Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

03.22.13
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Kickstarter-funded Read Matter finding subs do better than singles

Bobbie Johnson by Jeremy Keith from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Bobbie Johnson by Jeremy Keith from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Building sustainable journalism is a topic near and dear to me as it is core to the work that I do now, and Hacks/Hackers London on Wednesday provided one of those rare times when you get to hear someone a real journalism entrepreneur talk about what has worked and what hasn’t with their start-up. Of course, it’s also great to see a former colleague at The Guardian, Bobbie Johnson, find success.

He and co-founder Jim Giles launched Read Matter with a campaign to raise seed capital on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. They set a goal of raising $50,000, but in less than 48 hours, their goal was firmly in the rear view mirror. In the end, they raised almost three times their goal, brining in $140,201. As Bobbie told The Next Web, crowdfunding can be a great bit of market research. It allows you to find out whether there is real demand for your project.

One of the things that I think really helped their Kickstarter campaign was a great video that clearly explained what Read Matter was in a highly engaging way. It was a great bit of marketing, and if you believe in your journalism, I believe that you have to be ready to sell it. It’s not enough to have the conviction that journalism should win in the marketplace of ideas, you do need to work to make sure that it cuts through the overwhelming torrent of things competing for people’s time and attention.

However, taking a step back before the campaign, Bobbie and Jim did business plans. Bobbie quickly flashed the Excel spreadsheets they used to try to figure out if there was an actual business with how they planned to produce one long-form science and technology piece a month. For a lot of journalists trying to do start-ups, I’d strongly suggest speaking with someone with business experience. It’s not something that we were taught in J-school, but in this new world for the brave, this is something you’ll either need to develop or get via a partner in your project.

Bobbie and Jim are learning as they go along, and one of the things that really stood out for me was lessons that surprised them. They had expected most of their sales to be single sales, but they are actually getting more of their revenue from subscriptions. I read Bobbie’s experience that single sales were too high friction. It’s much easier to set up a subscription through iTunes, Amazon or your own payment system than it is to remember to buy something every month when it comes out. I think that has a profound implication for how news groups are packaging up their long-form, high-gloss, high-cost pieces. Does this mean that instead of trying to sell Kindle Singles, that it might be better for news groups to sell subs for long-form journalism? Should they have several packages that target niches? Read Matter covers only science and technology. Would they be as successful if they tried to sell “investigative journalism” rather than a single topic? My gut says that investigative journalism as a class of content might have more value to journalists than it does intrinsically to audiences. What I mean is that audiences are usually interested in topics, not classes of content. That is why I’m sceptical about the sustainability of trying to strip out deep investigative journalism from a broader package of content.

I’m doing a lot of thinking about how to support long-form, often investigative journalism. As  another speaker at Hacks/Hackers London on Wednesday – David Leigh of The Guardian – pointed out, the cross-subsidy in journalism businesses, mostly fat advertising returns, are going or gone. To me, the real question is not how to support investigative journalism on its own but how to find new sources of cross-subsidy to support it.

That aside, kudos to Bobbie and Jim. I know that their future success will take a lot of work and more learning, but it is encouraging to see people succeeding with new models to support the real heavy lifting of long-form original content.

03.20.13
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Coming to peace with journalism Part 1

This is a blog post that has been a long time coming. I simply hadn’t known where to start, and I’m the kind of blogger who doesn’t like to leave threads dangling. I need to get over that, and a journalist in the US inspired me with her courage in discussing why she left news. Allyson Bird, a woman in her late 20s in the US, said when asked why she wasn’t married and why she left news, she answered with one word: Money.

I can relate to that. I remember as an early 20-something reporter in western Kansas in 1994 that I made $2,000 less than a first year teacher, which is commonly used as the benchmark for low pay in the US. I remember going to a local TV station in a much larger city in Michigan after that job, and I was shocked to find that a junior producer made $3,000 less than I had in western Kansas.

Allyson then said that journalism didn’t seem like a “sustainable career path”, and she meant not only financially but also personally. She went on to explain:

This is the real reason why I left news: I finally came to accept that the vanity of a byline was keeping me in a job that left me physically and emotionally exhausted, yet supremely unsatisfied.

I did and continue to find journalism quite satisfying, but I know what she means about emotional exhaustion. For me, it wasn’t the hassling by editors late at night or during personal events. I’m probably a little too much of a workaholic for that to have bothered me. I still need to find a better balance between work and play.

To me, the emotionally draining thing was knowing exactly what I should be doing as a digital journalist and being almost completely powerless to do what needed to be done while I was working in a traditional newsroom. I have had a lot more success being an external agitator rather than a Barbarian Inside the Gates, which is what I called myself and was the title of a short lived internal blog when I was The Guardian.

Why did I take a buyout from The Guardian? I often get asked that question. A little over a year after Suw and I were married, I threw myself back into my job, giving myself one more chance to make a difference. I worked from the moment I got up until the moment I went to sleep. Then one day, Suw said to me, “I don’t get to see my husband anymore.” I refused to be a statistic of yet another journalist with a failed marriage.

The real reason I took the buyout though was that powerlessness and its corrosive effects. I was giving into the dark side; I was growing bitter. I knew that the lost marriages were only a side effect, not only because of too much work, but bitterness that I had seen in too many journalists. I was getting into middle life, and not only was I not going to lose my Suw, I wasn’t going to lose my soul. I didn’t want to become that bitter old man I had seen a fair number of times sitting in the newsroom alone not because there was a story to cover but because he had nothing better to do.

Fortunately, I’ve never feared course corrections. I miss being in a newsroom, but Suw reminds me that in the two years in between when I left The Guardian and when I joined the Media Development Investment Fund, I trained and worked with more than 800 journalists around the world.

But I still miss being in a newsroom. Suw has asked me what I miss. That is another blog post. I need to answer that question, but I needed to be honest and open about why I left the newsroom first.

Thanks Allyson for inspiring me with your courage. This is a good conversation to have.

03.18.13
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The bully barons of the British press fight to remain unaccountable

Of course, true to form, only hours after I published my previous post, three British press groups threatened to boycott any new self-regulatory body which might be underpinned by statue, the Guardian reported. Classy. As Alex Andreou at the New Statesman wrote, this really is a toddlers’ tantrum.

Much of the press seems to be belly-down on the supermarket floor, punching the linoleum, kicking out and screaming WAAH WAAH BUT I DON’T WANT TO BE REGULATED.

The three groups, News International (aka Hackers ‘R Us), Daily Mail owner Associated Newspapers and the Telegraph Media Group all portrayed themselves as the defenders of freedom of the press and democratic liberty. It should be pointed out, that when Operation Motorman looked into the use of private investigators by the the press and other industries, including the financial and insurance industries, topping the league table by a country mile was the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail says that every one of its 1218 requests from private investigators was legal. I would prefer if a proper investigation determined that rather than take it on the self-interested word of Mail man Paul Dacre.

The Guardian quoted a source close on these efforts who said:

We wouldn’t join the regulator. It would challenge the government to go for full state licensing. This is definitely under active consideration: to stand up against the politicians and for the media and say ‘we’ll go it alone and what are you going to do about it?’ They will just end up fighting for years and newspapers might rediscover a common purpose around press freedom and become a beacon of liberty. This is definitely a fallback position.

Lord Black, a Conservative peer and executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, said any regulator underpinned by statute would be constantly challenged by law. Translation: We’ll unleash our dogs of law.

This isn’t about the freedom of the press. This is about press corporations that want freedom from accountability. This is not about liberty, unless it is the liberty to continue to live outside the laws, ethics and standards of a democratic society.

Journalists, editors and publishers are citizens.We are not above nor outside the law. These three press groups are not defending press freedom, a freedom that exists to support and be balanced by other rights in a democratic society. They are rather fighting for their own self interest . They are not fighting to hold power to account but rather are fighting to hold onto their own power. Shameful.

03.17.13
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British journalists need to take responsibility for press reform

With respect to proposals over to reform the British press in the wake of ever widening allegations of phone hacking, computer hacking and utterly unethical behaviour, we’re seeing Greener’s Law in operation:

Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.

The British press have been spilling a lot of ink and pushing a lot of pixels in an attempt to avoid any change to the status quo. If the press was covering any other industry fighting so vociferously against a new regulatory regime, journalists and columnists would accuse them of special pleading and double standards. In a brilliant piece piercing some of the puffery of the press, Alex Andreou, writing for the New Statesman, put it this way:

The lack of self-reflection is truly staggering. The Leveson process is not something which was done to us. Nobody woke up one morning and thought “I know what I’ll do today – curtail the freedom of the press.” This is something entirely caused by the industry being, on the whole, out of control; engaging in occasionally illegal and often unethical practices. Take responsibility.

The response from journalists? Lord Justice Leveson put it best:

Not only are the press powerful lobbyists in their own interests, but they wield a powerful megaphone with considerable influence.

The press in the UK doesn’t want any interference by the government in what they do, which I support up to a point, but the press has talking a lot of nonsense about the proposals for reform and self-regulation for months.

With all of the spin in the press, it’s important to review what Leveson actually proposed. To quote a BBC explainer, Leveson recommended:

• Newspapers should continue to be self-regulated – and the government should have no power over what they publish
• There had to be a new press standards body created by the industry, with a new code of conduct
• That body should be backed by legislation, which would create a means to ensure the regulation was independent and effective
• The arrangement would provide the public with confidence that their complaints would be seriously dealt with – and ensure the press are protected from interference

Not to gloss over some of the finer points of the just announced proposals, but the main difference now appears to be whether the new self-regulatory body will be backed by regulation or a Royal Charter. I would like to know what happened to Leveson’s recommendation that in addition to the new self-regulation body, a new law “should also place an explicit duty on the government to uphold and protect the freedom of the press”. That would be a great addition to the proposals.

What has been troubling to me is that instead of reaffirming their commitment to professionalism, fair play and living within the law, too much of British journalistic commentary about the proposed reforms has been over the top, invoking the name of Stalin, Mussolini and other dark dictators. Anti-hacking campaigners are accused of bullying politicians simply by meeting them. Really? As if press barons never met with politicians? Indeed, as the FT recently said, all of the closed door meetings between powerful editors and politicians gave the impression that the press had something to hide.

A democracy cannot have an institution, governmental or otherwise, that operates with no accountability. Commercial press barons would say that their audiences hold to them account with the power of the pound, but commercial success is not equivalent to or a substitute for accountability.

The scope of this press corruption scandal continues to grow with hundreds of more revelations about not only Rupert Murdoch’s papers but also now at Trinity Mirror. At some point, voices within the press need to stop playing hardball defence and start getting to grips with how to respond affirmatively. I’m a journalist who has worked for the BBC and then the Guardian for most of my career, and I have been waiting for British journalists to stand up and categorically condemn the behaviour and commit to renewed professionalism. Certainly, some have, but mostly, I just saw reflexive grandstanding about the essential democratic role of the press. True, freedom of the press is essential to democracy, and the role that we play in supporting free societies it is one of the reasons why I’m proud to be a journalist.

However, we cannot turn a blind eye to how corrupt and corrupting certain parts of the British press became. Operation Motorman showed how widespread the problem was. However, the best way to put distance between the vast majority of journalists and these criminals within our midst is to stand up for our professional standards and ethics. The press cannot hold power to account if its own power is unaccountable. We cannot protect democracy while allowing a criminal class to grow within our midst. Our efforts at self-regulation cannot be taken seriously if the serial abuse is so obvious to everyone outside of our professional tribe, yet denied by so many people within it.

It was cheering this week to see Charles Blackhurst of The Independent, Lionel Barber of the Financial Times and Alan Rushbridger of The Guardian join together and call for a sensible compromise on press reform and regulation. According to Roy Greenslade in The Guardian:

All three editorials suggest that statutory underpinning will not inhibit press freedom. It doesn’t amount to statutory control of the press, says the Guardian. It need not impinge on press freedom, says the FT.

This is long overdue, but it should not just be left to editors to take this stand. If we really want to defend the freedom of the press that we enjoy in the UK, we have to stand up against the almost comically criminal hacks and stand up for professionalism, ethics and standards. The wretched excesses of parts of the press have been tolerated for too long, but now, a total lack of ethics and criminality by a not insignificant number of hacks is threatening freedom of all journalists. It’s not a joke anymore. It is threatening the precious freedoms we enjoy.

03.15.13
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The death of Google Reader: Taking the re- out of search

For hardcore RSS users and journalists, a collective cry of anguish went up as Google decided to kill Reader. As New Zealand developer Aldo Cortesi put it, it wasn’t just the death of a single application but a serious blow to the RSS eco-system, an eco-system that he said was already “deeply ill“. The knock-on effects of the death of Google Reader are not trivial:

Cortesi was very direct on the last point:

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player.

There are alternatives. I’ve used Feedly on and off for a while, and I still use NetNewsWire. I’m excited to hear that Feedly is working to allow people to easily migrate from Google Reader to its other sync services.

However, as the dust has settled since the announcement, I still haven’t found a drop-in replacement for Reader. As a journalist, Google Reader is essential to the work I do. As imperfect as Google Translate is, the ability to translate content easily from feeds in languages I didn’t speak was a god-send. It helped me keep up with developments in the Arabic, Chinese and Turkish markets that I simply wouldn’t have been able to without it. Sure, I can put things manually through Translate, but it’s all about efficiency.

Google Reader combined with Google Alerts (how long will that hang around I wonder) was another stunning way for me to discover new sources of information, especially as Google ripped out the sharing that once was a powerful social way to discover new information.

I’ll readily admit that I’m an edge case. RSS readers have never been a mainstream activity, but as a journalist, RSS was one way that I kept on top of the firehouse of information that I need to sift through as a modern information professional. In my work as not only a journalist but also as a digital media strategist, people ask me how I stay on top of all of the constant changes in the business. Although social and semantic news app Zite is the first thing I look at every morning, RSS and Google Reader have continued to play an essential role, and RSS, Google Reader or no Google Reader, will continue to be essential.

Google has had and then killed a number of extremely useful research tools for journalists, and Reader is just the latest. Search Timeline, which showed the frequency of a search term, was flawed but still extremely useful for research as a journalist. For journalists working with social media, the death of Realtime, Google’s social media search, was a terrible loss. No other tool has come even close to the functionality that Realtime offered. Topsy comes the closest, but it still lacks the incredible features that Realtime offered. Now, some of the death of Realtime was part of another company killing an eco-system, Twitter, but Google could have continued after the deal with Twitter fell apart. Google probably didn’t for the same reason it is killing Reader. The search giant wants to push Google+.

The death of Search Timeline, Realtime and now Reader all seem to be a pattern, loss of tools that were very important for journalistic research at the search company. I’m not saying my needs as a journalist are more important than the vast majority of other users of Google (although Suw notes that, as a consultant, she also relied on these tools and often recommended them to clients). My professional needs are quite particular. However, these tools were incredibly useful for research, and I don’t see any drop-in replacements.

My question to fellow journalists: How do we support the special web services that are valuable to us? How do we help create more resilient digital services that serve our special needs? I have some ideas, but that’s for another blog post.

03.10.13
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Reuters’ Connected China: How to win the argument for big data projects at news organisations

Connected China project from Thomson-Reuters

Data has long been a part of journalism, but I think we’re moving into a new and exciting phase in which data is helping to drive innovations in storytelling. Aron Pilhofer and the interactive team at the New York Times, Simon Rogers and the data team at the Guardian and Reg Chua, the data and innovation editor at Reuters, are all exploring new ways to bring together data and novel storytelling techniques together in new ways that help reveal context and connections while also engaging audiences with rich narratives. I am very fortunate to call all three friends and, in the case of Simon, a former colleague.

At the recent NICAR conference in the US, Reg unveiled the latest example of this new wave of data-driven projects, Connected China. What is Connected China? Reg explains on his blog:

It’s a little hard to sum up simply; at one level, it’s a microsite that focuses on looking at power in China, explaining how it flows, the key players and institutions, and their relationships, featuring stories and rich multimedia (including fantastic archival footage.) But it’s much more than that: It’s also a series of innovative data visualizations that pull from a rich, underlying database of people, institutions and relationships to illustrate the connections, careers and positions of key officials in China. And more than that: It’s a great example of how the combination of data. visualizations, stories and multimedia can be much more than the sum of their parts.

To me the micro-site is only part of the story. It is one application built from a database.

It’s an amazing database: Tens of thousands of entities, 30,000 relationships, and a million and a half words (not to mention the array of news stories, photos and videos also featured in the app.) The team structured tons of information – connections, the importance of job roles, etc – with an editorial sensibility. In other words, they applied news judgment – but rather than use it just in stories, they used it to structure data.

One of the really powerful features of this database is the relationships. This is an incredibly rich store of context. In the visualisations created on the site, suddenly, a web of power invisible to all but the most knowledgeable experts on China becomes visible.

The power of connections and context

For years, I’ve dreamed of creating projects like this that unveil relationships between events, people and companies. Years ago, I was inspired by a project called a project called the Shakespeare Explorer developed for the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. It is a wonderful multimedia project that brings together pictures, places, plays and historical events. The timeline highlights connections between the plays and events in history, putting Shakespeare’s plays in a broader context.

You can see something similar with this PBS Frontline interactive showing the connections between Al Qaeda’s network, and how much the US intelligence services knew about the network at various points in time between 1993 and 2001. There were a few features like this around the time of the 9/11 attacks.

These are powerful features, and Connected China shows how a decade of development has moved these concepts forward. The question becomes why we haven’t seen more of them.

How to justify the effort

Projects like Connected China take a lot of time and resources. When I was at the BBC, my colleague Gill Parker worked with a database startup in addition to her work in journalism. Gill was working on the team with BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner looking into global investigation into the 9/11 attacks. They had huge amounts of material, mainly Microsoft Word documents, but they didn’t have an efficient way to organise them. Gill knew there was a better way, so she reached out to me to see if I could connect her with someone at BBC News Online who could provide database expertise. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the spare resources. Well, we probably did, somewhere, but at the time the BBC wasn’t very good at pooling resources across the organisation.

I’ve thought a lot about strategies for making the case, both then and over the years. These are my recommendations:

Plan for reuse, not artisanal single use apps – If there was one lesson I learned early on in my digital journalism career is that it is almost impossible to justify artisanal web interactives. In the mid and late 1990s, we built a lot of things by hand online. To be honest, the massive effort was almost never justified by the response from audience. Very quickly, we learned that we needed re-usable elements that we could build easily over time.

For data, think of a database as raw material for other projects and apps. For instance (and knowing Reg, I’m sure that he has thought about this) with Connected China, you’ve got a huge database of structured information. Using something like Thomson-Reuters’ Calais, it would be relatively easy to link people in China stories to elements of Connected China.

Building databases takes effort, and knowing the kind of databases that will generate the most applications might help you decide which ones to develop and which ones aren’t worth the effort.

Think of potential revenue streams – The days when journalism could afford to be completely divorced from business realities is over, and if you’ve got to make the case why your data project should get scarce resource over another project, you’ll need to think of possible revenues sources that might make it more attractive to the powers that be. I’ve worked with a number of news organisations on data journalism, including Reed Business Information, CNN and Czech TV. Some of the techniques that I advocate are about bringing down the cost of charts and graphs, but I also speak to teams about how they can develop revenue streams through data projects.

Always ask:

• Does the data have commercial value?
• Are there obvious sponsors for the data?
• Could you build an app with the data that might be a premium product?

Think of internal and external applications – One of the strategic justifications that I tried to use for the BBC 9/11 project was that it would lead to an important internal resource as well as an external resource. Ultimately, for that project, the argument didn’t win the day, but it can help you get important buy-in if you can make the case that the data resource can help your staff as well as being a compelling feature for your audience.

Think small before taking on big data – Connected China is a massive project beyond the scope of most organisations. However, there are still important concepts about context and data that can be used on much smaller projects. Think of how structured data can be used to add context to local stories and how you can build up databases over time rather than thinking that you have to build big right away.

This really is an exciting time to be a journalist, and it’s great to see news organisations invest in projects like this. No matter the size of your organisation, there are important ways to use data to add value, in all senses of the word, to your journalism.

02.22.13
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Journalism, civic engagement and AP’s “A New Model for News” report

I started writing this as a comment on John Robinson’s blog, and then I realised that this is what blogging is really for, a distributed conversation. The comment grew a little too long so I decided to post it here.

John Robinson, a veteran reporter and editor in the US, highlighted how audiences in the US were distracted from President Obama’s State of the Union address by the manhunt for a former policeman in California. After getting past my initial reaction of ’twas ever thus’, I was quickly reminded of an excellent study commissioned by the Associated Press and carried out by the Context-based Research Group. They spoke to young news consumers around the world about how and why they consumed news. (The full report is still on Slideshare):

John offers up solutions, but sadly, you’ll have to file this post in evidence supporting his main premise rather than offering new solutions. For a couple of years, quotes from the study were a mainstay of talks I gave about how journalism can win the battle for attention.The New Model for News report said that the “essential finding” of the report was:

“The subjects were overloaded with facts and updates and were having trouble moving more deeply into the background and resolution of news stories.”

What’s really fascinating is the importance of the issue of resolution. The participants liked sports and entertainment stories, not because they were shallow, cotton candy stories but because of “the level of resolution that this type of news offers. Stories tend to have a beginning, middle and end or clear next steps.”

As for in-depth stories, they wanted to follow them but found the current formats didn’t give the social currency they were looking for.

This flags up all kinds of issues. For one, is the chronic paralysis in US politics intimately linked to issues around the coverage? Is there a way to change the coverage to present possible resolutions to engage people in the civic process and provide some way for people to weigh up these resolutions? The study found:

Participants in this study showed signs of news fatigue; that is, they appeared debilitated by information overload and unsatisfying news experiences. Many consumers in the study were so overwhelmed and inundated by news that they just did not know what to do. Participants with news fatigue would try to ascertain whole news stories, but they regularly and repeatedly were left unsatisfied. Ultimately, news fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response. The more overwhelmed or unsatisfied they were, the less effort they were willing to put in.

I have my own theories about failings in political coverage. I worked in Washington as a reporter for seven years, and so much coverage of politics is about covering politics as a business, rather than as a democratic function with wider opportunities for engagement. Outside of Washington, as well as outside the Westminster bubble of British politics, too much coverage of politics is about policy as drama. I think the latter response is to inject some narrative into politics that might satisfy the need for resolution that news consumers want, but I often find it lacking.

The research was and still is fascinating, and I don’t think much has changed. Sadly, the report came out in June 2008, just as the world was plunged into economic crisis, and I think a lot of deeper thinking about it was lost. Now, as the world continues to struggle with the fallout from that crisis, I’d argue that we need to revisit the report and see what it means not only for coverage of civics, public policy and global affairs but “wicked problems”.

02.15.13
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Print and digital: Managing the crocodile and the mammal separately

I used to be a big booster of print-digital editorial integration, but I’ve had a change of heart for a lot of reasons, reasons which I’ll outline more broadly at some point. When I first got into online journalism in the mid-90s, to be honest, I probably was suffering from a little of resource envy. The legacy business just had a lot more money, but it also made a lot more money. However, I’ve changed my mind. Simply put, I think that print and digital are two entirely different sets of products, and they often have different audiences.

I was just summarising a Pew report on successful revenue models for local newspapers for Knowledge Bridge, the site that I edit for the Media Development Investment Fund, and I found this eloquent and excellent metaphor for managing media disruption from former Harvard business professor Clark Gilbert who is now head of Deseret Management Corporation, owner of The Deseret News in Salt Lake City. He said:

In Gilbert’s theory of media evolution, the Deseret News print product is the crocodile, a prehistoric creature that survives today, albeit as a smaller animal. He believes the News, which has already shrunk significantly, is not doomed to extinction if properly managed. Deseret Digital Media is the mammal, the new life form designed to dominate the future. Armed with graphics, charts and a whiteboard that looks like it belongs in an advanced physics class, Gilbert speaks with the zeal of the cultural transition evangelist he has become. He argues that the path ahead does not involve merging the crocodile and mammal cultures, but maintaining them separately.

That makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s a sensible starting point. The next step, he admits, is the challenging part, which is to execute that strategy, which involves a lot of wrenching cultural change. However, he’s already got some success to show for his strategy. Digital revenue has grown on average 44 percent annually since 2010, and it now makes up 25 percent of the groups revenue. For those on the crocodile side of the equation, while print revenue dropped 5 percent in 2012, at least circulation numbers are headed in the right direction. Circulation is up 33 percent for the daily newspaper, and it’s up a stunning 90 percent for Sundays, due in large part to a new national edition.

It sounds like his excellent metaphor and smart strategy also is backed with some very good execution.

02.13.13
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Jonah Lehrer is a smug git who should never work in journalism again

Disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer had a forum to explain himself and his serial violations of core ethical standards of journalism at a Knight Foundation event. He wants a second chance, but clearly, he hasn’t learned enough about himself to prevent him from plagiarising and fabricating again.

Jeff Bercovici of Forbes wrote that Lehrer blamed his downfall on arrogance and “carelessness matched with an ability to explain my carelessness away”. It’s clear that he’s still leaning on the crutch of self-perceived eloquence to shift the blame and make his case for professional forgiveness. Bercovici said:

Lehrer used several analogies to make his case. At one point, he likened himself to the FBI, which adopted new failsafes after a case involving fingerprint misidentification revealed systemic problems. He compared his new “standard operating procedures” — a phrase he must have used at least 10 times — to the “forcing functions” that software designers employ to guide users away from accidents.

Bercovici said that the difference between Lehrer and his analogies was one of intention. That’s too generous of a reading for what Lehrer is trying to do. The mea culpa was in fact just another indictment of Lehrer and another example his self-identified failing of trying to “explain (his) carelessness away”.

Let’s take the FBI analogy. In the case, FBI and Spanish authorities based on current criminal investigative standards thought they had matched a fingerprint. They hadn’t, and the standard for matching fingerprints had to be changed. If we take this analogy and apply it to Lehrer, then he is saying that the failing wasn’t his but rather a failing in the fact-checking process.   It’s a silver-tongued attempt to shift the blame from the failures he won’t own to the institutions he failed.

I don’t say this with any joy, but he needs some more sleepless nights bolt awake at 3 am before he accepts responsibility for what he’s done. He’s a long way from earning a second chance in journalism.

I just finished reading the rest of of Bercovici’s write-up of Lehrer’s talk. Apart from the headline above (I sadly have no copy editor to blame), I’ve been diplomatic up to this point, but now I’m just hopping mad. To put it bluntly, the smug, self-serving git deserves to never work in journalism again. During his talk, he considered why he had done it, and his answers show that arrogance is not a past failing but one very much still present. He blamed his ethical failings on his intelligence and his busyness. Please! This isn’t a direct quote from Lehrer in Bercovici’s piece, but he wrote that Lehrer went on to explain just how busy he was:

Another is just how in demand he was as a writer, speaker and all-around public intellectual. Why consider yesterday’s mistakes, he suggested, when you can contemplate tomorrow’s $20,000 speech?  ”For me, the busyness was a way to avoid the reckoning,” he said.

Considering that $20,000 was not a figure that he just pulled out of thin air but the honorarium that the Knight Foundation paid for his speech, to me, it shows he’s still trying to avoid the reckoning. He hasn’t learned his lesson, only that he thinks he can get away with what he’s done. Is any editor foolish or delusional enough to give this fantasist, self-publicist and narcissist a second chance? That the answer is yes worries me.

01.20.13
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Hacks-Hackers London: Coder-journalists or hybrid teams?

Finally, after months of being busy and missing Hacks/Hackers, I was thrilled to make it to last Wednesday’s instalment, which focused on Big Data in Financial Journalism. Congratulations to Jo Geary of The Guardian for organising another great event and Marianne Bouchart of Bloomberg for being such a great host. 

Emily Cadman, the head of interactive at the Financial Times, had a great presentation, along with her colleague and my friend, Martin Stabe. Emily also had one of the best provocations of the evening. She challenged the idea that journalists should become coders. Instead of journalists learning how to code, she suggested that news organisations should build hybrid teams of crack coders and journalists and editors who can work with and speak to coders. That being said, she said that if you do find a coder who values journalism and can think editorially, then do everything you can to hold onto them. For organisations the size of the Financial Times or even for small and medium-size papers part of a larger group, I couldn’t agree more.

It reminds me of my early days in digital journalism, back in the mid-90s. I was working at a regional news website on special projects. I spent about an hour editing an image. One of my graphic design colleagues said that while she appreciated my initiative that what took me an hour would have taken her minutes. I still have picked up a range of skills, but I have tried to focus on things where I can really add value and not areas where a specialist like a designer or a developer has spent as much time building their expertise in their work as I have in journalism. 

Cadman said that it took time and effort, and I’m sure a fair bit of astute application of political capital, to build her team. These types of hybrid teams don’t get created overnight. I am not familiar with the history of the team at the FT, but I know that Aron Pilhofer at the New York Times has spent years building up his team and figuring how the best composition and organisational positioning of his team. 

Data and visual journalism on a shoestring budget

The FT, the New York Times and the BBC have all developed hybrid teams like this, and I’m sure that for a lot of smaller news organisations having the resources for such a team seems simply unattainable especially for regional publishers in the UK or metro publishers in the US reeling under economic pressures. However, I would say two things, there is a lot that can be done at a group level, creating projects that can easily be replicated across markets and use local data. Good designers can create projects that can easily reflect the style of individual local sites. 

There is another way to develop great interactive data projects and that is to rely on the myriad of web services that exist. At journalism.co.uk’s last news:rewired conference Paul Rowland, deputy head of online content at Media Wales, had a great presentation on how Wales Online does data-driven visual journalism facing the same challenges that almost all regional publisher does in the UK. He outlined the challenges as:

• limited resources.
• a lack of cash.
• no dedicated developers.
• a hefty newspaper legacy.

He gave a rundown of his favourite services that should be in every digital editor’s toolkit no matter how small your organisation. As I always say when I work with news organisations and MDLF’s clients, interactive journalism is a lot like the iPhone. If there is a story-telling technique that you want to try, there’s a web app for that. 

I am more technical than most journalists but I’ve never learned how to code. Instead, I’ve always referred to myself as a “cut-and-paste” coder. I have always tried to keep on top of the kind of services that Rowland highlighted, and cutting-and-pasting an embed code from a third-party service is something that almost anyone who has embedded a YouTube video can do. 

Last Wednesday was really inspiring, and I think that Cadman showed that we’re not just breaking new ground in terms of using data in journalism, but we’re finally starting to get a handle on the best ways to organise the new news room that doesn’t look to everyone to be a jack-of-all trades but realises the role of specialisation and editors who have the digital and traditional experience to work with these kinds of digital teams.