One of the easiest ways to get someone started on data visualisation is to introduce them to word clouds (it also demonstrates neatly how not all data is numerical).

Using tools like Wordle and Tagxedo, you can paste in a major speech and see it visualised within a minute or so.

But is a word cloud the best way of visualising speeches? The New York Times appear to think otherwise. Their visualisation (above) comparing President Obama’s State of the Union address and speeches by Republican presidential candidates chooses to use something far less fashionable: the bar chart.

Why did they choose a bar chart? The key is the purpose of the chart: comparison. If your objective is to capture the spirit of a speech, or its key themes, then a word cloud can still work well, if you clean the data (see this interactive example that appeared on the New York Times in 2009).

But if you want to compare it to speeches of others – and particularly if you want to compare on specific issues such as employment or tax – then bar charts are a better choice. Compare, for example, ReadWriteWeb’s comparison of inaugural speeches, and how effective that is compared to the bar charts.

In short, don’t always reach for the obvious chart type – and be clear what you’re trying to communicate.

UPDATE: More criticism of word clouds by New York Times software architect here (via Harriet Bailey)

via Flowing Data

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One of the highlights of last week’s Global Investigative Journalism Conference was the session on text mining, where the New York Times’s Andy Lehren talked about his experiences of working with data from Wikileaks and elsewhere, and former Washington Post database editor Sarah Cohen gave her insights into various tools and techniques in text mining.

Andy Lehren’s audio is embedded below. The story mentioned on North Korean missile deals can be found here. Other relevant links: Infomine and NICAR Net Tour.

[audio=http://audioboo.fm/boos/505538-andy-lehren-on-textmining-wikileaks-data-at-gijc2011.mp3]

And here’s Sarah’s talk which covers extracting information from large sets of documents. Many of the tools mentioned are bookmarked ‘textmining’ on my Delicious account.

[audio=http://audioboo.fm/boos/505548-tools-and-tips-for-finding-stories-in-large-amounts-of-text-by-sarah-cohen-gijc-2011.mp3]

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So, the plans for the New York Times paywall are out. I said when they were first mooted that they looked to be thinking along the right lines in allowing people to view content for free if they came via social media – but I feared that that innovation would be lost along the way.

It’s enormously encouraging to see that it hasn’t.

Why is it encouraging? For two main reasons: firstly, it recognises the importance of distribution in online publishing. If you erect an arbitrary paywall, many people will not bother to link to you because they don’t want to frustrate their friends. That not only hurts your social media traffic, it hurts your search engine ranking.

Variety magazine suffered from this so much recently, it seems, that they launched a blog outside of their paywall with an email begging other sites to link to it.

Secondly, it recognises that they need to balance quality with quantity. Online advertising has yet to settle into any sort of pattern, but metrics of engagement are rising in importance, and one of those metrics is how much traffic comes from recommendations, i.e. social media.

Another metric is, of course, how loyal a user is, how many articles they read, and how much you know about them. The subscription options will allow the NYT to gather that information too – without sacrificing the huge numbers that most advertisers will be looking for.

Curiously, the chairman of The New York Times Company is quoted as saying “A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the Web.”

But I don’t think they are paying just for the content. I think this system recognises that they are paying for convenience (you pay more to get the content across web, mobile and iPad than you do to get the same content on fewer platforms – and you could get all the content for free if you can bother to go through Bing), and reliability (not hitting a wall when you want to read the 21st article of the month).

In many ways it is no different to traditional subscriptions: it is the difference between paying for regular deliveries of the whole paper package, and picking up a newspaper that someone has left on the bus or the staff canteen, or borrowing one from a friend, for free.

In the past we accounted for those ‘freeloaders’ and ‘parasites’ – as we call them online – by adjusting our readership figures to reflect that every copy bought was read by 4 people. We didn’t lock down the newspapers and tell subscribers what they could do with them.

And so here we are, with the most mature, intelligent, and commercially sensible paywall model yet.

But we still have no idea if it will work…

UPDATE: Aside from the technical implementation I think Dave Winer has a point about the content proposition

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The following is an unedited version of an article written for the International Press Institute report ‘Brave News Worlds (PDF)‘

For the past two centuries journalists have dealt in the currency of information: we transmuted base metals into narrative gold. But information is changing.

At first, the base metals were eye witness accounts, and interviews. Later we learned to melt down official reports, research papers, and balance sheets. And most recently our alloys have been diluted by statements and press releases.

But now journalists are having to get to grips with a new type of information: data. And this is a very rich seam indeed.

Data: what, how and why

Data is a broad term so I should define it here: I am not talking here about statistics or numbers in general, because those are nothing new to journalists. When I talk about data I mean information that can be processed by computers.

This is a crucial distinction: it is one thing for a journalist to look at a balance sheet on paper; it is quite another to be able to dig through those figures on a spreadsheet, or to write a programming script to analyse that data, and match it to other sources of information. We can also more easily analyse new types of data, such as live data, large amounts of text, user behaviour patterns, and network connections.

And that, for me, is hugely important. Indeed, it is potentially transformational. Adding computer processing power to our journalistic arsenal allows us to do more, faster, more accurately, and with others. All of which opens up new opportunities – and new dangers. Things are going to change.

We’ve had over 40 years to see this coming. The growth of the spreadsheet and the database from the 1960s onwards kicked things off by making it much easier for organisations – including governments – to digitise information from what they spent our money on to how many people were being treated for which diseases, and where.

In the 1990s the invention of the world wide web accelerated the data at journalists’ disposal by providing a platform for those spreadsheets and databases to be published and accessed by both humans and computer programs – and a network to distribute it.

And now two cultural movements have combined to add a political dimension to the spread of data: the open data movement, and the linked data movement. Journalists should be familiar with these movements: the arguments that they have developed in holding power to account are a lesson in dealing with entrenched interests, while their experiments with the possibilities of data journalism show the way forward.

While the open data movement campaigns for important information – such as government spending, scientific information and maps – to be made publicly available for the benefit of society both democratically and economically, the linked data movement (championed by the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee) campaigns for that data to be made available in such a way that it can be linked to other sets of data so that, for instance, a computer can see that the director of a company named in a particular government contract is the same person who was paid as a consultant on a related government policy document. Advocates argue that this will also result in economic and social benefits.

Concrete results of both movements can be seen in the US and UK – most visibly with the launch of government data repositories Data.gov and Data.gov.uk in 2009 and 2010 respectively – but also less publicised experiments such as Where Does My Money Go? – which uses data to show how public expenditure is distributed – and Mapumental – which combines travel data, property prices and public ratings of ‘scenicness’ to help you see at a glance which areas of a city might be the best place to live based on your requirements.

But there are dozens if not hundreds of similar examples in industries from health and science to culture and sport. We are experiencing an unprecedented release of data – some have named it ‘Big Data’ – and yet for the most part, media organisations have been slow to react.

That is about to change.

The data journalist

Over the last year an increasing number of news organisations have started to wake from their story-centric production lines and see the value of data. In the UK the MPs’ expenses story was seminal: when a newspaper dictates the news agenda for six weeks, the rest of Fleet Street pays attention – and at the core of this story was a million pieces of data on a disc. Since then every serious news organisation has expanded its data operations.

In the US the journalist-programmer Adrian Holovaty has pioneered the form with the data mashup ChicagoCrime.org and its open source offspring Everyblock, while Aron Pilhofer has innovated at the interactive unit at The New York Times, and new entrants from Talking Points Memo to ProPublica have used data as a launchpad for interrogating the workings of government.

To those involved, it feels like heady days. In reality, it’s very early days indeed. Data journalism takes in a huge range of disciplines, from Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) and programming, to visualisation and statistics. If you are a journalist with a strength in one of those areas, you are currently exceptional. This cannot last for long: the industry will have to skill up, or it will have nothing left to sell.

Because while news organisations for years made a business out of being a middleman processing content between commerce and consumers, and government and citizens, the internet has made that business model obsolete. It is not enough any more for a journalist to simply be good at writing – or rewriting. There are a million others out there who can write better – large numbers of them working in PR, marketing, or government. While we will always need professional storytellers, many journalists are simply factory line workers.

So on a commercial level if nothing else, publishing will need to establish where the value lies in this new environment – and the new efficiencies to make journalism viable.

Data journalism is one of those areas. With a surfeit of public data being made available, there is a rich supply of raw material. The scarcity lies in the skills to locate and make sense of that – whether the programming skills to scrape it and compare it with other sources in the first place, the design flair to visualise it, or the statistical understanding to unpick it.

“The mass market was a hack”: opportunities for the new economy

The technological opportunity is massive. As processing power continues to grow, the ability to interrogate, combine and present data continues to increase. The development of augmented reality provides a particularly attractive publishing opportunity: imagine being able to see local data-based stories through your mobile phone, or indeed add data to the picture through your own activity. The experiments of the past five years will come to see crude in comparison.

And then there is the commercial opportunity. Publishing is for most publishers, after all, not about selling content but about selling advertising. And here also data has taken on increasing importance. The mass market was a hack. As the saying goes: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

But Google, Facebook and others have used the measurability of the web to reduce the margin of error, and publishers will have to follow suit. It makes sense to put data at the centre of that – while you allow users to drill into the data you have gathered around automotive safety, the offering to advertisers is likely to say “We can display different adverts based on what information the user is interested in”, or “We can point the user to their local dealership based on their location”.

A collaborative future

I’m skeptical of the ability of established publishers to adapt to such a future but, whether they do or not, others will. And the backgrounds of journalists will have to change. The profession has a history of arts graduates who are highly literate but not typically numerate. That has already been the source of ongoing embarrassment for the profession as expert bloggers have highlighted basic errors in the way journalists cover science, health and finance – and it cannot continue.

We will need more journalists who can write a killer Freedom of Information request; more researchers with a knowledge of the hidden corners of the web where databases – the ‘invisible web’ – reside. We will need programmer-journalists who can write a screen scraper to acquire, sort, filter and store that information, and combine or compare it with other sources. We will need designers who can visualise that data in the clearest way possible – not just for editorial reasons but distribution too: infographics are an increasingly significant source of news site traffic.

There is a danger of ‘data churnalism’ – taking public statistics and visualising them in a spectacular way that lacks insight or context. Editors will need the statistical literacy to guard against this, or they will be found out.

And it is not just in editorial that innovation will be needed. Advertising sales will need to experience the same revolution that journalists have experienced, learning the language of web metrics, behavioural advertising and selling the benefits to advertisers.

And as publishers of data too, executives will need to adopt the philosophies of the open data and linked data movements to take advantage of the efficiencies that they provide. The New York Times and The Guardian have both published APIs that allow others to build web services with their content. In return they get access to otherwise unaffordable technical, mathematical and design expertise, and benefit from new products and new audiences, as (in the Guardian’s case) advertising is bundled in with the service. As these benefits become more widely recognised, other publishers will follow.

I have a hope that this will lead to a more collaborative form of journalism. The biggest resource a publisher has is its audience. Until now publishers have simply packaged up that resource for advertisers. But now that the audience is able to access the same information and tools as journalists, to interact with publishers and with each other, they are valuable in different ways.

At the same time the value of the newsroom has diminished: its size has shrunk, its competitive advantage reduced; and no single journalist has the depth and breadth of skillset needed across statistics, CAR, programming and design that data journalism requires. A new medium – and a new market – demands new rules. The more networked and iterative form of journalism that we’ve already seen emerge online is likely to become even more conventional as publishers move from a model that sees the story as the unit of production, to a model that starts with data.

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The New York Times has combined visualisation with audio to produce a fascinating piece of work on the differences between gold winning times and runners-up across a number of Winter Olympics events. It’s a particularly creative approach to the challenge of communicating a relatively abstract story: what separates gold and silver. Well worth a look.

h/t Pete Ashton

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How good is this? While Murdoch and Sly complain about Google, The New York Times and Washington Post have been working with the search engine behemoth on a new form of online journalism. I’m still getting my head around the results, because the format is brimming with clever ideas. Here’s the obligatory cheesy video before I get my teeth into it:

So what’s so special about this? Firstly, it is built around the way people consume content online, as opposed to how they consumed it in print or broadcast. In other words, the unit of entry is the ‘topic’, not the ‘article’, ‘broadcast’ or ‘publication’. If you look at search behaviour, that’s often what people search for (and why Wikipedia is so popular).

But topic-based content is already creeping into news websites, largely for SEO reasons. This has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

One of my favourite features is the ‘conversations’ link in the top right corner. This takes you to a pop-up graphic/map of various comment threads from the website against particular themes. What’s particularly innovative is that this is embeddable – comments become distributable. This gives you more incentive to comment yourself (because you can embed the thread in your own online presence), and it also provides more opportunity for your content to be distributed and bring readers back to your site. And you can customise which elements of the conversation you embed. I’ve tested it at the end of this post. UPDATE: Neha Singh of Google tells me “The comments widget on the New York Times healthcare story was actually developed by the New York Times for their own site. You can see it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/29/health/health-care-conversations.html”

Back on the main page the navigation on the left offers a useful breakdown of content: in addition to medium-based navigation such as images, video and graphics you can choose to look at the people involved; you can navigate by key quotes; and you can look at resources such as reports, blogs and interactives. My word, yes – it’s linking to the sources! (Although sadly not to any blogs outside the stable)

Again, hugely useful for that significant proportion of people who are searching for a particular piece of information on a topic (and therefore will stick around longer and return in future).

You can also choose to go to opinion or articles, or navigate by event.

You can reorder the content in reverse-chronological order, or choose to show ‘Most Important Only’.

There is an RSS feed and email updates on the topic.

And particularly clever is that it remembers what you’ve seen so that when you return new additions are highlighted and old content removed.

At this early stage the format is still rough around the edges: it’s not the most intuitive piece of interface design, bombarding you with information while some useful elements (such as conversation) are not particularly visible. It seems odd that there is only one RSS feed and email alert for the whole topic – it would be useful to have more specific feeds, for instance on new video only. And it’s actually less inviting in making you want to contribute comments or other material, partly because you’re too busy reeling from the sheer volume of information and possibilities.

Finally, the biggest – and killer – question for me is how much of the construction of the page is done automatically, and how much requires someone to input and connect data.

And of course, it doesn’t address the advertising problem (but there’s plenty of potential here for stickiness and engagement).

The New York Times reports that

“Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, said that if it worked well, Google would make the software available free to publishers to embed in their sites, much as those publishers can now use Google Maps and YouTube functions on their sites.”

Google’s blog, meanwhile, says the platform will be improved in the coming months:

“Over the coming months, we’ll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. We’re also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If you’re a news reader, we’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’re a news organization, we want to hear your comments on the Living Storyformat. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online.”

One to keep an eye on. Oh, and here’s that conversation embedded, just to see how it works:

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Much has been said about the Washington Post’s now-infamous incident with issuing restrictive social-media guidelines after Managing Editor Raju Narisetti expressed his not-so-subtle views on war spending and public-official term limits on his Twitter page. Narisetti’s own first reaction to the policy was another tweet: “For flagbearers of free speech, some newsroom execs have the weirdest double standards when it comes to censoring personal views.” He since retracted and shut down his Twitter page on account of “perception problems.”

The Post’s own media reporter Howard Kurtz poked fun at the incident with this tweet: “I will now hold forth only on the weather and dessert recipes.” He then gave a half-hearted, almost contrived endorsement to his organization’s policy, calling the furor surrounding the incident “much ado about nothing” while emphasizing that social media are important channels for communication with readers. The newspaper’s technology writer Rob Pegoraro was also quick to insist that journalistic interactions through social media are indispensable.

It is hard to deny the fact that opiners are neatly divided between journalists and news organizations–in other words—between those that use social media and those that want to regulate it.

The very essence of social media is that it offers readers a glimpse of the “person” behind the journalist. Citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor looks at social networks as an opportunity for news organizations “to show readers that news is not a commodity produced by a faceless institution but a rich, collaborative process.”

For instance, Post political reporter Chris Cillizza, whose Twitter account, “The Fix” is named after his blog at the paper, entertains readers not only with snarky political comments but also by finding humor in life’s little trials, and his Twitter page has been surprisingly—and comfortingly—unhindered by all the drama. If his tweets were to trickle down to news article URLs in keeping with the Post’s new regulations, I wouldn’t follow him. It’s safe to say, neither would 14,540 others.

Despite these differences, even old-school news organizations agree that social media are important. But can managers, editors, reporters and readers agree on a social media policy? To that end, it would, perhaps, be helpful to analyze guidelines that have so far been proposed by different news organizations, and more importantly, how they have been received.

The policies

The Wall Street Journal laid down its own set of social-media regulations over the summer to much opposition.“Sharing your opinions,” the Journal said in an e-mail to staff members, “could open us to criticism that we have biases and could make a reporter ineligible to cover topics in the future for Dow Jones.” A tad more ridiculously, it continued, “Openly “friending” sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.”

Apart from confidential sources that any journalist would be expected to protect through sheer common sense, social media interactions with reporting contacts can only serve to enrich the exercise of newsgathering, and allow a more transparent process while at it.

Continuing in the same vein of going against the grain of journalistic transparency, the WSJ guidelines also insist that reporters not “detail how an article was reported, written or edited.” Social media guru Jeff Jarvis rightfully points out that these rules challenge the very idea of the collaborative nature of journalism that is promoted by online media.

The ability of a journalist to interact with his audience, be it by seeking story ideas, soliciting sources or sharing the newsgathering process is one of the main advantages of social media. Time’s James Poniewozik astutely calls blogs and social networks, the “DVD director’s cut with commentary.”

Perhaps, one of the most ridiculous of guidelines comes from the AP, which over the summer issued a set of rules, among them, asking employees to control not only what they said on social networks but also what their friends and acquaintances said: “It’s a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted.”

The AP’s rules came in the aftermath of one of its reporters posting a critical comment about the McClatchy newspaper chain on his Facebook profile. Mashable’s Ben Parr expressed rightful outrage at this, pointing to the ridiculousness of holding an employee accountable for another individual’s words.

Some guidelines, of course, are acceptable, though none seem to require much more than common sense and ethical awareness on the part of the reporter. For instance, the WSJ’s following rules:

• “Don’t recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work,” or
• “Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.”

Also reasonable are rules curbing the sharing of confidential company information. “Posting material about the AP’s internal operations is prohibited on employees’ personal pages” is acceptable as a standard for all staff members at an organization, not exclusively for journalists.

This was one of the reasons why the NYT found itself in a tight corner earlier this summer, when its reporters tweeted about internal discussions at the paper. The Times’ social-media rules are actually more reasonable than most, merely asking reporters to avoid conflicts of interest, maintain political impartiality, and exercise good judgment.

But when a group of journalists decided to broadcast proceedings from an internal staff meeting, the Times decided to throw down the gauntlet. Craig Whitney, the standards editor, made a valid point: “When you’re in an internal meeting that is not public where you’re discussing policy, you would no more Twitter it than pick up the cell phone or call up one of your friends and say, ‘Hey you’ll never believe what (Executive Editor) Bill Keller just said!”

And while that is perfectly reasonable, Jennifer Lee, one of the tweeters from the meeting insisted that there is often something to be said for sharing internal information about your news organization with your audiences. For instance, her tweet about Times’ Pulitzer winners was not only acceptable, but also good for the paper, she said.

Are readers excited to learn these nuggets of information directly from journalists they follow? Sure, it’s certainly more personal than reading a press release. And when the news is about the organization itself, it is especially helpful to hear employees’ unfiltered opinions. If not for Twitter, I probably would have had no way of knowing what Howard Kurtz thought about the Post’s regulations.

Distinction between individual tweeters and institutional ones

Where the Times went a bit far in its regulation was Bill Keller’s insistence that tweeting policies should follow what was already being implemented with regard to what reporters say on television or speeches: anything said was representative of the entire institution. This seems reasonable till you consider that Twitter is a “personal-social” page. It is not like appearing on television to talk about your thoughts and viewpoints on an issue as a reporter from the NYT might be expected to on Meet the Press.

This sentence among the Post‘s guidelines, rings a similar tone: “Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.”

Along the same lines, Rob King, Editor in Chief of ESPN.com, called Twitter a “live microphone.” The site’s guidelines state that “editorial decision makers (such as reporters and writers) essentially represent ESPN in all social networks, and hence, should exercise appropriate judgment (this is as opposed to policies for the rest of ESPN’s staff who may extricate themselves from ESPN affiliation in personal blogs).

ESPN sparked its own controversy when it recently banned reporters from using Twitter for content not sanctioned by ESPN.com, and Mediaite actually questioned the use of the “live microphone” metaphor in an interview with ESPN spokesman Paul Melvin: “Does ESPN recognize the difference between a Twitter feed and a live microphone on television (which requires incredibly exclusive access as well as millions of dollars of broadcast infrastructure)?”

Melvin’s response: “The point here is that all of these media are public. Whether it is TV or radio or a blog, a column a tweet or any other publishing format, these are all public media. The words we use have impact, and we should be mindful of that.”

This is significant. What a journalist says in a tweet cannot be similar to what would appear under a byline or on live television or on radio. Social media don’t operate strictly within the sphere of the workplace. Social media are part of what journalists carry home with them; it is where they ought to be able to express views wholly unrestrained by the rigid rules of traditional journalism. It is also where they delight their readers with a goofy tale about their dog and the latest controversy unfolding on Capitol Hill with equal aplomb.

A distinction should be made (as is done in the business world) between “individual” tweeters, and tweeters who tweet “under the umbrella of an organization.” Corporate policies on social media separate the personal from the professional, and hence are less restrictive on an employee’s right to tweet or blog. By these standards, @washingtonpost would clearly cross the line by tweeting about enforcing a term limit on senators such as Mr. Byrd, but @rajunarisetti was entitled to his opinion. As individual tweeters, journalists should not “relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens,” as the Post guidelines require them to.

The BBC, perhaps comes closest to adopting this sort of hands-off approach to the use of “personal” social media by its reporters: “Many bloggers, particularly in technical areas, use their personal blogs to discuss their BBC work in ways that benefit the BBC, and add to the “industry conversation”.  This editorial guidance note is not intended to restrict this, as long as confidential information is not revealed.” In addition, it excludes “personal” blogs from the guidelines, as long as no affiliation to the BBC is mentioned, and even encourages employees to include a disclaimer.

Is unadulterated objectivity possible?

It does, however, specify that editorial staff “should not be seen to support any political party or cause.” It also warns employees to discuss “any potential conflicts of interest” with managers and editors. This is a common theme among regulations cited by all news organizations. Perhaps, if a reporter did not share on his social network opinions and viewpoints on subjects he was reporting on, that would be acceptable.

But then again, restricting specific types of content is a slippery slope. As Editor & Publisher editor Jennifer Saba questions,“Somebody could say, ‘Oh I really enjoy Mad Men,’ and if they cover TV, does that mean they are biased?”

Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander raises this very question in his piece: “Can a reporter who doesn’t cover sports tweet that a team’s owner is a tyrant? Should an editor in the Business section post a comment on her Facebook page that gun owners are paranoid?” I’m not sure if his question is rhetorical, but unfortunately for Saba, he fails to answer it. The New York Times, ever our reliable source for information, jumps in, however: “A City Hall reporter or a politics editor might be “friends” with several different City Council members as well as the Mayor, but not just with one of them. But a reporter or editor whose work has nothing to do with City Hall could be “friends” with people who work there with no conflict of interest.”

But then again, is unadulterated objectivity on a subject a journalist has studied closely, even possible? As James Poniewozik writes, “any person who immersed him or herself in a vital, contentious subject all day and formed no opinion about it whatsoever would be an idiot, and you do not want to get your news from idiots.” And if he does have an opinion, is it in keeping with journalism’s goals to shield it?

Not surprisingly, organizations that appear to be least restrictive of journalists’ use of social media are also the ones that have embraced social networks to effectively disseminate information, engage with the audience, and promote content, such as the BBC and the New York Times, and NPR, which is touted by many as the most effective user of social media, most notably, Mashable.

Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-chief of the Guardian, another organization known for its utilization of social media tools for citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, has perhaps been most convincing in his ringing endorsement of journalists’ use of such networks to interact, engage and impart information. He has clearly stated on the site’s editorial pages that one of the advantages of Twitter is that it allows reporters to publish, unhindered by the confines of the newspaper and its Web site. This is also reinforced in the site’s social media statement, which promotes the idea of an open forum that promotes all forms of social networking interactions with readers.

Any set of reasonable rules for social media, then, are more common-sense parameters than anything else. And one would hope that journalists would be smart enough to not broadcast something on Twitter that would jeopardize their own credibility, alienate audiences, or embarrass their organizations.

As NYT’s David Carr writes “if you can’t trust the women and men who put out your newspaper to use their keyboards wisely regardless of platform, what are they doing working for you?”

[Part 2 will look at perspectives from history, such as the role of objectivity and the influence of technology on the changing rules of journalism]

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It seems The Guardian is considering launching a members’ club of some sort as part of moves to increase revenue, an idea that was also mooted by the New York Times a few months ago.

Members clubs are not a particularly new idea – they’ve been used successfully in the magazine industry for a long time – and they have a lot of potential, although probably not as a massive revenue generator, and less so in a recession (talk to anyone in the events industry to understand why). I’m trying to get hold of some concrete figures and experiences of these – if you have any, I’d be grateful if you could add them.

The biggest problem for newspapers in putting together a members’ club is the diversity of their ‘members’.

When the New York Times’ Bill Keller described their possible members’ club it apparently included “a baseball cap or a T-shirt, an invite to a Times event, or perhaps, like The Economist, access to specialized content on the Web.”

The Guardian appear to have a little more imagination: “benefits might include, for example, a welcome pack, exclusive content, live events, special offers from our partners and the opportunity to communicate with our journalists.”*

Still, from the very vague initial impressions I think both are making the mistake of seeing readers as an amorphous mass of ‘news consumers’ rather than a collection of niche markets.

The Guardian, for example, has particular strengths in covering the media, education, and ‘society’ (the supplements it prints on the first 3 days of the week). If I was launching a members’ club I would start with one of those (not media) and branch outwards. The offering then becomes much clearer (both to readers and commercial partners), the learning curve quicker and less damaging – and it also becomes easier for users to charge it to an institution.

*By the way, I love the fact that “the opportunity to communicate with our journalists” is part of the deal. So much for being ‘part of the conversation’

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While talking to an editor at a newspaper that had made a splash with a crowdsourced investigative story a couple years ago, I remember the subject of payment coming up, to which she made an interesting point. The citizens who contribute their time and effort have a personal interest in the story and do it because they want to help the paper – this is a citizenry interacting with its hometown newspaper for the betterment of the community and for the good of democracy. It was a valid point. After all, if they paid their citizens, they wouldn’t just be citizens anymore, they’d be employees.

News organizations have long been excused from digital sharecropping, a label that has been attached to crowdsourced businesses that exploit free labor from the public without offering compensation. Perhaps, media entities benefit from the altruistic and democratic nature of information sharing. The millions of Internet users that voluntarily put content out for free are more than a testament to that.

But where should the line be drawn? When should news organizations and media conglomerates begin to have to start paying for utilizing the time and resources of their volunteer contributors while holding complete ownership of the product – or at the very least, making revenue off of an individual’s product?

When Lindsey Hoshaw, a California journalist keen to investigate the “great garbage patch,” a huge mass of plastic  flotsam circulating in the Pacific Ocean, pitched the idea to the New York Times, the paper’s Web site expressed interest in the story and agreed to potentially pay her $700 for pictures. The trip alone would cost Hoshaw 10,000$, however. So she approached the crowdfunding Web site Spot.Us (where readers pledge donations to fund stories of interest to them) in order to raise money to cover travel expenses. The organization is hoping to garner 60 percent of the entire amount, and Hoshaw plans to take out a loan for the remainder.

The paper – and Hoshaw herself – justify the partnership because it is “a story she has long dreamed of, and [it’s] a chance for a byline in The Times,” one that allowed her to use the stalwart organization’s name to raise funds. The Times is not doing anything different in this case than it would do in the case of any farfetched freelance pitch – outlining how much it would pay her for the story and leaving it up to her to figure out how to obtain the remainder of the funds.

Jeff Jarvis calls this a necessary  “collaboration” in the new media ecosystem. His argument is that this is not very different from the Times site picking up a story that someone may have posted on a blog, for instance. Legally speaking, it’s more than fair. The paper’s Web site doesn’t own the story unless it funds fifty percent or more of it.

As per Spot.Us’s terms, unless a news organization decides to contribute one hundred percent of the funding, it doesn’t get exclusive rights, and if that were to happen, donors get reimbursed.

In an age where newspapers are struggling to raise revenue, all options are on the table. “Whatever you call it, what’s happening spotlights an important step in how we’ll pay for the news: finding some workable alternatives to news organizations shelling out big bucks required to cover important news in far-away places,” writes Bill Mitchell in Poynter this week.

This is not the first time The Times has partnered with a nonprofit site. It also has an ongoing collaboration with the publicly funded investigative reporting site ProPublica, which routinely offers its stories to America’s most influential newspaper for greater impact.

While this “journalist as entrepreneur” model is fueling important stories that might not otherwise get covered, it is also dangerously shifting the costs of reporting on to the shoulders of young, enthusiastic reporters.

Over the past couple of years, American journalist Jason Motlagh has reported on everything from the Maoist rebels in India to civilian casualties in Afghanistan, but doesn’t get much more than a travel stipend for his stories.

Motlagh is part of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis reporting, which I wrote about in a previous post; the nonprofit is covering stories that traditional American media are not covering for want of international bureaus that were shut down during the start of the industry’s crisis over two years ago.

The Center helps its reporters market their stories to other news organizations to “maximize impact.” In partnership with the organization, Motlagh’s work has appeared in the public broadcasting show, Foreign Exchange, the Frontline’s iWitness webcam program, and the Virginia Quarterly. But it is unlikely that this concept of “reporting first, money maybe later” will continue to allow journalists to make a career out of reporting.

This has, perhaps, been the plight of freelancers for decades, but what is scary is that veteran newsmen and stalwart news organizations are hailing these projects as exemplars of the new journalism model. Motlagh “is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget,” writes David Westphal in the Online Journalism Review.

If the news industry plans to rely on young, ambitious journalists eager enough to make a career so as to pay for their own breakthrough stories, where will subsequent stories come from? While journalists like Motlagh and Hoshaw should rightly be lauded for their determination and passion, this is simply not a sustainable model. Media scholars should be talking about workable ways to fund these projects and urging mainstream news organizations to get behind them, instead of making the case that this is the future of journalism.

PHP Freelancer

Iran election: faces of the dead and detained | World news | guardian.co.uk via kwout

They’re at it again. Following the very domestic issue of MPs’ expenses, The Guardian’s latest experiment with crowdsourcing goes international: Iran.

“We want to put a face to each of those hundreds – possibly thousands – killed or arrested since the Iranian election.

“Where we have a picture we have used it. However, our information is incomplete. If you have a picture of any one of these individuals or information we do not have please click below.”

Simple.

(Oh, and there’s also a spreadsheet of data and the invitation to post visualisations to the Datastore’s Flickr group.)

Coincidentally, a very similar project was mentioned by Arianna Huffinton at yesterday’s Activate Summit organised by… The Guardian.

NPR: Turning The Camera Around: Health Care Stakeholders is basically an image of healthcare lobbyists with rollovers that tell you who they are and how much they have spent. The explanatory paragraph ends:

“We’ve begun to identify some of the faces in the hearing room, and we want to keep the process going. Know someone in these photos? Let us know who that someone is — e-mail dollarpolitics@npr.org or let us know via Twitter@DollarPolitics.”

The piece, Huffington explained, went viral, which is pretty key for most crowdsourcing projects (and, by the way, for engagement, democracy… you know: the small things).

Meanwhile, the New York Times is also doing a little crowdsourcing on Iran:

“The New York Times would like readers in Iran to help us document the post-election unrest in Iran. Please upload your photographs using the form below, letting us know when and where the photographs were taken and whether you wish to remain anonymous.”

Or is it just citizen journalism? I guess it depends what they do with the material – it could be a lot clearer. 

More? Here are the webpages I’ve tagged ‘crowdsourcing’ on Delicious

PHP Freelancer