French data journalism outfit Owni have put together an impressive app (also in English) that attempts to put a user-friendly interface on the intimidating volume of War Logs documents.

The app allows you to filter the information by country and category, and also allows you to choose whether to limit results to incidents involving the deaths of wounding of civilians, allies or enemies.

Clicking on an individual incident bring up the raw text but also a mapping of the location and the details split into a more easy-to-read table.

But key to the whole project is the ability to comment on documents, making this genuinely interactive. Once commented, you can choose to receive updates on “this investigation”

This could be fleshed out more, however (UPDATE: it’s early days – see below). “So that we can investigate a war that does not tell its name” is about as much explanation as we get – indeed, Afghanistan is not mentioned on the site at all (which presents SEO problems). In this sense the project suffers from a data-centric perspective which overlooks that not everyone has the same love of data for data’s sake.

A second weakness is an assumption that users are familiar with the story. While the project is linked with Slate.fr and Monde Diplomatique there are no links to any specifically related journalism on those sites, leaving the data without any particular context. Users visiting the site as a result of social media sharing (which is built into the site) might therefore not know what they’re dealing with.

Technically, however, this is an excellent solution to the scale problem that War Logs presents. It just needs an editorial solution to support it.

UPDATE: Nicolas Kayser-Bril, the man behind the project (disclosure: a former OJB contributor) explains the background:

“We contacted several outlets on Monday to coproduce the app. (we’re still in talks with several others in Italy, Belgium, Germany). What we offered them was an all-inclusive solution that gives them visibility and image gains and a way for them to engage with their audience.

“You’re right to say that the app lacks an editorial perspective as such. We’re implementing a feature called ‘contextualization’ that will offer users links to backgrounder stories published on partner websites according to several criteria (year, civil/military report, region, nationality of the engaged forces).

“Moreover, we’ve crowdsourced a huge work that considerably expanded the glossary published by Wikileaks and the Guardian. We launched a call for help on Monday morning. In 36 hours, we had 30% more entries related to unexplained abbreviations or details about equipment, as well as a French translation. Something we want to provide is a way for everyone with a low level of English to decipher the documents.”

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Past OJB contributor Nicolas Kayser-Bril is now in charge of datajournalism at Owni.fr, a recently launched news site that defines itself as an “open think-tank”.

“Acting as curators, selecting and presenting content taken deep in the immense and self-expanding vaults of the internet,” explains Nicolas, “the Owni team links to the best and does the rest.”

I asked Nicolas 2 simple questions on his work at Owni. Here are his responses:

What are you trying to do?

What we do is datajournalism. We want to use the whole power of online and computer technologies to bring journalism to a new height, to a whole new playing field. The definition remains vague because so little has been made until now, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to slideshows, online TV or even database journalism.

Take the video game industry, for instance. In the late 1970’s, a personal computer could be used to play Pong clones or text-based games. Since then, a number of genres have flourished, taking action games to 3D, building an ever-more intelligent AI for strategy games, etc. In the age of the social web, games were quick to use Facebook and even Twitter.

Take the news industry. In the late 1970’s, you could read news articles on your terminal. In the early 2010’s you can, well… read articles online! How innovative is that? (I’m not overlooking the innovations you’ll be quick to think of, but the fact remains that most online news content are articles.)

We want to enhance information with the power of computers and the web. Through software, databases, visualizations, social apps, games, whatever, we want to experiment with news in ways traditional and online media haven’t done yet.

What have you achieved?

We started to get serious about this in February, when I joined the mother company (22mars) full-time. In just a month, we have completed 2 projects

The first one, dubbed Photoshop Busters (see it here), gives users digital forensics tools to assess the authenticity of an image. It was made as a widget for one of our partners, LesInrocks.com.

More importantly, we made a Facebook app, Where do I vote? There, users can find their polling station and their friends’ for the upcoming regional election in France.

It might sound underwhelming, but it required finding and locating the addresses of more than 35,000 polling stations.

On top of convincing a reluctant administration to hand over their files, we set up a large crowdsourcing effort to convert the documents from badly scanned PDFs to computer-readable data. More than 7,000 addresses have been treated that way.

Dozens of other ideas are in the works. Within Owni.fr, we want to keep the ratio of developers/non-developers to 1, so as to be able to go from idea to product very quickly. I code most of my ideas myself, relying on the team for help, ideas and design.

In the coming months, we’ll expand our datajournalism activities to include another designer, a journalist and a statistician. Expect more cool stuff from Owni.fr.

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Here’s a new contribution to the ‘Model for a 21st Century Newsroom’ concept: the Google Newsroom, by Benoît Raphaël. Based on his experience as editor in chief at Le Post, Raphael makes a number of salient points about reorganising the newsroom in a digital age. He suggests that “we have to forget that old idea of merging newsrooms” and create “one “where everything happens,” that is to say on the web. This is the heart of information system. The rest is just appearance.”

“At LeMonde.fr, print articles represent 30% of production, but less than 15% of traffic. You can not just write and redirect to a pipe. To produce content you have to take an evolving environment into account.

“Journalists become schizophrenic [when you ask them to write for print and web]. They become “bi-media” and feel they are bi-working, which for them means “twice”.”

Raphael says the newsroom must make a distinction between roles of creation-based journalism and those of curation-based journalism.

“Your 80 journalists are gathered into 10 business units, ie in thematic clusters. Just as an independent media (which could be branded in another way) managed (or not) by a cluster manager, around which you can gather 8 journalists, bloggers, a community + 1 marketing + 1 sales officer (they can work on multiple clusters). Each cluster can also have its copy editor and its associated community manager.

“In each cluster, we will produce creation-oriented journalism. The driving question must be: since everyone covers approximately the same information on the network, what is my added value?”

In addition, there are super copy editors working on taking the content and making the print product work to its high resolution visual strengths.

It’s a considered approach to the evolving newsroom that turns print-centric operations on their head. People will point out that print is responsible for most of the revenue, but there’s a point to be made here: it doesn’t actually mean it should account for most of expenditure. After all, travel supplements are more lucrative than war coverage, but that doesn’t mean you hold back from spending a disproportionate amount of money on the latter.

Since most news organisations are turning to a web-first strategy, it makes organisational sense that the ‘rewriting’ happens for the print or broadcast edition (in this case by the super copy editors), not the other way around. But as Raphael points out: “You tell me: will your 80 journalists be able to go on the web? In most newsrooms, the “web level” is close to zero. What is [stopping this happening] is bi-media schizophrenia.”

Thoughts?

You can also find the original article in French along with a reaction by Mikiane from France24

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France is currently paralyzed by yet another strike. Unlike the ones you’re used to when visiting my country, usually from railway or airport staff, this one was launched by lawyers and judges alike, united against their government minister, Rachida Dati (read more here).

Traditional journalists have been covering the event as it unfolded. Google News brings you more than 300 bland and unsurprising articles.

The only place where you can read what’s going on in France’s judicial system is a blog. Maître Eolas, a lawyer who opened his blog 4 years ago, just published 64 testimonies from justice professionals. He even renamed his blog ‘Daily news from angry justice professionals’.

Narvic, probably the best media commentator in France, immediately saw that Maître Eolas had become a media.

I see here the best proof that justice professionals in this country are the first ones to think that’s something is rotten in the media kingdom. To them, only Eolas’ blog is credible enough to collect their grievances.

Yes, blogs are dead. The amalgamation of all blogs in an imagined blogosphere has ended. OJB has nothing to do with *~ChElLe~*’s MySpace blog, for instance. It was about time late-adopters (you know who they are) realized this basic fact.

Blogging is about leading a conversation. Such discussions sometimes reach a level so high that it has implications in the public sphere. Maître Eolas’ blog served as a Cahier de Doléances for French lawyers. Just like Guido Fawkes’ role in Peter Hain’s resignation, Maître Eolas’ blog is now the Fourth Estate ; a real counterweight to government policies.

Do you know other examples of bloggers having an influence on public life?

Such a phenomenon might very well be limited to Western countries, where the market for journalists is such that it’s more profitable to write for one’s own pleasure outside the traditional media. In post socialist countries for example, the shortage of journalists is so acute that any blogger is hired by a media group after a few months’ blogging. In such conditions, barely any blog can exert any real influence.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril

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Over at sister blog JournalismEnterprise.com there’s an interview with Rue89 co-founder Pierre Haski. Rue89, a French news website, “doesn’t live off advertising. The cash flows from 4 sources:” Website design (50%), advertising, third-party services, and contributions from users (the tip-jar model). “The ad money is “out of reach” for a mid-sized player such as Rue89 and “it’s unclear if it will be in the future”.”

Read the full post (by Nicolas Kayser-Bril) here. We’re always planning other interviews – if you want to conduct one for JournalismEnterprise.com, let me know.

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UPDATE 10: Current startups include TweetSMS, Zygotweet, Twitmobile, Twittex, HootSMS, 3jam, Tweeteroo and TwitSMS.

UPDATE 9: Two workarounds suggested

UPDATE 8: Avatar campaign now under way. Now available for  the following mobile operators: 3 (http://www.tw3t.com/f/25l); O2: http://www.tw3t.com/f/25m; Orange: http://www.tw3t.com/f/25g; T-Mobile: www.tw3t.com/f/25o; Virgin Mobile (http://www.tw3t.com/f/25n); and Vodafone: http://www.tw3t.com/f/25k. Generic image also created by dear2world

UPDATE 7: Nathan Monk is suggesting a campaign of sending ‘boo’ tweets to Twitter founder Biz Stone

UPDATE 6: Journalism.co.uk reports on the impact on many newspapers’ plans

UPDATE 5: Interview about TweetSMS at ArabCrunch.

UPDATE 4: Also filling that gap are Zygotweet.com - also recommended is Jaiku.

UPDATE 3: Also from the Facebook group wall: Some are calling for a ‘Twitter strike’ on August 18

UPDATE 2: That gap in the market has already been spotted: TweetSMS.com (also on Twitter) offers to deliver text messages “for a low price”. On the Facebook group Wall Bullying.co.uk (also on Twitter) notes of Twitter’s official statement: “the prices they are getting charged are way over the odds: on the volume they are hitting it could be as low as 0.3 – 0.5p a text.”

UPDATE: Nicolas Gosset has set up a group to campaign in France

So Twitter has cancelled SMS updates for users outside of the US, Canada and India, apparently because it has been unable to arrange decent billing deals with mobile operators outside of those countries.

So I’ve set up a Facebook group in the UK to put some pressure on mobile operators to cut a deal, fast. It’s in their interests, after all – how many of us started to use text messaging more often because of Twitter? And how many of us are now going to stop?

Hope you can join and add to the numbers (even if you’re not in the UK). Also, if you’re not in the UK, please set up a group for your own country, let me know about it, and we can build a network of these.

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Could the BBC be funded by a tax on web and mobile? In France President Sarkozy has just announced that, from next year,

“prime-time advertising on public television will be phased out, with the lost revenues to be replaced by taxes collected from internet, mobile phone and commercial broadcasting companies

“Internet and mobile operators will have to stump up a tax of 0.9 percent of sales—which could raise up to 380 million euros ($595 million), in support of the state-owned France Televisions, which controls the country’s four public channels. A further 80 million euros ($125 million) will come from taxes on commercial broadcasters.”

Given the potential future insecurity of the licence fee in a converged media world, you’d be forgiven for wondering how many MPs, Ofcom bosses and BBC eyes will be looking across the channel to see how and if this works – not to mention Channel 4 as they angle for their piece of the future public pie with 4iP.

Next up: newspapers call for a tax on Google. Oh, sorry, they already did that.

Your thoughts invited…

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Just to let you know that the News Interactivity Index now includes newspapers from Norway (thanks Kristine Lowe), France, the Netherlands and the US. You can use it to compare any two newspapers or country averages. The following countries are now covered:

• France
• Hungary
• Macedonia
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Spain
• Switzerland
• UK
• US

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been turning the Online Journalism Blog into a group blog. For our first project we have taken Jo Geary’s news interactivity index, and applied it Europe-wide, creating an ‘interactivity index’ of newspapers across European countries – at the moment: the UK, Spain, Portugal, Macedonia, Hungary, Poland and Switzerland…

Not just that, but we’ve made the index itself interactive. Specifically, Nicolas Kayser-Bril has created this PHP object which allows you to compare two selected newspapers or countries.

The team so far is as follows: UK and France: Nicolas Kayser-Bril; Switzerland: Nico Luchsinger; Portugal and Spain: Alex Gamela; Poland: Marek Miller; Macedonia: Darko Buldioski; Hungary: Molnar Emil; Netherlands: Wilbert Baan.

If you want to help add information on one or more of your country’s newspapers you can do so here – you’ll need to ask Nicolas for a password: nicolas (at) observatoiredesmedias.com.

More newspapers will continue to be added, and there are other graphical tricks to come.

You can also embed this widget on your own blog with the following code:

<iframe src=”http://tinyurl.com/5c9vmy” frameborder=”0″ height=”605″ scrolling=”no” width=”415″></iframe>

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One of France’s main journalism schools, the Centre de Formation des Journalistes, has just launched a revamped new media curriculum, where all students are now required to specialize in new media on top of their traditional skills.

The program was 2.0’d from the start, back in June, when Philippe Couve brought together the crème de la crème of the French blogosphere to outline what the 2009 journalist should look like.

The participants agreed that journalists will need to excel in what used to be their core competency, namely to gather, sort, order and check information. Now, they’ll just have to do that online, with the help of a community of amateurs they’ll manage and, hopefully, leverage.

Besides trading the pen and Moleskine for an N95, journalists will need to work with IT people so that news organisations will be able to display content in compelling ways, Holovaty-style.

They’ll also develop skills to edit content themselves and they’ll keep these up-to-date.

Finally, as the web means more and more fragmentation and individualisation, they’ll know the mechanisms of the new economy and they’ll be able to read and react to audience figures.

The 2009 journalist will stand at a crossroads between the traditional, passé reporter, the techie and the marketing guy. How can such a ménage à trois work within a single body?

Three weeks after the start of the programme, it appears it’ll take some time. Emmanuel Parodi, business developer at Les Echos and lecturer in the programme, was surprised how little students knew about Digg, RSS, Facebook and the like. As they all have to keep a blog and a netvibes account for the duration of the programme, no doubt such technical shortcomings will be overcome quickly.

The lecturers’ bête noire remains the students’ conviction that participative journalism inherently devalues their work. Students are told they will have to share some power with the hoi polloi and they fear it, says Parodi.

Lecturing on the online media economic landscape myself, I was taken aback when some students affirmed that their raison d’être was to safeguard democracy (sic) and that their noble mission could not suffer being hampered with financial considerations. A flurry of anti-capitalistic jabber followed, underlining the difficulty of getting some journalists to think of themselves as economic agents.

When someone is utterly convinced she’s above the economy, the need to adapt when the economy changes clearly does not cross her mind. No matter how much XML or Java they learn.

This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns

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