Online Journalism Blog

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.

As traditional media outlets close down, the relative importance of non-market players becomes more important.

Governments around the world were quick to see the opportunities for their news agencies. From Xinhua (China) to ITAR-TASS (Russia), from AFP (half of its budget comes from state subscriptions) to Voice of America, governments are trying to shape the world’s public opinion.

The coverage of Gaza by Al Jazeera is a case in point. They produced quality journalism no other outlet could dream of. Now, viewers should keep in mind that money for such newsgathering comes straight from the pocket of the Emir of Qatar. Believe me, I’m sure Al Jazeera’s journalists keep that in mind too.

To help you measure the amount of government-funded journalism, I built this little app, I smell a government rat in my news. Just type in any query and you’ll see the share of articles produced with state funds. [Read more]

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’. [Read more]

As communism fell in Lithuania 19 years ago, existing dailies started to publish what they wanted. And what they wanted was money. The 2 main titles promptly became filled with advertorial paid for by politicians and industrialists.

The Lithuanian public quickly became disheartened with the printed press and turned to the internet instead. That’s why the audience of Lithuanian #1 website for news is only 8 times smaller than its UK counterpart, even though the country is 20 times as small as the UK (and twice as poor in terms of GDP per capita).

Seeing this enthusiasm for online news, MG Baltic, a Vilnius-based holding that trades in everything from consumer goods to news, decided to launch a website. The avowed goal was to complement their mass media portfolio. [Read more]

A couple weeks ago I published the ‘5 Stages of a Blogger’s Life‘ cartoon, drawn by Alex Hughes. It was an experiment to test a theory of mine: that cartoons could be particularly successful in increasing news website visitor numbers, and that news organisations should be doing more with them.

The results? In one week that cartoon got over 40,000 hits, making it the most popular single post ever on the Online Journalism Blog . [Read more]

4 years after launching his blog, a famous French writer publishes a book of comments. The revenues of the book roughly equal 30 years of on-blog advertising.

Pierre Assouline is the typical 50-something, successful French intellectual. Whatever he authors turns into a bestseller, he is involved in the movie industry, writes op-ed pieces for the best newspapers, gives lectures and hosts a radio talk show. And, like many of his ilk, was definitely technophobic. [Read more]

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.

Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends. It would read through the Wikipedia pages of a given theme and summarize key concepts. A semantic algorithm would bring a selection of the most authoritative people on a subject.

The journalist is left with what she does best: checking and analyzing the data.

That means avoiding the pitfalls of redundant news content. That means escaping the trap of writing about topics without having a clue of what’s at stake. That means interviewing people who do things rather than those who talk about it.

This article is the first of a 4-part series. We’ll explore semantic hacks for newsgathering, writing and publishing in the coming weeks. [Read more]

A new research from Indiana University showed that 54% of URL requests had no referrals. That means that most of the time, people do not click on links. They merely pick a site in their favorites or type in an URL in the address bar. A mere 5% of URL requests came from search engines.

The figures can hardly be doubted. The study monitored 100,000 users over 9 months �" the largest yet. What is more, the number of URL requests without referrals actually increased over the course of the study.

Users seem less Google-prone than what is often claimed. They spend little time surfing and prefer to go directly to destinations they know. [Read more]

Skoeps.nl, a citizen-journalism venture, closed down last week after its owners declared it unprofitable. The business plan seemed simple enough to succeed:

1. Find loads of money,
2. Advertise massively, and
3. Share advertising and syndication revenue with writers.

The plan worked, except that there wasn’t enough revenue to share. Skoeps cash-flow was in the black, which means that, if investors refused to go forward, growth must have been minimal and could not have offset the initial investment in the near future. [Read more]