny, personal-sized cake.

Only a few people would be able to eat something they enjoyed; everyone else would have to subsist on the horrible cookies. Since I unfortunately couldn’t attend, I asked Matt for some reflections. Below are a few of his insightful comments about the experience:

Q: What inspired the occupy tea?
A: I think it was Ron Paul who said, “let them eat cake.” As good as that sounds, we weren’t sure they deserved cake. So we bought some really cheap cookies.

Q: What do you think the result of the occupy tea says about our world?
A: It gives me hope that the cream really does rise to the top. Eventually, someone was bold enough to take the cake. She hoarded it all for herself and her friends, so the person with the best business acumen was rewarded, in tea as in life.

Q: What were the best reactions?
A: Of course, the aforementioned conquering of the cake was the most rewarding to witness. But I also took a lot of pleasure from watching the shame — real visible shame — from the cookie eaters. It was their own pitiful inaction that sealed their cake-less fate, and you could tell that they only blamed themselves. Perhaps this will serve as some sort of object lesson for them.

And so the experience was a perfect success. After some awkward confusion and pained cookie-eating someone took the cake and had a delicious feast among close friends in front of everyone.

The Occupy BTea (Lab) (Tea) took place on November 4th, 2011. A day that will live in infamy.

Experiment B: The Bubble Tea Bubble

The next semester rolled around and it was our turn to host tea again. We needed a theme. Our group loves bubble tea (sweet iced tea with tapioca pearls, also known as “Boba” in some strange places), and we wanted to share it with the lab. Unfortunately that stuff is expensive, so we couldn’t possibly buy enough for everyone. Luckily we also love puns and mischief. That stuff is cheap.

There was some email back and forth:

Me:
Hey everyone!

Turns out we’re hosting tea tomorrow, I knew that was coming up… Anyone want to do anything special? Honestly we *should* be hosting bubble tea, but that’s expensive so I assume we won’t. We could buy some actual bubbles though (as in, people would spend all of tea blowing bubbles)

Matt:
Can we host a bubble tea in the sense that everyone invests heavily in tea, driving the market to unrealistic levels, and then crashing, thus forcing all attendees to take a second mortgage on their mugs just to leave the lab space?

Me:
Yes.  We need to brainstorm on this.

Matt may not have been entirely serious in his suggestion, but it didn’t matter. The high level theme had been decided. After some deliberation we hatched a plan. That plan became official soon after with the following announcement:

Hello Media Lab and Friends,

Remember when we left the gold standard?  That was a great time to invest.  Same goes for the Internet in 1998 and 2012.

Anyway, we have some great real estate we’re trying to get rid of in the BT lab this afternoon at 4:00.  Come join everyone for Media Lab Tea in the Information Ecology space.

There will be FREE BUBBLE TEA, delicious snacks, and a wonderful activities!

Hugs, Kisses, and Bubbles,
 - Information Ecology

This looks totally legitimate!

Thus we set the groundwork for an economic bubble, creating a market based on goods whose implied value was not necessarily related to actual value

Our group’s advisor, Henry Holtzman, presented the tickets to students, staff, and faculty as they trickled in. The rules were printed on the ticket and no additional instructions were given, so people had to figure things out for themselves. “In tea as in life.”

Within minutes our lab was converted into a busy marketplace bubbling with capitalist energy. Conversations were occurring left and right, people were making trades and striking deals. Some, who either didn’t care about bubble tea or simply didn’t trust in their ability to get tickets, just gave them up for nothing. Others made demands. It didn’t take long for someone to shout out “I’ll pay $1 for a ticket!” Matt and I just lurked on the sidelines and watched in awe.

Not everyone played by the traditional rules, of course. There were threats of ticket counterfeit from students who scanned the tickets and warned us of their capacity to flood the market with fakes. One person went so far as to physically steal the tickets from Henry. All is fair on the tea market!

At 4:30 it was time to open the doors to the Information Ecology Bubble Tea Room. We invited anyone with three tickets to the entrance, and a motley crew of about 20 people filtered from the crowd. Some had partnered together, pooling their tickets and agreeing to share whatever tangible rewards might come (of course only one would be allowed in). Others had fought and scraped their way to the top, achieving the status of three-ticket-holder through blood sweat and tears.

This was the finale. The bubble was about to pop, and Matt and I needed to make sure we wouldn’t be nearby when it did. We opened the door and rushed away as the investors began to enter (Matt was on crutches at the time, but he managed to move faster than me).

Inside the room, perched on a standing table, was a lone bubble tea. This was done for effect, as there were 9 more in the refrigerator of assorted flavors and sizes. The extra stash was found almost immediately, but it quickly began to sink in that there were still limited resources. Only about half of the VIPs would see a payoff on their effort.

Nobody was shocked by the market crash — like I said, we have a reputation — but we hope that everyone learned a valuable lesson about bubble economies. I think Henry felt a little bit bad about the whole thing.

Later, in the name of closure, we emailed the Media Lab community:

Thank you all for experiencing an economic tea bubble with us. We sympathize with those who have been affected in this unforeseeable market adjustment. Due to extreme supply shortages, a threatened glut of counterfeit certificates, and ongoing physical security concerns, we cannot offer compensation for community members left with unfulfilled holdings. Additionally, the bubble tea room has been closed to further community access.

Take heart in the fact that Information Ecology is too big to fail, and in anticipation of a bail out will have its own private bubble tea outing in the near future.

God Bless.
-Information Ecology

I started the process by meeting with Mike Krolak. He is the man responsible for the technology related to product at The Boston Globe. This means web sites, but also things like printing presses, delivery trucks, and employee management systems. I’ll be starting my fellowship in one of his teams, which is the reason why I ended my first day with an ID badge, credentials, and access to most systems. Impressive, most impressive.

When we talked over lunch he was clearly curious to learn more about my purpose and personal goals, at which point I said “you and me both, bub” and stared awkwardly past his head. What I actually did was share my high level understanding of the Fellowship: it’s an experiment, but the goals are to help technologists learn what it is like to work in the journalism industry and to infiltrate and destroy newsrooms get newsrooms more comfortable with external collaboration and open development. Really we’re figuring out the details as we go along.

I got to learn a little more about Mike, what motivates him, and why he has spent more than a decade working for The Boston Globe. Here are three of my favorite points:

• There are so many simple, unsolved problems. Mike has a math background (I’m wary to tell people with actual math backgrounds that I was a math minor, but I was immediately able to relate), and one of the things that motivate math geeks is unsolved problems. In fact, the quest for the perfect proof can cause them to actually go insane! Mike sees the news industry as a great way to go mad, with tons of challenges ripe for the picking. A prime example: “did you know that there isn’t one major newspaper in the world that can tell you how many papers they distributed today?”
• Technology done wrong can get in the way of good journalism. I feel silly admitting this, but the idea that technology could actually hinder the way a newsroom produces content had never crossed my mind. For example many papers have publication processes that force articles through up to 50 different systems. Each transition leaves room for accidental content modification which results in more edits. What you get by the end is a professional version of whisper down the lane (or “telephone” for you non-Pennsylvanians).
• Newspapers are getting more comfortable with innovation. As you probably know already, when the Internet got popular the News industry sat around fat and happy and tried to use it in the same way they used any medium: to publish their content. In the past 10 years we have seen the advent of R&D departments and research spaces in newsrooms. There is a lot of catchup to do, but at least they’re trying.

For me these points frame the essence of the OpenNews initiative. Now that newspapers are innovating we want them to take a page from the mathematicians and make sure unsolved problems get solved in a way that everyone can learn from, expand upon, and contribute to (e.g. by publishing them to the world). As fellows we are also trying to understand what technology means for journalism and to share our lessons about where it can help and where it can hurt.

Now that the study has officially concluded, the numbers have been crunched, and the thesis has been submitted, I want to share what I learned from the resulting data and feedback.

I’ll warn you upfront: All conclusions drawn here should be taken with a grain of salt. The participants were not a random sample of the Internet, and as such, the results don’t reflect the general population. I think they are quite exciting nevertheless!

The Questions

There are many ways that a tool like Truth Goggles could be considered successful. A bare minimum is that users should prefer it to the non-augmented consumption experience (you know, the kind you have normally). Another measure of success might reflect the number of claims that users explored when the tool was enabled, or maybe the quality of that exploration.

These questions are interesting, but they all require different study designs. Here is what I considered when putting the study together.

1. Did people use Truth Goggles? It is difficult to accurately measure the use of a tool when working with a “captive” audience (i.e., study participants). Truth Goggles does not yet contain enough facts to be regularly useful in the real world, so the study had to simulate a reading experience and present articles with known fact-checked claims, so this question wasn’t explored too deeply.
2. Did people enjoy using Truth Goggles? This study was run online, so the only way to get direct feedback was by asking users directly. I also gave participants a chance to choose to enable or disable Truth Goggles for the final few articles after the tool has been completely exposed to them. Presumably, if they hated the interface they would have disabled it.
3. Were users exposed to more fact checks? In order to compare a change we must have a baseline and the ability to measure exposure. This study wasn’t quite comprehensive enough to address this directly, although I did keep track of how often users chose to view “More” information about a fact check (which took them directly to PolitiFact’s site).
4. Did users engage with the fact checks? To understand levels of engagement, the tool would need to keep track of what content was actually read and comprehended, as opposed to what content was simply rendered on a screen. Once again, tracking the use of the “More” button was a good indication of engagement.
5. How well did Truth Goggles enable critical thinking? Although critical thinking doesn’t require a change of opinion, it seems reasonable to believe that a change of opinion does indicate thought. By measuring the drift in beliefs about fact-checked claims after using Truth Goggles, it was possible to better understand the interface’s ability to facilitate updated beliefs.
6. Did Truth Goggles affect levels of trust in consumption experiences? This question is deeply relevant, but given the format of this study I did not attempt to measure trust in a robust way. I did give users an opportunity to comment on how they felt Truth Goggles affected their trust.

The final study design reflected aspects of each of these questions; however, “Did people enjoy using Truth Goggles,” “Did users engage with fact checks,” and “How well did Truth Goggles enable critical thinking” ended up getting the most focus.

The Preparation

Before the study began I selected, tagged, and pre-processed 10 political articles to create a pool of content that I knew would have fact-checked claims in them. For the most part, this involved going through PolitiFact, Googling the phrases, and hoping that some good articles would show up. Most of what I used was published in 2012 and came from a variety of sources with varying degrees of credibility.

I also added some tracking features to Truth Goggles in order to better understand what was clicked and explored. This meant I would know when users viewed a fact check or when they would interact with other parts of the interface. Finally, I had to create the actual study website, which added some randomization and guided participants through the process.

The Participants

The study was conducted online over the course of five days. Participants were recruited through email and Twitter. When I did the initial number crunching there were a total of 219 participants, 88 of whom completed the entire process. These numbers increased to 478 and 227, respectively, before the study officially concluded. This analysis reflects my thesis work, and only considers results from the original 88 participants who completed the entire study.

Unfortunately, the participant pool contained a disproportionate number of friends, individuals familiar with the concept of Truth Goggles, and professionals already aware of the challenges surrounding media literacy. The vast majority (about 90%) of those who actually completed the process were strong and moderate liberals. All of these biases were anticipated, but nevertheless they significantly limit the potential impact of the study.

The Process

From start to finish, the study took each participant around 20 or 30 minutes. After being shown the initial instructions, people were asked to rate 12 claims on a truth scale from 1 to 5. They only had 10 seconds per claim to answer, so this was really trying to get at a person’s gut reaction based on the information sitting in his or her head.

After the survey was completed, the treatments began. Everyone was shown a series of 10 articles which contained the previously rated claims. The first two articles were always shown with Truth Goggles disabled. The next six were presented with different Truth Goggles interfaces to help call out fact-checked phrases. For the final two articles, participants were able to choose one of the four interfaces (including “None”).

Once the article reading ended, participants were asked to re-rate the claims from the beginning of the study. At this point, they had been exposed to explanations and context for most of them, so this time they were supposedly providing “informed” answers as opposed to gut feelings. After the second round of ratings, the study wrapped up with a short exit survey, where participants had a chance to yell at me in the comments and tell me what they thought about the experience.

The Irony

Before going any further, I want to be clear that Truth Goggles does not assume that fact-checking services are correct. To the contrary, the hope is that users will question fact checks just as much as they would question any source, and consider all evidence with scrutiny. This philosophy is problematic for evaluation, because it is difficult to measure belief accuracy without considering something to be “true.”

Lacking a better metric, the source verdicts (i.e., PolitiFact’s ratings) were used as grounding for accuracy for this analysis. This means that from an evaluation perspective, I considered interfaces to be more effective if users ended up with beliefs in line with PolitiFact’s verdicts. Since belief dissemination is not the goal of Truth Goggles, the system must eventually use more sources (e.g., Factcheck.org and Snopes) to keep users on their toes.

The Results

In my thesis, I slice and dice the study data in more ways than I care to think about. But this isn’t my thesis, so I’m going to spare everyone a lot of pain and stick to the high-level observations.

• Truth Goggles increased accuracy and decreased polarization. Participants changed their beliefs about the fact-checked claims after reading the articles, regardless of whether or not a credibility layer was rendered. But without Truth Goggles those updates resulted in more polarization and less accuracy. In particular, when Truth Goggles was disabled people tended to become overly trusting of claims that appeared in articles. With Truth Goggles active, however, beliefs became nuanced and more accurate.
• When using credibility layers, people became less incorrectly skeptical but they remained just as incorrectly trusting. Truth Goggles was able to help skeptics become more trusting when trust was appropriate, but was not as effective at convincing false believers that they should become more doubtful. This means that participants who were not already overly trusting of a claim would tend to update their beliefs in a way that resulted in more accuracy when using a credibility layer. If you incorrectly believed a claim, however, you weren’t likely to correct yourself.
• Normal reading caused people to become more incorrectly trusting but they remained just as incorrectly skeptical. Without a credibility layer, participants who were not already overly distrusting of a claim would tend to overly trust that claim after reading its related article. This means that if someone was highly skeptical of a claim before reading the article, they wouldn’t change their minds. But if they were more neutral or already trusting, then seeing the claim in an article would cause them to believe it more strongly.
• Almost everyone enabled Truth Goggles when given a choice. Only two out of the 88 participants who completed the study chose to view their final articles without using some variation of Truth Goggles. The vast majority of participants (70%) selected “highlight mode,” the least obtrusive of the three possible interfaces. These numbers unfortunately don’t mean much because it is entirely possible that participants simply wanted to play with the tool. They could be far worse, though.
• There were virtually no significant differences between the three interface types. It was no surprise that “Highlight Mode” was the most popular, since it did nothing but highlight text and didn’t bully people into clicking things. Less anticipated was the fact that “Safe Mode” and “Goggles Mode,” which force exploration, did not outperform Highlight Mode. I suspect that this was a study artifact — forced interaction was unnecessary during the study because the novelty of Truth Goggles meant people might be curious enough to click regardless of the interface — but it was interesting nonetheless.

The short version of these results is that Truth Goggles helped combat misinformation, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. There also clearly needs to be a more comprehensive, longer-term user study.

For me, the big surprise was that that people were so prone to trusting content just because it appeared in an article or opinion piece. I was absolutely thrilled to see that effect get completely squelched through credibility layers. The results from the exit survey are also incredibly exciting, but that is a post for another day.