Breakdown: Earlier this week Lisa Park wrote a post on the power of giving an editorial voice to the larger community. Rachel Lovinger counters with thoughts on why the social narrative alone might leave news lovers hungry for something much more substantial. Get in on the conversation and read below >>

This past weekend I saw “Page One: Inside the New York Times,” a documentary about one of the preeminent newspapers of our time. And – let’s face it – our time is not a great time for newspapers. Page One is a high-drama, must-see film for anyone who’s interested in “the future of print media,” because it shows that, whatever happens to newspapers and magazines, we will still need journalism.

Page One tells its story primarily through the NYT Media Desk, which was established in 2008 to report on the state of the media (including the Times itself). They report on phenomena like Wikileaks, Twitter, news bloggers, and mobile devices, even as they participate in them. As a result, they’re an extremely self-aware group of reporters. When one reporter, David Carr, looks into a bag containing a new iPad he proclaims, “Is that a bridge to the future? Oh wait it’s a gallows!”

The predictions of the demise of newspapers in general (and of the New York Times in particular) are a constant theme in the movie and a hot topic in the media biz in general. But if you look beyond the business models and the distribution metrics, there’s a deeper question being explored here: What is the fundamental purpose of news journalism? Do the new modes of digital media have the ability to fulfill that purpose? And what would it mean to our culture if the standards and practices of journalism were allowed to dissolve away?

Sure, news blogs and citizen journalism make many promises that are hard for traditional media to compete with. News blogs get information to us more immediately, where traditional media has to do research, analysis, fact checking, editing, and other time-consuming activities. Citizen journalism uses distributed sources, so they don’t have to worry about sending people to places to investigate a story, as long as someone who was there at the time reports in to them. News aggregators like Huffington Post and some other startups mentioned in the film can bring us news on a wide range of topics from a wide range of sources with very little overhead, but where would they be without mainstream media providing the bulk of their content?

But newspapers like the New York Times bring expertise, perspective, and journalistic standards. When the film touches on events that have hurt the credibility of the Times, like Jayson Blair making up stories, it’s notable that the reason these incidents are so scandalous is actually because the paper has such a dependable reputation. They take the time to consider “Is this a story? What is the story? How do we tell this story?” while news blogs may just put the information out there and let you decide.

And that doesn’t mean those other sources are neutral and objective. As the Times media reporters demonstrate in the deconstruction of an edited Wikileaks video that was widely distributed on YouTube, there’s often an agenda. It’s just not stated explicitly. When asked if he considers himself a journalist, Julian Assange says that he does, but if he had to choose between the values of journalism and the values of activism, he would choose activism.

Of course, there’s a place in this world for activism, and modern media and digital communications have made it easier than ever before to be an activist. And certainly the planet would be better off with fewer trees being cut down, printing plants running every day, and trucks carting the papers to your local store. We can afford to lose newspapers, but can we afford to lose journalism?

If Page One is any indication, the people at the Times are doing their best to make sure that doesn’t happen. Check out the film and see if you agree with their choices. And if not, what do you think is going to get in their way? What do you think they should do differently? And do you think any of this matters?

The Breakdown: Rob Stribley highlights a recent exodus of bloggers on the popular site ScienceBlogs and discusses the consequences of when you really don’t know your audience.

A visit today to the web’s most popular portal for sciences lovers, ScienceBlogs, reveals something is amiss. Bloggers, many of them well-known and respected scientists, are abandoning their posts and the site is sloughing off blogs like buildings sinking into the sea in Christopher Nolan’s latest mindbender Inception. And what of PZ Meyer’s Pharyngula, the most provocative blog on the roll and arguably the cash cow for the entire ScienceBlogs enterprise? As of yesterday: “On Strike!”

The reason for these departures hinges primarily upon Scienceblogs recent addition of a new blog, Food Frontiers to their blogroll. The blog was ostensibly about food nutrition, but it was soon revealed to be sponsored by a large corporation, PepsiCo. As word spread that PepsiCo had indeed paid for this prominent space on ScienceBlogs, the header for the blog was altered to clarify the sponsorship, but the damage was already done. The bloggers and their readers were almost universally outraged and Seed Media Group, who manage ScienceBlogs, pulled the blog within 36 hours.

Know Your Audience
It’s important to note that many of the bloggers and their readers explicitly stated that they did not have a problem with PepsiCo the company, specifically. They were perturbed by the perceived intrusion of a biased corporate presence on principle (the whole point of science is to examine the known universe with strict attention to avoiding bias, right?). So it didn’t matter the company: it could’ve been KFC, Mrs. Field’s Cookies, Toys”R”Us, or ahem, BP (OK, the last would’ve been most egregious at this moment). The point is, it’s utterly remarkable that ScienceBlogs didn’t know their audience, didn’t understand the perception that making this move had the appearance of letting a wolf in with the sheep, however genteel the intentions of the wolf.

Be Transparent
The situation, of course, is also complicated by the fact that ScienceBlogs did not immediately reveal that Food Frontier was being written by PepsiCo employees. It was presented as a blog like any other within the fold, until the sponsorship was revealed. This move engendered an even greater level of distrust for Seed Media and quickly lead to other bloggers coming forward to confess their distrust for the editorial process, not to mention Seed Media’s ethics. One blogger, David Dobbs, framed it well:

“With the addition of Food Frontiers, ScienceBlogs has redrawn the boundaries of what it considers legitimate and constructive blogo-journalism about science. In doing so they define an environment I can’t live comfortably in.”

And that was his last post on ScienceBlogs. If Seed Media wanted to experiment with a sponsored blog, they should have done so transparently and labeled it as such from the get go. Instead, they launched the blog unlabeled and without warning their writers, a brief survey of whom would have lead them to question the wisdom of the endeavor anyway.

A quick visit to ScienceBlogs this morning reveals PZ Meyers is still very much on strike. He’s taken to Twitter for now, grappling with the limitations of 140 characters. Whether ScienceBlogs survives this debacle remains to be seen, but bloggers like Meyers have offered some lessons learned, sharing their thoughts on how ScienceBlogs could best move forward. There’s plenty we can learn from their situation, even if they don’t.

The Breakdown: Announcing, Nimble: A Razorifish report on publishing in the digital age. Rachel provides a description of the report that she wrote for Razorfish’s Media & Entertainment practice, with support from research partner Semantic Universe.

Last week I mentioned being busy. One of the things that has been keeping me occupied for the past several months is writing and producing a report called Nimble. It’s aimed at content producers that are moving from traditional media distribution to digital, and finding themselves facing new challenges.

Most magazines, newspapers, TV shows, etc. have a website at this point, but it doesn’t mean that they’re making the most of the digital experiences that they’re creating for their audience. The report looks at three major areas of interest to content companies – how they attact and retain their audience, how they deliver content across new channels, platforms, and devices, and how they remain profitable in the new digital economy.

The key is: Content needs to be free. Not necessarily free-of-charge, but free to be accessed wherever and whenever the consumer wants it. And to truly be free, content needs to be “Nimble.” Content becomes nimble by being well-structured and having meaningful metadata.

The report discusses the types of structure that can set content free, and how this approach will change the role of the editor, the way content companies make money, the way they deliver content, and the way they attract an audience. It also includes information about emerging technologies and tools that can help digital content publishers move into this nimble world.

Read or download the entire report at http://nimble.razorfish.com and follow us on Twitter (@NimbleRF) for interesting developments and updates. I’ll be presenting the report at the Semantic Technology Conference on June 23rd, and we’ll be doing a lot more with this material in the coming months.

News lovers beware. (Image courtesy of the talented Eleanor Rudge)

The breakdown: Robert Stribley discusses how a recent national tragedy was covered in the Huffington Post through a consolidation of local tweets.  What’s the impact of using these Twitter lists on citizen journalism?  Read on to find out.

“Good lord, is this hen scratch they call tweeting REALLY supposed to keep us informed?” – goodog, Comment posted 06:10 PM on 11/05/2009, The Huffington Post

Late last week unwitting citizens of Fort Hood, Texas suddenly found themselves serving as national correspondents, when the news-aggregation site Huffington Post began livecasting their tweets. HuffPo corralled their tweets via Twitter Lists and presented them within a Twitter widget—both shiny, new features the micro-blogging service had released just days before.  The implementation by the Huffington Post was somewhat shoddy. As of this moment, it’s still running.

Some background: On Thursday, November 5^th, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan began a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood military base that left 13 service men and women dead and 29 injured. In an attempt to tap into local reactions to the event, The Huffington Post set up the Fort Hood List and began streaming the tweets of people whose profiles indicated they lived in the area. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

HuffPo should have considered the impact of posting random tweets simply based upon their geographic location. Instead they let loose with a torrent, and the results, as people quickly noted, weren’t pretty. Don’t get me wrong: There were some poignant and informative tweets. However, many of them weren’t particularly relevant, were inaccurate, or made little sense out of context.

Some examples:

iTraceyRenee: watchin Gucci Mane ft Usher – Spotlight Video

Barbaramagana: Writing blog. hmm what will the topic be!!!

RicoRossi: I’m about to go assist in oral surgery, ill tweet later

sunnylena: @ArmyBarbieGirl do u have children?

One 17-year-old participant mentioned the Fort Hood incident precisely once, before resuming her random, typically sexually explicit tweets. Which are still being posted to HuffPo, as of this moment.

A few issues are at play here. Let’s take a quick look at them.

Security by Obscurity

Ideally, people should be made aware when their tweets are being broadcast in a more prominent venue. Now, arguably, the whole point of Twitter is to disseminate information in a public venue. And, by publishing content to Twitter (and, increasingly, Facebook, too), folks are engaging in a privacy transaction each time wherein they tacitly agree to make their content public. Unless they make their profiles private. For better or worse, people depend on “security by obscurity” where Twitter’s concerned. They realize their tweets are observable (one would hope), but they sometimes depend on their mutterings being lost in the noise. As we all continue living our lives more publicly, we’ll probably adapt and learn that security by obscurity is a myth.

In the meantime, publishing people’s tweets at such a visible level raises some issues. For example, in an internal conversation, Razorfish content strategist Rachel Lovinger suggested that HuffPo did Tweeters an injustice by publishing their tweets out of context:

It makes me wince that the top comment from a local says “Andy Pettitte, Houston misses you!!” I feel embarrassed for the person who said it and is going to be judged as shallow and insensitive, just because she used her Twitter account the way she always uses it, perhaps not aware that she’s now an unfiltered spokesperson for her troubled community.

Curation

How to avoid this context problem? Tweets should be curated, of course, at least automatically by keyword, if not manually. When they published their Twitter list, HuffPo claimed, “we’re capturing all the tweeted updates related to the terrible events at Fort Hood. This search is targeted, filtered, and local.”

Really? Targeted and local? Somewhat. Filtered? Not so much.

The first thing I thought upon seeing the Huffington Post widget was that many of the tweets weren’t remotely relevant. It desperately needed some curation. Of course, Twitter lists aren’t currently set up to do that. Since HuffPo couldn’t do the filtering, they put the onus on us. And why should we take on the cognitive burden of filtering out irrelevant, often inaccurate information? We came looking for signal, not noise.

Accuracy & Authenticity

For a news-oriented site, of course, accuracy should be the weightiest concern of all: by placing those tweets on their site, The Huffington Post amplified some misinformation, a problem more serious journalistic enterprises would be excoriated for.

Some have suggested we shouldn’t expect a high level of accuracy from real-time, citizen journalism. Perhaps. But relying on it is a mistake we’re seeing all too often. A more stringent process for participation certainly would’ve helped in this case.

Maybe we’re entering an age where – more than ever – news needs to be viewed with the admonition Caveat Lector, “Let the Reader Beware!” We should certainly maintain a healthy sense of skepticism when reviewing content, which comes our way. But news practitioners – and aggregators – should also be aware of the damage that the careless use of such information does to their sense of authority.

Unless sensationalism, not authority, is what they’re really aiming for, of course.

Further Reading

Columbia Journalism Review, “Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists”

Paul Carr, TechCrunch, “After Fort Hood, Another Example of How ‘citizen Journalists’ Can’t Handle the Truth”

Matthew Ingram, “Citizen Journalism: I’ll Take It Flaws and All”

The Breakdown: I was privileged to participate on a panel at a recent ‘Content Strategists of NYC’ meeting tackling the subject of the relationship between content strategy and publishing.  Leading the discussion was Jeff MacIntyre, principal of Predicate, and joining the panel was Ian Alexander, VP of Eat Media and Craig Bromberg, Editor in chief of AOL Real Estate .

How does a content strategist work with a publisher? What is the unique skill set we bring to the table? Are editors really being replaced by content strategists? What are all the necessary tools of editorial strategy? What problems are content strategists going to solve for publishers? For answers and insight to these questions, look no further. Explore the video panel discussion above, courtesy of the UX Workshop.  Most importantly, let us know what you think.  Comments welcome below.

The Breakdown: Our own Rachel Lovinger gave a presentation at the MIMA Summit about what can happen when you don’t have a clearly defined content strategy. She showed several examples of common problems, and talked about content best practices that could have helped avoid these problems. The Summit will be posting video of all the presentations soon (including great keynote talks by Jackie Huba and Seth Godin), but for now, explore Rachel’s slides above.

The twilight of an industry. (image via Clern)

The talk about the inevitable death of newspapers seems to have heated up in recent weeks. Overall, there seems to be a resignation setting in about their demise.

Major Losses in the News

Just the other day, Warren Buffet discouraged investing ever again in newspapers. (The New York Times lost $74.5 million in the first quarter.) And on May 4^th, remarks from President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gave no sign that there were any plans for the government to step in to save such a lowly thing as newspapers.

Buffet’s business partner Charlie Munger called the impending loss of newspapers a national tragedy. What this tragedy is akin to, if indeed it’s a tragedy, is hard to say just yet. So far, the hopeful replacements to the newspaper like the digital book readers the Kindle DX and Sony Reader don’t seem like the splendid new alternative, so for those grieving the impending loss, the mourning period will probably be extensive.

Enter the Lifestream

On another thread in the commentary on the ailing press, at the end of an extensive roundtable conversation published not long ago on Edge.org, David Gelernter, the visionary behind cloud computing, was asked the blunt question, “How do you save the New York Times?” (“Lord of the Cloud,” a roundtable with David Gelernter, John Markoff, and Clay Shirky.)

His response, while not giving much hope to the continued existence of the “printed page,” assured the Times of the value of their professional service. The service Gerlernter describes probably sounds pretty familiar to anyone with a bit of knowledge about how newspaper editors work—they sort out the important stories and tell you they’re important by putting them on prominent pages.

Using Gelernter’s term, a “lifestream producer” would sort and place the news on the “lifestream,” a digital time continuum of sorts, there to be plucked by the reader whenever it’s convenient or relevant to read. The reader would also be able to go back in time to trace the evolution of stories or take a peek in the future to see what lies ahead.

Make Way for Content Strategy

This, of course, would be good news for editors. Their duties would pretty much be the same, but they’d be given extra powers to shape or orchestrate how news is received across time. Editors wouldn’t be working alone, naturally. Journalists would still need to write or film the stories, and, most important, editors would be assisted by an intelligent software agent to help in sifting the relevance of the news and discovering related stories, whether transparent or obscure. Overall, this enhanced, or reconsidered, role of the editor strikes me as one of the bright prospects for figuring out how news organizations can carry on.

I hope that it almost goes without saying that a content strategist would have a significant role, too, in maintaining the smooth functioning and insightfulness of the digital lifestream. In fact, content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories. With the advent of a lifestream, this abiding interest could be entwined with a reader’s own interest in gaining a historical sense of things.

To Skim or Swim

One more bright note to mention in the press battle is a curious statistic also found near the end of the Edge.org roundtable. Readers of the New York Times in print, it turns out, spend an average of 35 minutes a day with the paper, while online readers of the Times spend just 32 minutes—a month. That puts the monthly average for the print reader at 17 ½ hours. What in the world are they doing all that time? Sudoku? They’re certainly not just skimming headlines. Of course, this statistic doesn’t tell the whole story—who knows what else the online readers are doing to get their news. But it does say that there’s an audience of newsreaders who have 35 minutes a day to pore over the events of our times. How long they would spend on the lifestream reading news, watching videos, seeing ads is yet to be seen, but I imagine it would be longer than a minute a day.