Category Archives: Journalism

07.26.07
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New health fears over big surge in misleading and irresponsible science reporting

As soon as I saw the news that Dr Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who first alleged that there was a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism, was to be brought before the General Medical Council on charges of professional misconduct, I knew that there’d be a media feeding frenzy. Despite lots of evidence that the MMR vaccine is safe and a distinct lack of evidence that there is any link between MMR and autism, journalists from every corner of the media insist on writing stories that lead the public to believe quite the opposite.

As the misconduct story broke, I saw stories on both ITV’s morning show GMTV and on the BBC, which managed to paint Wakefield as some sort of misunderstood hero and imply both that the link between MMR and autism was real, and that the ‘establishment’ was working to deliberately mislead the public. Both broadcasters used the same ‘reporting’ tactic – to interview the parents of autistic children, (along with the autistic children themselves and their non-autistic older brother, on GMTV), giving them the opportunity to promulgate their beliefs for five minutes, whilst a GP was given two or three sentences in which to respond. The last word, on GMTV at least, was given to the parents.

The pieces were incredibly biased, pitting beliefs against evidence, with the presenter clearly coming down on the side of the parents and, to all intents and purposes, dismissing the evidence and views of the medical experts out of hand.

This, by itself, is appalling. Beliefs are not evidence. Nor is suffering. No matter how much sympathy I have for children and adults with autism, symptoms by themselves are not evidence of the cause of those symptoms. And the fact that people are suffering these symptoms should not be interpreted as proof that studies finding no link between MMR and autism are ipso facto wrong. Believing things does not make them true – science is not some sort of Secret where the power of the mind can change reality.

What is true is that the media have exploited the beliefs of those who are suffering, and in doing so have denigrating the work of many respectable, honourable and diligent scientists in order to create outrage, because outrage sells. They have portrayed the flawed work of a minority of doctors – now charged with acting unethically and dishonestly – as David to the rest of the medical world’s Goliath, purely so that they can profit from covering the manufactured conflict.

Things got even worse on the 8th July when The Observer’s Denis Campbell wrote an article entitled “New health fears over big surge in autism”. The original article has been removed from The Observer website (i.e. Guardian Unlimited), so if you click that link all you’ll get is a 404 page, but the whole thing has been posted in the comments of Ben Goldacre’s blog, Bad Science. The chances are that the article has been pulled for legal reasons, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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07.06.07
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Steve Yelvington talks about networked journalism

Steve Yelvington talks about networked journalism

Steve Yelvington, Robb Montgomery and I conducted three days of workshops with journalists from across Asia on ‘citizen journalism’ and other ways to parnter with the audience.

I first met Steve at the Web+10 conference at Poynter in January 2005. He really is a digital journalism pioneer. Over dinner, he talked about writing Usenet clients for his Atari ST in the mid-80s and taking the Minneapolis Star Tribune newsroom onto the internet in 1993, either the first or second newsroom to connect its network to the internet. He has always seen the internet as a communication and community tool and not just as an information, publishing or broadcast tool because of his early experience with online bulletin board systems and early work on the internet. And he takes that sensibility to planning projects for Morris Communications.

I asked him a few questions about why community sites are important for news organistions. The video ends abruptly. Sorry about that, but 1GB is just not enough to hold all of Steve’s great ideas.

07.04.07
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Steve Yelvington describes NewspaperNext innovation process

I’m with Steve Yelvington at the IFRA Asia workshop on citizen media. He’s one of the great minds trying to take journalism into the future, thinking about the business, thinking about the journalism and thinking about both print and the internet. He talked about the NewspaperNext project.

The American Press Institute wanted to try to figure out what was happening to the US newspaper industry and what they could do to meet some of the business challenges that the industry was facing. API has focused traditionally on newsroom training, but now it wanted to focus on the business of newspapers. They applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation and worked with Clayton Christensen of Innosight Consulting.

Steve Yelvington served on the 24-member advisory board for the year-long project. News companies including Morris Communications that Steve works for and Gannet are taking the results very seriously. He described the findings of the research and how newspapers could apply them.

The basic findings:

  • Great incumbent companies consistently collapse in the face of disruptive technology.
  • “Cramming” old products into new forms is the wrong approach so new companies with new approaches win.
  • Products succeed by helping customers get done the jobs they already have been trying to do. (Newspapers are so all-purpose and flexible that they often fail in understanding what jobs they are meant to do. Classifieds? Sports pages to follow statistics of baseball? Money spent for static stock market listings when people get live data at their brokers’ site?)
  • We can learn to spot opportunities for growth, not just wring our hands over losses. (Steve demo-ed Dodgeball, a social networking site focused on basic human needs. If you’re 22 years old, you’re not sitting at home. You’re out with your friends. To find where your friends are, you can track them via your mobile phone and the web. Newspaper shouldn’t put out a youth-oriented tabloid, they should look to filling the needs of youth.)
  • Most market research misses the real opportunities.

Innosight Consulting was hired by a fast-food chain that wanted to sell more of its milk shakes. They used traditional market research and asked people what they wanted in the milk-shake. The research came up with lots of contradictory observations. Innosight, instead, hung out at a fast-food restaurant observing customers. Why do you buy a milkshake? What they discovered surprised them. There were two groups of customers buying milkshakes. In the morning, young, single people bought milkshakes between 7:30-8 am. They bought milkshakes and only a milkshake and left. In the late afternoon or morning, a family came in and bought a milkshake for their kids.

They began asking the customers why they bought milkshakes. The morning people were commuters with 30-40 minute trips to work. They wanted the milkshake to last. They couldn’t drink it fast and liked the thickness. The afternoon purchaser, the families, were parents trying to calm down and quiet unruly kids.

For the morning crowd, they created a milkshake with bits of fruit that was satisfying and would last. For the afternoon crowd, they created a smaller and thinner shake. By understanding the jobs that people are trying to do, they could better tailor the products.

  • Too much capital can doom a project. When trying to develop something else, pull it off. Give it a separate profit and loss statement. Make sure managers understand the imperative.

Steve next compared sustaining versus disruptive innovation.

Sustaining: Better, premium price, new & improved, leap forward and complicated.

Disruptive: Different, lower price, good enough, leap down and simple.

Is blog software simple? Yes. Blog software has disrupted the business model of traditional content management software. The transistor radio is a disruptive innovation. When it came out, the radio was tiny, small and tinny. It wasn’t as good as the cabinet radios. But it was good enough. And you could take to the beach. It didn’t compete but created an entirely new market for radio.

Disruptors:

  • Low end or new market that’s ‘beneath’ existing players.
  • Starts with least profitable customers.
  • Moves upmarket. (Steve said it comes up from underneath you and cuts off your legs.)
  • Changes the rules of the market.
  • Topples existing players.

Examples:

  • Steel mini-mills
  • Semiconductors, microprocessors
  • Minicomputer, personal computers
  • Desktop publishing
  • Digital photography
  • The Internet
  • Linux
  • MySQL

The bad news is that new entrants succeed at the expense of incumbents, and the very thing that make an incumbent successful lead to its failure including on focusing on your best customers, paying too much to your bottom line and focusing on continuous improvement.

We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.

Steve said that you can download an 85-page report from the Newspapernext site.

07.02.07
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Live blogging from Kuala Lumpur

I’m at the IFRA workshop on citizen media in Kuala Lumpur. I’m live blogging for the Guardian’s media blog about the sessions. I’m helping with the workshops with digital pioneer Steve Yelvington, multimedia guru Robb Montgomery and designer Peter Ong.

As a journalist, I’m very interested in some of the comments by the Malaysian journalists in the audience. They say that the region has historically been under regimes that exert so much control over their people that citizens are reluctant to express themselves. Also, the ruling party in Malaysia is setting up a group of 500 cyber-writers to counter the claims of bloggers. Fascintating stuff. I love finding out what is going on around the world, not just my little part of it.

06.24.07
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Newsvine and news as a social object

Thinking back to NMK, Dan Gillmor showed off Newsvine as an example of the transition from the Daily We to the Daily Me. Newsvine user Aine asked me what I thought about the site.

I’ve had an account on Newsvine for more than a year now and visit the site from time to time. I can’t say that I’m a frequent or heavy user. When I first opened the account last year, I found it difficult to understand its purpose. It didn’t have the clarity of sites such as Techmeme, Tailrank, Digg or Reddit, but I’ll be the first to cede that Newsvine was trying to do a lot more than simply recommend and vote on stories.

Thinking back to Jyri of Jaiku’s presentation at NMK, initially I thought the site wasn’t clear enough in giving users visual cues as to what to do. As Jyri said:

Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects.

However, the site has come a long way in the last year. The visual cues are stronger. The navigation and purpose seem clearer, and I’ve been impressed with the community building that the Newsvine team has done. There are few news organisations who really demonstrate the understanding of the outreach necessary to boot-strap a community site. News organisations usually focus on the content and not the community. Community doesn’t come free.

Newsvine isn’t like most news community sites, but it has features that more news sites should adopt. To encourage participation and community, news sites need to highlight the participation to encourage participation.

Another thing that has impressed me about Newsvine is how quickly the site iterates. They are constantly pushing forward new features, and for the most part, the features they have launched are focused on driving participation: The groups, the use of attention data showing what topics are hot and the live updates that make the site seem alive.

I still think that the site might be trying to do too much. I think they could do more with less. I still think that the visual cues might be stronger to guide users through the site. Maybe the site itself needs to clarify its focus a little more, but the site is a unique experiment in news as a social object.

As I said, I’m not a heavy Newsvine user. These are observations more as an observer of the Newsvine community than a member of it. I’d be interested in hearing the experience of others have had with the site.

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06.13.07
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NMKForum07: Citizen media innovation Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor: The disruption has never been higher than Web 2.0, but the cost of experimentation has never been lower. The R&D of media will happen everywhere, not just media companies. They will do the bulk of tomorrow’s R&D.

A lot of us have been talking about disruption and the democratistion of media not in the sense of voting but in terms of participation, production and access. The media used to think that we make stuff and distribution. We have a read-write web. People are not just consumers but collaborators.

There is also competition in the business model. eBay and Craigslist compete with classifies. Advertising revenues for Google will soon top television. What is the creative part of this? Data. Podcasts. Pictures. Blog posts. World of Warcraft. Halu hotel. Videos from the tsunami.

Also, data is places, and he showed Placeblogger, a site that aggregates blog posts based on places.

The question is not who is a journalist but what is journalism, and he showed off a professor’s economics blog. He mentioned the mobile phone pictures of the 7 July 2005 bombing in London. NGO’s can do advocacy journalism on their own and amplify their own messages. NGO’s can build trust. Corporations can do newsmaking, not press releases.

Press releases typically sound like a Turing Machine mated with a lawyer, but blogs can sound like human beings and provide useful information for people who care.

Journalism itself is moving from lecture to conversation and that is a great thing. It’s crucial to include the people who before were the audience. The first rule of conversation is to listen, and it’s not something that we do apart from listening to our sources. We listen to our sources.

We love readers, plural, but we’re kind of freaked out about reader, singular, who may call us out.

They are building converged newsrooms and adding staff blogs. But it still is freaking out journalists because people are saying things that they can’t control.

Adrian Holovaty who recently left the Washington Post to create EveryBlock.com. He pioneered using databases for journalism. It’s helping to record history, something that journalists should do but many don’t do. Los Angeles Times got a hold of a property database with foreclosures or possible foreclosures in California. People can simply add their zip code and find out foreclosures in their area.

Dan also showed a mashup of homes sold, plotted on a map, showing homes that sold for less than local governments thought they were worth. It was posted not by a journalist but created by a real estate agent who thought it was important. Why don’t media people do this?

I call this journalism just not done by someone who calls themselves a journalist. He showed a map of bombings in Iraq using a site called Platial. His students at Berkeley created this. No newspaper that Dan knows of has done this.

In Bakersfield, they created a pothole map. People could put a pin on the map showing potholes. They could add pictures. They could list potholes that have been fixed.

He also showed video mashups, an important new form of video commentary. Young people know to mix-up culture, but not journalists.

Journalists have changed from oracles to guides. No news organisations can cover everything. They should point to other stuff that they don’t do. AftenBlat in Sweden has a blog portal. If you send people away for good stuff, they will come back for more.

It’s a good start, but the next level is to get people deeper into the process beyond comments. That includes something like a Fort Meyers Florida newspaper did. They saw a rise in water utility rates. The readers responded to a terrific amount of information. The readers helped them investigate the story.

The BBC was early in asking for pictures from the audience. It is now routine. We should be careful about asking people to take risks.

He gives a few examples iconic photos from stories including the London bombings, the Thai coup and bombings in Jakarta. He said that authenticity is important, possibly more than traditional measures of quality.

He also points to SourceForge, a place for Open Source projects. The top projects get thousands of downloads. He takes a look at the long tail of downloads on the site. Most of the downloads are so low that they are approaching zero.

Clay Shirky says the cost of trying things is approaching zero. “There are few institutional barriers between thought and action.” That most of the projects fail is not a bug. It’s so cheap to fail, but the important thing is to learn. That is one of the hidden strengths of Silicon Valley.

He highlighted Dopplr, a project that he is involved in. It allows you to know about

People can focus on niche subjects or go hyperlocal. Newspaper project can lead to software development – see the Bakotopia project. This wasn’t done by a big media company but by a small, family-owned newspaper.

Trust and reliability need a lot of work. Too much data. We can move from the Daily me to the Daily Us, and he showed off Newsvine.

To approach distributed R&D, be open, don’t reinvent wheels, collaborate and take risks. Companies must give their employees the ability to fail creatively. That is why a lot of people strike out on their own to do it.

Martin Stabe of the Press Gazette’s Fleet Street 2.0 has uploaded the audio of the full talk (with a little help from his friends ; )

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06.13.07
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NMKForum07: Old Guard, New Tricks

  • Jem Stone, BBC New Media
  • Tom Bureau, Managing Director, CNET Networks
  • Meg Pickard, Head of Communities and User Experience, Guardian Unlimited
  • Adam Gee, New Media Commissioner, Channel 4
  • Paul Pod, TIOTI
  • Ashley Norris, Shiny Media
  • Nico Macdonlad, Spy.co.uk
  • Jeff Revoy, VP of Search and Social Media, Yahoo! Europe
  • Mike Butcher, moderator

I think I agree with Euan Semple sitting next to me. This isn’t a panel, it’s the Last Summer.

Nico: (In response to question about his criticism about the Guardian’s Comment is Free) I met Georgina Henry recently on a panel about social media, and I’m going to start writing for Comment is Free because it’s a great platform.

He says he has seen fads come and go. Media need to understand the trends. Disaggregation is going on. Many social institutions are losing their credibility. These trends are real. It needs to take an objective and rational view about them.

Mike: Can media win back trust?

Meg: Big media need to know that they have something to learn from our audiences. Gaining trust is not end. It’s a means. We need to learn from these social environments. Big media organisations don’t need to be all things to all people. We shouldn’t be trying to replace but embrace social media. Is creating a Twitter or Blogspot clone the business that we are in?

Adam: I think that traditional media are in a good place to achieve public tasks by putting participation in place. The project that I just launched is going to create the first map of public art in the UK in partnership with Moblog.co.uk. There is an underlying public task.

Jem: Lee Bryant talked about Comment is Free and the BBC and problem of social sites and news. He talked about ‘drive-by commenting’. I think that’s a fair criticism of what the BBC has done over the last 10 years. We haven’t been focused enough of why we are getting in touch with you. He quoted Maplin & Webb making fun of the BBC. “Do you reckon? What do you reckon? Get in touch with the BBC?”

He talked about sites like Flickr and YouTube. Should we get in there and moderate that? What are the rules? If we get involved, what are the risks? What are the risks to our brand?

Paul: One of the things with the BBC putting stuff out on the internet, out on YouTube, you have another layer of community. It’s getting quite complicated. Where does this stuff sit? We’re quite open to cooperation.

Jem: It’s a platform for discussion about content we produce. We’re comfortable with that. Is CBS, ITV or Channel 4 comfortable with that? I don’t know.

Tom CNET: Obviously, trusted content is our main business. A small group of users want to discuss the content. We call it an architecture of participation. We invite them to contribute the best quality content. We raise the bar quite high.

Jeff Yahoo: Two trends driving this. Broadband and technology. Anyone with iPod can be a DJ. Anyone with a computer and the internet can become a blogger.

It could centre around areas of passion like photos with Flickr. It could be about socialising with MySpace. It could be about information like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers. It’s about providing the user the best experience.

Mike: Is Comment is Free it? Is Have Your Say it?

Meg: We’re looking to a more granular approach. People consume things. Casual users might rate or recommend. Interaction adding their comments, and then curation being the heaviest level of activity. Right now, we’re seeing one level of that. How do people move from consumers to creators on our site? How do fund that proposition? How do we encourage people to become catalysts? Certainly, this is not it.

It goes back to trust, but it’s less about being trust and more about creating relationships.

Mike: Where does the journalist sit in this?

Tom CNET: Great question. On Silicon.com, specialist site for CIOs. With a cross section of our audience, there will be members of the audience who know more. They might not have presentation skills like journalist, but they have specialist knowledge. But maybe they don’t have the story telling skills.

Users as a broad-based community are setting the agenda.

Mike: XFM has switched to user-generated programming. Does anyone want to talk to that.

Ashley: I think we’re a long way from that. I think a lot of journalists despise new media. They still believe that they are delivering the truth. New media are bolting it on. They are asking people for user-generated content.

From Shiny Media’s point of view, from the blogosphere, big media has very little respect for bloggers. Daily Mail or Sun very rarely link out. There is a thriving British blogosphere but they very rarely get linked to by big media. There has to be training of journalists.

(Yes, I’m working on that at the day job, getting more training for our journalists at the Guardian.)

Nico: Publishing tools for print don’t support links to content outside their sites.

Let’s not over-state what we can do with social media. Government is working to get back to us. They will use these tools in a real instrumentalist way.

I’m interested in a real high-level discussion. No publication make it easy for people to post. People need to see related content. People need to see content filtered through people through a few degrees of separation from you on social networks.

There was a question from the audience about whether big media saw UGC as a cheap replacement for content.

Meg quoted me in what I often say that not all content should have comments, meaning that a blog post is different from a news article. I think it’s better to make it simple to people to blog about, recommend or share traditional content than simply throw comments on everything. Meg quotes me in that a work of journalism is meant to tie together as many threads as possible, whereas a blog post teases out a thread for discussion or debate.

I also wanted to tease out my tongue-in-cheek post from last week. I wasn’t saying that journalists can’t be trained to be good bloggers but rather that many times, in the obsession with big names and branding, news organisations rush their most prominent writers to blog instead of looking for passionate niche writers who love the interaction to blog. I give props to the NYTimes for getting their wine critic Eric Asimov to blog on The Pour. It’s a brilliant blog, a great virtual tasting room.

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06.12.07
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Did newspaper companies ever build printing presses?

Today, I was sittting in the lobby of a posh hotel waiting to interview Jason Calacanis about Mahalo, the human-powered search site that he recently launched. His plane was delayed for five hours, but he was on his way. As we watched members of Motley Crue traipse through the lobby, I got to chat to Wil Harris, and we were talking about innovation and news organisations, or possibly the lack of innovation. I said it was not in the DNA of most news organisations to develop products or software. Wil put it a great way:

Newspapers never felt the need to build their own printing presses.

Why do they feel the need to re-invent the wheel? We both asked. There is Drupal, WordPress and any number of third-party software vendors.

Just look at Mahalo. It runs on MediaWiki, and Jason uses Google AdSense on a few entries already to earn some revenue. As Jason told John Battelle:

Google Adsense exists as a massive, scalable, and wildly efficient monitization engine. We’re not going to sell ads directly… we’re gonna leverage the services out there based on which ones perform best on a PER-SERP basis.

Especially for a lot of small news organisations without the development budget, there are a lot of great web services that can quickly be adapted to build sites and services and generate revenue. Why build it all over again?

06.08.07
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Blogging is like sex

Journalist attack threat level

Hang on, this is a bit of a conceit, an extended metaphor. I’ve heard some suggestions such as from Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 that all journalists should blog. Sure, I’d love more journalists to embrace blogging. I am after all the blogs editor at the Guardian. Scott’s post has some great suggestions and tips for journalists who want to blog, and it’s worth a read for curious journalists who need to be pointed in the right direction for technically how to blog.

But I’d have to disagree that this is like writing a column or that it should be a place to publish things that you can’t publish elsewhere. Too often, news organisations who blog are accused (sometimes accurately) of populating their blogs with content that doesn’t quite make it onto their main news site.

Rather I’d suggest, both in content, tone and approach, news or media organisations have to editorially make it clear that this place is different, this is where we discuss things. This is where we engage with our audience for a number of reasons including transparency, debate and discussion or for tapping the wisdom of the our communities.

Now, if this is a place for engagement, media have to ask themselves before throwing their writers into an engagement space whether their writers want to or are able to engage with members of the public. Over and over and over, media get caught up in this silly brand/celeb obsession and push their biggest names to blog when really it’s more about getting your passionate members of staff to blog. We’ve just launched a food blog, Word of Mouth, at the Guardian, and it’s doing a storm because we’ve got a lot of passionate ‘foodies’ on staff writing about what they love and enjoying the conversation with others who share their passion.

This is a special skill, and to be perfectly honest, there are some journalists who not only don’t want to engage but, frankly, should be kept at a very safe distance from any member of the public. Some journalists who blog for their publications I’ve begun to assign a ‘personal threat level’, akin to the US terrorism theat level. “Today, there is an elevated chance of said journalist attacking a commenter.” You’ve all heard about when communities attack, but what about when journalists attack? This is social media, and you’re going to need some social skills.

The bottom line is that blogging is like sex. You can’t fake it. You can’t fake passion. You can’t fake wanting to engage with the public. If you do, it will ultimately be an unsatisfying experience for both the blogger and their readers. Sure, for a while, the self-confident writer might sit back after crafting a lovely piece of prose and have some post-creative puffery, patting themselves on the back for their performance. But soon, they’ll find their blog is a very lonely place.

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06.07.07
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WAN: Bias doesn’t sell

I was beginning to think I was in the minority in valuing relatively unadorned information over commentary and bloviation. I also chalked it up to the American tradition of newspaper journalism that I was trained in versus the British tradition. I’ve been told several times by Brits how bland American newspapers are. I had almost come to the conclusion that I was more interested in information over commentary because I’m a news junkie and, therefore, rather non-representative. Well, possibly not.

From Stephen Brook post over at the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog:

Bias puts people off newspaper, was a finding of a Harris Interactive/Innovations/WAN poll release at the World Newspapers Congress and World Editors Forum today.

It was the third most popular reason cited by people as to why they didn’t read papers, from the online survey of 8,749 adults in seven countries, including the US, Britain, Spain and Australia.

Bias was cited as the most popular reason in Britain and Spain, and the third most popular in Australia.

That is one of the findings by a Harris Interactive/Innovations/WAN poll released at the World Newspapers Congress and World Editors Forum today. The online survey asked 8,749 readers in 7 countries, including the US, UK, Spain and Australia.

I give Stephen Brook points for his Heart of Darkness reference and also the admission that in British journalism, the loss of bias is perceived as descent into blandness.

But I wonder if the perception of blandness is about the journalist and not the audience.

It would also be interesting to know what people saw as bias. Is it something they don’t agree with, or the interjection of opinion by the journalist?

While I may be a minority in my interests, I don’t think I’m in the minority of being really busy. I just don’t have time to wade through a lot of flowery prose and commentary dressed up as journalism to get to the facts of the story. I just need good, solid information delivered clearly and concisely to make economic, political and other life decisions, and I don’t think I’m alone.