In this latest post in the FAQ series, I’ve been asked to help answer a question on the “ethical dilemmas faced by news organisations when considering the use of AI in reporting stories“.
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I’ve written previously about the role that cognitive biases play in journalism, how to avoid confirmation bias, and anticipate criticism based on fallacies — but one cognitive bias I haven’t written about yet is the availability heuristic — or availability bias.
Availability bias is the tendency to reach for the most available reason, event, or tool, when confronted with a problem or decision.
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This week Twitter got angry.
Again.
It was angry because BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg identified the father of a sick baby who confronted the prime minister as a political activist, embedding one of his tweets in her own.
Then it was angry because people were attacking a journalist for doing her job.
Somewhere between the heated accusations and counter-accusations, however, there was an important lesson to be learned — and a reasonable discussion to be had.
It is a lesson about understanding very different online cultures, about new journalistic practices, and an emerging dimension of journalistic ethics that few reporters have truly gotten to grips with. Continue reading
In Hungary, not-for-profit news site Átlátszó has launched a full-time data team to create a wide range of data visualisations and data-driven stories. Amanda Loviza spoke to data journalist Attila Bátorfy about his plans to have Átló raise the quality of data journalism in Hungary.
Átlátszó was created in 2011 as Hungary’s first crowd-funded independent investigative news site, with a stated goal of holding the powerful accountable.
Data journalist Attila Bátorfy joined the site two and a half years ago. It was not long before he told editor-in-chief Tamás Bodoky that the site needed a whole separate team to produce higher quality data visualisations. Continue reading
Bombings in Barcelona in 1938 (Image by Italian Airforce under CC)
In a guest post for OJB, Carla Pedret looks at a new data journalism project to catalogue what happened during the Spanish Civil War.
125,000 people died, disappeared or were repressed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and during the Franco dictatorship, according to historians. Many of their families still do not know, 40 years later, what exactly happened to them.
Now the Innovation and Human Rights (IHR) association has created the first central database of casualties, missing persons and reprisals during the Spanish Civil War and under Francoism.
Answers to another set of questions around ethics and online journalism, posed by a UK student, and reproduced here as part of the FAQ series:
Yes, I think any changing situation – whether technological or cultural – presents new ethical dilemmas.
But should ‘online journalism’ have a separate code? I don’t see how it can. Where would you draw the line when most journalists work online? Ethical standards are relatively platform-agnostic, but journalists do have to revisit those when they’re working in new environments. Continue reading
UPDATE: Readers of this blog can now get a 20% discount off the book by using the code ME1211 when ordering on the Routledge site.
Magazine Editing is one of those books that I’ve used for years in my teaching. Unlike most books in the field, it has a healthy focus on the less glamorous aspects of running magazines, such as managing teams and budgets, editorial strategy, and the significant proportion of the industry – B2B, contract publishing, controlled-circulation, subscription-based – that you don’t see on supermarket shelves.
For the third edition, publishers Routledge approached me to update the book for a multiplatform age. That work is now done – and the new edition is now out.
Although it now has my name on it, the book remains primarily the work of John Morrish, who wrote the first two editions of the book. Editing his work gave me a fresh appreciation of just what a timeless job he has done in identifying the skills needed by magazine editors – as I write in the introduction:
“It is striking how much of the advice in the book is more important than ever. In a period of enormous change it is key to focus on the core skills of magazine editing: clear leadership, effective management, people skills and creative thinking around what exactly it is that your readers are buying into – whether that’s printed on paper, pixels on a screen, or something intangible like a sense of community and belonging.”
So if you can find one of the older editions cheap, you’ll still find it useful.
So what did I add to the new edition of Magazine Editing? It goes without saying that digital magazines (web-only, apps) are now covered. The diversification of revenue models – the increased importance of events, merchandising, data, mobile and apps – is now explored, as well as how online advertising works, and how it differs from traditional advertising. How to use online resources, including web analytics, to better understand your audience and inform your editorial strategy; and how magazine campaigns are changed by the dynamics of the web.
The chapter on leading and managing now includes sections on managing information overload, social bookmarking and social media policies, and there’s a new section on legal guidance on placements and internships. The budgeting sections now include online considerations, and there’s an exploration of the pros and cons of using free or minimal cost third party services against building tools in-house. A passage from the section on ‘Making money online’ is illustrative of the shifts facing the industry:
“Like so much else on the web, it is becoming difficult to see where content ends and commerce begins. The concept of a ‘magazine’ blurs when, online, it can also be a shop, a game, or a tool. It helps to think of how the business model of magazines has traditionally worked: gathering a community of people in the same place (on your pages) where companies can then advertise their products and services. The same principle applies now, but the barriers to selling products and services yourself have been significantly lowered, just as the barriers to publishing content have been significantly lowered for those companies whose advertising used to fund print publishing. Integrity is no less important in this context: users will desert your website if your content is only concerned with selling them your products, just as they will desert if your events are badly organised, your merchandise poor quality, or your service shoddy. Publishers increasingly talk of a ‘brand experience’ of which the content is just one part. In many ways this makes the reader – as they also become a consumer – more powerful, and the advertiser less so. Your insights into what they are talking and reading about may be of increasing interest to those who are searching for new revenue streams.”
The chapter on writing covers considerations in evaluating online sources of information and the debates in online journalism around objectivity versus transparency, and the values of a ‘web-first’ strategy. I also cover online tools for organising diaries and monitoring social media. There’s an exploration of best practice guidelines in writing for the web, and when multimedia is appropriate or preferable.
The chapter on pictures and design now includes advice on dealing with web designers and developers, multiplatform design and branding, sourcing video for the web, copyright and Creative Commons, infographics, and image considerations for online publication. And ‘Managing Production’ covers search engine optimisation, scheduling online production, and online distribution. The penultimate chapter on legal considerations adds data protection, the role of archives in contempt of court, and website terms and conditions.
I end the book with a list of tools that allows the reader to get publishing right now. And aside from the legal developments, the new considerations, roles and stages in the production cycle, this is perhaps the most important change from previous editions: a student reading this book is no longer waiting for their first job in publishing: they should be creating it.
If you have read the book and want to receive updates on developments in the magazine industry, please Like the book’s Facebook page. I’d also welcome any comments on areas you think are well covered – or need to be covered further.
There are two Cabinet Office consultations taking place at the moment around open data: one around data policy for the new Public Data Corporation (PDC), and another around the government’s policy around transparency and open data strategy.
This should be of enormous interest to any media organisation – a key opportunity to influence the availability of information of public interest.
For example, among the issues under consideration are (summed up by Tony Hirst): charging for PDC information, licensing and regulation.
These will all be vital elements in the future of journalism – news organisations and journalists should be vocal in shaping them.
The deadline for both consultations is October 27.
Various commentators over the past year have made the observation that “Data is the new oil“. If that’s the case, journalists should be following the money. But they’re not.
Instead it’s falling to the likes of Tony Hirst (an Open University academic), Dan Herbert (an Oxford Brookes academic) and Chris Taggart (a developer who used to be a magazine publisher) to fill the scrutiny gap. Recently all three have shone a light into the move towards transparency and open data which anyone with an interest in information would be advised to read.
Herbert wrote about the publication of the first Whole of Government Accounts for the UK.
And Taggart made one of the best presentations I’ve seen on the relationship between information and democracy.
What all three highlight is how control of information still represents the exercise of power, and how shifts in that control as a result of the transparency/open data/linked data agenda are open to abuse, gaming, or spin. Continue reading
If you read the literature on journalism’s professional ideology – or just follow any argument about journalists-versus-the-rest-of-the-world – you’ll notice particular themes recurring.
Like any profession, journalism separates itself from other fields of work through articulating how it is different. Reading Mark Deuze’s book Media Work recently I was struck by how a similar, parallel, ideology is increasingly articulated by bloggers. And I wanted to sketch that out. Continue reading
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