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Kevin: Geoff McGhee has created a video report looking at data visualisation as a story-telling medium. It has examples of telling 'data stories', life as a data stream and exploring data and technologies and tools.
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Kevin: Video from a recent event on data journalism at the Frontline Club in London. Features Simon Rogers, editor of the Datablog at The Guardian (friend and former colleague) and David McCandless, designer and author of Information is Beautiful. Really good note from Michael Blastland, freelance journalist and creator of BBC Radio 4's More or Less programme. He reminded journalists that they must interrogate official data and question how it was created.
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Kevin: Excellent piece by Jemima Kiss, friend and former colleague at The Guardian, looking at how mobile and the apps economy is driving renewed confidence at UK online publishers. However, the report was thin on details about revenue, she noted. Good details on freemium, sponsored and single purchase apps.
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Journalists’ identity as a barrier to tech adoption
As I mentioned last week, I’ll be speaking about the Future of Context at the Social Media Forum in Hamburg tomorrow. Bjoern Negelmann has been helping to frame the discussion ahead of the conference and, after our interview by email and blog, he’s posted a follow-up looking at possible evolution of Google’s Living Stories concept (in the original German and also in English via Google translate).
After outlining how he sees this working, Bjoern asks what’s standing in the way of the implementation of such a platform. As he points out, the technology exists. Why hasn’t anyone tried it? Part of the problem is that cash-strapped organisations aren’t prioritising this kind of work over other strategic goals. However, I also see other road blocks.
You ask why such an approach hasn’t been implemented. The main reason is culture, and that is an issue not just for journalism but for many industries. New technologies often challenge not only existing roles but also existing organisational structures. That means that managers often assess new technology not in whether it delivers a better product or experience but whether it will undermine their authority.
Have you ever developed what you thought was an excellent social media strategy only to see it collapse due to lack of implementation by key managers? You can have the best technology and clear performance targets, and it still will fail without buy-in from key gatekeepers hidden within the organisation.
The other issue is really about professional identity. Journalists are very tribal, meaning that they have always been very sensitive about who is and isn’t a journalist. Economic uncertainty has only heightened this sensitivity. Many journalists still define themselves not only by their jobs but by very specific ways in which they do their jobs. Case in point, in the UK, a proper journalist must know shorthand or they aren’t a proper journalist. In the US, where I’m from, shorthand isn’t a requirement for journalism training. Although I can type faster than most people can do shorthand, I’m not really a proper journalist because I don’t know shorthand. It’s not difficult to implement technology in journalism organisations that doesn’t affect journalists’ roles, but it is devilishly difficult to implement technology that impacts how they do their jobs because it challenges their identity.
Discuss.
links for 2010-09-22
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Kevin: The Fredrikstad Blad in Norway (a place where I've been and have done journalism training at the Norwegian Institute of Journalism) decided last year to dedicate half of its resources, both editorial and commercial, to the web. They have doubled their online revenue. It's been difficult, but the Mecom-owned newspaper is part of a larger effort by the group to cut costs and raise revenues. The staff had already been reduced by 20% when this effort came.
links for 2010-09-21
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Kevin: An article from 2009 that says that a glut of advertising space was one of the things depressing online display advertising during the recession. I wonder if things have changed as the recession eases. Tameka Kee wrote: "Even if the economy rebounds in 2009, it doesn’t look like the situation will improve because premium and mid-tier publishers are just creating too much content. When you add in the continuous stream of lower-quality user-generated content and social media inventory, the Journal says: 'The Web is likely heading for a shakeout on a scale unseen since the dot.com bust.'" I agree that a shake-out will happen, but like all such inflections, it's a matter of timing.
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Kevin: Mathew Ingram at GigaOm has an interesting look at the failure of journalism startup NewsTilt: "One of the more glaringly obvious flaws in the company’s makeup is what appears to be a lack of interest in the problem NewsTilt was trying to solve. While the company had an idea of what it wanted to do for journalists — namely, to provide a platform for them to find an audience and theoretically build some kind of business around their content, similar to what True/Slant tried to do before being acquired by Forbes — neither of the founders had any background in journalism. Worse than that, Biggar admits that neither had much passion for the idea either; the startup evolved out of a plan to develop a better commenting system for newspapers."
Social Media Forum: My thoughts on the future of context
Next week, I’ll be giving the keynote at the Social Media in Hamburg, and I’ve been asked to speak about the future of context. Bjoern Negelmann asked me a few questions via email about the subject, and he’s kindly allowed me to cross-post the interview for the Social Web World blog.
1) Kevin, as an expert for new digital media strategies you will be giving a talk on the “future of context” at the upcoming Social Media FORUM on Sept 28. Can you give three keywords that describe what we can expect from your talk?
Relevance, insight, value
2) Is “context” the turning key for the misled strategies of media companies in the Internet? And if so what is the explanation?
First I should say, as much as everyone in the industry wishes it, there are no silver bullets, no single solution that will solve the problems that media companies are facing. The iPad won’t save us. Paywalls won’t save us, and simply finding ways to increase context won’t on its own save us.
That being said, most current digital media strategies are fundamentally flawed. They are mostly based on the premise that internet really is just another distribution medium like radio, television and print. They rely on a media landscape of scarcity instead of abundance. These outdated assumptions are rooted in the era of mass media. In 20th Century mass media models, which relied on just a few sources of information and entertainment, success relied upon building the biggest audience possible and using paid content and advertising to make loads of money.
As Edward Roussel of the Telegraph, said, the link between rising audience and higher returns was true until the spring of 2008. Then something happened. Yes, it was partly due to the recession, but it is also due to an oversupply of online advertising space. As Paid Content says, premium and mid-tier publishers are creating too much content, creating a surplus of content to run ads against. As in any market, if supply outstrips demand then you have downward price pressures.
There are exceptions. With the online advertising recovery, The Daily Mail in the UK has been able to outgrow the competition and translate that into commercial success. Big still sometimes wins. There are still lucrative verticals such as business in which returns have stood up or actually grown during the recession. The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and The Financial Times are all enjoying success, partly due to increasing interest in business and finance due to the recession. However, most other publishers find themselves under severe pressure.
To change our fortunes, we first need to question the assumptions underlying 20th Century media business models. Until the 1980s, both audiences and advertisers had fewer choices and media owners could charge monopoly rents for advertising. But when the multi-channel world, whether broadcast or online, arrived, the media’s first reaction was to create more channels and content to try to take advantage of increased distribution opportunities. We’re now seeing the limits of such an approach as the law of diminishing returns takes hold.
Context is about adding value to content in ways that benefit audiences and advertisers. It makes it easier for audiences to find and make sense of relevant content. Adding context, rather than simply creating more content, is about realising that content is no longer scarce, but audiences’ time and attention is. It helps advertisers by providing opportunities for more highly targeted advertising.
3) But this strategy means allocating resources for producing context? Isn’t this against the recent strategies of media companies that are just cutting costs because of the “lousy pennies” of online advertising?
While media companies, especially newspapers, have been cutting staff to cut costs, they have also been creating more content. Digital production techniques make this possible but, again, we’re starting to reach the limits of that strategy. Basically, we have an oversupply of content driving an oversupply of digital advertising space, and traditional markets have one way of valuing a surplus: returns plummet.
The market is already flooded and the last thing we need is more content. A study commissioned by the Associated Press (PDF) found that young audiences were shutting off because they were lost in a deluge of episodic updates. The key conclusion was: “The subjects were overloaded with facts and updates and were having trouble moving more deeply into the background and resolution of news stories.” In essence, the news industry is acting against its own economic interest by producing more content and exacerbating the problem of information overload. It’s like trying to save a drowning man by giving him a glass of water
We need a much more focused approach. Allocating resources to producing context around existing content while making strategic choices about what not to produce will create opportunities by adding value and creating differentiated products. Yes, we live in a world of flow, with constant streaming updates, but mining that flow for context and value-added information will be where sustainable business models are.
4) So putting the weight on the “context” – what are the formats and examples of this strategy?
Thomson-Reuters has a service called Calais. It analyses thousands of mainstream media and non-traditional sources of information every day. It powers services such as Zemanta, which allows bloggers and traditional journalists to easily add images and links, which add context, to articles. As a platform, Thomson-Reuters can sell Calais to enterprises to make sense of the data and information they create, but it’s also a tool the company itself uses to algorithmically find meaning in the flow of information from traditional and non-traditional news organisations, e.g. finding new companies to watch before they show up on the traditional news radar.
One of my favourite examples right now is Sunlight Foundation’s Poligraft. Using public information about political contributions and a service like Calais, they reveal details about donors and major campaign contributions to members of Congress. It quickly adds a layer of context in any story involving political leaders.
The Guardian is achieving some great things with their Datablog and Datastore. Data is a key part of many stories that journalists write everyday, but in the past, the only thing we with did with those numbers was highlight a few. Now, the Datablog not only allows everyone to see the full set of numbers, but by hosting them on Google Docs for others to download, people with skills in data visualisation are able to present these numbers in new and creative ways. The Guardian has a group on Flickr to allow them to highlight their work.
The BBC also had another great example during the World Cup this year. They called it dynamic semantic publishing, and it took the official FIFA statistics to dynamically create a rich store of information about players, teams and groups. Not only was it a rich presentation of the facts around the World Cup, but it also helped their audience discover BBC coverage of their favourite teams and players.
5) If you take a look ahead in the future – what kind of media companies are able to adapt to that strategy?
The kind of companies that have been able to adapt to this strategy have been ones that see beyond traditional containers of content. For news, they realise that the written story is no longer the atomic unit, the indivisible unit, of journalism. There is data and context within the story, context that can be linked and used to draw connections between seemingly unrelated events in our increasingly complex world. Context is not just about adding value to pieces of content, but it also helps make it easier to organise and add news ways for audiences to find and discover what is relevant and interesting to them.
links for 2010-09-18
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Kevin: Some great examples of practical data and mapping applications for the 2010 Afghan elections. TileMill allows different sets of data to be overlaid on top of each such as fraud measurements over maps of election-related violence. Excellent examples of getting more information from mapping and datasets
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Kevin: Scott Rosenberg has an excellent guide to how to dig in a website and find out who owns it. It's a great primer for web journalists in some basic investigative techniques to you know who's behind what you're reading online.
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Kevin: Frederic Lardinois questions that numbers behind McDonald's claims that Foursquare helped it increase foot traffic by 33%. The numbers don't add up. Check-ins increased by 33% but most likely not foot traffic. Frankly, the check-ins might have started from a very low base, accounting for the double digit increase.
links for 2010-09-17
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Kevin: Domino's UK says that its social media campaign using Facebook and Foursquare was key in driving profits 29% higher. On Foursquare, they have what they call a superfans programme. CEO Chris Moore said that the "web-based activities offer a dual benefit of driving pizza sales online and building customer loyalty."
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Kevin: With a spend of only $1000, McDonald's in the US says that a Foursquare campaign was able to increase foot traffic to its stores by 33%. They didn't measure increased sales, only traffic, however, there are other examples that did measure sales, such as Domino's UK that attributed its social media and Foursquare campaign to a 29% increase in profits.
links for 2010-09-15
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Kevin: Dean Starkman writes about the dramatic increase in content production in the US while at the same time the journalism industry has cut 15,000 jobs. He writes about the dramatic rise in output across newspapers, television and the web. More needs to be written about this. I think that Starkman has written an important piece. The question I have is whether companies will have the courage to take a look at their output and take measured steps to reverse the forward creep that is valuing quality over quantity. Speed is good but shouldn't be the only thing driving journalism in the digital era.
links for 2010-09-13
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Kevin: An excellent look at the law concerning internet news aggregators and also looking at the different types of aggregators.
links for 2010-09-08
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Kevin: Google is definitely starting to find some clever ways to drive HTML5 uptake. One way is by helping to develop interesting interactivity using the emerging web standard. In this case, they have worked with Arcade Fire to develop a video that pulls in your location and "mashes up the film with Google Maps and Street View". The video also allows you to write a postcard to "your younger self". This is driving new levels of real interactivity, and it will be a great time for storytellers.
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Kevin: Mathew Ingram looks at investments in companies trying to build a business in the Twitter ecosystem. As Twitter itself seeks a business model, it's making it more difficult for other companies to build their businesses off of providing Twitter services. It's a fine line. Twitter wouldn't have experienced such growth if it hadn't been for the eco-system that developed around it, but Twitter also needs to find a sustainable business model or the heart of the eco-system will die.
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Kevin: Sarah Perez writes at ReadWriteWeb: "According to ABI Research's Neil Strother, check-in apps may raise privacy concerns among some users today, but those issues can be overcome by offering consumers deals, discounts and rewards. The "value-exchange" of receiving these rewards will be high enough that consumers won't mind giving up privacy in order to take advantage of the benefits."
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Kevin: The BBC uses Ushahidi's new cloud-based service, crowdmap, to map reports surrounding the London tube strike in September 2010. It should have had a filter not just as to what form of transportation but also whether the report was of a problem or of alternative routes to avoid congestion or suspended service.