Yes, it’s possible to stay on top of the news entirely from within Twitter and Facebook … but it takes work.

Following the right number of people (so as not to get overwhelmed) posting about a broad variety of topics (so as not to leave oneself ignorant) is an inexact and tedious science.

And call me cynical if you must, but I don’t trust my real-life friends to keep me informed, either: Absent the professional news organizations I follow there, my Facebook news feed would be largely pets, music videos and distressed chatter about how winter is, evidently, cold in some places.

All of this is a roundabout way of making the case for NewsWhip, a Dublin-based startup trying to beat Twitter and Facebook at their own social-news capabilities.

NewsWhip claims its site automatically pulls in and ranks the best trending stories of the moment from Twitter and Facebook, based on aggregated and weighted data of what the world is tweeting, sharing, liking and commenting on. The faster a recent story is spreading online, the higher it moves in the rankings.

CEO Paul Quigley said that speed is his “fundamental metric.”

“If a story has 10,000 shares and is 12 hours old, it won’t necessarily be a big deal,” he said. “We only care about how many shares it got in the last one to two hours, or even 30 minutes.”

Users of the free site or mobile app are greeted with a single column of stories from around the Web, which can be filtered by topic or location. A sister site for news professionals, Spike, lets paying subscribers filter even further by time intervals (“published in the last hour,” “published in the last three hours,” and so on).

Quigley’s pitch is that NewsWhip and Spike are better at surfacing trending news topics than Twitter and Facebook because the filter bubbles created by whom we follow “can cause us to become isolated from alternative ideologies to our own.”

But does it work? This isn’t a review, but I will say the algorithm would need some work before I could make NewsWhip my first stop for news. Unsurprisingly, the stories that gain the most speed and, consequently, the most prominent placement on NewsWhip are very “social-friendly.”

So you’ll see a mix of stories that provoke outrage sharing top billing with pop-culture watercooler fodder in the default “Worldwide” section, and not so much “real” worldwide news of the same moment, which usually makes it to the top of that other little aggregator, Google News.

And within certain topics, the absence of human editors is sorely noticed: I came to the technology section yesterday afternoon expecting something similar to the homepage of (human-edited) Techmeme, with stories about Microsoft’s Q2 or the rocky launch of Twitter’s video app, Vine.

No such luck. Instead, one of the top articles in tech was “GRAPHIC: Girl Puts Apparently Bloody Tampon Where It Should Never Go.” Thanks, but no thanks, Huffington Post.

(I’ll leave the inevitable hand-wringing about what the popularity of these articles says about society, or whatever, to the commenters.)

Still, NewsWhip has potential amid a crowded field of curators and aggregators, and even in the short term it could be a decent alternative news source for, as one example, the majority of American adults who have never seen news on Twitter or Facebook. It’s a good surface glance at the zeitgeist, and for some casual newsreaders, that’s enough.

This just in from the world of news: Mobile matters.

That’s the clear — if not all that surprising — message from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which just announced the winners of a mobile-themed “News Challenge,” awarding $2.4 million to eight media teams.

Most of the winners are little-known up-and-comers, ranging in their focus from political activism to community radio to connecting previously disconnected groups, like farmers in Kenya.

You’ve probably heard of at least one of the winners, though: Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia’s owner, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, will put $600,000 from the Knight Foundation toward its mobile users in developing countries. Among their plans: Making articles accessible via text, which could be a boon for feature-phone owners.

The other winners:

• Textizen ($350,000), an offshoot of Code for America that wants to conduct local public polling by putting questions in public places and then asking residents to respond via text.
• TKOH ($330,000), which is developing an oral history app to make recording audio and visuals to tell a historical story easier. The app would then let users share those stories with either a small group, like their families, or with the public.
• Witness ($320,000), a human-rights organization making an app that will add metadata to mobile videos. Thus, an app user witnessing a newsworthy event such as a political protest could send an encrypted video of the event to a journalist, with info about where the video was taken automatically baked into the file. Witness program director Sam Gregory said accountability questions have hampered Syrian rebels in the field: “Their material is not trusted by the news media, and is not robust enough to stand up to evidentiary scrutiny,” he said.
• The Cafédirect Producers Foundation ($260,000), which will expand its efforts to enable SMS information sharing among small-scale farmers in Kenya, Peru and Tanzania.
• Digital Democracy ($200,000), a nonprofit seeking to help indigenous Peruvian communities record and share how mining and oil drilling are affecting their lives and environment.
• The Art Center College of Design ($200,000), which wants to develop an open-source way to turn a smartphone into a community radio station. They plan to start their work with a pilot program in Uganda, but Knight Foundation program director John Bracken said he hopes that groups will share what they learn with others in the Knight network over time.
• Abayima ($150,000), which wants to build an open-source application for feature phones that will turn SIM cards into storage devices for news and information sharing. Founder Jon Gosier said this will help political dissidents such as those in Uganda in 2011, whose government kept tabs on its citizens’ SMS activity. “This was explained away as trying to curb messages that might incite violence, but to me, it showcased how vulnerable citizens are when there they only have a single means of communication.”

Image copyright Allies Interactive

When looking to invest in social media, it is important to look ahead at upcoming trends as opposed to what networks are “hot” right now. For that reason, I have compiled a list of my top five social media predictions for 2013 based on what we’ve seen this past year.

1. Brands will be forced to measure ROI

   CEOs are growing tired of implementing social media tactics with no proven return on investment or tangible metrics. According to a London study of 600 CEOs, 72 percent are tired of seeing budget requests that are not tied to tangible results. In 2013, community managers will be tasked with finding ways to prove the worth of their respective social channels and outreach campaigns. Perhaps an easy way to do this will be to task specific individuals with providing a monthly metrics report for C-level executives. This will help tie followers, “Likes” and friends into a dollar value and provide executives with what they’re looking for — a snapshot of the effect such efforts have on their bottom-line revenue.

   Harvard Business Review also points out that this effort can be countered by empowering community influencers in your respective social channels to collaborate with for online marketing. Influencers will revel in the attention of a major brand, while you reap the benefits of enhanced visibility and broader reach of content.

2. Visuals will play a bigger role than ever

   Humans are visual creatures, which can explain the sudden spike in growth that visual social networks have seen over the past year. According to Forbes, in July 2011 Pinterest had one million active users, and merely one year later boasted a community of 20 million. Instagram is another example of growth due to visual content — Business Insider reports that when Zuckerberg bought the company in the beginning of 2012, there were 860,000 daily active users. As of September 2012, that number skyrocketed to 11 million.

   It is growth like this that has attracted brands to not only use more visual social networks, but also push out visual content on existing channels. Even press releases are providing more visual content — according to PR Newswire, 77 percent of releases get more traction when there is visual or multimedia content embedded. We will see this trend grow in 2013, and brand managers will wisely produce visually pleasing content to drive community growth and interaction.

3. Brands will need to optimize content for mobile platforms

   The term “BYOD” took over publications this year, and for a good reason — mobile use is growing exponentially. People are consuming content from their smartphones and tablets at a rapid pace, and businesses will find that in order to make their content digestible, it will need to be optimized to fit these mobile platforms. Text-heavy content and long-winded stories are becoming a thing of the past, while quick links and pictures are easier to consume on smaller screens.

4. Brand journalism will become a norm

   Whether you are a brand journalism advocate or not, it is difficult to ignore the growth of the trend over the course of the past year. Based on the extreme success that many brands are seeing by creating their own journalistic content, we can only imagine how this trend will take off in 2013. Brands such as Cisco, Boeing and HSBC are taking advantage of the opportunity to connect with new audiences in a different way. In 2013, we will see even more Fortune 500 brands adopt brand journalism and begin to self-publish, especially as traditional media outlets and their manpower begin to shrink.

5. Social media advertising will continue to grow

   Brands are single-handedly shifting the advertising market as they turn to make deals with social media channels for ad placements. According to a recent report by BIA/Kelsey, social media ad revenue reached $4.6 billion in 2012 and is projected to hit $9.2 billion in 2016. Businesses will shift their budgets from banner ads to social ads in 2013 as they see an increased ROI from these efforts.

Autumn Truong leads the direction and development of Cisco’s social media programs and communities for the company’s global corporate communications department. She has over 12 years of communications experience in Silicon Valley working with both startups and leading Fortune-500 companies. Prior to Cisco, she was at EMC Corporation where she lead public relations for the company’s software business. She has also held various public relations positions with leading PR agencies such as Edelman Public Relations Worldwide.

Little value for journalists or their readership is created in the race to be first. We need a media that races to be right.

– Dave Pell, in a blog post entitled “Get Off My Stoop”

You can’t throw a rock in Silicon Valley without hitting a media start-up. But within that field, new and untested business models are the most important link to journalism’s future, said Matter Ventures CEO Corey Ford — and they need a space to grow.

Ford comes to Matter, formerly known as Public Media Accelerator, from Runway, the accelerator inside of Eric Schmidt’s venture capital firm Innovation Endeavors.

Matter (not to be confused with the similarly named long-form journalism start-up) has funding for at least two years from its investors, KQED and the Knight Foundation, each of which put in $1.25 million. A third partner, the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), will act in a more advisory role.

But as Ford recently told AllThingsD in an interview at Matter’s new working space in San Francisco, that doesn’t mean the entrepreneurs who apply to the accelerator between now and January 6 are applying to work for PBS or NPR.

In fact, just the opposite is true — although it’s possible some of the projects that come out of the accelerator could be of interest to public media companies, since Ford took over in April he has placed the focus squarely on sustainable for-profit business models:

AllThingsD: Why change the name from Public Media Accelerator (or Public Media X) to Matter Ventures?

Corey Ford: It’s a fundamental shift that we had to do. I started in April, but we were announced to the world as Public Media Accelerator before then, before we started developing what this is. At Stanford’s D-school (design school, where Ford used to teach), you come up with a problem statement to be “needs-focused and solution-agnostic.” You don’t want to embed the solution in your problem statement.

ATD: You want an abstract goal and a variety of solutions.

Ford: Right. The shift wasn’t because we don’t like public media. I mean, we love it, I used to work in it, and I care deeply about it. But, in order to innovate within this space, you can’t start from an institutional perspective. I know it sounds very Silicon Valley-y, but I think of this as a disruptive playground. It’s about the entrepreneurs.

ATD: So, why “Matter”?

Ford: I needed a name that had a value-based filter, something that created meaningful signals in the ever-increasing noise out there. Something that matters. The other thing about the name is that we are unapologetically about for-profit scalable entrepreneurship. There can be a false dichotomy between mission — “you have to be a non-profit” — and “you have to be money-hungry.” There’s a middle ground.

ATD: So the groups that you accept will all be for-profit entities …

Ford: … seeking a sustainable, scalable business model. What we didn’t want was people building a media property and just having their business model be, “Well, it’s good media, so foundations should fund it.” That’s fine, but there’s already other people doing that.

ATD: This is an overgeneralization on my part, but there are two big camps among media start-ups: aggregators pulling from existing content that’s out there, and those producing new content. Which are you looking for more?

Ford: It’s an open door. The best ideas are gonna be ones that we can’t predict and put out a call for. The whole world is much smarter than we are. We’re a platform to attract entrepreneurs. With that in mind, this could range from participatory platforms to, potentially, B2B-type services for existing media companies.

ATD: So, not necessarily making new journalism …

Ford: … but supporting those that already do. So, for example, if someone could redesign the pledge drive to help them have a deeper relationship with their audience and collect money in some way … Ultimately, at the end of the day, business model innovation is the thing that really needs solving. It’s up to the entrepreneurs to figure it out as they go.

ATD: How will your partnerships (with KQED, the Knight Foundation and PRX) work? Back when this was Public Media X, I had it in my head that this was somehow KQED’s accelerator.

Ford: I’m super-grateful for our partners. But KQED and Knight and any other partner we bring in will never have control over our investments or our entrepreneurs. That’s fundamental to the strategy. KQED can learn by being close to what we’re doing because, by definition, it can’t operate from a disruptive perspective. And if the entrepreneurs are working on something that may be interesting to KQED, they now have an instant audience that they can test it on, if they want to. But you can never cross that disruptive line.

ATD: You still want the entrepreneurs to have freedom.

Ford: Yes. What I say to partners is, “My job is to support entrepreneurs. They could be building something that looks very threatening to you, and if they do, I will be the wind at their backs.” You have two options then. Say, “I’m scared, I don’t want to be close to it,” or do what I think is the smart thing and say, “I want to be close to this because I can learn a lot from it.”

Our overall recommendation for new news organizations is even simpler than for journalists or for legacy organizations: Survive.

–From a Columbia Journalism School report by CUNY’s C.W. Anderson, Columbia’s Emily Bell and NYU’s Clay Shirky, entitled “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present”

Last night, San Francisco got a high-dose injection of East Coast media experts.

In an event space once belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle, New York University’s Clay Shirky, Columbia University’s Emily Bell and City University of New York’s C.W. Anderson sat down for an onstage interview with AllThingsD editor Kara Swisher (who is herself a transplant from the New York area).

The group convened at Intersection for the Arts to discuss “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” a new report published by the Columbia Journalism School, which also hosted the event for its centennial. You can find the full report at this link; it is also embedded at the bottom of this story.

After the event, I caught up with Anderson and Bell for a few postgame questions about the changing state of the media:

Many of the people in attendance tonight were in some way connected to the media. Why should people outside those circles pick up this report?

C.W. Anderson: To understand the hypercharged individual. If you want to understand how technology is empowering individuals to have all sorts of new responsibilities, but also significantly more ability and authority, you should read this report. There is far more pressure on you, and far more responsibility, because you’re now acting in public in a new way.

And for those who are in the media, what can they do? Is there some action individual journalists can take now?

Anderson: Individual journalists should familiarize themselves with how a database works, how an Excel spreadsheet works.

Most seem to know nothing about that.

Anderson: Yeah, my initial answer would be, “Oh you should learn to code.” But let’s not even go there yet.

Why not?

Anderson: Because, as you said, most journalists don’t even know how an Excel spreadsheet works.

So it’s a step-by-step thing?

Anderson: One thing at a time. Every journalist should learn some basic coding skills — not necessarily becoming coders themselves, but understanding the people who do in their organization, understanding what they can ask from them. But, hey, baby steps. Do Excel first.

Emily Bell: It’s really about understanding that the world of information is changing very quickly. We’ve always aligned journalism with things like marketing and PR, because it’s about telling stories and how you present something. But what about journalism as finding and distributing information? Learn math.

What about news editors? What should they do?

Bell: There was a phase of everything being converged — the offline and online newsroom. I wonder now whether a lot of that was a big waste of time. [Laughs] That’s why I think so many journalists now leave and do their own thing. They want to be freed of whatever that process is, just to experiment with new stuff. It sounds wishy-washy to say “enable your staff,” but that’s a hard thing to do.

And what about that distinction between journalists and non-journalists? Do we need better media literacy?

Bell: The public and journalism are indistinguishable. Journalism as a profession and a trade can’t take all of this on. Some of this has to be about how society is changing. Often, people produce really good journalism, but if they’re not journalists, they don’t do it all the time.

And that’s not a problem.

Bell: No. But we need people doing it all the time.

Read the entire report, “Post-Industrial Journalism,” here:

Below, Cohn answers 10 of our questions.

What was the last thing you fixed?
I built a composting tumbler in my backyard using industrial food barrels. But every year or so, I need to replace the barrel, which begins to sag under the constant weight. I fixed that the weekend before Circa launched, knowing I wouldn’t be able to anytime soon after.

What was your first computer?
An Apple IIc. Well, technically it was my father’s — but he put it in the back den and taught us all how to use it. I was maybe 8 years old and I loved to play King’s Quest and Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, a basketball game.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
I have a cat, Brooklyn. She acts as my assistant and takes my calls when I am in meetings.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
I love to bike or take trains. I try to avoid driving if at all possible. I grew up in Los Angeles where public transportation wasn’t that good, so I very much appreciate it now. I love being able to observe the scenery instead of the road when I’m getting somewhere.

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?
This is a tough one. I suppose I’d go with the ability to freeze time. It just seems like it would be useful. Plus, “Out of This World” was one of my favorite childhood shows. The main character was half-alien and had the ability to freeze time. The crazy next-door neighbor Buzz Belmondo was actually the father of a very good friend of mine growing up.

Describe an ideal day.
A little time in the yard. A burrito. Some time to watch cool sci-fi on Netflix coupled with light reading of my choice. A nice scotch. Yea, I could do that.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
I wouldn’t claim to know the single most important issue in the world. I am a big believer that everyone has to fight his/her own battles. What is the biggest issue for one may be nothing to the other. My biggest battle has been around how we can be informed. This is how I ended up in journalism to begin with. How information flows in our society is incredibly important. That is the issue I focus on the most. Would I say it is objectively “the most important in the world”? No, but that’s just the point — what information would one even use to determine what the most important issue in the world is. (Mind explodes).

What qualities do you like in a person?
Moderation. Not somebody too high-strung, but also somebody I can count on. Not somebody too boring/lame — but somebody who doesn’t need to be “funny” all the time. You get the idea. Also shoutout to Megan Cohn — because she has the qualities and said “yes.”

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Peter Pan. That would be a great adventure.

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
Jack in the Box. But can you blame a guy? Their cheeseburger is “Ultimate.”

anxiously awaiting The Daily Planet’s move to three day per week publishing.

– From commenter Everett Will, on a post about DC Comics’ decision to have Clark Kent quit the Daily Planet in Superman #13

Want to get news on your smartphone? You’ve got plenty of options. But if you ask Circa CEO Matt Galligan, none of them is especially good.

“The content gets a different design, so that it fits on the screen and the fonts look appropriate, but the content itself hasn’t changed,” Galligan said. “The time that you consume with this device is dramatically different.”

Circa, which launches today for iPhones after nearly a year of secrecy, is a news app designed specifically for mobile. Its modest goal: To completely overhaul breaking news and the experience of receiving updates on a developing story.

For starters, the editorial staff has completely ditched the idea of reported articles as we know them. Instead, their team of 12 writers in the U.S., U.K. and China aggregate small bits of information about the day’s top happenings as they come out of various sources.

These bits, internally called “atomic units of news,” are strung together into original stories. Each piece of a story, the CEO says, is like a flashcard: Users swipe through them one-by-one, and learn at least one new thing from each card they reach.

Readers can then tap a button to follow specific stories and be notified when Circa’s editors add new flashcards with new information. That could happen in five minutes or, for some stories, it might not happen for months or years.

Galligan argues that this format is better for mobile users because they mostly use their phones in “gap time,” like waiting at the bus stop or in line at Starbucks. So, Circa is to a news magazine what Angry Birds is to a much more expansive game like World of Warcraft.

It’s an elegant attempt to connect with our short attention spans on the go, especially since Circa keeps tabs on how far readers make it into a story. It’s not in the debut version of the app launching today, but Galligan says his team is planning a feature that will recommend new stories based on what Circa knows about what its users know.

The company’s clever full name, Circa 1605, shows they’ve done their homework, since 1605 was the once-disputed year of the world’s first newspaper. But they’re not the only ones to realize that traditional news articles are often comprised of smaller, separable pieces.

For instance, many journalists use Twitter to pass along bits and pieces of stories as they arrive. And most prominently, Storify lets its users read and create stories about events (like, say, the D10 conference), based on other peoples’ tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, and so on.

However, Galligan emphasizes that all of Circa’s content is original — which is technically true, but its writers are mostly piggybacking off of the legwork of professional and citizen reporters on the ground, converting their various updates into those “just the facts, ma’am” flashcards.

So, the app can’t replace journalism as we know it, but none of the site’s founders seem interested in doing that, anyway. Founding Editor David Cohn (previously, the founder of crowdfunded-news site Spot.us) also dismissed the idea that any gaps Circa fixes can somehow “save journalism.”

“No one project has that ability,” Cohn said. “You’re going to try to do too much — so much so that you’re not going to do anything.”

But there are definitely gaps to address. Circa co-founder Ben Huh (a.k.a. the I Can Haz Cheezburger guy) seems to have been mulling over the problems with breaking news for some time. In May 2011, he wrote on his blog:

“… the experience of consuming news sucks… After the initial 3 paragraphs that contain the latest update, the rest of the article is just a regurgitation of the previous 24-hours worth of stories that I’ve ready [sic] 9 times before.”

Of course, this doesn’t take into account narrative-driven news like a feature story following up on events that are already said and done. And Galligan readily admits that the deeper analysis offered by periodicals like the New Yorker and the Economist isn’t on Circa’s horizon, at least for now.

As Cohn remarked at a recent meetup of San Francisco-area journalists, though, the format of the news determines how it makes money, so it’s kind of a big deal. Since most media outlets make their money online from serving ads to as many people as possible, they’re encouraged to keep posting more-or-less traditional stories.

But both Cohn and Galligan are keeping mum about how Circa will make money off its stream of stories and flashcards. Whether or not the app is a hit will help them figure out what story to chase for themselves.

(Below, check out a portion of my interview with Galligan, in which he demoed the new app):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121015/breaking-news-is-broken-and-circa-wants-to-fix-it/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120820/the-empty-chair-beat-the-newsroon/ http://allthingsd.com/20120820/the-empty-chair-beat-the-newsroon/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2012 06:59:57 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=243363

The behind-the-scenes at Piers Morgan right now is the episode of Newsroom I want to see.

– Megan McCarthy, via Twitter. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) was scheduled to appear on “Piers Morgan Tonight” Monday, but was a no-show.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120820/the-empty-chair-beat-the-newsroon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120814/scissor-cuts-paper-cat-pix-beat-plagiarism/ http://allthingsd.com/20120814/scissor-cuts-paper-cat-pix-beat-plagiarism/#comments Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:59:04 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=241462

The Web called Zakaria out, and rightly so, for violating the basic tenets of his chosen professional realm. But he could just come over to the Web and do that all day every day and be basically fine as long as he posted pictures of his cat every once in a while.

– Michael Barthel, on Fareed Zakaria’s suspension from Time magazine for plagiarism

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120814/scissor-cuts-paper-cat-pix-beat-plagiarism/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120717/propublicas-new-app-explains-why-the-president-sent-you-that-email/ http://allthingsd.com/20120717/propublicas-new-app-explains-why-the-president-sent-you-that-email/#comments Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:00:39 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=226554 With the presidential horse race slowly trotting toward November, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are doing what political campaigners do best: Asking for your money.

Now, a nonprofit news site is pulling back the curtain on how the campaigns use different forms of the same email to ask for juuuuust the right amount.

ProPublica’s Message Machine is an eye-opening experiment in crowdsourced journalism. Its algorithm takes in emails users have received from political campaigns and committees, and spits out answers to two interesting questions: How many versions of that same email were sent out, and why?

After all, we aren’t just voters anymore — we’re customers.

For decades, political campaigns have collected and used data about potential supporters to target their efforts toward specific areas and demographic groups. But since 2000, reliance on things like targeted emails and online voter databases has become the new normal.

As the New York Times Magazine’s Jon Gertner noted in 2004:

… someone who appears nonpartisan, someone who might even think of himself as nonpartisan, may nevertheless have a political DNA that the parties will be able to decode.

So, the Message Machine will work in the opposite direction — matching up users’ “political DNA” (i.e., demographic info, which they’ll have to provide) with the one email they’ve received. Then, it will show how that email is different from similar emails sent to people with different DNA.

Previously, ProPublica had asked readers to forward the emails they received from any and all political campaigns to emails@messagemachine.propublica.org. But the (admittedly cool) products, like “You Probably Don’t Know Janet” emerged long after the original emails had dropped off most peoples’ inboxes.

Web developer Jeff Larson calls the new Message Machine a “living news app,” since it will have answers in “semi-real time,” provided that it has received enough similar emails to figure out a trend.

In its first few months (without the real-time functionality launching today), the Message Machine’s users submitted about 9,000 emails, Larson said. But about a third of them aren’t usable, because they come from local or state elections, and the Machine doesn’t have enough examples to look at.

One of the advantages to the “living news app,” though, is that that can easily change.

“If there is a hot race, there are a lot of emails and it looks like there’s a lot of targeting going on, we’ll include that in the app,” Larson said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120717/propublicas-new-app-explains-why-the-president-sent-you-that-email/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120711/columbia-university-names-sree-sreenivasan-its-first-chief-digital-officer/ http://allthingsd.com/20120711/columbia-university-names-sree-sreenivasan-its-first-chief-digital-officer/#comments Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:47:53 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=229392 If you know anyone in the New York media scene, then you either know Sree, or you know someone who does. And more often than not, you need only mention him by his first name: Once you and another person establish that you both know Sree, you’re already more than halfway to being friends.

For those who don’t know him, Sree — @sree on Twitter — is Sreenath Sreenivasan, who, during the 15 years I’ve known him, has been a hyperconnected, seemingly permanent fixture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (Full disclosure: I’m a graduate of the school, and was a student of Sree’s 15 years ago.) Having graduated from the school himself in 1993, he simply never left. Some 19 years later, as a professor, he has taught most subjects in the curriculum at least once, and spent the last seven years holding the title Dean of something or other: Most recently it has been Dean of Student Affairs.

Aside from his academic duties, he always found the time and energy to keep a foot in the media game. When I first met him, he was teaching a full course load and was a regular contributor to the New York Times Business section, and had just wrapped a gig as a freelance producer for “The Nightly Business Report” on PBS. He’s been a tech commentator for New York’s local TV news broadcasts, most recently for WCBS; he blogs on social media for CNET, does his own weekly Web-based call-in show on BlogTalkRadio, and teaches workshops for midcareer professionals of every stripe who are trying to get their heads around how to use Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn productively. He also co-founded the South Asian Journalists Association. And when this tornado named Sree finally stops whirling, he’s always got time for any student. The sign on the door to his office reads: “Yes you can bug me” “Don’t worry, you’re NOT interrupting.”

So it will probably come as a bit of a shock to anyone who has passed through the J-School’s halls during the last two decades that Sree is leaving, though he’s not going far. Today, Columbia appointed him its first Chief Digital Officer. It’s a new academic position in the office of the Provost John Coatsworth (the university’s highest academic officer), focusing on driving online education initiatives.

Columbia, like every other major university in the world, is trying to figure out how best to deliver its courses via the Web. It’s a weighty subject, covered in detail in a session with Stanford University President John Hennessy and Khan Academy’s Salman Khan at D:All Things Digital last month.

If now is the time for digital education to start having the impact that it’s going to have, Sree will be one of the people setting its agenda at Columbia. And yes, most people will still just call him Sree.

The memo announcing Sree’s new job is below:

Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2012 5:01 PM
Subject: Sree Sreenivasan appointed Chief Digital Officer, Office of the Provost

Dear Colleagues,

I am very pleased to announce that I have appointed Sree Sreenivasan as Columbia University’s first Chief Digital Officer. Sree, who was previously Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia’s School of Journalism, joins the Office of the Provost effective immediately.

Sree’s portfolio will cover a broad range of issues at the intersection of technology, education, and digital media. His primary responsibility will be to lead the development of a coordinated university-wide strategy in response to the quickening pace of change in online education and digital media.

This effort will focus on supporting the innovative and exciting distance learning programs run by the School of Continuing Education, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and other academic units, as well as facilitating efforts by other schools at Columbia that want to develop an online curricular presence. At the same time, this effort aims to make the most effective use of Columbia’s academic and financial resources, and incentivize collaboration and the adoption of effective practices across campus. The goal is to ensure that we deploy new tools and technologies in interactive and distance learning to ensure the richest and most dynamic learning environment possible for Columbia’s students.

Sree will work closely with schools, centers, and academic departments, as well as our existing digital development groups such as Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. In addition to his focus on online education, Sree will provide advisory services and programs to schools, faculty and administrators on digital technology and social media, working closely with our Office of Communications and Public Affairs to highlight areas of University leadership. (The role does not affect our existing information technology operations within the division of Student and Administrative Services.)

Sree has spent 20 years on Morningside Heights: one earning his M.S. at the Journalism School and another 19 as a professor, including seven as a dean. Most recently, he was the Journalism School’s Dean of Student Affairs, supervising admissions, student service/life and career services. All the while, he was an active member of the faculty, teaching digital journalism and social media; he will continue to be on the faculty, occasionally teaching there.

He has partnered with many departments across campus, serving as a sounding board, guest speaker, informal consultant and more. Among the honors Sree has received are being named to several lists of digital- and social-media professors to follow; AdAge’s 25 media people to follow on Twitter; and Newsweek’s list of the 20 most influential South Asians in America.

I am confident that Sree’s experience in academic administration and his widely respected expertise in new media technology make him uniquely well-suited for this challenge.

You can connect with him on Twitter (@sree) or Facebook.com/sreetips or the old-fashioned way, via email.

Please join me in welcoming Sree in his new position.

Sincerely,

John H. Coatsworth
Provost

(Image courtesy of Deidre Schoo)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120711/columbia-university-names-sree-sreenivasan-its-first-chief-digital-officer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120629/scoopfail/ http://allthingsd.com/20120629/scoopfail/#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2012 07:22:20 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=226053

The real lesson here is that the scoop is and always has been a dangerous act of journalistic narcissism. Did it truly matter if one outlet “broke” the same information that other outlets — and the world of the Internet — knew a second before another?

– Jeff Jarvis on the failure of CNN, Fox and other outlets to report Thursday’s Supreme Court decision accurately

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120629/scoopfail/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120626/it-may-not-be-televised-but-the-journalism-revolution-will-be-hacked/ http://allthingsd.com/20120626/it-may-not-be-televised-but-the-journalism-revolution-will-be-hacked/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:00:14 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=224222

What a weird weekend for journalism.

On Sunday, a day once reserved for fat feature-laden newspapers, a new television show and a San Francisco hackathon brought the future of the media into the limelight in very different ways.

The TV show was HBO’s “The Newsroom,” the newest project of “The Social Network” scribe (and D10 guest) Aaron Sorkin. The hackathon was NewsHack Day, an ambitious attempt to bring self-proclaimed “hacks and hackers” — journalists and coders — together for a mad weekend of learning, brainstorming and creating.

Both were entertaining. But, one was stuck in the past.

First, consider the opening scene of “The Newsroom,” which you can watch on YouTube here. Waxing nostalgic onstage in front of cameras and hundreds of students, protagonist news-anchor Will McAvoy pines for a time when America was great “because we were informed … by great men, men who were revered.”

Then, there was the upshot of NewsHack: In the span of fewer than 30 hours, eight teams formed, built practical Web sites and tools for journalists, and demoed their work for a panel of reporters and programmers.

One team’s Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) tracker, called Bird-Dog, got the big prize: A partnership to develop the tracker inside the Mother Jones newsroom.

“I think [Bird-Dog] is going to become a pretty standard tool in newsrooms across the country,” NewsHack organizer Michael Coren said.

Back in TV-land, Sorkin’s idealistic protagonist is not wrong to let past successes inspire him to be a better journalist.

However, solely celebrating and imitating “great men” is incompatible with the present trajectory of the news media toward greater collaboration among diverse groups of journalists and non-journalists alike.

Other projects at NewsHack (which was free with sponsorships by Knight-Mozilla Open News, among others) included Contextualize, a tool to easily annotate data visualizations to give readers added context; Dial Me In, a site that would automatically upload and transcribe reporters’ phone interviews; and On the Record, which pulls direct quotes out of news articles and lays them out in an aesthetically pleasing timeline, so readers can track who said what and when.

In addition to observing NewsHack Day, I also participated, joining a team called Haystax that aimed to make scraping data from any sort of table on the Web a simple point-and-click process.

The demo of our working prototype generated “oohs” from the audience. But it wouldn’t have happened if Haystax didn’t have a team of some experienced journalists, a dogged programmer and a team leader who straddled both worlds — Tyler Dukes, the managing editor of Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab.

But what we blatantly didn’t have, what no team had, was an easy answer to the big question: What’s next?

At the official start of NewsHack on Saturday morning, Coren emphasized job losses in the media and the “crumbling” of old business models, without new ones to take their place.

The characters in “The Newsroom” know this story, too. “You’re one pitch meeting away from doing the news in 3-D,” one staffer spits at McAvoy.

To which he correctly replies, “This isn’t non-profit theater. It’s advertiser-supported television.” It’s impossible, he gripes, to do a high-quality commercial news show.

Photo courtesy Michael Coren

At the close of the hackathon, money was far from the minds of almost all participants. Only one group described a potential business plan for their project, and many (including Haystax) moved to make their nascent projects open source and free for all online.

“Somebody asked me today, ‘Did you save journalism?’” Coren said. “I’m not sure hackathons are really about fixing the business model.”

So, in the absence of clear business applications for the hacks developed this weekend, the real philosophical question is one we’ve all heard before: How should technology shape the practice of journalism?

To answer that, one last comparison between “The Newsroom” and NewsHack Day is in order.

Halfway through the first episode of Sorkin’s show, the characters get some breaking news: The Deepwater Horizon oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The “good guys” then rally together to find out exactly what happened, in a refreshing acknowledgement of teamwork’s importance to fast reporting.

In a matter of minutes, they produce an hour of TV that proves McAvoy’s pessimism wrong: It’s factual, hard-hitting and insightful.

Impossible? No. But stuck in the past? Still yes.

Perfection was never an option at the weekend’s hackathon. Even given more people from more backgrounds and more time, all the projects demoed on Sunday were plainly incomplete. One of the big themes of the weekend was accepting that incompleteness is okay.

David Cohn, the founder of crowd-funded news platform Spot.us, told a group of NewsHack attendees that learning to work with limitations and imperfection is a vital part of the process, something coders know well and journalists often fear.

“This is a great first time to fail,” Cohn said.

Coren agreed that coders and journalists need to learn to borrow from one another’s rule books. And the only way they can do that is for them to actually do something, rather than just thinking or talking about it.

“It’s not enough to bring journalists in and lecture them,” Coren said. “It requires something that’s more experiential … and more difficult.”

As, of course, it always has been in media that matters.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120626/it-may-not-be-televised-but-the-journalism-revolution-will-be-hacked/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120623/scraperwiki-tries-to-turn-journalists-into-hackers/ http://allthingsd.com/20120623/scraperwiki-tries-to-turn-journalists-into-hackers/#comments Sat, 23 Jun 2012 16:00:08 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=223508

More and more, regular people are learning how to program: Codecademy is drawing hundreds of thousands of students; hackathons have become a seemingly everyday happening across tech-savvy cities like San Francisco; and now some are even calling for children to learn to program in elementary school.

So, are journalists setting themselves up to get left behind by technology again?

Not this weekend, at least. At the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, a hackathon called NewsHack Day kicked off yesterday with a day-long session aimed at teaching reporters how to scrape data for their stories.

Led primarily by ScraperWiki’s Thomas Levine, attendees got a crash course in how to find and pull down data, clean it up, and apply it to projects.

“Computers can do anything that a team of interns can do,” Levine said.

My project? Instantly scraping Securities and Exchange Commission filings for the “compensation tables” that detail what company execs get each year in salary and perks. Done manually, digging those tables out of multiple documents can be slow, but they often contain interesting insights.

Even if some of the drudgery of document-reporting can be outsourced to a computer, though, technical know-how isn’t enough to make a strong story.

Levine used a Department of Labor Web page that linked to unions’ collective bargaining agreements as part of his introductory lesson. But, while looking at the site, he said he didn’t know the difference between “private sector” and “public sector” unions.

T. Christian Miller, a senior reporter for ProPublica in attendance at the event, said the union example shows the need for journalistic “hacks” and tech-savvy “hackers” to work together in the future.

“Every journalist needs to know a little about coding, but it’s hard to expect full knowledge,” Miller said.

To remedy that knowledge gap, the journalists in attendance Friday will be joined over this weekend by designers and programmers, to either flesh out their existing projects or start new ones.

NewsHack weekend organizer Michael Coren, a contributor to FastCompany and The Economist, said projects can be either “story hacks” to bring data into in-progress stories, or more general “news tools” that reporters can use on any number of stories.

So, the SEC scraper would be a “news tool,” because — if it works, and that’s a big if — it could scrape any company’s filings from any year for compensation info.

But what’s the bigger point of all this? Does the reporter of the future have to be equally adept at both writing and coding?

No, Coren said — the most important skill reporters can gain from NewsHack Day is being able to talk like a programmer. That means journalists can know what’s possible with technology and communicate what they want the tech experts to do.

Coren criticized newsrooms that segregate techies from journalists — singling out CNN, as of the time he previously worked there — as part of the problem. He said the sense of journalism as a community of people with different skills is the real goal of NewsHack weekend, not the projects.

“If we come out with great code, I’m going to be happy, but at the end of the day, it’s two days,” Coren said. “The community is what’s sustainable.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120623/scraperwiki-tries-to-turn-journalists-into-hackers/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120614/shrinking-deadlines/ http://allthingsd.com/20120614/shrinking-deadlines/#comments Fri, 15 Jun 2012 06:59:03 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=220650

It’s very common today for a reporter to get a phone call or a text from the home office saying, “our competition has X and you need to beat it in the next thirty seconds, preferably less.”

– Dan Rather on the digital news cycle

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