Monthly Archives: February 2013

Journalism and the Difference Quotient

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Response to “What is Journalism For?”

Last week we read excerpts from the book “The Elements of Journalism” by Kovach and Rosenstiel in which they posed the important and timely question: “What is Journalism For?”

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, journalism is a timeless function of our human instinct to know about the world around us – what they call “The Awareness Instinct”. According to uncited anthropologists, pretty much all people around the world share the same definition of news and news values. They trace the history of journalism from publick houses in England to its present day and assert that its purpose has remained essentially unchanged across that time until this particular moment of crisis. What is that purpose? What is journalism for? They answer:

The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing. – p 12

The journalism described in the essay is high-minded and has everything to do with good moral things like justice and democracy and nothing to do with bad evil things like propaganda, nation-building, scapegoating, war-mongering and hate-building (all things I would claim that the media in a democratic society also do). This journalism is an abstracted ideal that the authors attempt to naturalize with links to supposedly inherent human instincts and to strip of its specific cultural and historical manifestations by claiming that it has been ever the same across all time and space until this particular moment of corporatism. I became less irritated by this essay once I stopped thinking of it as a bad historical or descriptive account and started thinking about it as a defensive manifesto for a field in crisis trying to justify its existence.

As a manifesto, it raises valuable questions – What are our ideals for journalism in the 21st century? How linked is journalism to the institutions – newspapers, tv news, their corporations – that produce it – and is journalism’s power directly related to being part of large, powerful organizations that many people see and many people trust? In an increasingly globalized world where the media entities are part of corporate conglomerates can journalism maintain any of its supposed “free press-ness”, it’s ability to report independently on powerful interests? And as the corporations get bigger, the audiences get sliced and diced in ever-smaller niche chunks. As audiences move to a “pull” mode of delivery where we increasingly select which news we wish to be exposed to, how can journalism be an engine of difference versus an echo-chamber for our existing selves?

Ok, so now I’ve diverged into my own questions. But it’s sort of like driving a car versus taking the bus. They accomplish the same purpose but with radically different “difference quotients” – i.e. how much of the world are you exposed to that you don’t already know (and that you might not choose to be exposed to even if you did know?) In a car you are your own little individual car-person. You choose, you turn, you arrive. You are the great consuming last man – comfortable in the power of your consumer choice to determine your destiny. Whereas on the bus, you go the bus’ way. There are probably people who are not your color. There are probably obnoxious people or homeless people or kids doing weird things. You hear little conversations, sit uncomfortably close to strangers, and probably learn more about these people than you ever care to.

But at the same time there’s something to be said for that bus experience, right? There’s something to be said for just smelling other people occasionally.

So, I’m not sure I buy the heroic story of journalism as the timeless bulwark of a democratic society, but I do think that one of the things that should be troubling to us in the whole journalistic crisis is that the difference quotient of our individual lives is being diminished with every shrinking public good, whether that is public transit or public information. And when we see, smell, hear and feel less difference we are less tolerant. And therefore less democratic. When we need to look for everything we want to know we will be entertained and engaged like never before but completely unaware of the many complex worlds that used to sit next to us on the bus.

 

 

Capitalizing on Hyperconnectivity

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My interest in the future of news, and thus in taking this course, does not stem from a professional background in journalism or technology. Instead, it derives from experiences I have had while working in post-conflict areas. The overt lack of access to credible information in many of these contexts—and its implications for transparency, corruption, etc.—motivated me to explore the relationship between information, news, and democracy, and founded my belief that the words “news” and “truth” should be synonymous.

Realizing the relationship between news and certain civil and political rights, such as free speech and access to information, drove me to really ponder the significance contained in the U.S.’s First Amendment. But a curiosity that was spurred by a proud celebration of my nation’s commendable values concluded with a deflated and disillusioned understanding of the rights contained therein.  Specifically, while sifting through the web I found vignettes—such as the fact that CNN signs advertising contracts with governments that it covers, or that most major US news outlets agreed not to publish soldiers’ coffins at the request of the U.S. government—which suggest a news industry whose coverage is dictated by corporate and government interests. And although the above examples may be exceptions, I cannot be sure because these outlets are almost as obtuse as the governments and businesses they purportedly hold accountable. As such, although I have many journalist friends who lament how increasingly challenging it is to earn a decent income, I am excited by emerging forms of participatory media, fueled by interconnectivity, that could potentially provide a paradigm for challenging the existing monopoly over news content.

But before celebrating social media, and besides the fact that my friends are losing jobs, a negative result of the changing nature of news is that many outlets are closing their foreign bureaus. When I asked one of my friends why her paper, the Lebanese English-language daily The Daily Star, was not covering the uprisings in Bahrain more frequently, she lamented that what her paper publishes is dictated by the information that the news wires contain.  Existing traditional publications are relying on a shrinking pool of verified sources for their information, and this too is problematic; neutrality in specific pieces is meaningless if only a narrow slice of events happening around the world is reported on.

At the same time, a non-curated jumble of information on the net that perhaps touches upon a wider array of issues could never supplant the quality reporting and analysis we see in The Washington Post or the BBC. We should not expect it to, and must be careful to idealize phenomena such as We Media, if for no other reason than that most content that the most popular tweeters discuss still links back to ‘credible’ publications for sourcing. And I will not even endeavor to address the ethical, verification, and other issues that accompany using “citizen journalism” in reporting. Indeed, the million-dollar question now is not whether we need news curators or not. We unquestionably do.

Instead, the question toward which to focus our efforts concerns who the new curator will be, where this entity’s interests lie, and how a model can be designed whereby truth and transparency, as opposed to money and politics, dictate content and information flows.

These criteria automatically disqualify governments and most current news outlets from assuming this role.  So what are our options?  I believe we must think in terms of the increasingly international and interconnected nature of our lives, on which much of new media’s success relies. As such, what about an international body (not limited to government members) that funds and is responsible for ensuring broad, verifiable coverage on world events? I know this sounds ridiculous and totally unrealistic today, but a public, nongovernment entity may facilitate an open, international conversation about what the role of news should be and how to improve it terms of quality and equity, bringing news into a broader conversation about individual rights.

Specifically, addressing such a mammoth topic as information on the international level may facilitate a more robust discussion of development topics related to communications, like the digital divide. Access to the Internet, and underlying that basic literacy, are at least as massive of impediments to an informed citizenry of the world as is lack of transparency. And until we also draw such issues into the debate surrounding the future of news, the discussion will transpire among a class of elites instead of the “citizens” that journalists purportedly aim to serve. Bringing news content regulation to the international level could help to change all that.

Writing for an audience, or why science is not like football

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This week, we were asked to write about what it is that we want news to do.

I am a science writer. A lot of science writers are, for lack of a better word, reformed scientists. They used to study C. elegans or neutron stars out on a lab bench somewhere, until realizing one morning that they infinitely preferred learning and talking about science to actually doing it. Consequently, the field is full of journalists who are exceptionally passionate about their chosen subject matter. They love biology (or chemistry or geology or whatever the case may be), and aspire to cultivate that same powerful fascination in others.

This is mostly a good thing. But sometimes the blanket desire to communicate to “the people” can be overwhelming. At this year’s ScienceOnline unconference, I attended a fantastic session called ‘Opening Doors: Science Communication for Those that Don’t Care/Don’t Like Science’ (co-led, incidentally, by MIT professor Tom Levenson). During the conversation, it quickly became clear that many of us shared the same desire to communicate with “the people,” and the same confusion over how to do it.

Check out more tweets in this Storify created by David Ng.

I also heard several people at the session compare writing about science and writing about football. For example, two attendees debated how broad an audience the NFL reached, and whether they shared our idealistic goal of getting the message out to everybody. Later, I hear another writer express concerns that he was tripping the line between journalist and activist; someone else pointed out that sports journalists never had to worry if they were going to be conflated with sports activists.

This was confusing to me. A science article and a football article are two totally different kettles of fish. Just I would never pick up a recap of a Cowboys-Giants game, there are people out there who would never read an update on the search for exoplanets. There are occasional pieces of media that transcend the divide, sure, but those tend to be exceptional cases, and often involve the recommendation of a source that the reader already relies on and trusts. And yet, many seemed to think that the solution to our audience problem was to combine a single kind of high-level content with masterful social media trickery, thus sneaking knowledge into the hands of every member of the unsuspecting public.

“Citizens have become an abstraction, something the press talks about but not to,” write Kovacs and Rosenstiel. Many of the writers at that SciO session were so ardent about communicating their science that they hadn’t considered too closely who they want to communicate it to. I am equally guilty. Whenever I work on a piece for my graduate seminar, I spend a lot of time thinking about the lay reader. But I never really stop to ask myself who exactly that lay reader is.

One audience member, Danielle N. Lee, was ahead of the curve on this problem. Lee is a biologist by day, and she writes about biology/ecology for minority audiences at Scientific American’s The Urban Scientist. She’s designated a particular sector of the public who she wants to communicate to, and customizes her work for them by, e.g., using hip-hop analogies. “Speak their language,” she said. “And if you can’t, don’t feel bad or obligated.”

I think, now more than ever, science writers need to heed this advice. We have far more control on the internet than we ever could in a newspaper or magazine. Anyone with a decent internet connection has the power to publicize their ideas, and to promote their work through social media to those who they suspect will be interested in it. Bloggers like Ta-Nehisi Coates openly cop to deleting deleterious comments on their posts in order to cultivate a particular atmosphere of discussion. YouTube vloggers like the Green brothers literally give their audience its own name.

With this control, we relinquish the claim to be all things to all people. One of lessons I took away from last week’s media diet exercise was that I rely on very specific sources for my daily news — blog networks rather than magazines, news trackers rather than print newspapers, reddit rather than Facebook. Even publications that might have once been described as belonging to the general audience now have their own defined demographic. (Last week my father forwarded me a USA TODAY article about a golfer who had been bitten by a black widow spider. Perfect example of something I would probably never read on my own finding its way to me.)

I’d like to see newsmakers embrace this freedom of choice. Think not only about what we’re saying, but who we’re saying it to. Accept that to say yes to one audience may mean saying no to another. Let news be a personal experience.

A Tribute to the Stars, with Star Pasties

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A grainy tape plays in the background. On the stage, a stunning brunette in a blue sequin dress mouths passionate words to a fedora-clad man. He has gone too far–he has found out her secret. She pulls out a gun–and pulls off her dress.

This is Film Strip!, the sexiest tribute to film across the decades. For two weeks only, Boston’s Rogue Burlesque and their guests grace the Oberon stage with this sexy, offbeat, and undeniably funny show. You know you are in for a good time when hostess Liz Fang opens by yelling, “This is a burlesque show… Get off the stage until your clothes are off!”

Film Strip! delivers on burlesque’s promise of sexy glamour: Lily Bourdeaux uses a knife to cut off her sheer black thigh-highs before donning a sequined floor-length black-and-white dress. Film Strip! is funny: the audience could not contain its laughter when Ms. Sassypants strips down from a four-legged sequined preying mantis costume, passionately consumes mad scientist Dan Prior, and emerges with his severed head dripping red-sequined blood. Film Strip! is geeky: Brandy Wine cautiously strips from a hobbit costume to a portrait shrine of Orlando Bloom in The Hobbit. The pieces have a deliciously irreverent attitude towards traditional sexual icons: in its homage to “Some Like it Hot,” Kitty Spanks plays a Marilyn Monroe who, increasingly frustrated with the props in her dressing room to blow her dress upward, decides to take everything off. A true celebration of the female body, Film Strip! features the pregnant Polly Surely in “Satan’s Little Helper.” The show also celebrates the male body: the men of Sirlesque have several numbers, the most memorable of which is the ever-playful “Presidential Undress.”

Film Strip! is what burlesque should be: a many-layered, playful celebration of art and sexuality. With only one week left to see it, buy your tickets now:
http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/film-strip

David’s Media Diet

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The following are stats derived from using RescueTime.

After tracking my media habits for the past week, what I found most striking is not the media that I consumed by what I didn’t consume. This is most striking in terms of format – almost no media was in formats that existed before the web. The one exception, was NPR which I listened to for 10 minutes on a car radio. The books, I read were in PDF format rather than paper. The videos I watched were seen online rather than on a television. If meetings and lectures count as Media they were the one traditional format that took up significant time.

I was surprised how little time was spent on news. I expected Google News to rank higher than it did. I now realize that I would simply glance at Google News a few times a day, never spending more than a few minutes there.

In terms of the Media where I do spend time, Gmail was by far the site I used the most, This was to be expected since I use gmail as a task manager through the ActiveInbox browser add-on. Thus the time spent on gmail includes task management activities in addition to traditional email.

In terms of applications, the gnome-terminal (Linux command shell) was where I spent the most time. During the past week, I spent considerable time accessing remote machines through ssh.

Shopping sites such as amazon.com and slickdeals.net also ranked highly. In the past, deal sites such as Slickdeals.net have been a time consuming and expensive addiction for me. Perhaps, because of my backgrounds in economics and security getting great bargain is immensely satisfying — even if it’s for something I don’t really need. Thus I’m relieved to have spent less than 2 hours shopping there.

 

Chart of sites:

Chart of Sites
Chart of categories


 

 

MC’s Media Diary

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Tracking media consumption is hard. We are constantly inundated with ads, TVs and music in the background, pictures, and other bits of media we may barely see. Sites with dynamic content, like Facebook and Twitter are particularly hard to track. The content is varied and there is no lasting record of content viewed. This is problematic because I get a significant portion of my news through Twitter. I could track every tweet I load, but I do not read every tweet I load. The same goes for articles on a webpage with ads or multiple types of media on the page. I might not read the ads or the comments, but there is no way to automatically tell. Gaze tracking on the page may be one way to solve this problem.

It is probably possible to track media consumption well with some elaborate scheme and the right software. I have some ideas of how to do this, but I mostly stuck to tracking sites I visited on my computer plus the more major offline media consumption experiences. I also focused on content I consumed because, while I did produce content, I did not track time spent consuming or creating different types of media. While I spent a significant amount of time creating content, the number of things I made is insignificant when compared to the number I consumed.

I manually categorized the few thousand individual pages I visited and some offline media experiences in the past week. The graphs and discussions of each graph are below.

The above graph shows how I consume media. As I was primarily tracking links, I naturally consume most of my media on my computer. I also use my phone to quickly look things up and read the news while in transit. If I was fully able to track my Twitter usage, my phone percentage would likely be higher.

At 0.5%, offline consumption is barely visible. Offline consumption includes paper books and handouts, classes, and lectures. Conversations, ads I see, music or TV programs in the background of a room, and other media I consume intentionally or accidentally would greatly increase my offline consumption. Unfortunately, I did not track all of those.

This graph highlights the limitations in my tracking method. That said, I do spend much of my time in front of my computer or phone visiting links. So what types of media do I consume?

Apparently I do a lot of searches. My searches category also includes searches on individual websites, but 33.2% of all pages I view is a lot. I did not track the content of my searches, but it probably is proportioned similarly to the other categories.

Another interesting finding is that I read more blogs than standard articles. I also view many school website pages as I check hours of food places, read assignments, upload school work, and check course registration.

There are a few things this tracks poorly. Books and TV and movies have small slices because I consumed relatively few of them. In some ways, the less time a particular type of content takes to consume, the more I view it. Thus, the most time consuming activities appear far less prominently than they should. For a different reason, social networks should have a bigger slice. Tweets do not take long to read, so I read a lot of them, but each tweet does not add a page view.

The graph above shows the type of content I consume. The categories are based on which areas viewed the most media about this week. After searches and social media, I consume the most media about free information. Free information is a category I created to include transparency, open access, leaking and disclosure, and other related areas. For most people, free info would probably not be a category. Instead, they might read a couple related articles a week in US and world news. These categories are just what worked for me.

Likewise, I am not sure there is ever a normal or average week in content or type of media I consume. Some people have discussed events, like the snow storm, that make their media consumption this week abnormal. I definitely looked at more weather pages than I generally do. That said, many weeks there is a story I search for many articles on and cross reference so I can understand the whole situation. This constant searching for many articles drastically and regularly distorts what type of content I read.

 

The Power Point Diet

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Media Diet

After monitoring my media consumption this past week, I came to a rather unsurprising conclusion: I spend a lot of time staring at Power Point presentations.

As a student, it’s no shocker that the largest portion of my media intake comes from lectures and presentations. This week included a lecture from John Sterman at Sloan and a presentation on the remediation of a former refinery in Baltimore, Maryland. My frequent exposure to big-screen learning might also explain why I find myself looking for shorter, smaller bursts of media on my walks home. It turns out that those between-class glances at Instagram, Twitter and Facebook add up. Even more pronounced was my social media usage while in “transit.” I happened to go out of town this weekend and happened to spend an embarrassing amount of time using social media, text and email on the flight and going to-and-from the hotel and my research site. Overall, I chose to represent my data set in four categories: MIT, Home, Transit and Field Work. A few reflections on each category:

MIT
I spend a lot of time here. This category marked the broadest range of uses with everything from online news to in-person presentations.

Home
I tend to do a lot of in-person interacting at school so I tend to catch up on my reading at home.

Transit
I typically bike to school but traveling with a studio team to Baltimore required a substantial amount of coordinating which we accomplished via text.

Field Work
My camera ran out of storage during a site visit for another course. I wound up working around things by taking photos via Instagram.

Media Diet

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I decided to approach some high level questions about my media diet. I tracked my activity in RescueTime and ManicTime and also took notes of what I read. My main points will focus on when I get my news diet, how it differs through the day, and what outside factors interfere with it. I organized my diet by how I might consume content differently at different times of day.

When do I read my news?
I wish Rescue Time could break down my activity by time of day.
Morning – I usually read the overall news and what has been happening in the past day. Mornings are either NPR time or Flipboard (twitter feed) time. One of them wakes me up.
Afternoon – during breaks in between work and meetings. I often read links that caught my eye from social networks or that people recommend during meetings
Evening – I have an end of the day catch up on what whether something significant is happening in the breaking news. I read international news, particularly about Romania. The last one is clearly triggered by my late night conversations I have with my dad about news that is local to him.

This makes me wonder how the context of the day affects how people consume news, and how different of a user we are at different times of day. Is there a way to customize the news experience to the different contexts and need that we might have at different time? Are there certain triggers that make us read particular type of news?

Where do I get my news content from?
Most of my reading comes from social network outlets. I look through my twitter feed daily. I chose to use Flipboard on my iPad which gives me a headline and a couple of paragraphs from an article. Every day I visit the main page of a mainstream media news outlet. I really enjoy using the iPad interface for doing that and I have a set of news apps installed that I check. When I don’t use Flipboard I listen to NPR on my iPad. The iPad is my main source of news consumption.

I am of course wondering what I am missing on by my selection of news sources and mode of consuming news. I wish there was an easy way to find out how different sources present the same topic, or what other articles would be of interest that I never get to read.

What kind of news articles do I read?
Over 50% or my read is technology related articles, strong professional bias. The rest cover sparsely topics of health and wellness, work space, design, international news.

I am still exploring how the different news producers we use can get users to engage with more diversity.

Who are my discussion partners about news
Mostly online through chat with friends, over dinner with friends. Attending a talk sparks at least 30 minutes of discussion around the information gained. My dad.

I think discussion partners are a great way to actively engage with content through discussion. Unfortunately very few of my reading (or headline browsing) results in discussion. I wonder how much of the news get disseminated though word of mouth and how that plays a role in the information processing process of a certain topic.

How long do I spend reading one article?
I captured a snapshot of two hours of browsing. On average the span of attention on each article can be seen below. The amount of continuous time I spent on one task is between a few seconds to 10 minutes. In a 60 minute session of deep dive into news I clicked on 10 articles on average. I didn’t finish reading them all.

I wonder how many articles I fully read and what am I missing by not finishing the reads? Is there a different way the same content can be delivered that would make me engage with it more easily? can we have different versions of the same article for a different context of the user, different time availability or attention level? How do users allocate their attention to navigating their news content. What keeps one engaged with a reading? how much information do we acquire from browsing headlines? Is there a better way to organize a news feed to help the user gain more from the content than they are currently?

Media Diet

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I’m a bit of a Twitter addict — I have the Twitter app on my phone and both Twitter and Tweetdeck on my laptop. For the most part, that’s where I consume the most media. For a week, I tried to keep track of all the links I clicked on and read on Twitter via my laptop and tweet about them at @MediaMemoir. Below is a chart showing the links that I tweeted about at the account.

This graph doesn’t show the types of media that I encountered from TV, articles I read on my phone or in print, or all the tweets I read (if I kept track of every tweet I read… I don’t even want to go there). For the most part, I don’t tend to spend much time clicking links and reading on my phone. However, most of my light media consumption probably comes from reading quick summaries and tweets via Twitter (which is not on this chart).

Most of my heavy media consumption (actually reading an article or watching a video vs. just reading <140 characters about it) happens in a few dense chunks during the day. These chunks are mostly determined by my schedule.