stdout.be | ruminaties over journalistiek en technologie

Young Traditionalists (quote)

2012-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Students are told from even before they walk on campus that being a journalist means Being a Good Writer, Being a Good Editor, Being a Good Photographer. No one is telling them they could be an application developer, or a data journalist, or a media entrepreneur. Or if they have heard it, that voice is getting drowned out by traditionalists. A disturbing amount of time, the traditionalists drowning those students out are other students.

(Matt Waite)

A hard-knock life

2012-01-10T00:00:00+01:00

Humans are storytellers. It’s in our genes. It’s our default setting.

We tell stories all the time. For free. Not out of idealism or anything, but because that’s what we do. We write because we think, and we think because we are. That’s why blogs are so popular, why people use twitter and internet forums and why every organization you can possibly think of has its own newsletter.

Humans are also, as a rule, very curious about what’s going on around them.

Our curiosity and our love of storytelling are what makes a reporter’s job so damn appealing. Telling stories is wonderful, and knowing things others don’t carries prestige. Which leads people to be storytellers and sometimes journalists even if they’re not getting paid, or not getting paid all that much. It also leads so many of us to consider a career in a field that can be downright grueling.

The prestige associated with journalism also leads otherwise very smart people to start news outfits without really caring too much about whether they can make it work as a business. A big chunk of the media orgs that have seen the light of day in the past five or ten years are born out of idealism and passion, fostered by people who would keep on doing journalism even if they weren’t getting paid at all.

When we ask ourselves why it seems difficult to fund (some kinds of) news organizations, here’s an answer we should consider: that most news organizations, especially some of the newer ones, aren’t businesses, not really, not in spirit.

The goal for many web-era news outlets isn’t making money, the goal is having fun and doing something worthwhile. Sometimes they try to close a gap in the news coverage. Fix some perceived lack in reporting standards that needs immediate remedial action. Bring water to a news desert. But a gap in reporting is not, in fact, necessarily also a gap in the market.

Journalism is not an easy business to be in, because we want to be in it even if it’s not. Journalism is not an easy business to be in because we go for it and try to make things work when all the signs tell us we shouldn’t even bother.

People care about the news. They want to pay for it. They want the light stuff and the deep stuff too. They just don’t want as much of it as we — journalists and media makers — produce. But we forge ahead and produce it anyway. We love journalism so much we create supply without demand.

Media professionals are starting to find out ways to make journalism profitable again after the digital disruption, heaven be praised. But not everybody can turn their hobby or even their journalism degree into a job. We will never find ways to make it easy for every writer and every publisher to make money.

Journalism is a cutthroat industry. The wages are lousy. Don’t expect that to ever be different.

Paywall logic (quote)

2012-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

Most people don't use your news site enough to want to pay for it. By putting up a paywall, you don't just lose them as readers but also as eyeballs to advertisers. This is why only the most permeable paywalls have any chance of success.

If you won’t give us any money, we won’t show you any ads!

(Clay Shirky)

Just passing through (quote)

2012-01-03T00:00:00+01:00

[What] is the style of reporting you want to be doing if you are just passing through on your way to some place more cosmopolitan? If you see your performance in Anytown, USA as an extended audition for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post, then you will try to do Inquirer journalism in Greensboro. But maybe that’s not what Greensboro needs.

(Jay Rosen)

Return of the Brands

2012-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Advertising is done with. Our readers hate it, and marketeers are starting to hate it too. There are better ways to reach customers than with banners and billboards. And so ad spends are going down, down, down. Ninety percent of all discussions about new business models in media, beneath the surface, boil down to this: help me, advertising isn’t paying the bills anymore.

Let me back up and explain the ad-supported business model for news in a couple of sentences.

The first thing to realize is that, since the 20th century or so, people have never been willing to pay for good journalism. A good newspaper is worth maybe half a cup of coffee to a reader, but certainly not more.

Complaining has never saved a business, and so instead of whining about the ignorance of the hoi polloi and their unwillingness to pay for journalism, instead newspaper executives sneakily redefined their business as selling eyeballs to advertisers. A substantially more profitable business to be in. The pocket change you shlep out for a subscription is primarily meant to prove to advertisers that you actually care about what you’re reading and won’t just throw it away like a flyer or spam mail. Advertisers care about that sort of thing, because if you’re not an engaged reader, the advertising gets lost too. But subscription revenue is not the point.

Most newspapers get anywhere from fifty to eighty percent of their income from advertisements, and of course, free metro papers get all of it from ads.

When newspapers are actually a service to advertisers and not readers, people running newspapers have to start thinking in different ways. Videlicet: how can I, publisher, sell the most and the most expensive advertising, while spending as little as I can on good writing?

If you sack your senior city hall reporter and that costs you a hundred subscriptions, but it saves you $40,000 a year and doesn’t really bother the advertisers, then why not? If advertorials are upsetting your readers, but not enough for them to actually switch to your competitor, is that really a problem?

Economic optimization of the newsroom and ad-supported journalism go hand in hand.

You could cry and pout all day about how commercialism is destroying newspapers, but it is how it is: readers don’t pay for journalism, advertisers do, so advertisers hold the strings.

But here’s the thing. Advertising is waning. A couple of percents each year, ad expenditures are going down. Upswings happen, but they’re freak events. Plus, the ad money that remains is moving away from newspapers to other outlets. So we have to figure out a new business model that isn’t ads.

Getting people to actually pay for our content at full price is tricky. Even paywalls don’t go that far, and paywalled news websites merrily show you a shit-ton of ads even after you’ve paid over a hundred dollar for a year of digital access. Same for dead-tree editions, of course: that big subscription fee does not entitle you to an ad-free printed newspaper.

There are other, partial, solutions – ways to make money with journalism. Not enough, but enough to get started.

Some organizations have reported great success with organizing real-life events, others are monetizing workshops that teach local businesses how to use social media, some make money with Kindle and books and yet others ask readers to sponsor (not pay for) their enterprise reporting on a per-story level.

All these new business models have something in common: they allow you to make money because people respect your newspaper, your brand. And the more they respect your brand, the better you can monetize it.

The New York Times can sell their Manual of Style and Usage to the general public but the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in Montana can’t.

You can teach businesses how to get their act together online, but not if your own website is horrible.

Your events can be the talk of the town (and cheap for you to organize, with all those journalists and their rolodexes) or they can be “that pathetic thing our pathetic newspaper is pathetically trying to get us to attend.”

There’s no reason for people to come to your newsroom café instead of any other bar unless they genuinely appreciate what you’re doing.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Trust. Community. Fun.

When advertising slips below the symbolic 50% revenue line, news organizations will see that they have to start caring about their readers again. Not because the executives at the top aren’t ice-cold capitalists – they are – but because it will make business sense again to make you, the reader, happy, when it didn’t make business sense before.

When advertising wanes, selling a mediocre product for next to nothing to boost circulation is not a valid business model anymore, and instead, trusted news brands gain in importance. Maybe ten years from now, we can start being proud of the news we put out again.

Taxonomies don't matter anymore

2011-12-19T00:00:00+01:00

Taxonomies and tags are a way to connect people to content they care about. They rise to the surface through faceted search, site navigation and related content widgets. I am no longer convinced they’re very good at their job. (I used to be.) Maybe for libraries but not for news websites, anyway.

Let me explain, step by step, why categorization is becoming ever less useful, especially the formal, well-defined, crafted-to-stand-the-test-of-time approach to categorization we call taxonomy.

(Or you can also scroll down to “What we do need” to read, well, what we do need.)

Taxonomies drive navigation

They can, but they don’t need to. It’s perfectly possible to have sections be simple buckets that you push stories to, and those buckets can change organically over time as your editorial priorities change. This year you can have a Presidential Candidates bucket and a Euro-Crisis bucket and an Arab Spring bucket and next year you can have different ones to fit whatever you feel is most important. Section pages only house a couple days’ worth of content anyway, so your categories don’t have to withstand the test of time to be useful.

But then what about our archives, you say? We have search engines for that. Search engines can sometimes fail to find important stories, you say? So can the indexers that categorize your stories. And your readers are just looking for a couple of stories related to topics they care about anyway, they don’t care about an exhaustive repository.

Taxonomies improve search

Actually, caring about search improves search. The reason the search engines on our news websites suck isn’t because we’re not tagging things properly or because we don’t have enough metadata to make them work, it’s because we’re too stupid to devote any time or resources to doing great search.

I outlined a ton of tricks news websites can use to improve their search engine in my Findability and Exploration blogpost twenty months ago. I still think those tips are really good. It’s just that nobody’s trying them.

Tags in any form or shape are excellent at driving search and navigation in repositories that contain very little text: photos (Flickr), links (Delicious), contacts (Highrise), all that stuff. No argument there. Doesn’t apply to stories.

Taxonomies drive content recommendations

The best content recommendations on news websites are inside of the body copy: inline links. With recommendations, you never know what you’re getting. It’s mystery meat. With links, a writer tells you why she’s pointing at something the moment she’s pointing at it.

Automated recommendation engines are mainly useful as cute but non-essential pageview drivers and if your journalists are too lazy to add links.

Taxonomies make topic pages smarter

Topic pages aren’t generally shit because we’re not annotating our content with enough whateveritis or because the world cannot be represented in machine-readable form (though there’s that too), they’re shit because we treat them like shit: we never update them, we never care for them, and the only resources they get are computer resources.

Likewise, our mapping and timelining efforts often suck because we fail to commit the time a dev or a journalist would need to do them right, so everything gets pushed into ugly semi-automated quasi-solutions.

We come to topic pages for an encyclopedia-like overview of events and issues, and to get quick links to the most pertinent content. A way to catch up to big stories when you feel behind. We don’t come to topic pages for automatically aggregated sort-of-relevant content with no editorial guidance as to what’s important and what’s not.

Sometimes, you just have to do things by hand, in prose.

Taxonomies allow users to easily subscribe to particular topics

Taxonomies also allow us to inundate users with text alerts and digests when really what they want is not a firehose but meaningful updates when they make sense. There is really no way to sidestep curation unless we don’t care that we’re annoying our users.

What is more frustrating to me than a lack of solid content categorization is that there is no single CMS out there that allows you to indicate follow-ups, updates, series, retractions, corrections and responses. Now that would be interesting metadata and it’d really allow us to keep readers in the loop and give them updates to stories they care about. Much more useful than telling me that this story is an education story and that that story is about air travel.

Taxonomies allow for alternative ways of browsing

The best taxonomies come in bunches: one for topics, one for genre, one for organizations, one for people, one for… anything you’d like. Mood, for example: you could collect all sit-down-and-relax longform stories, all whimsical ones and all serious ones, so people could view different stories depending on what mood they’re in.

Thing is, we’re already enabling alternative ways of browsing, and we’ve found a way to do it that’s much quicker and much more fun than meticulously tagging all our content. It’s called curation.

What we do need

What it boils down to is this: when you’re building a news site or a news application, categorization is not one of those no-brainers that you can just assume will be necessary, but instead is something that you have to figure out as part of your content modeling. (Which is why thinking of a news site as a confederation of apps makes so much sense: you cannot do proper content modeling for massive news sites, but you can for individual beats.) Taxonomies don’t get a free pass. They must prove their usefulness to the task at hand, just like every other tool we use to structure, annotate and enrichen content.

The kind of categorization efforts we can sensibly commit to will therefore likely be simple, direct, focused. Not complex, not large, not all-encompassing, not, in other words, taxonomies.

When we do need complex hierarchies of content or unusual ways of bundling stories together, ontologies and domain models embedded in news applications are there to help us out.

Play to your strengths

But there’s an even more important lesson news orgs can learn. For so long now, technology and journalism have been fighting each other. We’ve been continually asking journalists to do things they’re not comfortable with. Some of that has been and will remain perfectly justified. But one of the quickest, easiest, most fool-proof ways of making a news website that kicks ass is to play to journalists’ strengths instead.

Journalists suck at tagging, but they can usually write awesome explainers and background pieces, point to previous coverage everyone should know about and collect bunches of interesting related content for specific audiences. It’s not just that they can, they love it.

You can do a lot of contextualization with technology, but you can also do it with people and do it better.

I haven’t been building software that plays to journalists’ strengths. I’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem.

The question I’ll be asking myself in the coming months is: how can I build technology that helps journalists do their job and technology that supports them in areas where they are weak? Better search, so they can actually find the archive content they want to link to in their latest coverage. Sourcing tools like Squire or the Nieman Lab’s Fuego. Browser extensions. Wiki software that doesn’t suck, so reporters don’t have to struggle to bring context to the news.

I won’t be working on automation and repurposing. It’s because of automation, not in spite of it, that news websites suck. It doesn’t make economic sense anyway.

No more mediocrity

For the past fifteen years, we’ve been training our readers to get used to mediocre experiences online. Just look at any news website, any page.

Taxonomies, metadata and structured data can either be used to make those mediocre experiences cheaper to produce, or to make really great experiences. It’s up to us to choose which path to take. The approach is very much different even if the toolkit is the same.

Stepping away from mediocrity, for me, means putting power back in the hands of the newsroom. To make that happen, I’ll be building prosthetics, not machines.

Journalists' right (quote)

2011-12-19T00:00:00+01:00

Kara, Wall Street Journal columnist and All Things Digital co-exec, said this a couple of months ago at a journalism roundtable. This is from memory so may not be verbatim.

Journalists feel like they have a right not to have economic realities (en)forced upon them.

(Kara Swisher)

Battling banner blindness

2011-11-22T00:00:00+01:00

Banner blindness is at close to 50% for internet ads. I wonder how long it’s going to take most newspapers to realize that we need to reinvent how businesses connect with our users, because banner ads are just not working out. At all.

I simply cannot believe that there isn’t a way to tell people about new products and services and special deals without pissing them off. After all, at the right times and in the right quantities, we want to know about the new furniture store that opened up just outside downtown, next month’s concerts at the arena and the new flavor of Doritos. The problem is not that we hate advertising, the problem is that we hate the kind of advertising we get.

People are generally okay with commercial information, but they don’t want to be bombarded with it and they don’t want to learn about your Friday special through a screaming, distracting graphic. Why don’t we do things like this instead:

One promising alternative to banner ads, it seems to me, is a revival of the good old-fashioned sponsorship and the copywriting behind it.

If readers and viewers are ignoring visually intensive advertisements, the last thing we should do is to try and make our ads stand out. Instead, we should incorporate them in the content in a way that doesn’t violate our journalistic integrity. Which is a pretty good description of how sponsorships worked in the early days of radio and how they sometimes still work: the host thanks the sponsor, either the host or the sponsor describes what they’re selling in one or two sentences, add a jingle, and that’s that.

Sponsorships — as an ad format — have three advantages over banners.

The announcement of the sponsor is either part of the lede (for text) or the intro for broadcast radio or video — that is, it’s integrated in the content, not something you have to sit through in order to get to the content. That means consumers can’t easily skip the advertisements, but the short length of these messages also means they’re not so annoying that you’d actually want to skip them.
Sponsorship messages put the onus on businesses to think really hard about how to make themselves interesting to your audience; if the business owner or the presenter can’t make your company or product sound interesting in two honest sentences, without the help of whiz-bang advertising, then that says a lot. Conversely, a non-existent creative budget won’t lead to the ghoulishly ugly ads that local news websites currently have to cope with. The Deck also works this way: “Sell us something relevant to our audience and we’ll sell you an ad.”
The relationship between the money that comes in and the realization of the program is also much clearer, whereas for an ad you usually don’t make the connection between advertiser and “the guys that make this thing possible”.

I’ve also been really enamored by the ironic take on product placement on Stephen Colbert’s show in the past few years: his purported love for Doritos and Ben & Jerry’s has been so over-the-top that the advertising is immediately obvious, turning it from subliminal trickery into something more like “hey, Doritos is my sponsor, they deserve some advertising, and let’s be honest, these chips aren’t so bad are they?”

Colbert’s sell is respectful to both the advertiser and the audience; he’s not trying to kid you into thinking that these are the best tortilla chips on earth, he’s just asking you to consider buying a packet, as a courtesy to the sponsor that’s making this show possible. Not every news organization can get away with ironic product placement, but most of us can start emulating that balanced, honest tone.

Sponsorship messages on radio shows, especially the way they used to be done in the thirties and forties, have an aesthetic value and an authenticity to them a precision-engineered banner ad simply does not have. It doesn’t say “BUY MORE DIET PEPSI.” It says “Hey guys, we make this product which we think you may like, feel free to check us out and enjoy the show (or enjoy this great story), like we will.”

Advertising (quote)

2011-11-19T00:00:00+01:00

Should Wikipedia have ads?

Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things: (1) A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume OR (2) A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product.

(nupark2)

Who we enable (quote)

2011-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

[We] shouldn’t focus so much on what we do as much as what we enable, who we impact and what comes from all that.

(Greg Linch)

Frictionless

2011-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

Two different payment models have really impressed me lately: Kickstarter and Kindle.

Kickstarter impresses me because it so potently shows the value of authenticity. Artists and writers and journalists talk about the cool stuff they’re working on, and their enthusiasm is simply contagious. On some pages, it’s hard not to contribute right away. In just the past two or three months I’ve supported Zombies, Run!, Last Two-Step in Texas, Lauren Ipsum and A Thousand Thank Yous, four very cool projects.

My credit card is suffering, but that’s a small price for that fuzzy warm feeling, the feeling that you’re a part of something bigger.

But there’s more to Kickstarter. Each project has a goal, the amount of money the artist needs to complete the work. You only pay once enough people have chipped in to reach the goal. If there’s not enough support, nobody pays.

As a commenter over at Hacker News said last month: Kickstarter is hacking the tragedy of the commons. I would have never payed twelve dollars to support Parallel Print Shop’s purchase of a big old letterpress without some kind of assurance that they’d actually use the money to pay for the press, and that they’d have enough backers to actually do that. And I certainly would never pay a random stranger sixty-five bucks for a book that doesn’t yet exist, but with Lauren Ipsum that’s exactly what I did. Sending money into the void is uncool, and Kickstarter cleverly assures you that’ll never happen. (Projects can fail of course, but nobody will ever just mysteriously disappear with your money.)

The cherry on top for Kickstarter is that, after playing to our sense of wanting to belong to something bigger, after making us all excited about the project, it makes things just a little bit sweeter by appealing to our selfish side as well: oh, by the way, if you sponsor this project you’ll also get one of these very cool rewards. And that seals the deal.

Kickstarter is superb social design and something news organizations, both non-profit and for-profit, can learn a lot from.

We’re used to doing the whole “without us, democracy is doomed” shtick, but scaremongering and overinflating our own importance rarely leads people to reach for their wallet. Telling people that they should pay, because content is valuable and they’re a bunch of gosh darned freeloaders, well, nope, that doesn’t help either.

Getting people to care about your writers and their work, that’s the first step. Make them want to pay you.

Authenticity. Good-natured fun. Being part of something bigger. Getting appreciation for giving. Excitement. That’s Kickstarter.

The Amazon Kindle and Kindle Store has a more traditional approach. They’ve made the whole purchasing and delivery process so frictionless that you’re bound to do impulse buys: an age-old marketing trick. The good kind of impulse buys, mind you, the kind you end up loving more than you’d thought.

Even though it’s based on simple impulse buying, Kindle is intriguing because the crucial second ingredient that it adds is that it gets you away from your computer.

Reading on a computer is either a harried experience or a part of wanderings across the web that go anywhere and everywhere, with constant distractions from your email, your Facebook and your twitter accounts. I’ve noted before that such a hyperkinetic environment isn’t conducive to getting people to buy anything at all, no matter how easy it is.

With a Kindle, you get the good old-fashioned reading experience of a paperback or a good magazine, which is the kind of relaxed emotional state publishers want you to be in when they are peddling their wares. It’s leaning back in a comfy chair that gets you buying, and it’s the great e-ink reading experience that keeps you buying.

Another way Kindle works (for me) is through vastly limiting my choices, but again: in a good way.

Let’s face it, even news curators don’t help us a lot with information overload, because we just end up using ten different curators in addition to a ton of “regular” content providers and then there’s those endless tweets to keep track of too. Curation adds to the overdose instead of making masses of information easier to grapple with.

Magazines and Singles on Kindle battle information overload with a good dose of retro: just pick a magazine you like (my favorite thus far is Slate), buy it for a buck or so, sit down, trust in their selection, read it from cover to back and feel happy that, despite the deluge of information out there, you’ve managed to read a very fine selection of stories indeed, and managed to finish them. (Finishability is the next big thing, I feel it.) Yes, those same stories are available online for free. Even more of them in fact. But that’s not the point. The experience is different, and the return to editors as gatekeepers, while it’d be a stupid move online, is a refreshing experience once you’re away-from-keyboard. Sometimes we do need to act like digital space is expensive, even though it’s free.

The Kindle lesson is: think about more than just the content you offer. Think of the experience you’re trying to create, and look for platforms that will help you create that experience.

The corollary to that lesson is that we, as an industry, are still clueless about how people are reading the news, when they’re enjoying it and when not. We need more ethnographic reports like the one the Associated Press did in 2008.

When we do research, we don’t necessarily need to figure out what people think they need or like. The very basics will do: how do potential news consumers act when at home, what do their days and evenings look like, and how could our products fit into those routines. We think we know but we’re often blind about our own behaviors let alone those of others.

Our websites and newspapers aren’t as good as they could be because we don’t have a clue how people read.

Kickstarter and Kindle are fascinating platforms that news organizations can leverage and profit from. But they’re also models that we can learn from. Make payment frictionless, think about the experience and not just the content you’re selling, make people feel a part of something bigger, don’t force people to pay but infect them with your own enthusiasm and passion so they want to pay, and realize that doing and offering less is a selling point.

Eye-opening (quote)

2011-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

The Guardian's Emily Bell about why it's not true that talking with readers takes time away from reporting and writing.

The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting. It should be at the heart of it.

(Emily Bell)

Paralysis (quote)

2011-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Do you know what it’s called when you lose all sense of touch? It’s called paralysis, and they push you around in a wheelchair while you calculate black hole radiation.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best.

(Bret Victor)

Gaat politiek over feiten? (comment)

2011-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Tom Naegels, ombudsman voor De Standaard, vraagt zich af of journalisten uitspraken van journalisten eerst moeten fact-checken voor te te publiceren.

Goed stuk. Twee opmerkingen.

Eén: ik betwijfel of het niet-checken van politieke uitspraken altijd een kwestie is van haast. Evenvaak is het de wens van een krant om neutraal te blijven. En dus worden dingen gepubliceerd waarvan journalisten best weten dat ze kort door de bocht zijn, zonder veel duiding, omdat “het oordeel aan de lezer is”.

Je kan fair en evenwichtig schrijven zonder te moeten vervallen in iedereen-heeft-evenveel-gelijk. Ik zie niet in waarom een journalist lezers er niet op zou mogen wijzen dat een uitspraak zwans is. Als je dat aandurft, vermijd je doorgeefluik te worden voor halve waarheden. Publiceren / niet publiceren vind ik dan ook een verkeerde dichotomie; er zijn betere manieren om om te gaan met uitspraken als die van Francken. Zie ook Jay Rosen over dit onderwerp.

Twéé: zou De Standaard niet eens zijn eigen PolitiFact oprichten?

37% there

2011-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

The Columbia Journalism Review just published Dean Starkman’s Confidence Game. Read it — it’s a skeptical take on the “future of journalism” crowd and our vision.

I’m skeptical too, the other way around.

Something that’s bothered me for a while is that most proponents of good ol’ journalism defend it by setting up a straw man, not of their opponents’ position but of their own, which they sell thusly: vintage journalism, made from one hundred percent pure investigative reporting. According to Starkman, public-interest reporting is “the point”.

To warm us up to this idea, Dean tells the wonderful story of how Ida Tarbell took on big oil in the early 20th century, leading to the dissolution of the Standard Oil monopoly a few years before the Great War. This is real journalism, this is the good stuff. It’s impossible to disagree, and why would you want to anyway? It’s not like Ida herself can disagree either, and yell something like “damn, this liveblogging stuff is hot.” She can’t because she is dead.

The argument breaks down not because it’s an appeal to emotion, but because it conflates x is good y with y has to be x to be any good. Gypsy jazz is good music, some people think it’s the best kind, but music doesn’t have to be gypsy jazz to be any good.

Investigative reporting is important, but it’s not the only kind of important journalism out there. According to the Knight Foundation’s report on the information needs of communities, we have a need to coordinate, solve problems, establish systems of public accountability and develop a sense of connectedness. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says journalists have to be authenticators, sense-makers, navigators and forum-leaders. On those criteria, criteria that can hardly be said to come from future-of-newsies, enterprise reporting like that of Ida scores 1/4 and 2/4. That’s 37% there, almost half of what we need to put out a solid news product. If we stop there, you get an organization like Amnesty International, whom I actually donate to, but they’re not a media company, I don’t think. So would you mind us searching for the other half?

There’s irony here: Starkman complains that people looking to reinvent journalism always bring up the same five or six success stories, and then proceeds to make a case that goes something like “I mean, wasn’t Watergate kick-ass journalism, though? More of that stuff, is all I’m saying.”

Now, if you’re under the delusion that all journalism is investigative reporting or aspiring to be investigative reporting or reporting that was not allowed a fair chance to develop into an investigation, you’re bound to make a couple of very funny conclusions about how the news industry should work.

For example, when talking about the mantra that readers often know more than journalists, Dean simply counters that for most enterprise stories, like the News of the World scandal, this isn’t the case. And when evaluating the oft-repeated statement that content has become a commodity, his response is predictably that enterprise reporting is unique, expensive and valuable.

To make this counter work, of course, he has to ignore

academic reports and books that lay out how pervasive imitation and rewrites are and have long been in the news industry, and how even before the internet, newspapers were on a course towards homogenization
the fact that j-schools train reporters to be generalists that can cover any kind of topic moderately well
the dozens of reporters that float around important officials at any time of day, begging for a soundbite
seats at press conferences, all filled with journalists that will report on exactly the same thing in exactly the same way.

All of these are facts that hold even for the golden age of journalism. Calling news a commodity, not because we like it but because it’s unfortunately the way things are, how dare we.

When Jeff Jarvis argues that it’s damn hard to make money from journalism by getting people to pay for it, Dean responds that the collapse of the advertising model doesn’t imply the editorial model was failed, and that’s entirely correct. But does our perennial reliance on advertising not also tell us that readers commonly value content less than what it costs us to make it?

I love long-form journalism and I think every newspaper needs more investigative reporting than they have now. I think Dean is right that small operations and bloggers can’t do everything a big news organization can. I believe paywalls can work sometimes, even though they impede conversation. I think print has a future, and so do a lot of other not very sexy models. Most importantly, I feel very strongly that we’re asking journalists to churn out too much content at too fast a pace, and, what’s more, that the pseudo-journalism a lot of reporters are asked to produce is an insult to their professional honor.

It’s just that I have no idea how any of that implies that journalists should go easy on social media (time better spent reporting, apparently), that good pro/am collaborations are and will always be the Pegasi of news, that personal branding is silly, that free can never be the basis of a business model, that lots of text is always the best way to report on current events, that reporters can only waste time talking to their readers and that news has value even if people won’t pay and won’t read.

The first set of facts has absolutely no relationship to the second. That’s ultimately why I feel Dean Starkman’s exposition holds no water: as much as I appreciate some kickback to opinions perhaps too forcefully held, his arguments don’t say what he wants them to say.

Give me a strategy and I'll show you a success

2011-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

Want to know what works in news?

Instantaneous (Al Jazeera’s liveblogs) or old news (any newspaper) or even older news (The Economist)
Print-first (most student newspapers) or digital-first (it has saved the Journal Register papers) or even newsletter-first (DailyCandy and tons of B2B)
Quality (The New York Times) or good-enough (Gawker, free Metro papers around the world)
News from all over the place (HuffPo) or unique coverage (McSweeneys, The New Republic)
Social (Hacker News, reddit) or algorithmic (Google News) or editorial (Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish)
Professional (every newspaper) or amateur (Evanston Now, Berkeleyside) or by students (The Local East Village)
Mobile-first (arguably The Wall Street Journal) or no mobile at all (most local and rural papers)
Niche (TechCrunch) or subculture-based (Monocle) or something for everyone (Sunday papers)
Paywall (The Financial Times, Mediapart) or porous and metered (Morris among others), contributor memberships (MetaFilter) or free (many, many others)
Service-driven (Curbed) or community-driven (Davis Wiki) or format-driven (Politifact) or story-driven (Harper’s)
Collaboration (California Watch plus its many partners) and competition (any country with more than one national broadsheet)
Non-profit (MinnPost) or for-profit (The Batavian)
Short (Newser) or long (Slate) or longer (ProPublica’s Kindle Singles)
Being a technology company (The Texas Tribune), meticulous about metadata (The Guardian) or neither (any and all bloggers)
Opinionated (Techdirt) or even biased (FoxNews or IndyMedia) or dryly factual (BBC News)

Give me a facet and I’ll give you success stories from all over the spectrum. Business successes and editorial ones.

People always look for the one best solution. Fact is, you can make just about anything work if you’re smart about it.

Lesgeven in Ethiopië

2011-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

De eerste weken van oktober heb ik 12 dagen in Ethiopië doorgebracht, om aan de universiteit van Jimma een cursus webdesign te geven in opdracht van de Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad (VLIR-UOS). De cursisten daar hebben HTML5 geleerd, CSS3, heel wat jQuery, thema’s maken in Drupal met het Zen framework, en tot slot een piepkleinbeetje GIMP.

Ethiopië ziet er eigenlijk exact uit hoe je zou denken: brakke hutjes met golfplaten dakken, mensen die overal op straat lopen, winkeliers en werklieden die met muilezels op schok zijn. Om de zoveel honderd meter een bar of samenkomstplaats die er infeite net als alle andere hutten uitziet, behalve dat er achter een glasloos raam cola en sigaretten en alcohol wordt aangeboden. Zeer fotogeniek, al zou je er niet willen wonen.

Dinsdagavond, na de eerste lesdag, schreef ik in mijn dagboek “Het lijkt soms alsof ze allemaal doodsbang zijn van mij.”

We waren er met wat moeite in geslaagd om de eerste stapjes te zetten in CSS. Met de hulp van een oude presentatie van Idan Gazit en David Kadavy’s Design for Hackers had ik ook allerlei truukjes gedeeld om mooie websites te maken zelfs zonder veel esthetisch inzicht.

Na zo’n paar uur te babbelen met mijn geadopteerd Amerikaans accent — “you do not speak Belgian English” werd me meermaals gezegd — ben ik nieuwsgierig of iedereen mee is, en of dit het soort dingen zijn waar ze meer over willen weten. Stilte. Ik had eerder op de dag al gevraagd aan iedereen om op een briefje vlug te noteren wat ze wilden bijleren, maar die briefjes waren praktisch blanco teruggekeerd. Omdat ik weet dat spreken in groep niet iedereen ligt, stelde ik dan maar voor om me te mailen met vragen of suggesties. Geen enkele mail ontvangen die dag.

Goed beseffende wat voor een totale kwast ik ben als ik Frans moet spreken, was het niet moeilijk om wat sympathie op te brengen voor mijn griezelig stille klas. Dus heb ik me niet laten doen en gewoon verder les gegeven. En woensdag ook. En donderdag. En vrijdag. En tenslotte kreeg ik de klas toch een stukje losser. Oef.

De webpagina’s die we op het einde van week één maakten, zullen geen prijzen winnen. Maar er is toch altijd iets magisch aan dingen kunnen maken die je een week geleden nièt kon maken.

De volgende week kreeg ik evenwel een andere uitdaging te verwerken.

We waren van HTML naar CSS gegaan, een paar softwarebibliotheken gezien zoals Bootstrap, met Firebug foutjes leren opsporen en repareren en dan naar Javascript overgestapt. Selectors, traversal, DOM manipulatie, AJAX, the whole enchilada. Allemaal op een nogal gezapig tempo, maar net gepast goed, gezien bijna iedereen meekon en anderzijds het gepuf van de cursisten duidelijk maakte dat de oefeningen toch niet te makkelijk waren.

En toch. Eerst morde één van de betere studenten dat het wel wat sneller mocht. Dan vertelde een andere student me dat hij graag met Drupal zou leren werken en of we Javascript vandaag konden afronden. Wat ik een bizarre vraag vond, want Javascript was de voornaamste reden waarom iedereen mijn cursus wou volgen. Nadat de webmaster me niet veel later vroeg of er eigenlijk nog een stuk cursus over GIMP zat aan te komen, een programma voor fotobewerking, begon ik me zorgen te maken. Des te meer toen één van de cursisten wegglipte omwille van “een belangrijke vergadering”. Gaf ik de verkeerde stof? Ging alles dan toch te traag, zelfs al kreeg maar een enkeling alle oefeningen opgelost? Of net te snel?

Omdat ik de helft van de klas niet in de steek wou laten ten voordele van twee slimmerds, en omdat ik sowieso niet geneigd was om twintig verschillende onderwerpen half-en-half aan te leren, heb ik me die opmerkingen niet echt aangetrokken, op één toevoeging aan het curriculum na: een korte introductie tot thema’s ontwikkelen in Drupal.

Ze maken je ‘t nochtans niet gemakkelijk om het been stijf te houden, die Ethiopiërs. Ten gevolge van hun gebrekkig Engels hebben ze een heel bizarre manier om vragen te stellen. In plaats van "do you think we’d have some time to learn image manipulation in GIMP?" zeggen ze “you will learn us GIMP yes”, zonder enige vragende toon en met een onschuldig gezicht dat geen spoor van passieve agressie weergeeft. Die onschuldige blik maakt het natuurlijk nog erger, omdat die de hele situatie wat doet lijken op een mafioso die droogjes en emotieloos opmerkt dat je er geweest bent tenzij het beschermingsgeld binnen het uur voor de deur staat.

Er gaat niet alleen veel verloren in een vertaling, er komt per abuis ook veel bij.

Later die week kwam Yonas me een vraag stellen. Yonas is webmaster van Jimma University. De vraag was of ik straks de certificaten kon tekenen die bewezen dat iedereen kundig was in de hele rits aan technologieën die ik hen had aangeleerd, de ene cursist al met wat meer succes dan de andere. Toen werd het mysterie van eerder in de week, de plotse vloedgolf aan vragen voor nieuwe cursusonderwerpen, me duidelijk. Alles wat we zagen zou op dat papiertje terechtkomen, en iedereen die aanwezig was kreeg zo’n certificaat, en voor werkgevers zijn certificaten bijna even belangrijk als een diploma. Meer is beter.

Iedereen was in het begin van de cursus leergierig en blij om iets bij te leren, maar de dag voor de ceremoniële uitreiking was de primaire bekommernis zoveel mogelijk dingen gezien te hebben, of je die nu begreep of niet. Ik wil enthousiasme om nieuwe dingen te leren niet verwarren met academische trukerijen, en ik ben niet zo cynisch om te denken dat alle studenten bezorgd waren om dat certificaat. ’t Is alleen spijtig voor die paar studenten waarvoor een certificaat meer betekende dan kennis.

Na acht werkdagen zaten de lessen er op. Onze laatste oefening was een soort rudimentair gebouwenbeheersysteem. Ik kon terug naar huis keren.

De eerste keer dat ik op de universiteit naar het toilet ging, vroeg één van de cursisten me met bezorgde blik of alles wel naar wens was. Jimma heeft besloten dat ze propere toiletten onbelangrijk vinden of te duur voor zo’n banaliteit, en die cursist moet gedacht hebben dat mijn tedere Europese sensibiliteiten geschokeerd zouden zijn door wat stank, niet beseffend dat wij ons vrijwillig aan dat soort vuiligheid onderwerpen op muziekfestivals. Vertederend.

Elk half uur vroeg wel iemand “is everything ok?” Ze zitten er met je in.

Maar er is één iets dat mijn cursisten en alle andere mensen die ik op de universiteit heb leren kennen, niet kunnen laten: elk gesprek waar je bijzit, zelfs als ze je nadrukkelijk hebben uitgenodigd als gast, elk gesprek is in het Amhaars. Soms kijkt je dan iemand aan, beseft dat je al een kwartier met je duimen draait, excuseert zich omdat ze je buitensluiten uit het gesprek… en converseert dan prompt verder in zijn moedertaal. Zeer bizar, maar ik veronderstel dat de verklaring eenvoudig is: hun Engels is nèt goed genoeg om een cursus als de mijne mits volgehouden inspanning te kunnen vatten. Bovenop zo’n vermoeiende lessen tijdens de koffiepauzes òòk nog eens Engels moeten spreken lijkt hen bijgevolg, gok ik, equivalent aan een vork in je oog steken. Je meenemen op uitstapjes en op café en ’s avonds iets gaan eten, allemaal met plezier. Je moest ze alleen niet vragen om Engels te spreken. Het is ze vergeven.

Twaalf dagen Engels was vermoeiend voor hen, maar twaalf dagen Amhaars ook voor mij. Het was een bijzondere reis. Ik ben blij dat ik mijn studenten iets heb kunnen bijbrengen. Maar ik was ook blij terug te zijn.

Getting it

2011-10-30T00:00:00+02:00

As much as I love new stuff, I’m your archetypical late adopter. I don’t have a smartphone and I don’t think I’ll ever get a tablet. I started using twitter just a couple of months ago. My MP3 player is seven years old and it’s not an iPod. I started using the Delicious bookmarking tool at precisely the moment everybody decided social bookmarking was passé. I write all my blogposts in TextEdit.

All in all, I sympathize with the old farts in the newsroom. A liveblog here and a Google map there isn’t suddenly going to turn you into a better reporter.

What does worry me, though, is that many journalists seem to define their jobs in an oddly circular way: journalism is what journalists do. Hence, to be a good journalist, you should emulate what good journalists did before you, or more specifically, how they wrote. And because the best journalists ten and twenty years ago didn’t know the first thing about statistics, never used an RSS reader to keep track of their beat and surely didn’t care about engaging with their readers, why should we?

But by imitating the best journalism of yesterday without a full understanding of why that journalism was great and what made it so powerful, our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair.

If accountability journalism is your thing, why do you not know how to use Excel and Google Fusion Tables? If awareness is what it’s about, then why are you so afraid of using twitter to reach out to people? If it’s important for your job to keep up with the latest happenings in the music industry, how can you not realize how much easier RSS will make things for you?

I don’t believe there’s a great digital divide between journalists and techies. I believe there’s a great divide between those who merely do journalism, and those who get it. Between people who want to write and people who want to be reporters. If you get journalism, you won’t allow a little uneasiness around computers or a lack of mathematical aptitude to faze you and keep you from being a better journalist. If there’s an obstacle preventing you from giving your readers the kind of reporting you feel they deserve, you’ll pick up whatever tool will help you to do a better job and you’re not going to rest until you get it. And if you don’t find the right tool, then you try your best with the tools you’ve got, like liveblogging by constantly updating that same post, cajoling a tech friend into helping you out with that Google map or keeping in touch with readers over email if your boss won’t let you use social media.

Conversely, we can do without the gadgeteers and the fakers. A lot of the journalists that use twitter nowadays stupidly use it as a cheap way to get quotes from readers without having to leave the comfort of their chair. Or they ask the graphics department for a flashy infographic because interactive visuals look so pretty. That’s technology too. It’s just not very interesting.

It’s that old cliché, courtesy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Get people excited about being better journalists, show them how technology helps them reach that goal, and the luddites will be luddites no more.

Prototyping with Draughtsman

2011-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve just put up a small app on GitHub which I’ve been using to help me create prototypes using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It works a little bit like mod_php and Apache in that you just write code or stylesheets in whatever kind of format you want, and the app takes care of transparently compiling and serving up the result, but without having to create any kind of project structure or scaffolds, and without having to mess with application servers or autocompile scripts that continually watch file directories for updates.

I’d been noticing this weird gap in how I prototyped and how I worked on production apps: for prototypes I usually started with quick-and-dirty plain HTML and CSS just to get something on the page, but whenever I had a decent-enough prototype that looked like, hey, it might be worth actually turning into something real, I had to convert my HTML into the Jade or Django templating language, my CSS into SASS or Stylus and my JavaScript into CoffeeScript, losing valuable time but more importantly being forced into the rather boring and uninspiring task of converting things that already work from one format to another before you can get back to business again.

So you surf to localhost:3400, browse through the directory listing (which defaults to ~/Sites on OS X), click on a .jade file and it renders HTML, transparently converting any .styl, .sass and .coffee files as well, if you have any. Of course, whether this would be useful for you depends on how much prototyping you actually do, and whether it supports the kind of formats you use in real projects. That’s why the whole system is plugin-based, and you can add your own formats with little snippets of code like this:

I’m taking requests for handlers (and might even do a PHP handler sometime) and if you need some help building your own, or just getting the app up and running, holler.

I’ve included autostart scripts for Ubuntu and OS X, though I don’t know if they’ll work for everybody.

You can use it together with Apache too, by having draughtsman forward any requests for formats it doesn’t need to or can’t compile — say, PHP — to an address of your choosing. For me, though, draughtsman has pretty much obviated the need for a LAMP install.

Full docs and details at https://github.com/stdbrouw/draughtsman. Check it out!

Designers need engineers

2011-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

Like so many of you, I’ve been indulging in the amateur analyses all over the web about why Steve Jobs, p.b.o.h., was so great. The recurring message is pithily summarized by Mathew Ingram: “Technology is the least important thing about Apple products”.

Bullshit. The reason why Apple manages to build such magnificent products is because design and usability drive the engineering, yet the technology behind their products is by no means trivial. Apple cares a lot about engineering, more than Dell and Samsung and RIM.

It takes one designer to decide that touch interfaces are the bee’s knees, maybe another one to come up with intuitive finger gestures for such an interface, and then it takes engineers to convert the electrical capacitance of your fingers on a piece of glass into digital information, engineers to make the best damn screen they can, and more engineers to get a computer to interpret your wildly inaccurate finger movements.

Have you ever used a bad touchpad? Like, any touchpad not made by Apple? It’s horrible. Designers without engineers to back them up.

It takes one designer to say “we’re going to build a small, sleek laptop”. It then takes engineers to make sure that laptop doesn’t overheat, engineers to assure that its tiny speakers don’t sound like crap, and engineers to fit everything into that small package.

Have you ever noticed how none of those beautiful Bose speakers in the hifi store sound any good? What a disappointment. Designers without engineers to back them up.

Oh, and, do you remember Windows ME? “We’re really working toward simplifying the computing experience for home users.” said Microsoft’s Shawn Sanford. Except it crashed all the time.

It might seem like semantics, but there’s a big difference between putting design first and saying design is more important than technology. It’s the kind of attitude that leads companies to hire UX experts and design experts who then push all kinds of recommendations down to IT and engineering, and afterwards complain that nothing ever got implemented. Why? Because these companies don’t understand that good design is more than pretty and friendly: good design has meat, good design has substance, good design depends on great engineers.

Reading is for suckers (quote)

2011-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

Lewis DVorkin from Forbes talks obliquely about how single-page stories are not high on the list of priorities for his news site.

Translation, reading on any major news site is a terrible experience. We know this but are doing nothing to distinguish ourselves because we’re quite happy with the revenue our ads bring in from artificially inflated pageviews created by a design that places our users’ reading experience somewhere between last and not even on the radar. In the meantime, can you please purchase the print magazine so that we can stay in business?

(Andrew Spittle)

Day-old news (comment)

2011-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

We've worn out the idea that yesterday's news doesn't cut it anymore in this fast-paced uber-connected world. There's good journalism at every time scale.

I’m not going to complain about the New Yorker for being print-first and not very interested in audience interaction. I don’t think that’s the right approach for most media outlets but it works for them and they have some kick-ass journalism going on. WIRED has an amazing online presence but I really only read the monthly magazine, which by the way always arrives two weeks too late here in Belgium, so depending on their editorial calendar the reporting I’m reading is 4-6 weeks old. I don’t mind. And when I’m reading a day-old newspaper on the train, I don’t mind either. So in that sense, I do agree with Godin when he says that the value of breaking news is overrated: there’s room all over the spectrum, for live reporting, for enterprise stories that take months to produce, and yes, for day-old news.

Now, the more interesting question is: when you stop hunting for breaking news, is there anything you can do with the time you’ve gained? Can you provide a service that is perhaps more valuable than breaking news to your audience if only they’ll humor you while you’re slow-cooking? Answer that, and you know what to do.

A wild success and an utter failure

2011-10-19T00:00:00+02:00

Reading an old post by the wonderful Jason Scott about The Great Failure of Wikipedia and then a more recent one by Megan Garber titled Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed? about research by Benjamin Hill and these pieces reminded me of something I’ve wanted to write for a long time, about how Wikipedia is a wild success despite its utter failure.

Hill’s big finding is that Wikipedia has become so popular because its founders didn’t buy into the if you build it, they will come meme, so they knew they had to write and edit and evangelize to get people on board instead of fetishizing technology.

And the evangelizing worked. I couldn’t live without Wikipedia anymore, it’s that good. Frankly, I’m so in love with Wikipedia that I’d gladly pay to keep it running, and so I did: last year, I donated. You should too.

Procedural whackjobs

But Wikipedia works its magic through what is actually a massively inefficient publishing process. Important stuff gets deleted by idiots, discussions about unimportant issues drag on, pages get deleted because they’re somehow deemed not notable enough, and so on. People get pissed off and nine times out of ten they’re right to be mad. Wikipedia has accumulated its fair share of self-righteous, power-hungry people with too much time on their hands.

Wikipedia works despite its guardians and community standards, not always because of them.

Luckily Wikipedia is such a big place that each subsection has grown its own contributor culture. As a senior during my undergraduate studies, I contributed pretty actively to Wikipedia, doing research about philosophical pragmatism and related articles. Surprise: I enjoyed it, it was great. The procedural whackjobs tend to leave literature, philosophy and science alone.

Share!

As a contributor, it’s more pleasant if you actually understand that Wikipedia has a very specific purpose, and that is to make all kinds of subjects and concepts understandable to a general audience, with a (good!) bias towards perpetuating the common wisdom and mainstream ways of thinking. This is Jason Scott’s old beef with Wikipedia and it doesn’t make sense to me.

If you have uncovered fantastic new information about a certain topic, you should write an essay or a book or a blog post and then maybe that will get incorporated into relevant Wikipedia articles.

If you have a particularly zesty way of writing and are worried that *-for-brain editors will eat it all up and regurgitate it as a bland soup, you’re probably right, and you should find another place to share your knowledge.

If you’re bringing a fresh new angle to a subject, a new way of thinking about things, for Pete’s sake, don’t waste it on Wikipedia.

You’ll find that you’ll feel much better about Wikipedia if you look at it as just one repository of knowledge, rather than as a grand unifying thing.

Create your own knowledge base, answer questions on StackOverflow and Quora instead of writing about it on Wikipedia, blog about your area of expertise, release your rights-free images on Flickr (I do) instead of Wikipedia.

The important part is that you share knowledge. Wherever you want, really, as long as we can find it.

Feeding the machine

Wikipedia is about people, not technology. But here’s a less charitable interpretation: Wikipedia has to be about people because it never cared about technology.

Editors manually create endless list pages, like all people born in 1603 or people from Rhode Island, because Wikipedia’s data model, viz. no data model at all, doesn’t allow these pages to be autogenerated from simple database queries. Same thing for disambiguation pages, figuring out which pages map to which translations, and linking broader topics together with more specific articles.

We’re all complaining about our crappy CMS but our misfortune pales in comparison to MediaWiki and the way it devours Wikipedia contributors’ cognitive surplus and cajoles them into repetitive manual labor that you figure, this being the 21st century and all, computers would do for them.

Wikitext

Then there’s wikitext, which once upon a time had a Markdown-like elegance but has now spiraled so out of control that most local or topical wikis fail before they’ve started: potential contributors take one look at the syntax, decide rocket surgery might be more within their cognitive capacities and run away before contributing even a single word.

Frankly, considering how hard it is for non-techies to write in MediaWiki, I’m surprised that a local city wiki like the Davis Wiki has ever gotten off the ground. It has certainly survived against all odds. And I’m not surprised they’re looking to get rid of MediaWiki.

The WikiMedia foundation has been looking for a Rich Text Editing software dev for a long time. They try, but I don’t know if they can truly solve much considering MediaWiki is such a decrepit codebase. All improvement is bound to be the electronic equivalent of dodging landmines.

Blobs and bots

Part of the problem is that Wikipedia and its engineers are introducing ever more (confusing) wiki syntax to cope with semi-structured data. Semi-structured data are things like a person’s birth date and current residence, anything that’s not a blob of prose. Structure can give content a second life in maps and timelines, and makes it easier to find what you need, like famous people from Rhode Island born after 1972.

Getting any of that good stuff out is really hard, which is why DBpedia — DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. — deserves so much kudos. Of course, if Wikipedia’s data model were anywhere near reasonable, creating an api.wikipedia.org wouldn’t take a separate project like DBpedia, instead it would be a good day’s work for a software engineer and that’d be that.

Wikipedia bots alleviate some of the drudge work by gardening and cleaning Wikipedia automatically while crawling through its pages. For example, many American city pages were created and are updated with new census information and maps without human intervention. Thank you, rambot. But these bots themselves are convoluted pieces of technology. Wikipedia’s data model means they have fudge raw text without stepping on anything real humans have written, which is not easy.

Bots help, just not enough.

Wikipedia is tragic that way: there has been no money, no strategy and no guts to take the software to the next level for ages now, so we’re stuck with a patchwork of fixes and tweaks on top of software that was already out of date when it was first released in 2002.

Inside the sausage factory

As a reader, you don’t really notice that developers have a hard time getting meaningful data out of this huge bank of knowledge, you don’t notice that professors and experts get frustrated fighting with nimwits about stuff those experts know inside-out, you don’t notice that many early contributors never return, you don’t notice the vandalism, you don’t notice how many people whose contributions we’d cherish are put off by that horrible, horrible wikitext syntax.

(What English readers also don’t notice is that local versions of Wikipedia, like the one in Dutch, are even more inconsistent in their quality than the English-language flagship. Wikipedia wins by sheer numbers, and when those numbers aren’t present, quality suffers.)

But here’s the thing: the common wisdom that garbage in means garbage out doesn’t actually apply to Wikipedia. In the Wikipedia model, you put in lots of raw material that’s decidedly less than perfect, but the stuff that comes out is actually damn tasty. In other words: Wikipedia is a sausage factory.

Wikipedia needs to knock out the bullies and improve their tech, because both are making Wikipedia less great than it could be. But while they do so, let’s also just take a minute to appreciate the enormous value of this thing that we’ve created, we, together, people from all over the world.

The Five-Minute News Break

2011-10-18T00:00:00+02:00

Facebook is perfectly optimized for a nicely distracting two-minute browsing session during work. We open up a browser to research something for work, but, ah… why not check how our friends’ day is going first.

News websites work similarly: a homepage with a smorgasbord of content, all stories a mere click away, and each story can be skimmed in one or two minutes. And then shared through twitter just as quickly.

When we think about how to monetize news, we hardly ever account for the fact that over half of all news consumption happens in short five-minute breaks in between work, studying or waiting for the bus. But these short breaks change everything.

You will never ever be able to ask money from somebody who’s surfing during work time. It’s embarassing enough that we’re getting distracted while we ought to be productive. Actively investing money into making those sneaky distractions more pleasant wouldn’t feel right, would be a bit seedy even.

In The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, one newspaper after another reports not being able to properly monetize online video even though the advertising rates for pre-rolls are very attractive to publishers. Well duh, I don’t even have a headset near my work computer, and I’d rather die than have anyone see me watching what for all they know could be cat videos on YouTube.

But it’s not just that paying for more enjoyable work breaks would feel wrong (or that work breaks are wrong!), there’s just no need for quality journalism during the daytime. When I’m working, I want to be distracted. Maybe something to clear my mind. Short updates about what’s going on in the nation fit the bill. Celebrity news does too. Cat pictures too. And news from friends on Facebook too. An investigation into how methamphetamine destroys lives… eh, not so much. Cheap content is actually the most satisfying when we’re just snacking for news.

In fact, we actively save up the really good stuff for when we’re not at work, using Instapaper, Read It Later, Klip.me, Spool and the Safari Reading List feature. But we encounter the good stuff when our frame of mind is one of uncritical consumption and aversion to paid content, which is really bad luck for publishers. By the time we get home, we, true news omnivores, have already saved up our evening reading. By the time we as a reader would be inclined to maybe pay for media, we don’t have to because you as a publisher gave it to us for free earlier. And if you wouldn’t have made it free, we’d have just skipped it. Because skipping and skimming is what we do during a five-minute break. Now that’s a Catch-22 if I ever saw one.

You can’t ask people to pay for your content at the time they’re least invested in it. You can’t sell engaged users to advertisers during the daytime, because they’re not engaged, they’re surfing and hopping.

Despite the Catch-22 that affects the news fiends among our audience (who save up during the day to read at night), can we take advantage of the smaller visitor peak from 9 to 10 P.M. and traffic during the weekends? Most news sites see a big reduction in visitors on Saturday and Sunday, in vacation periods and during the summer months. But while there’s less consumption, especially online, it’s also more relaxed and people’s tastes are a bit more refined. People still take time to savour a Sunday edition. People pay to get more out of their weekends. We should try to work with that audience, both online and in print.

Keep our daytime coverage short and sweet, and make kick-ass video, features and enterprise reporting for the evenings and weekends, when advertisers pay more and people may at the very least pay something.

The Rise of the Internet (Anti)-Intellectual? (comment)

2011-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Some academics are complaining about how vapid popular literature about internet culture is, insisting that more people should listen to *them* instead. I disagree.

I’d have to disagree that academic works are by definition or even de facto more rigorous or closer to the truth than popular works à la Jarvis.

While sociology and psychology are empirical sciences, the closer you get to theoretical sociology and communication studies, the more philosophical these investigations become and thus the more dependent on the persuasiveness of the argumentation and, let’s be honest, on being able to string together a bunch of pithy quotes by important precursors that through a process akin to magic end up supporting your argument. I have a master’s in philosophy and plenty of buddies with doctorates, so I know full well how this works and how dishonest some academics are in this regard — whether the intellectual fraud is pursued wittingly or not, I don’t know.

In my own field of expertise, epistemology, it was at times plain dazzling to see how childish philosophers can act when confronted with their opponents’ arguments, with how much nonchalance opposing views get brushed off. Or how simplistic some of the proposed theories and arguments were in the first place. A PhD does not a scholar make.

(As an aside, the slightly immature running joke among my fellow philosophy students was always that critical theory and communication studies was just crappy philosophy, and that we felt sorry for people in those fields, heh.)

There is amazingly great work going on in academe (though not all of it as well-written as it could be), but for every good paper there are ten bullshit ones. Which is about the same ratio that you can expect to see in the literature “business folks” write. Yet the message you seem to convey is one of blanket rejection — maybe at most this stuff is “enjoyable”, but it’s not written by someone in my professional sphere, so it can’t be any good. Is that really what you’re saying? Is that opinion based on broad and substantive evidence, viz. have you read a lot of these books, and have you tried to read them without too many preconceptions, without begrudging the non-professionals for entering your territory even before you start to read?

Come to grips with the fact that universities are not the only place where wisdom originates nowadays, and take responsibility for academia’s utter failure in disseminating its findings and theories. Solve that problem before you complain about jaded publishers, a public that does not listen and before you start calling anyone an anti-intellectual.

(And, yes, you hit a nerve here.)

Just a matter of time (comment)

2011-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

Matt Waite remarks on how some students, when faced with a technical challenge, respond by saying "No idea how to do this, but gimme some time and I'll figure it out" whereas other students respond by saying "No idea how to do this", end of line. Is this the self-imposed "journalists can't do math" meme rearing its ugly head all over again?

Isn’t it an exposure thing too? Once you’ve mastered one specific tech, learning another is suddenly that much less daunting, and the perceived challenge becomes ever smaller for each new technology you learn, even if the learning process itself is more difficult each time. But familiarization takes time, and I don’t think a teacher can influence it very much.

Or maybe there’s a disconnect between the technology and the goals students want to achieve.

The engineer’s attitude when faced with a big problem is to cut it up into small chunks that are manageable, so when the problem is “telling great stories” an engineer can see how programming can be one small but important chunk, alongside the more traditional writing and reporting curriculum.

But if you’re not used to the engineer’s way of thinking, then the idea that you’ll have to learn how to code to be a better journalist will sound very foreign, no matter how passionately a teacher tries to explain it. And thus you won’t be motivated to persevere when shit gets tough — coding becomes a dreaded obstacle that keeps you from graduating (or keeping your job) instead of a useful skill you must acquire at all costs.

So how do you get journalists and future journalists to yearn for technical knowledge?

Great Expectations (quote)

2011-10-02T00:00:00+02:00

So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?

(Howard Owens)

On bundles and blobs

2011-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

News is information. (It’s many other things, too, but forget that for now.) The news industry often bundles information, because bundling is a convenient and an efficient way to disseminate information.

We bundle information over time: instead of reporting everything as we find it out live, we gather up all kinds of related information and bundle it into a story. Bundles come in different sizes: we can churn out a quick news report in half an hour, or we can save up months of work for an enterprise story. They also come in different colors: most often we bundle topically related information (a story), but sometimes we bundle by type of information (a rumors section) or time (today’s linkblog).

We also bundle — weave — information into narratives. Stories are not concatenated facts, they’re not bullet-point lists. Stories combine related information and glue it together in paragraphs. Let’s call these narratives blobs.

Now, the thing about bundles and blobs is that they’re simultaneously awesome and stupid. Bundles and blobs are like nuclear fission, really: splitting the atom powers your house and it happens to be a great way of killing people.

Bundles are convenient and efficient, but slow. We can’t have slow in a 24-hour news cycle. Blobs are the stuff of every great story, but they’re unstructured which means we can’t use computers to make them even better.

You know when we know

Whenever we bundle information over time, we’re stashing information onto a backlog when we could be releasing it into the world right away — that’s why bundles are slow. Newspapers are yesterday’s news and for stories we really care about, that just doesn’t cut it. Hence 24-hour news channels, live reporting, text alerts, tweets, sneak preview blog posts and living stories.

Slowness is one grievance, another is the distance stories create between the writer and her audience. There are bound to be many smart folk who use our news websites, and by only giving them access to the finished product, we’re refusing to let them help us tell a better story. Journalism is one great big conversation… but only if we allow it to be.

There’s a catch… Unbundling (cue dramatic orchestral soundtrack) has a price. More bits means less context and less understanding. Let me explain that.

Our brains are really good at context switching, but it’s taxing. Leaving your email client on all day and reading each mail immediately as it arrives is a productivity killer like few others. And don’t bug me on the phone while I’m working, unless you want to ruin my day.

Our brains are also really good at connecting the dots, but they’re best at it when there’s a good chunk of information floating around in the working memory. You can’t read Aristotle’s Organon one sentence a day and end up a Peripatetic.

Learning twenty different facts about a news story one at a time and spread throughout the day implies lots of context switching and a pernicious lack of that chunkiness you need to get your brains up to full power. The end result: tweets and bits, much like giant cookies, are best produced and consumed in moderation.

It’s not surprising that together with the advent of update-as-we-learn-more styles of reporting, there’s also a growing interest within media circles for long-form stories and explanatory journalism.

As we do more bit-sized reporting, we have to figure out the right mix between long-form and short-form. Nothing but tiny updates and readers will tell us we’re not doing our jobs, that they’re drowning in information but don’t feel like they’re learning anything. This goes double for unfamiliar topics: readers don’t care for and can’t understand nuggets without a good old-fashioned story to tell them what it’s all about first. No updates and no process journalism on the other hand, and people will flock to faster and more participatory platforms, where they are treated as more than just a spectator.

Structure

I mentioned before that stories, which bundle information by translating it into sentences and paragraphs, are unstructured. Stories are big blobs of text. News stories hint at all sorts of structure, mind you, mostly of the x is y type: this person said that, this review gives that pub a four-star rating, this story is about that organization, which organized this event which happened at that place right there. But all of that structure is hidden in narrative prose, which makes it hard to parse for computers, which in turn makes it hard to display in another way or to repurpose it for another goal. Publish a map alongside each crime story? Nope. Create something as simple as a Top 5 of all recent movie reviews? Nope. Grab all the latest quotes from interviews with local politicians? Definitely nope.

The solution here is doing away with that other kind of bundle we’ve just talked about: the blob. Don’t for a second think that because you’ve done away with bundles, you’ve done away with blobs too. You can slice up your story into individual sentences if you want to, but instead of one big blob you’ve now got many tiny blobs. Doesn’t help you very much. You can tweet and live report all you want, but that doesn’t give you any more structure to work with than a big fat story would.

If we want to repurpose news or create mashups and need structure to do so, we have to put every individual piece of information we care about in a database — say, a database that links all stories to the geographical coordinates of the places those stories talk about. (Coordinates instead of place names, because names are free-form, thus blobby, thus bad.)

There’s a price to pay for unblobbing the news too. Applying structure to news usually means adding structural tags in addition to categories, dates, locations and other metadata. What it usually boils down to for a journalist is this: first, we submit our story as usual; then, we fill out a form so computers can sort-of understand our story too. But “just” filling out a form for every story we work on can turn out to be more drudge work than we signed up for. We don’t want to hasten through the categorization and data entry either, because if we don’t do it right, our data will be a mess and all our structure will mean nothing because it’s unreliable.

As metadata is such a time sink, getting rid of blobs is the art of doing just enough and not too much. It’s an art most news organizations don’t yet master.

So I guess what I’m saying is…

Stories make sense because they have just the right information density and allow journalists to add some much-needed context to the news in a way bit-sized updates can’t. But they’re slow, and they shut out readers instead of making them part of the process. Tweets and blog posts and short updates fare better in that regard — as long as you don’t overdo them because then it gets confusing and annoying. How much is too much depends on the story.

Stories make sense because people learn more from engaging narrative than from fact sheets. Without those fact sheets, however, computers can’t help us explore fresh ways to tell a story. We need new ways to tell stories: readers are losing their bearings in a sea of news and we need the tools to turn that experience into something better.

Keep writing the trusty old news article. But do more than that.

Making money with media

2011-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

“I think the economic challenge is too high”.

It’s ridiculously hard to make good money with news. It truly is. I’ve been working in this industry for three years now. I feel like I’ve become pretty good at what I do thank you very much. Just don’t ask me how to make money with news.

Some newspapers and blogs are still in that happy zone where they can rely solely on advertising. But advertising budgets keep shrinking, and anyway, there’s something deeply unsettling about making money by annoying the hell out of your readers and viewers. (Oliver Reichenstein would disagree, however.)

Yes, there is good advertising too.

I actually enjoy leafing through a magazine with beautiful full-page ads.

I like sponsorship schemes too. A sponsor’s logo next to an act of journalism feels like a company telling us that, hey, they like this stuff just as much as we do, and they want to support good reporting. (Yes, I know it’s actually rather less altruistic.)

And while advertising that works on the principle of intent generation — buy this, buy this! — is annoying, that’s not the only kind of ads there are. Google’s AdWords or featured listings in a classifieds section can actually be pretty helpful. That’s because they rely on intent harvesting instead: trying to sway users towards certain options when they’ve already decided they want to buy something much like what you’re offering.

As we switch more and more from interruption marketing to permission marketing, advertising will in all likelihood become more helpful and less intrusive, but there will be less of it too. How much money can we get out of just sponsorships and contextual ads?

The cold hard fact is that if I were a local business owner today, I would not for the life of me pay for a banner ad on a news website. You get so much more out of a simple Facebook page it’s ridiculous.

We’d need less money in the first place if we cut down on spending and organized newspapers a little more like startups. But lean hyperlocals are struggling too. And that new flagship in Texas, the tightly-run well-oiled Tribune, is a non-profit. John Thornton simply does not believe the Texas Tribune and its kind of journalism could work as a commercial enterprise.

The jury is still out on the workability of paywalls. I agree with Steve Yelvington that a porous wall can make business sense. But part of what makes online journalism so much more engaging than its print counterpart is all the conversation around stories and news reports. No matter how soft your wall is, it’s still a wall, and you can’t talk about something you can’t see. Making money by destroying part of our value proposition is better than having no money at all, but you’ll forgive me for not being all psyched about it.

Cross-subsidization has long been the way media companies made money. News itself never made much money, but the classifieds did, so all was good. Thing is, when you sell a bundle of only tangentially related things where one part subsidizes the other, eventually somebody is going to take the profitable part of your business and copy it — without the news part.

A couple of years back, the Chicago Tribune toyed with the idea of offering general web design services. Rue89 actually does. But a web design company doesn’t need a news website to provide its services, so you’re at a competitive disadvantage against the vast majority of web design firms that aren’t media organizations. I’ve heard people say that it’s embarassing that it wasn’t a newspaper that invented Craigslist. I disagree. If we had, Craig Newmark still would have kicked our ass and still would have stolen our classifieds. Again: if you bundle things, prepare to get unbundled.

Cross-subsidization and loss leaders in journalism aren’t entirely dead though. Solid reporting leads to strong, well-respected brands. You can leverage that cultural capital to help sell social media courses or a styleguide or an event. There’s money there, but again, less than there used to be.

Perhaps it’s just that the web sucks for making money. Who knows. But iPad apps and interactive magazines are turning out to be far from the huge revenue makers they were hyped up to be. Don’t expect a solution there. Print won’t die, but circulations are declining and the average subscriber keeps getting older.

Micropayments, then? Something like iTunes, say? Long-form journalism on the Kindle (where you pay a couple of bucks for a single story) seems to be working out for ProPublica. But honestly, there’s so much news out there, so much of it interchangeable. Why pay for stories when Google can point you to the same story on a different website for free? And even when it’s great, unique journalism we’re talking about, it doesn’t take a genius to see why a news experience that consists of having consumers ask themselves “Okay, should I pay for this article? Maybe? Maybe not? Maybe? Maybe not?” over and over and over again is unpalatable.

Among the many tip jar systems, I like Readability most, but I don’t see it going mainstream.

Premium content was a fad some years back, but it turned out “premium” really just meant jazzed-up mediocrity. Yes, you can charge (or charge more) for superb content, but really great content is also really expensive to make, so while increasing revenue with premium content is easy, actually getting profits out of it isn’t.

Some media execs still want to make money with user-generated content, but, um, 2005 wants its business model back. Among community-driven sites, MetaFilter and Reddit and Davis Wiki are doing well, but it’s not like their model is easily replicated.

Steve Buttry wants local media companies to become community service companies, and I like that line of thinking, but the Internet hates middlemen so getting your cut on ticket sales and daily deals as a facilitator might be harder than you imagine.

I refuse to believe that media is a hard business to be in, but evidence is against me.

It seems the best we can do is mix-and-match ten different sources of income, none of them sufficient on their own but not too shabby if you add ‘em up. Thing is: that’s what news gurus say, but I’ve never actually seen one of them pull off said diversification.

This is driving me nuts.

Anti-patterns (quote)

2011-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

With a thick dose of irony, rickmb pithily shows the childishness of arguments against common abstractions in programming, like web frameworks and object-relational mappers.

Trains are an anti-pattern because you almost always eventually have to go somewhere where there are no tracks or stations.

(rickmb)

Designer languages and incidental complexity (comment)

2011-09-15T00:00:00+02:00

Andrew Luetgers thinks CoffeeScript is an exercise in making a programming language that is as terse as possible, at the expense of readability. I argue that, instead, it is about achieving a closer fit between what you think and the code you actually write down. Cutting down on line noise, not creating it.

Hm, your argument that CoffeeScript divides the community is specious at best. Sure, on a superficial level it means people writing code for the browser are now using two different languages (well, plus ObjectiveJ, ClojureScript and a couple of others) but at the end of the day both crowds can use each other’s libraries and both crowds are knowledgeable about JavaScript. I dunno, maybe there’s something to this line of thinking, but then you really do need to do better than just spreading FUD around.

Secondly, your fear that CoffeeScript leads to line noise and is harder to scan utterly misunderstands the design goals of CoffeeScript. Sure, CS cuts out and shortens syntax here and there, but the ultimate goals are greater consistency and better readability. It’s about things like default arguments, list comprehensions, function binding, destructuring assignment and so on, which are obviously all things that are possible in JavaScript and, you might argue, things you can do in your sleep in plain JavaScript too… but they lead to an incredible amount of line noise, with temporary vars and brackets and parens all over the place.

Helping us express common patterns in as clean a way as possible is not at all about saving keystrokes, it’s about making a language that brings what you mean and what you write as close together as humanly possible, instead of forcing you to think about stupid implementation details and incidental complexity.

This is especially obvious if you’ve ever coded in Python or Ruby. You want to quickly loop through a hash, whip up a quick for ... in loop, and notice that, err, this isn’t working at all. You want to see whether a string starts with a substring, look for something like str.startswith(substr) and realize that you’re going to have to make do with str.indexOf trickery, which is easy, but indexOf isn’t very descriptive now is it? You want to do something as simple as adding a few default arguments to a function or method, and realize that JavaScript has no syntax for such a common pattern. Now, I’m sure you’re thinking “well, but these things are super-easy in JavaScript, you just have to know how to do them” — but at that point you’d actually be arguing the inverse of your original claim, namely that the fact that JavaScript is harder to write and scan because it doesn’t abstract away these patterns doesn’t matter. Well, it does!

What Your Old Graphing Calculator Says About Technology (quote)

2011-08-25T00:00:00+02:00

Here’s the thing. Some technologies don’t change all that quickly because we don’t need them to. Much as we like to tell the story of The World Changing So Fast, most of it doesn’t. Look at cars or power plants or watches or power strips or paper clips. The changes are in the details, and they come slowly. But that’s ok. More change isn’t necessarily better.

(Alexis Madrigal)

Philosophy

2011-08-24T00:00:00+02:00

I studied philosophy for four years and enjoyed a little more than two of those. I enjoyed the first year because the classes were so varied: literature, world history, psychology, ethics and epistemology. I enjoyed my last year, my master’s, because of the small class sizes, fun electives and professors that actually took their students seriously. I learned a lot from my studies, even if it isn’t always easy for me to answer what exactly that might be. An attitude, a way of thinking, a perspective.

Come to think of it, I did get some actual answers to actual questions too. The first thing philosophy students are usually told when starting their education is that it’s about the search, not about the answers, and that you shouldn’t really expect any profound answers to life’s questions. Funnily enough answers to the big questions are exactly the ones I’ve found, though. I feel like I have an understanding of the role art can fill in society, what the nature of knowledge is and how you can decide whether an act is moral, immoral or amoral.

I’ve also learned that philosophy is sometimes a very narrow-minded discipline. That’s something you probably don’t understand if you haven’t studied it. I’ve learned that philosophers sometimes willfully forget certain questions. How can we organize knowledge in ways that help people learn? How do you create a culture of learners? What are the best heuristics for determining the veracity of an actual piece of information you see before you? Are there ways we can get more output from scientists without resorting to publish or perish tactics?

Those questions are big questions too. They’re some of the core questions of modern society. But they’re also eminently practical. And the practical realm is one that philosophers, at least since the 20th century, have schlepped off to scientists. Which is silly, but what can you do?

What’s interesting though, is that people around the world are working on each of those big issues, even if they’re not pure and good enough for philosophers to bother with. Information scientists at universities, in private companies, in the media and at a search company like Google think every day about how to organize and disseminate knowledge. Sociologists sometimes ask poignant questions about the nature of science and the ways we’ve organized our knowledge gathering operations in universities and labs. Cognitive psychology teaches us many things about knowledge that philosophical epistemology doesn’t.

At the end of July, less than a month ago, I started reading Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers. And now I can add yet another discipline to the list of subjects that answer questions that philosophers have been asking (or should have been asking) for centuries. As a philosopher I’ve learned to be critical about everything I read and hear, not to see causation in every correlation, to think for five minutes before accepting a scientific report at face value. Now, as an amateur statistician, I’ve learned regression analysis do to the same thing. As a philosopher I’ve learned that the improbable isn’t impossible, and familiarized myself with the problem of induction. As an amateur statistician I’m using simple Monte Carlo simulations and know about p-values, so I can actually calculate how probable it is that the conclusions I draw from data are the result of reality being the way it is rather than statistical noise.

When are universities going to give us a major like that, one that teaches us about the role information has in our society and that enables us to handle bucketloads of data responsibly, using whatever mix of disciplines may help us in that quest? Philosophers with those skills are philosophers the world could use. Instead, we’re churning out experts in Kantian phenomenology and grue and bleen.

Filosofie

2011-08-24T00:00:00+02:00

Ik heb vier jaar filosofie gestudeerd en dat minstens twee jaar graag gedaan. Het eerste jaar deed ik graag omdat de lessen zo gevarieerd waren, met literatuur en wereldgeschiedenis en psychologie en ethiek en kennisleer. Het laatste jaar omwille van de kleine klassen, leuke keuzevakken en proffen die je voor de verandering eens serieus nemen. Uiteindelijk heb ik heel wat bijgeleerd in mijn opleiding, al vraag je me beter niet precies wat — een houding, een manier van denken, een kijk op de wereld. (En zo dicht geëindigd tegen een grootste onderscheiding, verdorie.)

In mijn opleiding heb ik ook een paar antwoorden geleerd. Als student filosofie maken ze je meestal snel genoeg wijs dat het om de zoektocht gaat, niet de antwoorden, en dat filosofie meer is dan zwanzen over de grote levensvragen… maar grappig genoeg zijn dat wel de vragen waarop ik antwoorden gevonden heb. Antwoorden op vragen zoals welke rol kunst kan spelen in de maatschappij, wat de aard is van kennis en wat de juiste manier is om te beslissen of iemand een morele, immorele of amorele daad stelt.

In mijn laatste jaar filosofie heb ik ook geleerd dat filosofie soms een zeer nauwdenkende discipline is. Iets dat je waarschijnlijk niet begrijpt als je het niet hebt gestudeerd. Ik heb geleerd dat filosofie soms, en het lijkt wel bij opzet, bepaalde vragen vergeet. Zoals: hoe kunnen we de kennis in de wereld zo organiseren dat mensen die willen leren geen haarbreed in de weg staat? Hoe kweek je zo’n intellectuele nieuwsgierigheid? En hoe bepaal je dan eigenlijk of de zogenaamde kennis die je voor je hebt ook écht kennis is. Hoe zorgen we ervoor dat wetenschappers meer kennis produceren, en minder van het soort onderzoek waar enkel zijzelf of hun departementshoofden om geven?

Die vragen zijn ook grote vragen, het zijn zelfs de kernvragen van onze moderne samenleving. Het zijn echter bij uitstek praktische vragen, en die laten filosofen liever over aan wetenschappers. Dom van ze, maar wat doe je d’r aan?

Evenwel, wat blijkt: er zijn mensen bezig met èlk van die grote maatschappelijke vragen. Informatiewetenschappers aan universiteiten, in bedrijven, in de media en bij een zoekmachine als Google denken elke dag na over hoe ze kennis kunnen organiseren en hoe hun mensen beter en efficiënter kunnen samenwerken. Sociologen stellen indringende vragen over de organisatie van ons wetenschapsbedrijf, waar het werkt en waar het foutloopt. Cognitieve psychologie leert ons soms meer over kennisleer dan de filosofische kennisleer zelf. (Daarom dat ik zo graag psychologie wou studeren nadat ik mijn masterjaar voltooid had. Maar vier jaar bijstuderen was me wat te veel van het goede.)

Eind juli, een dikke week geleden, ben ik begonnen met lezen in Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers. En nu kan ik alweer een discipline toevoegen aan de lijst van vakgebieden die vragen beantwoorden die filosofen stellen of zouden moeten stellen. Als filosoof heb ik geleerd om kritischer te zijn, in correlatie geen causatie te zien, om vijf minuten na te denken vooraleer een wetenschappelijke studie at face value aan te nemen. Nu, als amateur-statisticus, leer ik regressie-analyse om dat te doen. Als filosoof leerde ik dat het onwaarschijnlijke niet onmogelijk is, en het probleem van inductie. Nu leer ik Monte Carlo-simulaties uitvoeren en p-waarden berekenen, zodat ik wèèt hoe waarschijnlijk het is dat een statistiek voortkomt uit de staat der dingen en niet uit de menselijke tic om te veel betekenis te zuigen uit te weinig data.

Wanneer gaan universiteiten ons eens zo’n opleiding schenken, een die ons leert welke rol informatie speelt in onze maatschappij en ons in staat stelt om op een verantwoorde manier om te gaan met alle informatiestromen die we op ons afkrijgen — ongeacht welke mix van disciplines daar ook het meest geschikt voor moge zijn. Zo’n filosofen zou de wereld kunnen gebruiken, eerder dan de zoveelste verwarde professor die je warm probeert te maken voor zijn briljante herinterpretatie van Kant.

Macho programming

2011-08-23T00:00:00+02:00

Programmers pay an enormous amount of attention to their toolbox. We fight about what we think is the best editor. We’re constantly on the lookout for fresh techniques and software that’ll help us build other software. Most professionals do: woodworkers buy the best lathe and the best chisels and power tools money can buy, many musicians are afflicted with Gear Acquisition Syndrome, and if you’re a chef those newfangled ceramic knives are ever so tempting.

But programmers are a little bit different than other professionals, in that there’s no consensus whatsoever as to what the best tools and programming languages are. One favors the elegance of Python, another the power of Ruby, some people swear by PHP for its easy deployment and yet others cherish the huge toolbox that is Perl. Nothing wrong with that either: pick whatever tools you’re comfortable with and go do some work.

I have to admit, even for a zen-like chap such as me, it’s still quite the mental effort to repress knee-jerk reactions about the tools and programming languages other people use. Perl is for dinosaurs, Ruby for hipsters, Haskell is useless outside of academia, C is for masochists, C# for corporate drones. Computer programmers have probably been waging these kinds of petty religious wars since the dawn of computing. It’s harmless bickering, and not entirely unexpected since each of us has invested so much time into learning to properly use the tools we’ve chosen. Nobody likes to be told they’ve not chosen wisely, but everybody likes to tell everybody else about their own wise choice. It’s a silly but harmless social phenomenon.

What intrigues me more is how programmers will sometimes purposefully avoid using an admittedly better tool. IDEs are for sissies. Web frameworks like Django are for script kids. Why use existing APIs when you can write everything yourself? It’s the handicap principle in all its glory: everybody should know that you’re simply so amazingly skilled that even with crappy tools, you can still effortlessly best your peers and write better code, faster.

Less than ten years ago, it was C programmers talking down to Java devs. I mean, seriously, if you can’t even manage some pointers and do your own garbage collection, what business do you have calling yourself a coder?

Five years ago, the big thing in web development was whether to hand-tool a CMS or just tweak an existing one.

Now that Ruby on Rails’ adoption of CoffeeScript has put that little language into the spotlight, there’s no shortage of coders declaring that, yeah, it’s pretty neat. I mean, if you don’t know the quirks of Javascript. Which I do.

It’s funny, because in addition to showcasing a healthy self-confidence, it also betrays a fear that every new tool that comes out may finally be the one that gives young pretenders an edge while you can’t be bothered to pick it up anymore, the thing that’ll finally mark you as an old fart.

Actually, now that I think about it, it’s not that specific to programming. My dad is an electrical engineer, and occassionally he’ll fuss (in a goodhearted way) about how new graduates can’t seem to do anything without their calculators and computers anymore. And journalists who are unfamiliar with technology and social media and web apps — not veterans but aspiring reporters — are prone to say that good storytelling is still all a writer needs, in a fruitless attempt to hide their insecurity around computers.

Healthy scepticism about new stuff is a good personality trait. But take five minutes to think about whether it’s helping you, or keeping you handicapped. You’re not better because you can do things the hard way. Just stubborn.

Real names and the golden mean

2011-08-05T00:00:00+02:00

There’s a lot of buzz going on about whether Google Plus should keep its real-names policy or reject it.

Frankly, I care about Google Plus even less than I care about Facebook, but these posts raise some interesting points about why anonymous posting and pseudonyms can make sense: they avoid commenters self-censoring dissenting opinions, they can make people feel more safe on the Internet and they can get people to relax instead of feeling like every word they say will be a perennial part of their public history.

There’s really not much Google can do: either they allow pseudonyms or they don’t.

But Google’s quandary is not that of a news website: the interaction we have with readers is so different, mostly centered around the commenting policy and therefore more amenable to smart in-between solutions. We can introduce real name policies that protect us from trolls that are still humane and don’t lock out anonymous voices that need to be heard.

Avoiding self-censorship

We don’t want to discourage people from submitting sensitive information or sharing personal stories because they have to fill in their real names. These fragile messages are often some of the most valuable your news organization will receive from a user. They need to be encouraged.

Specify an e-mail address underneath each story and mention that private or anonymous comments are welcome there, or provide a special form for anonymous comments both for unregistered and registered users. Only publish those comments if they have a justifiable reason for being published anonymously. Remind your users that publishing anonymously just because they feel like won’t fly.

Encouraging contributions

Up until about seven or six years ago, the question most publishers asked was “how the hell do I get people to comment on my stories?” Now, commenting is so engrained in news consumers’ behavior, we rarely still wish for more comments, we look for fewer but better comments.

For those few organizations that do have the tragic problem of an under-commented site, not all is lost. You could set up your site to work with Facebook Connect, which allows people to use their existing account on Facebook (good for them) and all comments they make will be with their real name (good for everybody).

Alternatively, you could allow comments without registration, but gently guide users towards the registration process: once they’ve given you their alias and e-mail address (common requisites when commenting) you could send them a mail asking whether they’d like to verify their name and make an account on your website. Creating an account should be so easy that anybody who is considering it will actually do it, too.

Keeping the conversation local

Users may feel comfortable with giving us their full name and bear no ill intent, but at the same time they might not feel so comfortable about their colleagues or employers being able to google and find everything they’ve ever said on heated topics like euthanasia.

Some news sites account for this by allowing readers to only publicly display the initial of their given name, together with their full surname. While a particularly curious internet user could still connect the dots in less than five minutes, it’s a good-will gesture toward users that can make sense.

A more technical solution would be to include comments in an iframe or to load them in using Javascript, perhaps using the Disqus commenting system. That way Google and other search engines won’t index comments at all, just stories. At least for now — do note that search engines are getting increasingly smart about finding dynamically loaded content, so it’s not clear how long such Javascript tricks will remain effective.

Another option might be to only show comments to other logged-in users. To make sure that the bulk of your traffic still sees the best of those contributions and to tempt lurkers to join in, simply pick some of the best comments for each story and ask their authors for permission to publish those publicly. That’s a triple home run: no anonymous bullshitting, it gives the comment space a more intimate feel, and the 90 percent of your users who are just passing by don’t get huge comment threads thrown at them.

Trends, crack and special sauce (comment)

2011-08-02T00:00:00+02:00

Nicole Cifani is a fellow Mozilla-Knight news lab student, and she's building Pop!, which tracks what's grabbing people's attention on twitter and other social networks — all in realtime. As she calls it, a trend tracker on steroids.

Hi Nicole! I hope you don’t mind a bit of scepticism… but wouldn’t you rather have a tool that could spot news that nobody is talking about yet than display trending topics? News has a huge social component —not just social media, in general we just like to talk about current events and share our take with other people — so I don’t want to discount trend tracking off the bat… but you’re going to have to do a damn good job of it to make it into something fresh and appealing.

One of the trending/curation websites I appreciated most was Viewsflow, though they’ve since pivoted to produce PeerIndex and shut down their old site. What they did was not just about spotting trending topics. They algorithmically bubbled up what opinion leaders in economics and other areas were saying and reading. That, for me, was like the special sauce an aggregator needs: not just stuff people talk about, but the promise that I can have a look at the habits, thoughts and conversations of people that matter, without having to wade through tons of twitter messages. It’s more personal that way, and as a result more engaging.

In a nutshell: do you want to produce a trend tracker on steroids, or rather take a trend tracker as your basic idea and spice it up with special sauce? Two very different things, and I kind of like the latter more.

Shameless self-promotion: trends are boring.

A consultant's lament

2011-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

TV series The Wire wrapped up a great fifth season a while back. A big part of the story revolves around a fictionalized Baltimore Sun that has just suffered heavy cutbacks. A scene that stuck with me is the one where the managing editor tells his staff just a tad bit too glibly that they’ll simply have to “do more with less”. If you’ve watched the episode, you probably wanted to give that guy a smack in the head just as badly as I did. Here’s this guy who doesn’t know the first thing about journalism, telling seasoned journalists to do better and “be creative”.

It’s been a recurring theme during the Mozilla-Knight lectures as well: journalists have zero tech skills and even less motivation to learn, how can we help those poor, poor souls? Shazna Nessa and Mohamed Nanabhay and the other lecturers don’t mean it like that, I’m sure, but that’s probably how it sounds anyway.

I sometimes wonder if my work is perceived like that. I mean, I know it is, sometimes at least: an earlier post about how there are two cultures in how people think about the media got me branded as a “complete fucknozzle” over at the FleetStreetBlues blog and a guest post I did at the Online Journalism Blog had pretty much the same effect. And I certainly remember some of the strange looks I got from my colleagues two years ago when I went off on a tangent about this whole information business thing.

And it’s not that I really mind. That’d be rich — considering my posts are often so harsh on others.

But it does worry me.

Because, like most people who advise journalists and newspapers about how to survive the early 21st century, it’s been a while since I’ve written any stories myself. I follow lots of techies and media bozos on twitter and through RSS feeds, but hardly any reporters. My blog has a solid readership, but I don’t know if many of my readers think of themselves as journalists.

So we say that the future is in semantically annotated news, that stories are not the atom of news, or talk about disintermediation, engagement, curation and cross-platform repurposing. Mind you, I agree with all of that stuff and heartily encourage you to read it, but they’re all terms I never hear journalists use.

I don’t think I was very far off when I talked about those two cultures eleven months ago.

Every once in a while I read a New Yorker, and I have a print subscription to WIRED magazine. I’ll probably renew my New Scientist subscription next year, too. And when I read a story in any of those, I can’t help but think that I wouldn’t change a thing, that all this future-of-journalism stuff is nonsense, snake oil.

Of course, five minutes later I see Jay Rosen tweet “Market capitalization of McClatchy newspapers, 2006: $3.5 billion. Today: $200 million. Ya think a rethink might be due?” And I’m reminded of the fierce discussions I’ve had with journalists who want nothing to do with their readers, because readers should just read and shut up… and then I think: my God, these people, these journalists, they’d rather die than help this industry survive.

At some point in my career, maybe soon, maybe ten years from now, I want to go back to reporting. For a year or so, to see the other side of that coin again.

I’ve got the confirmation bias blues.

Git in the newsroom

2011-07-29T00:00:00+02:00

I have no idea what it is, but every writer or budding techie in the newspaper industry who stumbles on Git and GitHub, or any version control system really — enjoying some of that computational thinking, are we? — suddenly goes “Oh. My. God. We should write stories like you guys write code in Git, with forks and branches and commits and issue tracking and history.”

It’s one of those wonderful moments when different fields of study come together and cross-pollinate.

Applying some of the best practices of the IT world to journalism is actually a good (if half-baked) idea. But I sometimes fear people might be taking the version control metaphor a bit too literally, unaware of why you cannot simply use version control as-is in a journalistic context.

One

Version control systems are line-based. For narrative texts, that actually means paragraph-based. Not only does this make it difficult to find the actual changes in a piece of text, it also makes it vastly impractical to, say, merge a spelling fix you’ve done in a special branch with the master branch, because it’ll just overwrite the entire paragraph and all updates that may have happened since.

My blog is actually version-controlled. Feel free to check on GitHub how absolutely useless the diffs are when I update a post.

Two

To get the most out of version control, you’re supposed to make atomic commits, which means that every batch of changes you make should have one specific purpose and one specific purpose only. If you fix a typo, reorder a couple of paragraphs and change the title, those changes merit three different commits.

For code, atomic commits work really well and are hardly any trouble; you’ll have to commit your changes maybe every half an hour and force yourself not to switch to a different task too often. Reasonable enough. For editing prose, be prepared to do a commit including a descriptive message of your changes about every five seconds. Let’s see how long that stays fun for.

Three

Merging code can sometimes be a challenge, although it’s relatively painless in Git. You can easily isolate a block of code and transplant it onto other code. A sentence, however, is a fragile thing that can imply all sorts of things and needs to fit with the next and previous sentences and the paragraph in general.

You might want to haul over sentences, like a crucial fact you corrected in one branch like, say, your web edition of a story, to another branch , like, say, your longer in-the-works print edition. Merging at its best. But think about how time-intensive that would actually be: you have to cherry-pick exactly those commits you want to merge in. Not only that, you will never be able to avoid doing a bit of double work, because the two branches will likely be different enough that the same sentence or paragraph may make absolute sense in the one version but look weird in the other.

Code can take some manhandling, writing can’t. Copy-pasting and a light rewrite suddenly doesn’t seem so bad.

Four

Collaboration on stories is really really hard. Much harder than collaborating on code, even though that’s not always easy either. Look at how hard it is to work together on a piece even when you have the real-time feedback you get in a Google doc. It’s something you generally only want to do if you absolutely can’t avoid it, say, to get a bit of a turbo boost for breaking news.

Now imagine having to do that same collaborative writing exercise in total isolation of each other, like you’d do in a Git-based workflow. Then merge the result together and see what happens. Writing code alongside each other is more like writing different stories about the same thing rather than actually collaborating on a story, which is why it works, and why it won’t work for journalists or wiki authors.

It’s a metaphor, people!

Journalism may need version control, but it needs its own special kind of version control, and that’s something we haven’t invented yet.

On APIs, vanity and loose coupling (comment)

2011-07-28T00:00:00+02:00

If you've been reading my blog in the past months, you know I'm intrigued by the question of whether the CMSes of yore still make sense for news organizations. This is a response to some CMSey ruminations Phillip Smith just posted on his blog, which you should probably read first.

Hi Phillip,

Really like what I’m reading, but you bring up a couple of rhetorical questions that actually have perfectly valid answers.

You say that the Talking Points Memo front page management app needs read/write access to the content API, but that’s actually not true: the titles and teasers that come from the CMS are meant to be placeholders or defaults, and tweaking the copy on the front page should never affect the original content that comes from the CMS. Any changes that happen at this level are purely aimed at perfecting the presentation of the story on the front page of one specific platform (the desktop browser), not the content itself.

Also, it would be perfectly feasible to create a read/write API that has support for versioning, content locking and validation. I’ve actually done this before. The idea should indeed be to push as much of the logic as possible to the API, so the front-end applications can be stupid simple.

If, like TPM, you’re hijacking an existing CMS, then, as you say, it becomes an incredible mess with duplicated logic everywhere. However, that’s why we should ask the question of what a post-CMS CMS should look like.

If you’d build a API-driven CMS from scratch you’d probably build it as a front-end that can interact with any RESTful data store that follows certain conventions, and would leverage all the features of that API instead of doing validation, locking, versioning etc. itself. Still quite the mission, mind you, but a different one.

You also raise the question of how much bit-twiddling we should do to make the presentation just right for each page on every platform. Well, I’d say that we should do as much twiddling as makes sense economically. It is actually perfectly possible to automate a magazine-style publication, and let a computer layout stories and pictures by just inputting the page you want each story to be on. I’m not kidding, I’ve done this. It’s just that, well, the experience is so much better with human designers behind the wheel, so that’s what we collectively stick to.

If it’d pay off and if it’d make sense usability-wise to customize every individual page for every platform, then yes, I think we should do exactly that. You ask: where does it end? I answer: it ends at the point when we say, “okay, I can do more fruitful things with my time than this silliness”. For some publications that happens fairly soon (just the facts! content over embellishments!), for others, like the beautifully designed WIRED, that happens rather late. And for TPM, the front page is where it stops. It’s the one thing they want absolute control over, and that makes total sense to me.

Lastly, the information professional in me does cry a little bit when you say that CMSes are made for non-technical people to input structured data. They’re not, they’re made for people to input big blobs of text :-)

The Andy Rutledge Debacle (comment)

2011-07-26T00:00:00+02:00

Design professional Andy Rutledge shared some uncommissioned New York Times website design mockups earlier today, showing what good news website design should look like and describing in detail why the NYT is awful at it. But not everybody agrees. Actually, most people don't.

I disliked Andy’s inappropriate and vituperative comments about the NYTimes site and I think his ideas about the industry are quite naive, but I did enjoy the redesign and thought some of his criticism (e.g. that NYT’s nav is all over the place) was spot on.

I think people miss the point when they say it’s (too) easy to do redesigns if you’re not hampered by reqs and politics and financial considerations and whatever, or when they say that Andy’s redesign isn’t realistic. That’s not the purpose of a carte blanche redesign mockup.

Sometimes we need to go crazy and mock up stuff that can’t absolutely work in its pure form, because they get the creative juices flowing and they avoid us only ever considering incremental improvements when a full-on rethink might be what we need to move forward.

I’ve done many of these kinds of designs in the past and I’m actually working on some others for work right now. They always get people thinking, even if you’d never ever actually want to implement ’em.

Andy’s mockups revolve around what a news site could look like if the reading experience was all that mattered. Okay, now let’s do a similar exercise for a news site that revolves entirely around fostering a community. Or one that is all about bringing context to the news. Or all about sharing. Or new ad and sponsorship forms. Or centered around the mobile experience. You can bet that each of those mockups would teach you something and would help you when you’re doing a real redesign.

So, more crappy unrealistic redesigns, please.

A culture of coders

2011-07-25T00:00:00+02:00

Our standards have gone up. The amount of tools a web developer has to master to create slick and scalable HTML5 websites is simply staggering and, on the inside, big sites tend to look like Rube Goldberg machines.

But on the other hand, not-so-big websites, those that make up about 95 percent of the web, are getting ever easier to create, thanks to technologies like mod_php, infrastructure like Heroku and frameworks like Django. We’re at the point where casual programming has become so easy that you don’t really have to identify yourself as a coder anymore to actually be one. Biologists, accountants, musicians and journalists can all dive into web development and make small apps that support them in their work within a month.

I attended a lecture by John Resig last week, and one of the things that stuck was his advice to give your users the space to grow. What made jQuery so successful is that it always encouraged newbies to stick around and persist, even if they couldn’t tell a variable from a for loop. Those newbies eventually start coding up plugins, writing documentation and evangelizing your project. They’re dumb only if you keep them dumb.

Programming is about automating repetitive tasks and making information out of data. Those skills shouldn’t be the sole province of computer science grads. Imagine what the world could look like if basic computer literacy isn’t reading email but writing code.

We’re going to get there eventually, our society demands it, but there are some steps we as programmers can take today to speed things up and create a more novice-friendly hacker culture.

We can participate in spaces like Hacks/Hackers and StackOverflow where aspiring coders can interact with and learn from people with more experience. Schools aren’t exactly preparing people for this digital world, so we have to. But there are also some technical things we can do.

One is to sometimes just suck it up and create your application in PHP. PHP apps are easy to deploy and extend, even if the language itself is a mess. I don’t doubt Drupal would be a more elegant CMS if it was written in Python, but it’s also clear that its success has been predicated on PHP’s low barrier to entry, because that’s what kickstarted the whole plugin module ecosystem, as it did for WordPress and even MediaWiki.

The other is to make sure our apps, even if they’re closed-source, have public APIs and are webhook-enabled. If you’re not familiar with webhooks: they’re little scripts you can write that can be notified whenever something happens within an application or CMS, like somebody saving a new record into the database or deleting a comment. This presentation by Jeff Lindsay explains it really well. Webhooks can do anything you want them to, but they’re ideally suited to solve interop challenges like sending an email whenever you have new items in Google Reader, or saving links you post on twitter to Delicious.

Together with glue services like Scriptlets, ifttt and Yahoo! Pipes, APIs and webhooks are turning the web from a bunch of silos into something more like legos.

In the words of Jeff Lindsay: “The read-write web gave us user contributed content… I want user contributed (democratized) logic.”

Making the news fun again (comment)

2011-07-18T00:00:00+02:00

Nicole Cifani thinks making the news fun again is about creating a central place for consuming the news, a place that cares about your habits and interests. I'm not sure that's the first place to start looking.

I’m really intrigued by the “news isn’t fun” problem, but I think it might merit thinking outside of the web. I really love printed magazines because they force me to take some time, sit down and savor every story, whereas online I often skip even the most brilliant of content because I’m more rushed, maybe just reading the news during a 5-minute work break. Same reason why Instapaper + Kindle is doing so well, I think. I’d like to see more people thinking about how you can leverage the unique properties of each medium to craft a better news experience.

Another area where we can improve is, I think, conversational journalism: having journalists participate in comment threads, on twitter and on Facebook, being available for interaction with readers, doing open newsrooms, answering reader’s questions and guiding coverage based on what people want to know. In short, creating a real community around a news website. Because content has become a commodity but community hasn’t.

I don’t think having a one-stop place to get all your news is really what we need, and I’m not even convinced that there’s a technical solution to be found to this problem. Making the news fun/interesting/cool again will depend on journalists approaching their interaction with readers differently than they do today.

Machine Learning Fairy Dust

2011-07-18T00:00:00+02:00

I was looking over the entries to the Mozilla-Knight digital journalism challenge, which asks people to think of an application that could profoundly impact the way digital journalism is done. (Disclaimer: I’m a participant myself.)

Some people are trying to solve the problem of having to browse twenty different news websites to get the kind of information you want. Um, like Reeder or Flipboard, you mean? Others want to create easy ways for people to share information and for reporters to distill that information into stories. Um, like Facebook, twitter and Storify?

But the thing that struck me most is how nearly half the entries mention machine learning or language analysis. And the particular way they mention it: vaguely, in a way that not quite explains how exactly the process should work and how it’ll do its magic. In many product ideas, machine learning seems to fill the role of industrial superglue: it’s what holds an otherwise mediocre application together. “My application proposes bundling comments by what they talk about, so people won’t have to sift through tons of comments to read the ones that interest them. Difficult, time-intensive you say? Nah, we’ll slap some language analysis juju on there, et voila.”

Machine learning as a meme is very similar to “social” five to ten years ago: you took an okay-ish concept, added some crowdsourcing, folksonomies and social networking, and there it was, your wonderful Web 2.0 brainchild. AJAX used to have the same effect on people: the term found its way into the layman’s lexicon and everybody started talking about how they’d make this beautiful, AJAXy web app without really even knowing what it entailed, just that it’d be really slick. Real-time web has a shot at attaining the same status in the not-too-faraway future, and I can’t count the amount of apps that are mobile location-based gamification with coupons.

The fact that machine learning is on people’s minds, and that to a certain extent it has become easy — Google just opened up its Prediction API, taking care of all the fussy details for you, at least for a certain set of problems and provided you only need limited accuracy — has me very excited. But the nonchalance with which people talk about machine learning and natural language analysis also has me worried, because, in entrepreneurspeak, it functions as a sort of magic pixie dust that’ll make everything better.

There’s no substitute for good product design. You still have to make something people will want to use and find your way around technical stumbling blocks, not just fill in all the gaps with “ML will solve any difficulties we face”. Because it won’t.

Don't worry about what the world needs (quote)

2011-07-18T00:00:00+02:00

Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.

(Howard Thurman)

Pimp My Reader

2011-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

RSS readers are a great tool for journalists to stay on top of things. They allow you to follow a gazillion websites and blogs, both famous and obscure, without having to manually check tons of irregularly updated websites each and every day. Once you’ve become adept at skimming, you can get a ton of news and story ideas in less than thirty minutes.

Not much more than ten years ago, a reporter who kept up with trends was somebody who read a couple of different newspapers and magazines and knew a couple of people in different places and asked, “hey, what’s going on?” For some journalists that’s still how it works, but they’re finding themselves no match for their adversaries who do know how to really keep track of the remote regions of the web.

That said, feed readers were made for consumers, not for newsrooms, and it shows. Here’s what would change that:

Email inboxes as feeds. Journalists are already used to skimming through huge piles of dirt to find the odd potential gem, but in a different context: their inboxes are filled with PR junk. It would be great if we could add email streams to our reader, together with feeds from newswires like Reuters and AP. One easy routine.
Twitter and Facebook link inlining. You should use TweetDeck or CoTweet to keep tabs on twitter, not a reader. But when you’re in curation mode, what’s really most useful is not the actual Facebook and twitter messages but the stuff they link to. Opening fifty tabs for those links is annoying and will be full of duplicates, so I want something that can aggregate the links from my twitter stream, visit each link, grab the content and consolidate it in a feed for rapid consumption.
Feed filters. Swimming through noise is part of the game, but sometimes the noise is just too much, and it makes sense to filter feeds. Mostly through simple term matching (remove anything that doesn’t have ‘education’ or ‘Apple’ in it), but I want webhooks too, to fix my own information overload.
Scraping. Some websites still don’t have feeds, or don’t have feeds of the things you want. I want a super-simple web scraper that outputs to an Atom feed, so I don’t have to remember websites I have to visit every day or week.

Email, social media, blogs, wires and news updates, all in one (filtered!) stream, that’s what I want. I might build it, too. Halfway there: Google Reader plus Yahoo! Pipes and ifttt. But easier (think FeedHint) and not spread over five different services.

Metadata (quote)

2011-07-12T00:00:00+02:00

Metadata, you see, is really a love note – it might be to yourself, but in fact it’s a love note to the person after you, or the machine after you, where you’ve saved someone that amount of time to find something by telling them what this thing is. Lives have been absorbed getting metadata, and so there’s an entire field of computer study about this idea, and making your machines do the hard work for you. Google’s got some interest in this, I heard. If you could completely generate Metadata, life would be pretty awesome. But you can’t. Not really. Not completely.

(Jason Scott)

The post-CMS CMS

2011-07-11T00:00:00+02:00

Daniel Bachhuber shared an interesting post last week, about the bifurcation of content management and delivery. Or, in humanspeak: managing content and displaying it are really two separate things, and they’re usually bundled in what we call a content management solely because the management part is considered to be a trivial thing (just some text boxes to enter and edit content and a way to slap tags on your content) or because we want something that works out of the box, without having to mix-and-match different components.

I wouldn’t call what’s happening with CMSes a bifurcation though, like Deane Barker (the author of that blogpost) does. It’s more like having ten different little back-end pieces, with a single presentation layer that can create a uniform experience out of such a mess of individual parts.

Which raises an interesting puzzle that neither Matt Waite, Sean Blanda, Matt Thompson or Ian Bicking, the gurus of the post-CMS world, seem to be talking about. And that question is: what would the ideal web delivery platform look like if our priority was to help us piece together different components, not build everything into a single app like, say, your average Drupal install. Existing CMSes aren’t built for that kind of environment, so we don’t just need to complement the CMS by leveraging different best-of-breed tools each with their specific focus, we actually need to replace the CMS with some kind of presentation layer software that’s better suited to the new distributed reality.

But what’s the role of that new kind of CMS, or presentation management system or web publishing tool or however you’d like to call it?

First off: presentation tools can have a vastly reduced scope. Little apps are or will be taking care of all sorts of things that traditionally a CMS would do, like categorizing content and managing comments. In particular for newspapers, content creation will probably happen elsewhere, too, and it’ll be stored in a platform-neutral way, because that way the same content that ends up in a CMS can also be used in print.

And secondly, the defining feature of a great post-CMS system will no longer be how well it manages content or even how easy it makes it to produce content: we’re taking care of that stuff elsewhere. Instead, the most important criteria in deciding the worth of a web publishing tool become:

how well it can aggregate and sometimes manipulate or clean content from a ton of different places
how well it plays together with external apps
how fast it is and whether it can cache bits of content that take a long time to load
how easy it is to apply a consistent visual theme to that content

“The home page is merely a master aggregation of this confederation” as Matt Waite argues.

Among newspapers, The Guardian is perhaps furthest along the CMSless path: many parts of their website are driven by a whole bunch of search queries that fetch information from an internal search engine, which in turn grabs its content from an internal content creation tool (the vestige of what you’d traditionally call a CMS), plus a theming layer to display those search results in a pretty way.

So what the future needs are powerful content ingestion tools and quick and easy ways to display that content in the style that you want, not yet another CMS. That’s what I’m betting on.

Other People's Papers (quote)

2011-07-11T00:00:00+02:00

My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?” Which indicated to me, along with a number of the other email responses I got from students, that many of them don’t even know what plagiarism is.

(Anonymous)

Dataviz and beauty

2011-07-05T00:00:00+02:00

I had some free time on my hands today (apologies to my dear client, who is currently waiting on some deliverables from me) which I decided to invest in three activities:

Buy chisels, a gouge, cut-proof working gloves, fine sand paper, a mallet and sesame oil. I’m going to try my hand at some simple woodworking and make wooden spoons.
Work on my secret side project.
Try out processing.js.

Processing is a popular visualization language that is used by artists, academics and pretty much anybody who wants to visualize and animate data. It’s not for the faint of heart, though — I just had to learn how to convert polar to cartesian coordinates to render the silly spiral in the image above. And it’s a programming language, so there’s that barrier too. 35 lines of code for the example above. But anyway, you can create some jaw-droppingly beautiful stuff.

Which got me thinking: what’s the point of a visualization, its explanatory value or the aesthetics? I’d say it’s really the latter for me: I love how good dataviz can tease and urge you to read the accompanying story or explore the underlying data. It’s different for infographics, because an infographic is supposed to explain a difficult topic, often with a spatial component, something not easily explained in copy like how a particle collider can smash atoms and what happens when it does. It’s also different for graphs, where you want the cleanest and clearest way to represent numbers and how they relate to each other. Dataviz, on the other hand, is about presenting just enough information to get people to turn things over in their mind, or about showing us the familiar in an unfamiliar context. The kind of stuff you want to buy a poster of.

And this is really nothing more than just a fanciful musing, but maybe news needs to become a little bit more beautiful. Less of a commodity, more thought-provoking. Unique, rather than pushed into the same formats over and over again. Perhaps the same stuff you read anywhere, but different. I think that’s why WIRED is the only magazine I actually still subscribe to.