Few things illustrate the challenges facing journalism in the age of ‘Big Data’ better than Cable Gate – and specifically, how you engage people with stories that involve large sets of data.

The Cable Gate leaks have been of a different order to the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs. Not in number (there were 90,000 documents in the Afghanistan war logs and over 390,000 in the Iraq logs; the Cable Gate documents number around 250,000) – but in subject matter.

Why is it that the 15,000 extra civilian deaths estimated to have been revealed by the Iraq war logs did not move the US authorities to shut down Wikileaks’ hosting and PayPal accounts? Why did it not dominate the news agenda in quite the same way?

Tragedy or statistic?

I once heard a journalist trying to put the number ‘£13 billion’ into context by saying: “imagine 13 million people paying £1,000 more per year” – as if imagining 13 million people was somehow easier than imagining £13bn. Comparing numbers to the size of Wales or the prime minister’s salary is hardly any better.

Generally misattributed to Stalin, the quote “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” illustrates the problem particularly well: when you move beyond scales we can deal with on a human level, you struggle to engage people in the issue you are covering.

Research suggests this is a problem that not only affects journalism, but justice as well. In October Ben Goldacre wrote about a study that suggested “People who harm larger numbers of people get significantly lower punitive damages than people who harm a smaller number. Courts punish people less harshly when they harm more people.”

“Out of a maximum sentence of 10 years, people who read the three-victim story recommended an average prison term one year longer than the 30-victim readers. Another study, in which a food processing company knowingly poisoned customers to avoid bankruptcy, gave similar results.”

Salience

This is where journalists play a particularly important role. Kevin Marsh, writing about Wikileaks on Sunday, argues that

“Whistleblowing that lacks salience does nothing to serve the public interest – if we mean capturing the public’s attention to nurture its discourse in a way that has the potential to change something material. “

He is right. But Charlie Beckett, in the comments to that post, points out that Wikileaks is not operating in isolation:

“Wikileaks is now part of a networked journalism where they are in effect, a kind of news-wire for traditional newsrooms like the New York Times, Guardian and El Pais. I think that delivers a high degree of what you call salience.”

This is because last year Wikileaks realised that they would have much more impact working in partnership with news organisations than releasing leaked documents to the world en masse. It was a massive move for Wikileaks, because it meant re-assessing a core principle of openness to all, and taking on a more editorial role. But it was an intelligent move – and undoubtedly effective. The Guardian, Der Spiegel, New York Times and now El Pais and Le Monde have all added salience to the leaks. But could they have done more?

Visualisation through personalisation and humanisation

In my series of posts on data journalism I identified visualisation as one of four interrelated stages in its production. I think that this concept needs to be broadened to include visualisation through case studies: or humanisation, to put it more succinctly.

There are dangers here, of course. Firstly, that humanising a story makes it appear to be an exception (one person’s tragedy) rather than the rule (thousands suffering) – or simply emotive rather than also informative; and secondly, that your selection of case studies does not reflect the more complex reality.

Ben Goldacre – again – explores this issue particularly well:

“Avastin extends survival from 19.9 months to 21.3 months, which is about 6 weeks. Some people might benefit more, some less. For some, Avastin might even shorten their life, and they would have been better off without it (and without its additional side effects, on top of their other chemotherapy). But overall, on average, when added to all the other treatments, Avastin extends survival from 19.9 months to 21.3 months.

“The Daily Mail, the Express, Sky News, the Press Association and the Guardian all described these figures, and then illustrated their stories about Avastin with an anecdote: the case of Barbara Moss. She was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2006, had all the normal treatment, but also paid out of her own pocket to have Avastin on top of that. She is alive today, four years later.

“Barbara Moss is very lucky indeed, but her anecdote is in no sense whatsoever representative of what happens when you take Avastin, nor is it informative. She is useful journalistically, in the sense that people help to tell stories, but her anecdotal experience is actively misleading, because it doesn’t tell the story of what happens to people on Avastin: instead, it tells a completely different story, and arguably a more memorable one – now embedded in the minds of millions of people – that Roche’s £21,000 product Avastin makes you survive for half a decade.”

Broadcast journalism – with its regulatory requirement for impartiality, often interpreted in practical terms as ‘balance’ – is particularly vulnerable to this. Here’s one example of how the homeopathy debate is given over to one person’s experience for the sake of balance:

Journalism on an industrial scale

The Wikileaks stories are journalism on an industrial scale. The closest equivalent I can think of was the MPs’ expenses story which dominated the news agenda for 6 weeks. Cable Gate is already on Day 9 and the wealth of stories has even justified a live blog.

With this scale comes a further problem: cynicism and passivity; Cable Gate fatigue. In this context online journalism has a unique role to play which was barely possible previously: empowerment.

3 years ago I wrote about 5 Ws and a H that should come after every news story. The ‘How’ and ‘Why’ of that are possibilities that many news organisations have still barely explored. ‘Why should I care?’ is about a further dimension of visualisation: personalisation – relating information directly to me. The Guardian moves closer to this with its searchable database, but I wonder at what point processing power, tools, and user data will allow us to do this sort of thing more effectively.

‘How can I make a difference?’ is about pointing users to tools – or creating them ourselves – where they can move the story on by communicating with others, campaigning, voting, and so on. This is a role many journalists may be uncomfortable with because it raises advocacy issues, but then choosing to report on these stories, and how to report them, raises the same issues; linking to a range of online tools need not be any different. These are issues we should be exploring, ethically.

All the above in one sentence

Somehow I’ve ended up writing over a thousand words on this issue, so it’s worth summing it all up in a sentence.

Industrial scale journalism using ‘big data’ in a networked age raises new problems and new opportunities: we need to humanise and personalise big datasets in a way that does not detract from the complexity or scale of the issues being addressed; and we need to think about what happens after someone reads a story online and whether online publishers have a role in that.

This is a draft from a book chapter on data journalism (the first, on gathering data, is here; the section on interrogating data is here). I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around considerations in visualisation. A further section on visualisation tools, can be found here.

UPDATE: It has now been published in The Online Journalism Handbook.

“At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information. Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers – even a very large set – is to look at pictures of those numbers.” (Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2001)

Visualisation is the process of giving a graphic form to information which is often otherwise dry or impenetrable. Classic examples of visualisation include turning a table into a bar chart, or a series of percentage values into a pie chart – but the increasing power of both computer analysis and graphic design software have seen the craft of visualisation develop with increasing sophistication. In larger organisations the data journalist may work with a graphic artist to produce an infographic that visualises their story – but in smaller teams, in the initial stages of a story, or when speed is of the essence they are likely to need to use visualisation tools to give form to their data.

Broadly speaking there are two typical reasons for visualising data: to find a story; or to tell one. Quite often, it is both.

In the parking tickets story above, for example, it was the process of visualisation that tipped off Adrian Short and Guardian journalist Charles Arthur to the story – and led to further enquiries.

In most cases, however, the story will not be as immediately visible. Sometimes the data will need to be visualised in different ways before a story becomes clear. And an understanding of the strengths of different types of visualisation can be particularly useful here.

UPDATE (Dec 7, 2010): Visualisation probably needs to be extended to include humanisation and personalisation. More detail here, and to come.

Types of visualisation

Visualisation can take on a range of forms. The most familiar are those we know from maths and statistics: pie charts, for example, allow you to show how one thing is divided – for example, how a budget is spent, or how a population is distributed. They are thought to be particularly useful when the proportions represented are large (for example, above 25%), but less useful when lower percentages are involved, due to issues with perception and the ability to compare different elements.

More useful in those circumstances are bar charts or histograms. Although these look the same there are subtle differences between them: the bars in bar charts represent categories (such as different cities), whereas bars in histograms represent different values on a continuum (for instance: ages, weights or amounts). You should avoid using 3D or shadow effects in bar charts as these do not add to the information or clarity (histograms do not have gaps between bars). The advantage of both types of chart over pie charts is that users can more easily see the difference between one quantity and another. Bar charts also allow you to show change over time.

Pictograms are like bar charts but use an icon to represent quantity – so a population of 50,000 might be represented by 5 ‘person’ icons. It is not advisable to use pictograms if quantities are close together as the user will find it harder to discern the differences.

Also useful for showing change over time are line graphs. Lines are “suited for showing trend, acceleration or deceleration, and volatility, including sudden peaks or troughs” (Wong, 2010, p51). In addition, a series of lines overlaid upon each other can also quickly show if any variables change at different points or at simultaneous points, suggesting either relationships or shared causes (but by no means proving it – these should be taken as starting points for further investigation. You should also avoid plotting more than four lines in one chart for purposes of clarity).

Line graphs should not be used to show unrelated events. As Seth Godin (2009) puts it: “A graph of IQs of everyone in your kindergarten class should be a series of unrelated points, not a line graph. On the other hand, your weight loss is in fact a continuous function, so each piece of data should be attached.”

Scattergrams are similar to line graphs, showing the distribution of individual elements against two axes, but can be particularly useful in showing up ‘outliers’. Outliers are pieces of data which differ noticeably from the rest. These may be of particular interest journalistically when they show, for example, an MP claiming substantially more (or less) expenses than their peers.

A number of charts can be visualised together in what is sometimes called ‘small multiples‘, allowing the journalist or users to display a number of pie charts, line graphs or other charts alongside each other – allowing comparison, for example, between different populations.

Two increasingly popular forms of visualisation online are treemaps and bubble charts. Unlike other charts which allow you to visualise two aspects of the data (i.e. their place on each axis) bubble charts allow you to visualise three aspects of the data – the third being represented by the size of the bubble itself. A particularly good example of bubble charts in action can be seen in Hans Rosling’s TED talk on debunking third-world myths – a presentation which also demonstrates the potential of other forms of visualisation, and animation, in presenting complex information in an easy-to-understand way.

Finally, Treemaps visualise hierarchical data in a way that could be described as rectangular pie charts-within-pie charts. This is particularly useful for representing different parts of a whole and their relationship to each other, for instance, different budgets within a government.

Perhaps the best-known example of a treemap is Newsmap, created in 2004 by Marcos Weskamp. This visualises the amount of coverage given to stories by news organisations based on a feed from Google News. Weskamp explains it as follows:

“Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.” (Weskamp, 2005)

These are just the most common forms of visualisation, but there are dozens more to explore. The Periodic Table of Visualisation is a particularly useful webpage giving an overview of the various forms.

Considerations in visualisation

Charlie Beckett makes a useful distinction between using visualisation for “rational understanding (I now get the figures) and emotional understanding (I now care about the figures and want to do something).” It is worth deciding which of the two you are aiming for.

When visualising data it is also important to ensure that any comparisons are meaningful, or like-for-like. In one visualisation of how many sales a musician needs to make to earn the minimum wage, for example, a comparison is made between sites selling albums, sites selling individual tracks, and those providing music streams. Clearly this is misleading – and was criticised for being so (Techdirt, 2010).

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics (2010) offers a wealth of tips on elements to consider and mistakes to avoid in both visualisation and data research and is well worth reading for more on this area. Here are just a selection:

• “Choose the best data series to illustrate your point, e.g. market share vs. total revenue
• “Filter and simplify the data to deliver the essence of the data to your intended audience
• “Make numerical adjustments to the raw data to enhance your point, e.g. absolute values vs. percentage change
• “Choose the appropriate chart settings, e.g. scale, y-axis increments and baseline
• “If the raw data is insufficient to tell the story, do not add decorative elements. Instead, research additional sources and adjust data to stay on point
• “Data is only as good as its source. Getting data from reputable and impartial sources is critical. For example, data should be benchmarked against a third party to avoid bias and add credibility
• “In the research stage, a bigger data set allows more in-depth analysis. In the edit phase, it is important to assess whether all your extra information buries the main point of the story or enhancwes [it].”

Visualising large amounts of text

If you are working with text rather than numbers there are ways to visualise that as well. Word clouds, for instance, show which words are used most often in a particular document (such as a speech, bill, or manifesto) or data stream (such as an RSS feed of what people are saying on Twitter or blogs). This can be particularly useful in drawing out the themes of a politician’s speech, for example, or the reaction from people online to a particular event. They can also be used to draw comparisons – word clouds have been used in the past to compare the inaugural speeches of Barack Obama with those of Bush and Clinton; and to compare the 2010 UK election manifestos of the Labour and Conservative parties. The tag cloud is similar to the word cloud, but typically allows you to click on an individual tag (word or phrase) to see where it has been used.

There are other forms for word visualisation too, particularly around showing relationships between words – when they occur together, or how often. The terminology varies: visualisation tool ManyEyes, for example, calls these word trees and phrase nets but other tools will have different names.

Once again, I’d welcome any comments on areas I may have missed or things journalists should consider. I’ve had to split this section into two, so Part 4 continues to look at visualisation, and focuses on tools and publishing.

The lineup for the Perugia International Journalism Festival 2009 has been announced. I’ll be speaking on the first of a series of panels devoted to ‘New Media – The Future of Journalism’. The topic is “Blogs and online communities: Where now for interactive journalism?”. The other members of the panel are Luca Conti, Ben Hammersley Antonio Sofi and Juan Varela.

The following day Paolo Ligouri, Marco Pratellesi, Charlie Beckett, Erik Ulken and Giuseppe Smorto will discuss “Networked journalism – permeable, interactve, 24/7, multi-platform, multi-dimensional – is here. The media is saved!” (if they have any time left after they finish reading out the title)

On Friday April 3rd the topic is “Information 2009: blogs, social media and online-only newspapers. Where do you get your news?” – discussed by Pierre Haski of rue89.com, Google’s Stefano Hesse, Carlo Revelli of Agoravox.com, and La Repubblica blogger Vittorio Zambardino.

And on the Saturday “Small is beautiful. Even to the big. How specialised media websites have won over readers, the market and big media companies. Niche set up, nice bright future?” PaidContent founder Rafat Ali, WeblogsSL founder Julio Alonso, Business Week editor-in-chief John Byrne, and Nova24 editor Luca De Biase will discuss.

The best thing about this festival is that members of the public can attend free of charge.

Would love to meet you if you’re there – let me know in the comments.

Gather round, gather round for this month’s Carnival of Journalism, which addresses the timely question of ‘How do you financially support journalism online?’. I’ll be updating this post as the carnival performers put on their outsized business heads and add their peacock-like contributions.

• First up in the parade is the glamorously ruffled Dave Cohn, who addresses the merits of community funded journalism with his post;
• Following him is the dame Jack Lail, who notes how the rules for staffing levels are changing – and that while there are rules of thumb for print operations, no one seems to have worked out what the economics are when you publish online-only.
• While the rainbow-coloured Charlie Beckett points out Frederick Filou‘s reasons why 2009 could be a good year for the news media.
• The resplendent Wendy Withers offers the following advice to both freelancers and news organisations: diversify
• Ryan Sholin, wearing the feathers of Invisible Inkling, comes up with 3 obvious ways to support online journalism;
• and the masked Bryan Murley points out that “there are no new business models for news … The only possible models are these: advertiser-supported and reader-supported (through subscriptions or donations).” The key, he says, is to get out of the neglect that has brought news organisations to this point in the first place.

• Jason_Cobb @paulbradshaw No established model can work. Which is the beauty of it all. Time to start again at grass roots with info as base, not profit
  
• nmcintosh @paulbradshaw Advertising. Subscription. Not charity. Revenue’s not the problem
• Paul0Evans1 @paulbradshaw Recognise that it’s not *that* expensive to publicly subsidise & the mood on this stuff is changing http://tinyurl.com/8yymcs
• BostinBloke @paulbradshaw advertising….premium subsciption service…membership discounts
• matthewbennett @paulbradshaw Subscribe to an individual journalist: top quality individual journalist blogs with premium content section
• benkunz @paulbradshaw Business model for journalism: Turn 1 major city paper in each U.S. region into a nonprofit. Done.
• NigelBarlow @paulbradshaw I still think that there is a case for puuting a paywall around quality content
• wcochran @paulbradshaw: Subscribers have to take a bigger share of cost. Good news: online news costs less.

I’ve also started a video conversation on Seesmic on the subject – embedded below – on which I’d welcome your thoughts.

“This book is my manifesto for the media as a journalist but also as a citizen of the world. As a journalist you are constantly being told that the news media have enormous power to shape society and events, to change lives and history. So why are we so careless as a society about the future of journalism itself ?” [1]

This is how Charlie Beckett presents his book “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), in which he tackles the main challenges to journalistic practice in our days, and its influence to maintain free and democratic societies .

Charlie Beckett is a journalist with a 20 yearscareer at the BBC and ITN, and he is also the founding Director of POLIS, a think tank about journalism and society at the London School of Economics. “SuperMedia” is a work that gathers and structures several streams of thought about the future of Journalism as a essential service to contemporary societies, and how the changes in the news industry, beyond inevitable, are necessary.

Alex Gamela posed a few questions to Charlie Beckett about his book (Portuguese version available here).

“I estimate that we have five years – perhaps ten – to save journalism so that journalism can save the world. “

So, why is journalism in danger? For Beckett, this is due to a “mixture of economic pressures, political repression ( [in] places like Africa, Russia etc) and the shift of people’s attention to new media alternatives”.

The traditional media have kept their relationship with the audience fairly unchanged in the past few decades, which seemed to work just fine, but with the coming of new technologies that relationship shifted, and the news industry seems to be having some difficulties adapting to the new circumstances.

I had to ask Charlie Beckett a question he himself raised in his book: “What is wrong with the media business?” “It is too formulaic, too closed, too limited.” In fact, the trouble and the fears are increasing in the “dead tree” industry: dropping profits, lower circulation, staff cuts, and the reluctance of many professionals to embrace the new ways of communication.

Despite all that, journalism’s job is still the same: to inform. And the flow of information in a free environment allows a better knowledge of what surrounds us, and a more effective interaction with it. But, for a long time, journalism took the part of the messenger that was never accounted for.

And what is its role nowadays?

“Journalism has many roles: entertainment, watchdog, informer, forum, economic medium and more. Societies with open and thriving news media seem to be richer and more well-adjusted.”.

At the heart of the news process are journalists, an ill-viewed class at the eyes of most citizens. Under such a pessimistic perspective on the function they perform, I asked if journalists had forgot about their responsibilities:

“Of course not”, says Beckett, “but a journalist’s priority is to do their job well. Wider responsibilities should be considered by the journalist and their organisations, but everyone will shape them differently. Networked journalism allows the public to help define and then share the responsibilities.”

Networked Journalism

Charlie Beckett spends a large part of his book talking about networked journalism. As he explained on BBC “Networked journalists share the news process with the audience right from the start: from information gathering to distribution, in active, participative way.”[2]

In a nutshell, Beckett described it to me as a “thorough-going change in journalism practice which challenges the basic assumptions of mainstream journalism. It synthesises the functions of editing, reporting and packaging with much public involvement throughout the process.”

As long as they have access to a computer or a cell phone, any member of the audience can collaborate with journalists as a citizen journalist, through wikis, blogs, or providing multimédia contents. Or they can just sit back and watch the results of this collaboration.

This implies new perspectives and an extension of the news agenda that expands with each participation. This synergy can rebuild public trust in journalism, and an increase of media companies’ knowledge about their audiences: “People are increasingly sceptical but that can be a good thing. Old Media didn’t take audience seriously because they never met them.”

But the participation of amateurs in the news process raises the content quality issue. For Charlie Beckett this does not apply: “There are vast amounts of rubbish on corporate media.”

Another one of the most discussed subjects on New Media is how they can generate revenue: “Much too big a question! If I knew the answer I would be very rich.”

We’ve been watching practical examples of this evolution: the celerity of how the Sichuan earthquake was reported on the web, the democratization of multimedia content, the development of social networks and virtual communities, etc. But more than a technological evolution, networked journalism is a philosophy: “(…)is a return to some of the oldest virtues of journalism: connecting with the world beyond the newsroom; listening to people; giving people a voice in the media; responding to what the public tells you in a dialogue. But it has the potential to go further than that in transforming the power relationship between media and the public and reformulating the means of journalistic production.”.[3]

The multiplication of ways to communicate means that there is a whole lot more information than ever before, where each individual can express himself according to his own agenda. I told Charlie Beckett that the media landscape looked like a broken mirror, with different platforms in different media, for fragmented audiences, using various applications. He replied: “What’s wrong with diversity and difference and distance? But generally more public participation allows greater voice and more connectivity.” Between people, and between audience and media companies. Are the new networked media outlets becoming the heart of communities? “Yes – but they might also be on the edges of communities or outside of them. NJ naturally works best when supported by groups of people but those communities might not be geographical.” The geography that we relate to now is the one of concepts, tastes, ideas.

In his book, Beckett extensively reports on how the networked media can influence the political conscience of citizens when mainstream media is alerted to subjects that usually would remain hidden under the stack of the news pile that fills newsrooms everyday. Networked journalism allows a reformulation of the news agenda, making way to news that are important to smaller communities, or society in general, but of which is disconnected for not being provided with information about that reality. The main example that Beckett uses is Africa: how can societies with few economical resources, educational and democratic deficits, and a low technology penetration rate can benefit from something like networked journalism? Africa does not have widespread internet network, but in most countries there are structures that enable a good cell coverage.

The participation of independent voices in the construction of a news image of Africa, created far from governmental pressures, may give us for sure more insightful perspectives than the ones provided by state media, or by correspondents that can’t reach everywhere. With the easiness of spreading information via mobile devices, Africa may become the perfect testing ground for networked journalism.

“It’s not the perfect testing ground. I said that it is the ultimate test, because so much old media has failed in Africa. Networked journalism offers a fresh opportunity that can be grounded in African’s own experience and expertise.”

But is this a path without risks? The power of networked journalism is to influence common people’s lives, but are there any dangers in this way of doing things?

“Who are the ‘common’ people? I honestly don’t see any real ‘dangers’ in new media trends that aren’t common to old media dangers. People will still be dishonest, biased and greedy online as well as offline, but I honestly don’t think that new media has any new threats compared to old mass media.”

Hyperjournalists

There are clear advantages in embracing new media: they’re cheap, fast, more effective, and their potential is almost infinite. Still, there is a lot of suspicion over them:

“People always resist change. New media means learning new tricks. Some jobs will go. And it challenges the assumptions of old journalism so some people will find that threatening.”

And what standard procedures journalists must follow in this brave new world? “There should be NO standard procedures. That is old thinking.” In “SuperMedia”, Beckett defends that versatility and the ability to adapt are the most important features for future communication professionals, not only to new Technologies and market characteristics, but also to their relationship with the users. The journalists of the future must know how to use social networks in their favour, create and package news in several formats, and know how to manage user contribution before, during and after publishing.

To Beckett, “Journalism likes to think it is a superhero when it is really Clark Kent.”[4]. A journalist’s superpowers are his ability to colaborate with the audience, but that doesn’t mean that his activity will become more precarious: “The journalist is just as needed because you need filters, editors, and packagers but they will have to become facilitators, connectors and enablers as well. It’s a more complex and interesting job and just as vital.”

Will the heightening of the complexity of journalistic activity make journalism more reliable, even better? Beckett believes that “it will be as reliable as the people who make it. ‘better’ is a very subjective word. But yes I think that public participation raises standards by increasing resources.”

Hyperjournalists training for Super Media reality should be “much more multi-skilled and work more on problem-solving to foster a craft of creative engagement with the public rather than spending months learning to copy journalists of the past.”

The problem is that the relationship of journalists with elements outside to newsrooms hasn’t been easy. Beckett wrote extensively about the journalists’ relationship with another emerging class, bloggers, that seem to be living above the rules imposed on journalists, and that rapidly won their way as information distributors. Have bloggers as many responsibilities as journalists nowadays, and should they have their own ethical code? Or will quality become the true regulator of their activity?

Beckett believes that bloggers don’t need an ethical code: “Most journalists ignore any codes they might have. The guarantee of quality or reliability is diversity, accountability and that comes with networked journalism.”

After all, we all can become journalists. As Beckett says, journalists are “people who report, analyse and comment on events and issues for other people to consume.” And it’s in the crossing of these relationships that Supermedia is created.

The SuperMedia Challenge

“Supermedia” is a networked book itself. Charlie Beckett resorted to the ideas by Paul Bradshaw, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and other new media thinkers – besides referring to other personalities that affected that reality to ground and develop his own concepts.

What comes out of it is a rather optimistic perspective (at least that is how it seems to me, despite the gloomy principle it stands on) that provides practical indications on how media, from corporate to personal, could and should develop. It’s a fundamental work in this period of transition and definition of what it is journalism, what is it good for and who is it good for.

Enriched with the author’s perspective about the social importance of media, it’s the perfect digest of several streams of thought on the ways industry and audiences should follow in the future. It’s not a complex book regarding concepts, but it is in the implications inferred, and i believe it will turn into an excellent guide for professionals and journalism students, to understand how we pass from a one way, corporate and limited communication, to another, networked, relational, costumized, communitary. And the questions raised in the book don’t have necessarily only one answer.

Above all, Beckett defends the increasingly mooted idea that the news is a service, not a product, therefore the public interest stands above all the rest. It’s a strange way to liberalize something that belongs to everyone, and that must serve the common welfare.

Like he says in his book, “journalism can be a greater force for good.” I asked him if that “mission, should we accept it”, is possible: “Of course anything is possible. But it is a choice. We get the media we create.”

You can buy “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” here, or download the first three chapters from Polis website.

Charlie Beckett, the Director of the LSE and LCC thinktank POLIS, and former Senior Editor of Channel 4 News, has just published his book SuperMedia - and if you follow this blog you’ll find his conceptual model of “networked journalism” rather familiar…

Below you’ll find my ‘Model for the 2st century newsroom’ and, below it, Beckett’s own “conceptual structure”,

Beckett acknowledges that “In my attempt to give some sort of conceptual structure to this process I am indebted to the work of Birmingham City University’s Paul Bradshaw and his “Model For A 21st Century Newsroom” at his website, Onlinejournalismblog.com.”

Unfortunately, he’s not indebted enough to directly reference the post that included the model (despite numerous footnotes referencing other blog posts) – or to include the original model in the book – or, of course, to mention it on the page containing the model (i.e. the one that will be photocopied, etc.).

Because, for all his talk of indebtedness his personal claim to the model is quite clear when he introduces it: “As part of the definition of this more connected or “distributed” journalism I want to imagine a different kind of “newsroom.”

Except that “conceptual structure” had already been created back in September 2007, and this is merely a slightly tweaked reproduction.

I’m not laying any claim to the constituent ideas behind the 21st century newsroom (which are linked to in the original post). And this isn’t an ego trip – I’m more than happy for anyone to rip the model to pieces, rebuild it, adapt it or build on it. That’s why I published it. That’s why I write this blog. What is frustrating is the absence of the transparency we should expect from academic publishing and aspiring networked journalists. (The proper academic thing to do – and what the editor Anna Feuchtwang should also have done – is use the phrase “adapted from the Model for a 21st Century Newsroom, Bradshaw, 2007″).

Even more frustrating is… well, couldn’t he have done something better with it? Surely there’s some holes to pick in it? Or big improvements to make? It’s a nice illustration of how it works in practice, but…

But perhaps I’m missing something – perhaps indeed, Beckett’s model is so substantially different as to not warrant any more than a mention of my name. Perhaps I’m expecting too much academic rigour from the head of a university thinktank, or ‘networked journalism’ standards of transparency. I’d love to know your thoughts.

If you want to see it in context the graph and its attribution can also be found on pages 54-57 of chapter 3, available for download from Harvard University (PDF):

My original post that introduced the Model for a 21st Century Newsroom, is here.

UPDATE: Charlie emailed quickly to clear things up: “Any fault in attribution is down to me and my transfer from TV journalism to book form. It was a very late addition and I wasn’t careful enough. I’m not a trained academic and I don’t pretend to be one. I spend a lot of time linking to your work, both literally online and in referencing your work to other people.”

He has also agreed to amend the PDF with appropriate references, and include an addendum slip in the US edition clarifying the origin of the model.

Thanks Charlie, now, as you say, Let’s get back to the real issue which is the future of journalism.