Making data-driven journalism “work in the best way possible”

Great column by Craig Silverman at Poynter.org that gives a clear-eyed assessment of the “inevitable” shift to data-driven journalism. Good stuff.

“Journatic’s approach — and the change it represents — is not going away. That means it’s important for journalism to find ethical, responsible and productive ways to integrate these approaches. To set benchmarks and guidelines for producing quality content using the kind of low-cost labor and mass production techniques that were long ago adopted in manufacturing. To find a better way forward.”

“You have to determine which stories can be written from afar, and which must be done by those with local knowledge. … The starting point is to establish policies, procedures, and standards to guide outsourced, mass production content operations [for] quality control.”

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Why the Journatic controversy is a good thing

The Journatic fallout continues, and apparently the story has legs. On the heels of the controversy around it systematically faking bylines so its offshore labor could appear to be nearby to its clients (that is, local newspapers) and named “Jimmy” and “Ann,” one of its biggest clients, TribLocal, discovered plagiarism (from Patch, no less!) and suspended its use of Journatic indefinitely, saying:

“[Fake bylines and plagiarism] are the most egregious sins in journalism. We do not tolerate these acts at the Chicago Tribune under any circumstances, whether from a staff member or an outside supplier like Journatic.”

But Tribune Co. is actually also a Journatic investor, so that’s a bit of sticky wicket, innit?

Then one of Journatics’s high-ranking (and quite recently hired) editors, Mike Fourcher, quit, on the grounds that Journatic is attempting to “treat community news reporting the same way as data reporting”:

Inevitably, as you distribute reporting work to an increasingly remote team, you break traditional bonds of trust between writers and editors until they are implicitly discouraged from doing high quality work for the sake of increasing production efficiency and making more money.

Cutting through the noise, it sounds like he tried to argue for paying people more for better quality stuff, and Journatic’s owners balked.

As I have said, hyperlocal, algorithmic journalism at scale is such a tough area, and one that’s evolving all the time (actually, at a very quick rate, if you take the long view). But the Venn diagram of quality, quantity, turnaround time, local expertise, ease of assignment, keeping readers happy, keeping writers happy, keeping staff editors happy, data-mining technology costs, platform costs, actually making money — and, you know, not lying about any of it — it’s not an easy nut to crack, and that’s why no one’s done it yet.

My dabblings in this area at now-defunct Seed certainly didn’t pan out as planned. But nonetheless I agree with Fourcher, the ex-Journatic guy, on this:

Journatic’s core premise is sound: most data and raw information can be managed much more efficiently outside the traditional newsroom; and, in order for major market community news to be commercially viable, it needs be conducted on a broader scale than ever before.

For Journatic’s part, it released a statement saying: “We are in the process of conducting a thorough review of our policies, software, technology and personnel. We are immediately and forcefully addressing the issues we find and making changes where necessary. Until we have completed our review we will decline any further comment.”

So all of this being said, now that TribLocal is back in the hands of “real” journalists, what will happen? Will the quality of coverage be so amazing that readers demand it continue? Will they even notice? Will the cost of paying writers who can write well in the first place be less than Journatic’s current model of paying editors to correct the writing of non-native English speakers, then selling that as a third party to TribLocal and others? Will the other papers who use Journatic’s service (the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle) also balk amid the controversy? Will there be a resurgence in hiring actual journalists to cover local news?

All remains to be seen, of course. But it’s exciting, because at the very least this kerfuffle has people (lots of them!) talking about this, and publicly instead of in back room deals and investments about which local readers are unaware. The Fourth Estate is actually weighing in on a controversy, doing their jobs — reporting on it, ruffling feathers, making waves. And ultimately that is a very good thing for us all.

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“But can he do it?” Who cares?

The New York Times today published another entry into the annals of a trend I’ve noticed that I call the “But can he do it?” story. It’s a series of stories that profile a white guy “reinventing” the media, as reported by a white guy in the media. This one is about David Karp, the 26-year-old “wunderkind” who invented Tumblr. It’s filled with quotes like: “‘He has very little notion of what it means to be a conformist,’ or to measure his thinking against abstract conventional wisdom.”

Eye roll. A privileged white guy is a nonconformist? OK, if you say so.

But this is only one article, one that follows many, many eye-rollers before it with the same theme. For example, there was the Ken Auletta profile of Tim Armstrong in The New Yorker last year, in which he questions whether Armstrong’s strategy of revitalizing AOL’s home page and investing in local will pay off. (I guess Armstrong didn’t bother to tell Auletta that actually the other part of this “strategy,” the winning part, was buying the Huffington Post a week later.)

The Washington Post recently did a “But can he do it?” piece on whether Chris Hughes really can revitalize The New Republic. And speaking of white guys revitalizing the media: Can Josh Tyrangiel remake Businessweek now that it’s Bloomberg Businessweek? And speaking of The Washington Post (talk about the insularity of the media), can Robert Thompson remake it under NewsCorp?

On and on. Obviously the trend is indicative of a much larger problem, which is that white guys in the media are constantly (unconsciously?) creating these stories so they can continue to reinforce their own relevancy. The narrative of “But can he do it?” is really their own, so they think it’s interesting for others to read about. And then their editors, who are for the most part white guys in the media, also think it’s interesting, so they OK the stories, and the column inches, and the emphasis in coverage. But obviously no one else cares whether these white guys in the media will succeed except for other white guys in the media.

Really: Will Bloomberg Businessweek make money? Will David Karp reinvent advertising on the Internet? Well, WILL THEY?

Who cares?

And also, of course, the articles never actually say or even predict whether these white guys will or will not reinvent these media properties/websites, because the writers have no idea. Which just reinforces how useless this so-called reporting truly is. No one actually knows how this business is going to go in the next few, handful, several, many years in the future. These stories might as well be headlined: “Does this white guy know something the rest of you white guys don’t?” The answer, at the end of each, is, “Maybe!” And also, if not explicitly, “I hope some day this guy or a guy like him will hire me!”

The same is true, by the way, for political profiles and business profiles. “Can this white guy win this election/policy argument/budget showdown against other white guys?” “Can this white guy sell more lightbulbs/lumber/lathes than the other white guys?”

It’s boring. It’s irrelevant to most of the population. No one knows the answer anyway. And yet it’s the focus of coverage because, unfortunately, white guys run everything. So it’s a problem for women, gays, minorities and anyone else who would like see themselves and their lives and struggles reflected in the media but is completely un- or under-represented.

Final note on this: “But can he do it?” is basically is Ken Auletta’s reason for being. It seems like every article he writes is another breathless “But can he do it?” He wrote a whole book that was basically a “But can they do it?” about the two white guys who created Google. Rarely, he writes a “But can she do it?” But given that there are only two powerful ladies in media (obviously, Jill Abramson and Sheryl Sandberg), these are unusual. But fair’s fair, he did write them, though I’ll warn you that neither of these women has any answers about the future of media, either.

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Publishers tackle the outdated CMS and the damn DAM

This article in Folio about CMSes and DAMs reads like a primer for magazine-based web publishing. It’s a bit dumbed down for those of us in the industry, who’ve been having this exact conversation since, oh, 2006. But that’s precisely why this quote from Time Inc. CIO Mitch Klaif is so hilarious (and hilariously sad). “Time is currently evaluating CMS platforms that offer ‘create once, publish many’ capabilities, but Klaif notes that it is too early to know if these can meet Time’s multi-channel needs.”

It’s too early to know and the company is evaluating CMSes? Interesting spin. Here’s what’s actually going on: Time Inc. uses outdated technology that was created in 1997. I’ll say that again, in all caps: NINETEEN NINETY-SEVEN. They rely heavily on a CMS that was built in 2002. So in web years, that translates to, what, around 50 or 75 years behind the times? Consider that the company that makes the CMS Time Inc. uses doesn’t even exist anymore.

So it’s more than a little disingenuous to claim that “it’s too early to know.” They know, it’s just that what they know is either, “We don’t have a strategy except to keep maintaining this ridiculously outmoded tech that doesn’t even use languages recognized these days and for which the runway is quickly vanishing under our wheels” or “We’re scrambling to find a solution that won’t leave us in this exact same position five years hence, except no one on our tech team is remotely bold or forward thinking, so we have no clue.”

As for the rest of the article, I certainly agree that a CMS or DAM environment that makes assets “smarter” is desirable…and has yet to be built. Letting publishers “easily find and use relevant content — not only based on the article’s specifics, but also on the asset’s relevance to a particular platform” and allowing “access only to assets for which sufficient rights were secured” are both awesome ideas. But no one in publishing does this well.

I’ll grant that media tech — heck, all of tech — is constantly evolving, and often in unpredictable ways, and getting digital rights from writers and photographers is its own hell. But after all these years, no turnkey solution has yet been built. It simply does not exist, and it likely will not until actual technologists take an interest in what publishing is doing and the particular challenges the industry faces. But they probably won’t, because (have you heard?) the media industry is dying, and it’s unable to monetize itself, let alone create forward-thinking systems.

Apparently at Hearst, “Our plan is to have a system where, no matter where content is created, we’ll be able to store it in such a way that it can be easily used on any platform.” Really, is that your plan? Do you plan to do that? How about less “planning,” less “it’s too early” and more doing, building, iterating, testing, shipping code? The time is now; in fact, the time was years ago.

[Disclosure: I used to work at Time Inc.]

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Journatic and the future of local news

This week’s This American Life featured a segment on Journatic, a hyperlocal, scaled-content creator that’s apparently replacing local reporters in many markets. I’ve previously written about hyperlocal news and the value of using algorithms in news creation, so the story was of great interest to me.

My argument with hyperlocal is that no one has yet figured out how to do it right. It sounds to me like Journatic is finding some success, but it’s also failing in important ways. My defense of algorithms is mostly to do with the company Narrative Science, which as I said is “not a threat, it’s a tool, and it fills a need.” That need is basically the scut work of news reporting, and although the folks there are working on this very issue, for now, “It’s a tool that does a programmatic task, but not a contextual one, as well as a human.”

Journatic aims to solve the hyperlocal problem with the algorithmic solution. The company scrapes databases of all kinds, then uses that data to “report” on local bowling scores, trash pickup times, where the cheapest gas is, and who has died recently. The company does this by using algorithms to mine and sort public information, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that.

When it launched, Journatic-populated site BlockShopper was basically a real-estate listings site based on publicly available data. Using public records, it would “report,” for example, that “123 Main St. is in foreclosure.” But since then, the algorithms and tools have gotten smarter. Soon it was able to say a home was in foreclosure “by the bank” and also add that it “is up for auction on March 31.” The site is now so smart that it actually feels almost invasive. To wit:

The real estate information contained in the article is publicly available, from the names of the people involved in the transaction to the price paid to the location details. The fascinating thing, and what pushes it into a brave new frontier of journalism and privacy invasion, though, is that the information on the professions of the involved is also publicly available (probably via LinkedIn). Arguably, all the article is doing is presenting public data in a new format. The difference is access and availability. In the pre-Internet days, there was no way to know public information except to go to the city records office and look, and there was really no way to know about peoples’ professions except to know them or ask them. These tasks required interested and motivated parties (such as journalists), because actually going places and talking to people requires on-the-ground reporting (not to mention complicit consent). This is not the sort of work Journatic traffics in. That’s not a criticism, necessarily, just a fact: There used to be barriers to the information; now there aren’t; Journatic uses this lack of barriers plus its algorithms to surface the data.

 

Journatic aims to solve the hyperlocal problem with the algorithmic solution.

 

At first, the company didn’t do any (or much) writing or analysis. According to This American Life and its whistle-blower, though, the company now pays non-native-English-speakers in the Philippines between $.35 and $.40 a story to try to add a bit of context to the data. Thirty-five to forty cents! However shady this is, though, it is not necessarily unethical. It’s capitalistic, and it’s pretty shameful, and it feels wrong somehow, but it’s not unethical journalistically.

Where it does get unethical is when readers are misled, and that has apparently occurred. They force these writers in the Philippines to use fake bylines like “Amy Anderson,” “Jimmy Finkel” and any number of fake bylines with the last name “Andrews,” in order to Americanize them and dupe readers, according to the show. This is flat-out wrong, and I think Journatic knew it — they apparently reversed their stance on this after the story aired.

But ethics aside, and journalism in broader context here, Journatic’s founder, Brian Timpone, claims that the “single reporter model” doesn’t work anymore. The Chicago Tribune, one of Journatic’s customers, says that it’s gotten three times more content for a lot less money. These are serious issues for the future of the profession (along with the opportunity for privacy invasion and privacy mishandling that all this unfiltered data presents). It’s no doubt true that the Trib paid less money for more content versus hiring local reporters. But what is the quality of the work? I think we all know the answer. Shouldn’t that be a bigger factor than it is? If you’re just turning out junk, your brand gets diluted, and your readers soon abandon you altogether.

It’s easy to criticize, but it seems to me that Timpone is trying, as we all are, to devise a way forward. That’s admirable, in its way. It’s a little scary, and the desire for progress sometimes makes us color outside of the lines, and when that happens, places like This American Life need to be there as a regulator, as has just happened. We’re all still muddling our way through the ever-changing new online media landscape, and we will test theories and make mistakes and learn lessons, and with any luck we will end up with a better product, one that serves readers first, last and always. I hope someone is able to someday crack the code of good news done quickly at good quality for a good wage. Until then, we must keep trying.

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Being busy and the fetishization of the offline

I noticed an interesting juxtaposition in two articles I’ve recently read about the intersection of “real life” and those we live online.

The first argues that “being busy” is an artificial creation or, as Tim Kreider puts it, “a hedge against emptiness.”

[People are] busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.

He says that busyness is “something we collectively force one another to do,” and he goes on at length about how he hates being busy (“Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve”) and has instead taken to an “undisclosed location” to focus and write.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. …The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration.”

The piece has some really lovely passages, and I consider it a romantic idealization of what life can and should be. That’s why I’m anxious — it’s my surroundings! Who doesn’t want to drop out every once in a while and just be with nature, man? And this guy is doing it! He’s so right.

Then I read this piece by Nathan Jurgenson. In it, he argues that, in fact, the only reason we feel peaceful and like we’re actually accomplishing something when we’re offline is that it’s in direct relief to being online.

The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. One of our new hobbies is patting ourselves on the back by demonstrating how much we don’t go on Facebook. People boast about not having a profile. We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishizing the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for. …Maintaining the fiction of the collective loss of the offline for everyone else is merely an attempt to construct their own personal time-outs as more special, as allowing them to rise above those social forces of distraction that have ensnared the masses.

Take that, guy who just bragged about his personal time-outs!

“The clear distinction between the on and offline, between human and technology,” Jurgenson writes, “is queered beyond tenability”:

It’s not real unless it’s on Google; pics or it didn’t happen. We aren’t friends until we are Facebook friends. We have come to understand more and more of our lives through the logic of digital connection. Social media is more than something we log into; it is something we carry within us. We can’t log off.

This piece also gets a lot of things right, and I consider it, as I did the Kreider article, to be a romantic idealization, this time of our lives online.

They key is to somehow find a happy medium. It’s not moving to rural France, and it’s not constantly taking pictures of the things and places you’re seeing instead of experiencing them. It’s somewhere in between, and that, to me, is the challenge of the technological times in which we live.

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Hyperlocal news in context

The New York Times quietly announced that it was ending its three-year-old experimentation with hyperlocal journalism, and on its heels, the Neiman Journalism Lab wrote a piece following up with some of the players and laying out five specific lessons learned. These lessons are:

1. It just doesn’t make sense for big media companies to pay their staffs to go hyperlocal.
2. Hard-hitting hyperlocal coverage benefits from some professional journalism.
3. Create a platform that makes it easy for people to participate in diverse ways.
4. Understand the power of email.
5. Don’t abandon experiments in “innovation land.”

Hyperlocal — which I define as small-time stories that are confined to a geographic area but which are incredibly important to that area — is a serious puzzle, one that no one has found a good solution for yet. When hyperlocal had buzz — probably back two or three years ago now, when it wasn’t yet clear that it was such a quagmire — the indicators were that as papers were shutting down left and right, folks needed an online equivalent for news and such. The argument was that print papers were closing down because their “business model” — which is to say, putting interesting and germane copy around relevant ads — was failing, but online news would somehow be the answer. For some unknown reason, but probably because it was much, much cheaper, the people running these new hyperlocal startups (or sometimes online versions of existing papers) also convinced themselves that, in addition to going online instead of print, they would also do it on the cheap: Instead of paying experienced beat reporters to do good ol’ writing about the day’s local news, a model that had worked forever, they would instead fired those people, “engage the community” and hire “citizen journalists.” In retrospect, that didn’t work so well.

According to the Times‘s Jim Schachter, it turns out it’s “impractical” for the New York Times, being a national and international news org, to turn to hyperlocal coverage. Well, yeah. Despite the fact that the Times itself has a well-read City Desk (read: hyperlocal news), it’s not their model to start an equivalent in Wherever Else, USA. They know New York City. They have a giant, well-recognized brand in which local places want to place their trust and their ads. It’s a good combination — it’s a business, in fact! — called “the news media.” It’s “scalable” in that it works (or used to) in almost every community across the world.

Another now-obvious hyperlocal lesson learned: Professional journalists are good at writing and editing. Non-journalism-skilled “citizens” aren’t necessarily good at that stuff. Extrapolating, when readers want information, they want it to be relevant and clear. They don’t want to have to work for it. When these waters are muddied — trying to parse what a non-journalist is trying to say among possibly irrelevant, definitely badly written prose — it is not a fun time. Readers’ response to this isn’t to get even more engaged and volunteer to be the citizen journalist, much as the bottom-liners at media companies wish they would. It’s not even that they get riled up and want to comment about the quality. What readers do is, they just stop reading.

The thing is, though: People care deeply about and do want to read about local news. They care about school board meetings and and city council decisions and high school sports scores and local heroes. They just don’t want to go to the board meetings or ball games themselves. They don’t care that much. Plus, they’re busy doing their own jobs.

So these are two key realizations of the hyperlocal business: You have to provide relevant and well-written copy that doesn’t ask anything of the readers other than to read. (And maybe, if it’s well-written and relevant enough, they might actually pay for the privilege and/or comment on a story.)

Another essential understanding is recognizing and respecting a corollary phenomenon: the rise of social media as a determiner of local relevancy. The Neiman article doesn’t touch on it at its own embarrassment, since engagement is this area is absolutely insane, off-the-charts, disruptive, phenomenal, revolutionary, whatever word or phrase that means a new paradigm has been created. That a new paradigm for social interaction occurred simultaneously yet oppositionally with the attempt at a new paradigm for local news is a coincidental but unfortunate event (unfortunate, that is, for these news sites).

My understanding of the fourth finding, “Understand the power of email” is that people like newsletters. But in my experience this is neither true nor relevant. However, the third lesson, the idea that technology must facilitate participation, is huge, and it’s another key point to answering the question that Schachter proposes: “How do you prompt communities into the act of covering themselves in a meaningful way?” I don’t have the answer (does anyone?), but I think social is playing no small part in this, too, and one need only see all the check-ins and status updates to see that people do like participating in the community around them (and, in turn, telling others about it in order to either humble-brag or exacerbate their followers’ FOMO or both).

I almost want to (badly) paraphrase Mean Girls by saying, “Stop trying to make hyperlocal happen.” But actually, I do think hyperlocal has a place in our evolving news, online and social ecosystem. Hell, I think algorithms have a place. It’s early days yet. But it seems to me that what successful products have in common, and what they all come to realize sooner or later, is that above all else, they must serve the reader (or user). It’s so incredibly obvious yet so often overlooked. And as soon as hyperlocal sites incorporate this truth into their businesses, the better the experience will be for readers and the online news industry at large.

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