This is the fourth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Human capital

So here’s person number 4: Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist.

Fifty years ago he used the phrase ‘human capital’ to refer to the economic value that companies should ascribe to their employees.

These days, of course, it is common sense to invest time in recruiting, training and retaining good employees. But at the time employees were seen as a cost.

We need a similar change in the way we see our readers – not as a cost on our time but as a valuable part of our operations that we should invest in recruiting, developing and retaining.

Any online operation that does not incorporate its users in production is not only democratically deficient, it is commercially inefficient.

Of course some are inclined to see user generated content as a mass of ignorance, abuse and waffle. Those people should ask how much work has been put into attracting good contributors? Into developing a healthy commenting culture? And how much has been invested into giving the good users a reason to keep coming back?

Journalism’s conflicted future

I have spoken about journalism’s ego problem. This is worsened by the fact that journalism is going through an identity crisis, which will become increasingly problematic as it tries to reinvent itself for an uncertain future.

And as always, this is nothing new. In the 1920s journalism faced a similar conflict: between the journalism of information and the journalism of stories. Should we, as journalists, perform a role of providing citizens with the information that they need to make informed decisions? Or are we just in the business of great stories?

The source of that conflict then was the rise of the scientific method, as I explained at the start of this lecture. The source of today’s conflict could be traced to institutional change in news organisations becoming part of larger entertainment empires – and the melting pot of online publication.

Where you stand on the role of journalists will likely depend on whether you think you’re in the business of building cars, constructing roads or organising picnics, and what role you think journalism should perform in a democracy.

Is journalism part of a deliberative democracy, in which the media provides a public forum for debate and consensus?

Is journalism’s role is to provide citizens with information – as part of a liberal democracy?

Or should the media encourage participation and engagement as part of a participatory democracy?

The institutional history of journalism kept those views somewhat separated – as Lokman Tsui explores in his ethnography of Global Voices.

But as these cultures of journalism clash in the online space it is more important than ever that we reflect on our own views of where we stand.

And as educators we should be teaching our students to be aware of their positions and how that affects what they report on, how they report it, and who gets a voice in its coverage.

If objectivity is to remain a journalistic value, then it should be modern objectivity, not this 19th century construct that passes for objectivity in most newswriting: the setting up of an arbitrary fence, and the selection of a source from each side of it as an indication of ‘balance’.

Culture shift

In many ways culture is the way that people and institutions communicate with each other. And just as institutional culture shapes the journalism that we create, for the last couple of decades there has been a growing movement outside of news institutions that sees democracy as both participatory and information driven.

The campaign for Freedom of Information, the work of MySociety in opening up voting records and debate transcripts so the public could see what their representatives were doing and saying in their name. The Free Our Data campaign – which sought to give the public the right to use information that was paid for with public money. And the Linked Data and Open Data movements which have campaigned to make public bodies publish data in a form that makes it easier to interrogate.

What these people – and I want to name some of them here:

• Tom Steinberg and Tom Loosemore
• Heather Brooke
• Charles Arthur
• Tim Berners Lee and
• Chris Taggart

What these people have done – and are still doing – is making power accountable, promoting a cultural expectation that we should have access to information about how our money is spent, and that most publicly funded information should be available to the people who paid for it.

This of course is one of the first steps to ‘holding power to account’, the great argument that publishers make for their existence. That is what the Telegraph did with the MPs’ expenses; what The Guardian have done with Wikileaks data.

But too much of this groundwork is lying ignored and unsupported by the mainstream press.

When Walsall Council released their spending data last year the webpage received more visits than the rest of the council website. They received several enquiries from people like Chris Taggart asking for information about why particular items had been redacted – but they received only one enquiry from the local newspaper.

And that was to ask: ‘Why have you released the data early?’

For comparison I want to show you a video of Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation in the US talking about their government’s transparency initiative.

Where is the news organisation in the UK that is lobbying like this?

A similar cultural shift is happening around public meetings and hearings, with hyperlocal blogs who want to make processes of law and democracy transparent.

Simon Perry of the Ventnor Blog was ejected from a coroner’s court last year on the grounds that he was neither a member of the press nor a member of the public. Richard Taylor was investigated by Cambridge City Council for recording public meetings – he was not told what the grounds of the investigation were. In Brighton a councillor was disciplined for posting clips of council meetings to YouTube. And Heather Brooke was told that she could not make an audio recording of a hearing because the tribunal could not “maintain the necessary degree of control over the transcript.” When Brooke asked for a copy of the ruling she was told that there was to be no written record of it.

This is one area where journalists and news organisations can be investing in their users. It should not just be bloggers pushing for these changes.

Part five can be found here.

Following the tone set so succinctly by Glyn Moody, I thought I would add my own thoughts on what Sir Tim should say to the government when he bends their ear on transparency.

Firstly, I would second everything that Glyn says.

But I’m going to be cynical and strategic, and urge Sir Tim to emphasise the importance of open data on a couple of areas that are close to the government’s hearts.

1. Stimulating growth in the economy.

You could compare a genuinely significant release of public data to an economic stimulus.

Like cutting VAT, only cheaper.

At minimal cost you could have a new raw material that startups and established media organisations alike could create new value out of. Some of those would create commercial implications far exceeding any revenue generated within government (as research recently suggested in relation to the comparably valuable Ordnance Survey data).

Repeat after me: jobs and money, jobs and money.

2. Efficiencies and passing on costs in the public sector

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon puts it particularly well:

You will sooner gain your end by “appealing to men’s pockets, in which they have generally something of their own, than to their heads, which contain for the most part little but borrowed or stolen property”

Public sector spending is going to drop whichever party is in power. Let’s play to that.

By opening up public data the government will effectively be able to pass on some development costs to willing volunteers who mash up the data in their own ways. The difference is that people will do this to their own agendas and for their own benefit.

But more importantly, the results of this experimentation – if supported and encouraged – should produce work that makes it more efficient to interact with public data and therefore public bodies. If I can use a slider to find out which schools are within 3 miles, that saves 20 minutes of someone answering a phonecall in the local education department. If I can have a Facebook app which tells other users how much money alcohol abuse is costing my local hospital, it might save the NHS a bob or two. You get the picture. 

Oh yes, and it’s important for democracy, civic engagement and digital literacy

The limited data that’s available in the UK is an embarrassment. Imagine what MySociety could do with what’s available in the US.

Likewise, for all the talk of transparency, the recent announcement that Cabinet Papers and information relating to the Royal Family would be exempt from the Freedom of Information act is a backward step. Heather Brooke’s concerns proved right.

The cynic in me sees the appointment of Berners-Lee as an action intended to generate the illusion of movement – “We’re working on it”. But the Freedom of Information act is possibly the most positive contribution the Labour government has made to this country’s political health since it came to power, and not to follow through on promises made would be an enormous political mistake.

So I will add one request to my advice above: I would stress that any discussion of transparency acknowledges the importance of requiring any organisation using public funds to make their data public too. So much public work is outsourced to the private sector that it is particularly difficult to see whether public money is spent responsibly.

More at Podnosh, BBC, Emma Mulqueeny, Simon Dickson and Amused Cynicism.

There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation.  It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it.  At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.

Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory.  Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us.  Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.

Correctly tagging the mass of available data to provide a clear sense of meaning is the best way of achieving this according to Nova Spivack, founder of Twine, one of the leading sites in this field.  He says:

“This next generation is actually based on enriching the meaning, enriching the structure.  The reason we want to do this is so that software can understand the web like humans can understand the web. Because the semantic web is not for humans, it is for machines.”

Undertaking this task will revolutionise the way we utilise the internet, creating intelligent interaction and impacting on the way the web is perceived in popular culture. Vint Cerf, one of the driving forces behind the creation of the internet, says:

‘I don’t believe that we will see arising out of the current internet…conscious artificial intelligence, but we will probably see the system become easier to interact with – for example, voice interaction is becoming increasingly easy to accomplish. I’m almost certain you’ll see products emerging that will allow you to orally interact with the network – ask for something, demand something, or command something and have [it] happen.

“We may feel that this system is more intelligent because we are interacting with it in ways that don’t require us to point, click and type. The semantic web idea will make the internet seem more intelligent because we are extracting knowledge that other people put into it in a way that looks pretty intelligent.”

So the aim of the ‘semantic web’ is to allow data to be accessed and shared effectively by wider communities, yet processed automatically by computer.  In order for this to happen there needs to be a simple system to catagorise data so it can be easily located and organised.

Much progress has been made in this infrastructure, particularly in the development of the new languages – Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) – by the World Wide Web Consortium .  The languages are used to annotate code, representing ‘knowledge’ which will enable applications to use them more intelligently.

At the moment HTML is limited to describing static content, documents and the links between them. However RDF, OWL, and XML can describe arbitrary things such as people, events or objects.  It is layered on top of HTML and consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object. For example: “Jeremy Paxman” <subject> belongs to <predicate> journalists <object>.

These descriptions allow increased meaning behind the static content, demonstrating the structure of the knowledge behind it.  In this way a machine can process knowledge itself instead of text, using a process similar to human reasoning.  This should result in more meaningful results being returned in searches and perhaps even allow for increased automation when it comes to research by computers.

The success (or failure) of these experimental technologies will motivate further research and development, not only from within the industry but also academia.  It is certain their efforts will influence the future development of information technology.  In a further post I will explore the services currently being forged and in a final post on the ‘semantic web’ I will tackle the revolutionary uses this new technology has for journalism.

However the last word here must go to Tim Berners-Lee, the internet pioneer who says:

“A ‘semantic web’ has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialise.”

Reuters recently published a report entitled: ‘What’s Happening to Our News: An investigation into the likely impact of the digital revolution on the economics of news publishing in the UK‘. In it author Andrew Currah provides an overview of the situation facing UK publishers, and 3 broad suggestions as to ways forward – namely, kitemarks, public support, and digital literacy education.

The kitemark idea seems to have stirred up the most fuss. In the first of a series of email exchanges I asked Currah how he saw this making any difference to consumption of newspapers, and how it could work in practice. This is his response:

Yes, the kitemark idea has triggered quite a response… Unfortunately, as the discussion online suggests, the term has implied to many a top-down, centralised system of certification which would lead to some form of
‘apartheid’ between bloggers and journalists.

That was certainly not our intended message. The report simply wanted to foreground the idea of digital labelling as a means of improving transparency in online news coverage.

All we meant by a kitemark was a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.

Our report only touched upon this project of labelling, which the Media Standards Trust are busy working on. For a more detailed discussion, see the post by Martin Moore or read about the related efforts of http://www.newscredit.org

So, in summary, we are in favour of an open source, voluntary, bottom-up system of tagging NOT an archaic, top-down system of certification dividing amateurs and professionals. We did not envision participation in such an initiative as a precursor to public funding – though intelligent labelling and linking to external sites could, for example, be far more developed at the BBC.

In terms of value, by intelligently labelling the news all sorts of valuable derivative uses might be enabled (e.g. helping users to filter content by criteria or triangulate stories). It might also help to avoid the failures of purely algorithmic search approaches to news (e.g. the fiasco surrounding the publication of an outdated United Airlines story on Google News in August last year – triggered, in part, due to the lack of any embedded metadata about the story’s publication date):

Is this similar to the ideas that Tim Berners- Lee is working on in his Knight-funded project?

Yes – absolutely. This is something we only briefly touch in the report. We’re hoping to spend more time looking at this approach in follow-on research. I think the initiative being developed by Tim Berners-Lee and the Media Standards Trust has a great chance of improving transparency, especially when tagging and labelling technologies are seamlessly integrated into the workflow of the newsroom.

I can see how something around metadata could help users find original journalism, but how do you see this kitemark keeping journalism alive in a business sense?

Whether this would realistically boost the economics of news is difficult to answer. But on the basis of our research, it seems that a more transparent, systematic way of tagging the news could help publishers in a variety of ways…

For example, by developing a more comprehensive network of tags connecting stories, themes and content that might, in theory, keep people on a site for longer – in turn, strengthening ad revenues. It might also perpetuate the value and profile of a story long after it was published.

Metadata is also the key to techniques such as search engine optimisation, social media marketing, and the like, all of which are about attracting more attention around the content for longer. It would also provide a system for displaying stories in new formats, such as digital maps.

When or whether all of this will translate into enough ad revenues to keep publishers afloat is an open question; investing in the systems and training to make this archival linking possible is another hurdle.

An alternative approach might be to buck the trend towards free by introducing new forms of online paid subscription, to provide access to a premium, searchable and fully digitized archive of all back content. Metadata would also be a key step in that direction.

The discussion continues in the comments

NB: The Freeman’s Journal has an excellent critical overview of the report, with responses from Currah in the comments.