You might’ve noticed that some blogs and news websites carry a little message that accompanies their comment forms. Underneath each story and above the text box in which you type your reply, it usually says something like “be fair, be reasonable, be a decent human being”. The idea being that a simple, friendly message might sometimes be enough to encourage readers to give up on caustic cynicism and rude remarks.

Change user behavior by changing how you invite those users to participate. I wonder — I’m not saying I know — whether we could scare away baddies and improve comments by kicking that technique up a notch.

If somebody dies and you publish an obit, wouldn’t it be reasonable to allow people to pay their respects, while noting to readers that this is probably not the right time to evaluate whether the deceased’ time on earth was well-spent?

If a story really has no use for random opinions, but could benefit from people sharing their own experiences, why don’t we ask people whether they have an experience they’d like to share, instead if asking them if they want to react?

If an investigative piece could use corroboration, why don’t we ask if readers wish to inform us of anything or if they have any pertinent links they would like to share, not whether they want to respond?

If a columnist publishes a beautiful tranche de vie, is there really any point in having people interact with the author? Is not the only meaningful interaction, for a contemplative piece like that, for people to say whether they like it or not? If that’s so, why not replace the comment form with a simple “like”-button?

If a public thinker gives us a tough thesis to chew on, shouldn’t we ask people to mail back their thoughts or ripostes after mulling it over, instead of encouraging them to fire off a quick two-sentence reply?

Priming readers for certain kinds of contributions is not about trying to own the conversation. You never do. People can always vent their thoughts through Facebook and Twitter. It would be about encouraging people to have the kind of conversations actually worth having.

Different kinds of content require different kinds of responses. And responses come in a cornucopia of flavors:

• corrections
• appreciation
• additional information: an expert view or external links
• responses to the author, rather than public comments
• experiences from readers’ lives
• opinions
• discussion among readers

Add your own.

Some types of responses even ask for different interfaces.

We could encourage people to contribute information or sources they’ve found, by making it easy to add a link, Facebook-style.

Corrections could use their own Wikipedia-like discussion pages, so accusations and inaccuracies can be treated with the gravitas they deserve, while not disturbing the lively on-topic discussion going on.

Currently, when newspaper websites ask readers to share their thoughts, the very language and user interface biases responses towards opinions and (smart-alecky) corrections. That’s okay, but we also need more people sharing their own experiences, their expert views, that one obscure but incredibly relevant web page on the topic at hand. We’re not getting enough of those.

Isn’t that just bad interaction design?

Let’s start off with a quote from Adrian Holovaty:

I’ve only met a handful of people who became journalists because they like information. And I think that helps explain why there have been some major cultural issues in the journalism world in the age of the Internet

Taking information seriously means we don’t treat stories as big blobs of text, but recognize that, say, an interview is not the same thing as a book review. We need to bring out the implicit structure in all those content types.

Taking information seriously means we don’t stuff stories into an undifferentiated archive, but categorize those stories according to what they’re about.

Taking information seriously means that we don’t see a story as an island, but rather annotate it with all kinds of metadata about persons, organizations, places, events, previous reporting, sources and data that are related to each story.

Three challenges for the news industry

At this point, you’re probably wondering: why bother? Solid question. Allow me to take a step back.

The news industry is facing any number of challenges. There are three, in particular, that I think are important.

1. We’re stuck in the perpetual now. Each day we churn out new stories, and it’s getting really hard for people to keep on top of that information flow, and to really learn something about the larger issues that are at hand.
2. We’re slowly realizing that there’s more to journalism that storytelling. It’s about informing communities, in whichever way we can.
3. We’re not making the amount of money we used to. Advertising revenues aren’t what they used to. Maybe we’re trying to sell our readers a product they no longer want, as Robert Pickard insists. And news has become a commodity. It’s difficult to profit from commodities.

Better living through information

We’re definitely doing some things right: we’re following readers on whichever platform they prefer: Twitter, Facebook, web, print, iPad, mobile. We’re experimenting with timelines and maps and aggregation. We’re going beyond stories, with wikis and news apps.

But we’re simply not making enough money and our readers aren’t getting the broader context or the deeper knowledge they need. Information would help us solve those three challenges. It might sound far-fetched but it isn’t.

Metadata would help.

• Metadata can give readers a broader picture, by linking up stories with profiles of people and organizations. By linking stories to previous reporting, external sources and relevant data.
• Metadata can give readers a different picture. We can make maps, because we have structured data on each place that’s mentioned in a story. We can make timelines, because we’ve got the same kind of data for events.
• Metadata can lead readers to easily explore related themes or content from the same neighborhood, instead of jumping away once they’ve read a single article.

Summed up, metadata helps us move beyond the perpetual now.

And structure can help.

• Structure, by decoupling content from its presentation, makes it easy to publish to the web, in a print magazine and on the iPhone simultaneously, in a way that’s tailored to each platform. Create once, publish everywhere.
• Structure, because it splits up content into its constituent atoms, also makes it possible to recombine, say, different recipes into a searchable database, or to split up our political reporting by region, and to show that on a map.

Summed up, structured information saves money and helps us find new ways of informing our readers.

If that’s so great, how come you ain’t rich?

So, if structuring, categorizing and annotating information is so great, why is nobody really doing it?

Well, we are, to some extent! The Guardian, the New York Times and the Texas Tribune (courtesy of Hot Type Consulting) are doing a whole lot more than just publishing stories as big blobs of text, and it shows.

But why don’t we, when we don’t? I can think of two reasons.

1. CMSes suck. They can’t handle a lot more than a title and a body field, and they’re not meant to store rich metadata. You’re not supposed to build applications on top of them. They don’t manage information at all, they just put stuff up on the internet, whatever its form. And publishers aren’t inclined to take matters into their own hands, reminding us that they make news, not technology.
2. Our industry has been so slow to realize they’re in the information business, is because metadata is invisible. It’s an investment in your back end systems that only leads to cost savings or a better user experience in the long term.

And while asking for infographics or flash animations or one-off news apps is all fine and dandy, most executives are not about to commission a new content management system. It just feels a bit too extravagant.

And with that, we’ve kind of reached into the core of the problem. For most executives in the news business, digital innovation is the cherry on top, not the key to our future. It’s the sprinkles on a cake.

In the words of Paul Rissen:

In the overwhelming chase for the ‘new’, and with financial constraints, it’s often not regarded as possible to consider anything which doesn’t provide a simple, quick and easy solution. Perfectly understandable. But also perfectly misguided and wrong.

What we, as an industry, need to learn, is that digital strategy is not about sprinkles, but about baking a better cake. If we don’t see the opportunities, somebody else will.

It’s fascinating to see how media criticism has evolved into two strands, each as committed to good journalism as the other, maybe even in agreement on some of the finer points, but each strand with way different priorities.

• The old school reads about the current state of journalism in their union newsletter, while youngsters are browsing the Nieman Journalism Lab.
• The old school complains about how we’re not covering justice and national politics the way we used to, while a new generation is upset that so many journalists look down on regional and local news. So much potential in hyperlocal.
• The old school is shocked when a journalist takes sides, while most of us will nod when Jay Rosen says that it’s only fair for journalists to be transparent about where they come from, rather than faking objectivity and pretending to be neutral when they’re not.
• The old school laments the decline of investigative journalism, while the new school is thinking up new ways to hold people in power accountable, and to catch them when they’re lying.
• The old school would wish the government intervenes to support quality journalism, whereas we’d rather win the support of our fellow citizens through Spot.Us and Kickstarter.
• The old school regularly reminds us that our readers are stupid, whereas the internet generation knows that our obsessive focus on breaking news is hardly congenial to people who wish to understand the broader issues facing our society.
• The old school thinks good journalism is dying. The new school thinks news has become a commodity.
• The old school will cite Thomas Jefferson (not Benjamin Franklin as I mentioned earlier), who said “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter” — younger journalists, instead, will wonder whether newspapers still have an important role to play in society, whether they can make or break politicians now that so few people still trust the press.
• The old school just wishes there was more money to go round, whereas those new to the newsroom doubt if money would solve anything. They’ve seen their bosses throw money out of the window; they know we fail to act on lucrative opportunities time and again.

There’s wisdom in both strands of media criticism, but sometimes I can’t help but feel the old school hankers for a mythical past of journalistic excellence that never existed. Apparently I’m not the only one who is fascinated about that generation gap, either.

With that thought, I’m off to EJC‘s Data-driven Journalism roundtable in Amsterdam. I’ll report back soon.

I help people create news websites that encourage exploration, tease out the deeper context behind every news story and have the rich structure and metadata needed for easy repurposing across platforms.

That’s my first stab at an elevator pitch, by the way.

I considered information designer, but nobody knows what the heck that means.

I described myself as a journalist/coder for a while, but it’s been a long time since I did any reporting myself. Plus, I’m not the guy who creates infographics or multimedia packages that tell an individual story differently. Instead, I do infrastructure work to better present each and every story. I want to make sure all the content on a news website works together to provide readers with clear pictures of broader issues. So journalist/coder doesn’t quite fit.

I’m a pretty accomplished coder and I have some experience with larger software projects, but then again, I’m not really a software architect pur sang either.

So information architect it is. For now.

But then again, maybe I’m not an information architect in the same way a lot of other people are information architects.

Most publications (though not in the Polar Bear book!) relate information architecture closely to user experience design, maybe even suggesting IA as a subfield of UX design. User experience design for information-heavy websites. But I don’t do any UxD myself, though it fascinates me.

I work on taxonomies and all kinds of navigation. Enhancing findability and encouraging exploration is very big for me. That’s classic IA if anything is.

But what keeps me up at night? Thinking about how content on a news website can relate to other content, and to people, places, events and so on. Or, technically speaking: creating domain-specific ontologies that bring out the structure and interrelations in content.  And domain modeling is traditionally a task either assigned to a software architect or, in very specific circumstances, to a library or information scientist.

And the fact that many information architects take the structure of information as a given upsets me to no end. Because it essentially conflates information architecture and user experience design.

If information is a given in our line of work, all that’s left for us to do is a little dressing up. Sprinkle information with some faceted metadata. Tweak the search engine a bit. Think up a few different ways of navigating around that information. Important, sure, but it’s work on the fringes.

Crap in means crap out. An information architect who doesn’t have a say in how information is carved up and how it relates to other information — as well as its entry, codification, storage and retrieval — ends up being a glorified UX designer with an expertise in information-heavy websites.

That’s not me.

Usability and user experience professionals with an expertise in large-scale information-heavy websites are exactly the sort of people a lot of companies could use. But an UxD isn’t going to change the way you think about

• how information flows through different systems
• how information can be put to use in different contexts and for different end products
• how information can be reliably archived
• how to avoid jumbling presentational markup with structural markup
• how applying structure to information can fuel database applications
• which workflows should be in place to ensure accurate metadata
• whether there are any sensible international standards or nascent conventions (like microformats) that should be adhered to

and so on.

The core of a digital strategy.

Companies should make sure they hire people — either information architects or software architects — who can solve these problems and can spot opportunities hidden within data or information. That’s what makes an information architect different from a user experience designer. A UX designer isn’t supposed to think out an archiving strategy or a publishing workflow. They’re better at other things. Things I do awfully. And vice versa.

Anyway, go check it out.

Now, I happen to think automated trend tracking is incredibly cool, if only because it upsets the heck out of music reporters who used to trick us into believing they had some sort of a superhuman grip on reality, whereas apparently they were just following three or four different websites to track down “the next big thing”. Sucks to be you, guys.

But anyway. Automated trend tracking is cool, but it’s also disappointing, boring even, from a journalistic perspective. Weren’t we supposed to be the people who unearthed news from all over the globe? The guys who point at stuff nobody would ever stumble across if it weren’t for us — like a very cool blogpost on the educational system in Siberia, written in freakin’ Russian? Or a very insightful critique on the new government coalition, written by a joe-schmoe nobody’s ever heard about before? Yet trend tracking does exactly the opposite: it gives more attention to what’s already in the spotlight.

Readers want to know what everybody else is talking about, and join the debate. So tracking what’s hot is, well, cool. But instead of the bazillionth trend tracking app, I’d much rather see a tool that would use aggregation, machine learning and natural language processing to crawl the far outreaches of the web and spot obscure but valuable news or opinions that could enhance existing coverage. Like a robot army of researchers for every reporter, working 24/24 to suggest new angles and exciting topics we’ve missed. Topics everyone has missed. That one interesting commentary from an otherwise incredibly dreary blog that nobody would ever want to put in their RSS reader.

• An aggregation tool like Superfeedr, combined with Yahoo! BOSS, could provide the raw content from feeds, from Twitter, from all over the web.
• Natural language analysis using the NLTK and Open Calais would ascertain for each piece of incoming content whether it belongs in one of the topical areas our news org covers, and if not, throw it away.
• Machine learning using PyBrain or the Google Prediction API could give a rough estimate of how interesting this piece of news is, based on previous coverage — similar to how Google Reader’s magic ranking works.
• The Google Language API could do rough translations of content in Spanish, French, Ukrainian, whatever. When tied in with the aforementioned language analysis and machine learning, those translations might hint at fascinating content from across the globe.

Will this work? I don’t know. But it’d be damn nifty if it would. You’d do more with fewer people.

Our methods of newsgathering have hardly changed in the last century. The web has given every single person with an internet connection the same research tools as reporters. Time to change that around again. Time to experiment.

News companies right now should be thinking about how to avoid their products from becoming commodities, insofar as they aren’t already.

Simple economics mean that profit margins for commodities gravitate towards zero. So that’s not a business most people want to be in. It’s definitely not a business The Gazette wants to be in.

But content is very much the business newspapers and magazines and tv stations used to be in. Even the word ‘content’ might be enough to upset journalists: they’re not just churning out generic textual drivel, they’re producing meaningful analyses about healthcare, insightful commentary on the oil spil in the Gulf, beautiful reporting about the theatre and about education. “Don’t just call that content as if it means nothing!” And they’re right. But it doesn’t change a thing. Most of the stuff the average journalist produces, is a commodity. Reporters don’t get paid much because what they produce isn’t worth much.

Reporters have the skillset and hopefully still the vigor to do things better and differently. News companies, even though their influence might be waning, still command an attentive audience. So changing news orgs around and repositioning them to be ready for new challenges shouldn’t be impossible.

Yet often changing companies around is hard. Really hard. Because people are afraid to fail. They’re afraid to tell their co-workers that wacky new idea they’re dreaming about. They get antsy when they have to fix a problem, instead of being excited by the challenge. People get defensive. And the, it’s exactly the sort of attitude our school system tries to instill in people:

A harried teacher might find it easier to teach a class to obey first and think second, but is that sort of behavior valuable or scarce now? [...] The paradox is that the very people that are the easiest to categorize, to command and to dominate are the last people we want to work with. (Seth Godin)

Tim McDougall, who is VP of marketing at SourceMG and a very smart guy, told me a nifty anecdote. When he’s feeling mischievous, he goes around asking people about their biggest failure. Preferably in a social setting where other people are involved in the conversation too. “So, what’s your biggest failure?” Some people have no trouble admitting their fuck-ups, laughing about them and telling you what they’ve learned in the process. Other people freeze. And as Tim says: “Not having a biggest failure makes the conversation that much more awkward, doesn’t it?”

So that’s how Tim McDougall wants to run things. “I’d rather have 50 successes out of 500 attempts, than 20 projects that are, each and every one of them, a success.” I kind of like that. A lot. How many executives, do you think, share that spirit? How many in the news business? It’s one of the things that makes me very excited about what Chuck Peters and his team at The Gazette have in store for us, and glad that I can be of some service to them in the process.

Becky Lutgen Gardner, who heads information content at SourceMG, said it best: we should stop clinging to self-limiting behavior. Because that’s exactly what most news media are doing. We’re throwing away reporter’s notes that could provide useful context to news stories, and we don’t care to publish primary documents even though our readers might really like them. Colleagues are duplicating efforts because they don’t know what the guy in the next cubicle is working on, or because they don’t particularly care to know. Reporters still worry too much about what technology and ambient journalism (e.g. by citizen reporters) means for their jobs, rather than grabbing the opportunities it offers with both hands.

All that potential. Gently floating by.

What makes innovation so hard in modern corporations? Management and corporate hierarchies were invented to make work go faster and smoother. Maybe they still do. But not fast enough. Not smooth enough. And definitely not agile enough to adapt to the rapid pace of change the media industry is demanding.

Must do better.

This is what Cedar Rapids looks like. Sorta.

As I write this, I am 30,000 feet above Northern Canada and on my way to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to talk to Chuck Peters and his team at The Gazette. So I thought it’d be fitting to use my time on the plane to take a second look at Steve Buttry‘s insightful A blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, which most of you guys have probably heard about. Steve wrote the report for The Gazette, saying “This is a vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general.”

Newspapers should reach into the very heart of communities if they’re to stay relevant — that’s the one-sentence summary of Steve’s thoughts. Newspapers should support and stimulate ongoing discussions. Local news media especially should be the glue that ties together all the different parts of a community. They should think beyond news stories, and offer services to enrichen the lives of those they serve.

I love it. But it’s not going to be easy. I see three pitfalls we should be sure to avoid if we want to become the community hosts Steve wishes newspapers and their reporters to be.

1. Beware of the kitchen sink

Newspapers are in a unique position to contribute to their community: they have some political leverage, they have resources to do things no individual can hope to achieve, they have an overview of what’s going on in their community like no one else, and they have an attentive audience. So it’s easy to find opportunities. Ticketing services, online marketplaces, hosting for local schools, experience networks for business owners — these might all be things that we can do and Steve urges us to consider them, but I’m not sure he has me convinced.

In certain ways, we really should strive to become ‘ambient’ in the communities we serve. But it’s easy to overdo. We need focus. We need to find a few key ways in which we can best serve our readers. To me that means helping people in ways that excercise our core competencies as journalists: our knowledge, our connections, our skillful reporting.

Have a few strong points where you can really make a difference for a community, rather than halfheartedly having your fingers in just about anything. Ticketing? Hosting? I dunno.

2. Please don’t talk about user-generated content

If you really care about a community, don’t talk in terms of user-generated content. User-generated content means appropriating other people’s work for your own profit. But that’s not a real community connection. And

Yes, user participation is important. It can take the form of crowdsourced news or larger projects, like what The Guardian did with MP’s expenses. It can take the form of contributions for readers. User reviews. Whatever. But in the end it should be about empowering people and getting more people talking, rather than getting them to do your job.

There’s obviously a thin line between user-generated content and a real community connection. But you’ll know the difference, and your readers will too. If you don’t respect them, they won’t respect you. Good luck monetizing that.

3. Become a connector, not a middle man

There are two ways to help people get what they want: either you become a middle man, or you become a connector. It might be enticing to try and monetize the “glue” you offer in a direct way. And that might bring in some money initially. But the internet is all about disintermediating. It’s about cutting out the middle man. Helping people to navigate the important parts of their life — housing, education, work, mobility, culture and play — is important, but it should add value, rather than skimming it off the top. eBay might turn a handsome profit, but that doesn’t mean people like it. Newspapers can’t afford to squander their cultural capital like that. There has to be a better way.

It’s an oft-heard mantra in technology circles that ideas are worthless; it’s the implementation that matters. I’ve always felt a bit ambiguous about that statement, especially in journalism where so many executives and journalists could use a healthy dose of vision. We need more people like Steve and we need more blueprints. But Steve’s work does feel very much like it’s only halfway there. I’m curious to hear where both TBD (where Buttry works now) and The Gazette take things next.

It’s not technology I want to talk about though. Luddites can do good journalism. Slow journalism (think San Francisco Panorama) is just as important as process-driven reporting and databases and metadata and what-not. The thing that struck a familiar chord was the underlying attitude, shared by many journalists, towards both technology and business acumen. Ardent reporters and editors come up with a plan that describes the newspaper or news website or magazine of their dreams. Subsequently, they go looking for investors, business partners, managers and coders with one question and one question only: “here’s the blueprint — will you make this work for me?”

“Will you make this work for me?” betrays a way of thinking that embodies a deep dichotomy between what something should be and how do we turn this into something real. And despite their vigor and enthusiasm, that split sets these journalists up for failure even before they get started.

Beginning with the very first brainstorm sessions, thinking up a new media project (or any other project for that matter) should involve a back-and-forth between what we want and what is possible. Do we have a good idea that would cost an exuberant amount of money? Does it involve insurmountable technical challenges? Okay, let’s go back to the drawing board and see whether we can’t do 90% of what we want with half the money. Are there some technical opportunities out there that might inform how we conceive of our brain child? Let’s not allow those opportunities to pass us by. If you ask these questions, little by little, you’ll end up with something great. And just as important: it’ll actually work.

Don’t start a new venture and say, “yeah, we intend to turn a profit within, um, five years”. That’s just an excuse not to think about the difficult business decisions you should be thinking about. Not two years from now, but at this very moment. When you get a new project underway, start with a plan on how to get to profitability from day one. Anything else is bullshit.

There’s a lot to like about Django. It’s Python. It has a large, fun community. It’s elegant. It simplifies web development, but Django never simplifies things to the point where it would kick you in the back later on: not too much magic, no cumbersome integration with a javascript framework (hello Rails!) and a lot of documentation.

There are two little things about Django that just feel so incredibly wrong to me, though. Number one: generic views. Number two: the flatpages contrib app. They both violate the “make it simple, but not simpler than it should be” ethos that is otherwise so engrained in the way Django is architected.

Don’t fuck with the mental model

Django is great in part because its elegant project structure makes it easy to remember where you’ve put stuff, and where to go look if something goes wrong, or when you want to add a new feature. Rafe Colburn, when talking about what makes a good programmer, says:

One attribute that I think may be important is the capacity to keep the details of a large system in your head. What I mean is, the ability when someone brings up a new feature, to quickly know exactly how it should be implement in the context of the existing system. Or, to be able to recall where the code is in the system that performs some function

And Django makes it easy to be a great programmer, because it gives you this very simple project structure.

The Django docs explain that generic views make a few simple, monotonous tasks more painless. You shouldn’t need any boilerplate code in your views to create what are indeed generic list and detail pages — there’s nothing really happening in the view anyway except fetching a few objects and pushing them to a template. True enough: in any application and website I’ve built thus far, I’ve encountered a few list/detail combos. Lists of users and their individual profiles. A photo gallery with an overview but also a page for each photo. And so on.

However, the trouble with generic views is that, in order to save on a bit of boilerplate, they completely mess up the Django’s simple mental model. Code suddenly lives in a whole different place not just depending on which purpose it serves, but  also depending on how simple or complex it is. That’s certainly a… quaint way of organizing code. The code for mixing stuff together can now live in both urls.py or views.py. Flatpages is just as annoying, and for entirely the same reason: stuff gets routed around using urls.py, or, oh, yeah, with this dodgy FlatpageFallbackMiddleware that magically transforms a 404 into something else entirely. Messing up other middleware in the process.

Both generic views and flatpages make it harder to be great. They raise a whole bunch of PEP 20 red flags, most notably: “There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.” And what do you get in return? Close to nothing. Web pages more often than not grow beyond what generic views or flatpages can do for you, so at some point you’re going to break most of them out into real, proper views anyway. Why not do that right from the start?

Generic views and flatpages are easily avoided. You can just not use them, and code in Django as if they didn’t exist. So complaining about these little Django warts might be a bit inane. They just feel like cruft, though, something that might’ve made sense for The Lawrence Journal-World way before Django got opensourced, but today, it just encourages bad code organization practices. Don’t use ‘em, just don’t.

And that’s the word.