Our group used this exercise to discuss how we consume news on our phones, what kind of mood we are in when we read news on our phones, and what we do before and afterward. One of the surprising takeaways is that many of us check our phones for news when we are bored or waiting for something… in other words, often in a negative state of mind. As an antidote, we thought that more humorous short stories might be in order!

What follows are the raw, unedited notes I took during our discussion….

1. Method of attraction – how does the form attract and sustain attention in an attention scarce world? Last minute updating. Push notifications. Convenient. Newness.

2. How did you find this news? Did you subscribe, link from a friend, turn on the TV, etc Subscription. Sharing. Feedly. Pocket. Passive. You grab your phone because you’re bored, and it pops out.

3. Did you have to choose it (by searching, clicking)? Or did it find you (like radio, push notification)? Often you receive it passively through push.

4. When do you experience news in this way (time of day, during what types of activities)? What were you doing immediately before and immediately after experiencing the news in this way? First thing in the morning. Smartphone as alarm clock. And when you’re waiting. Before and after, you are likely doing something completely non-news related. Or you’re on your email.

5. Are you doing other things while experiencing the news in this way? Maybe lying in bed or walking down the street.

6. Who else was experiencing the same news? Was it co-present, remote, asynchronous Mostly individual. There are some Facebook links that you might follow to news but these are the minority.

7. How did you feel while experiencing the news like this? e.g. Intellectually stimulated, guilty pleasure, obligated to read it, riveted until the end, interrupted but kept coming back, bored, occasionally annoyed, took you out of everyday life, etc. Bored. Distracted. Guilty for not clicking on all of the follow-through links!

8. Did you “do anything” based on the news – for example, share it, talk about it with someone, log it somewhere, remember it later, cite it? Share it. Tweet it. Save it to pocket.

1. What kinds of values are embedded in this news experience? Values: quick and dirty

2. What is this experience’s “theory of the user”? Who do they imagine you are? Does the experience also have a “theory of change”? Theory of user: limited time, limited attention Value: using time efficiently. Always staying connected and up to date. Efficiency. Theory of change: informing people. But not necessarily giving them time to take action.

3. What is this experience’s end goal? Virality & eyeballs? Deep listening? Exposé for action? End goal: eyeballs. Entertainment. Get subscriptions. Get user data.

4. How are you empowered through this experience? Disempowered? Disempowering because people read headlines only. Counterargument: Can also be empowering… If something big happens, you can get on your phone right away and take action and get up to date.

5. What kinds of stories is this method good for? bad for? underutilized for? Good for: breaking news stories. Short stories. Sports news. Segmentation. Bad for: long stories. Historica analysis. Non-urgent stories.  Infographic. Underutilized for: advocacy stories

6. What other form could you mash up with this for to create a new product that delivers the news?

Split screen on the mobile phone. Shopping while doing that.

Or combine humor with short phone stories. For more appealing and mood improving content

Combine short radio story with a mobile news story. So you can listen while you are walking. Like a short news podcast.

Our group decided to do a write-in candidate and explore the experience of consuming news on Twitter. Since Twitter is so formless (or multi-formed), we first talked about how we typically access Twitter and what we use it for. There were four people in our group, and half of us primarily went to Twitter through laptops, and the other half leaned more to access via cell phone. Some used Hootsuite, some used Tweetdeck, and some used Twitter’s home page.

Then there’s the question is what is “news” on a Tweet. In some cases, the content of a news story fits within the 140 characters of a Tweet itself. More frequently, though, the Tweet is a link to a news story along with some comment about it by the person Tweeting. In that way, reading news on Twitter is like entering a story via the comment section of an article.

All of us follow both individual reporters we like plus the institutional feeds of news organizations (like @nytimes). None of us read all of the Tweets by the people we follow. Instead, we occasionally look at the flow of info into our personal Twitter accounts as if looking out a window.

Here were our brief answers to some questions posed on the assignment:

1. What kinds of values are embedded in this news experience?
Twitter favors “efficiency” of language, conversational, and humor
Twitter’s new Web design (pictured below), released this week, seems designed to attract more general users – to make Twitter look more like Facebook, and therefore more familiar.

2. What is this experience’s “theory of the user”? Who do they imagine you are? Does the experience also have a “theory of change”?
Twitter seems to assume users want to be part of a community, want to do networking or want to be part of a conversation (or all of the above).

3. What is this experience’s end goal? Virality & eyeballs? Deep listening? Exposé for action?
Social sharing. instant communication, breaking news

4. How are you empowered through this experience? Disempowered?
The barrier to entry is low, so it appears to create a more casual, level playing field. It’s possible for anyone to address public Tweets to anyone, no matter how famous. Sure, that celebrity probably won’t read the Tweet, but the system makes users feel empowered.

5. What kinds of stories is this method good for? bad for? underutilized for?
conversation starters

6. What form could you mash up with this to make new product for news?
Twitter wants to be the second screen
the global backchannel

“Cna yuo raed tihs?”
Dyslexia and how its tackled in the Romanian education system.

Last summer, the magazine I edit published the story above, a long and in-depth piece looking at what happens with dyslexic children in Romanian schools. We believe that getting people to read and pay attention to a story tackling such a huge topic requires that we go deep inside the lives of individuals through which we navigate the landscape. (The story of one can stand in for the story of many).

The goal of this is to create empathy. The danger, often, – as Rowan Williams said in a lecture on empathy at Harvard – is that focusing narrowly on one person (especially in pieces about social issues) you only trigger the emotional response, which leads people to take action that takes care of their immediate discomfort, but doesn’t always trigger the cognitive response, which can generate larger-scale solutions. (This research on the moral molecule, empathy, and donations is an illuminating. // Williams also wrote a more convoluted and calm version of the Dobelli piece.)

If we accept the premise that journalism should help find ways for people to get involved, the challenge – both of the journalism itself, as well as of any way of involving the public – is to balance the emotional response and the cognitive response.

Let me go quickly through what we tried in both the journalism and the follow-up, and then see what we could have done more of/better.

The story. We had one character, Robert, who lives in a small town with his working class family. He was diagnosed late, the parents though he was lazy, the school didn’t offer any remedial classes. All in all, he somehow made it to VII-th grade with little to no progress. We also had a contrasting character, Ioana, who lived in the capital, had a wealthier family, was diagnosed early by good psychologists, her parents moved her into a private school, and paid for speech classes. She was the same age as Robert, and flourishing.

We didn’t want to leave it there, and we also looked into the systems: what made one school work, and the other not. We looked at the psychologists and therapists and found that schools in Romania are understaffed – a therapists would have to evaluate an average of 45 kids/day for 5 minutes each to get through all. We also looked at NGOs and associations involved in this space, and learned that their funding had dried up (they had done good work publishing special manuals, and training teachers). We also looked at the law and saw that it actually said everything it should – it was not implemented because it required both material resources, as well as more involvement from families.

This seemed like a complicated, but interesting set of conclusions. The law is good, but there are no resources. Some schools do good, but families need to learn about them.

It seemed like there was an entire universe of stakeholders that could all do a better job: kids, parents, teachers, administrators, lawmakers, doctors / therapists, NGOs.

The follow-up. We didn’t have a systematic approach to involve readers – it wasn’t something we had done before. We did publish it on our website immediately (which we don’t do), we gave out the contact details of the reporter (which we also don’t often do), and we did encourage people to reach out if they had ideas of how to help. This is how we got a few people reaching out to contact Robert’s family, and somebody donated an iPad, which Robert dreamed of.

The bigger thing we did is an event, where we tried to facilitate the interaction between some of our stories, and our readers. At the event, the reporter laid out the issues, and also presented a bulleted list of the needs of some of the relevant NGOs in the field. Unfortunately, most of the needs were in the realm of fundraising, and I don’t know exactly if something came out of it.

Looking back, here are some other things we could have done better to increase the potential of getting people involved. (I’m still working on these kinds of ideas, as it is a priority for us in the next year or so).

The story. Should have definitely used some of the tools and processes discussed in class:

• the way the system works could have been much clearer explained in infographics. The visual representation would have spotlighted more clearly where the system breaks;
• we could have created interactive elements that attempted to put the reader in the experience of a dyslexic kid – reading texts, writing texts etc.
• we could have used videos;
• in the style of solution/constructive journalism we could have more clearly did sidebars/breakouts on how various situations have been handled, and/or what best practices are around the world;

The follow-up. This is the more difficult part. The advocacy, if this is the word, is not (necessarily) the problem. It’s tougher to decide how you use resources, and whether you need to take over the lives/action of others (doctors/teachers/parents). That being said:

• we could have pointed to groups/ways to contact relevant stakeholders;
• certainly we could have pointed to the more traditional petitions/donations opportunities.
• we could have brought together all relevant stakeholders for a series of meetings, and moderate a conversation, and offer the results to the public. The journalist as a facilitator of dialogue seems an important role in a culture where stakeholders don’t read, take action (as it still happens in Western media).

With the shift toward “view from somewhere” journalism, we are probably going to see more activist-style stories permeate the news pages. So how do you engage readers who might want to do something about what they are reading?

Rather than designing a widget, I think the way to get readers talking and acting is to simply do a better job of helping them find content they might be interested in and that might provide ammunition for causes they already hold dear.

As we discussed in early classes, the media do a poor job of matching readers with content. In my experience, beyond simple algorithms at the news sites I wrote for, it was typically up to me and online editors to identify communities that would be interested in a new story and target them by emailing a link, tweeting at them with appropriate hashtags, or encouraging sources to share the story. This was time consuming and we weren’t always aware of the key players and interest groups on the subject—especially globally—or we didn’t have time to find their contact information.

This assignment made me wonder whether there is a systematic way to match journalists who write about particular causes to appropriate online communities, newsletters, interest groups, policymakers, discussion boards, Facebook pages, et cetera, so that they can better target their stories and mobilize people for action.

For example, I imagine a website for journalists that allows them to search key words related to a story, perhaps narrowing by geographic region. Let’s say I am writing about the need for transparency in clinical trials. I enter the words “transparency” and “clinical trials” and the website spits out contacts and Twitter handles for advocates of the AllTrials campaign, other journalists, health professionals, politicians, researchers, and activists who already write or talk about clinical trials transparency, and Facebook or other social pages related to the issue. It would be even better if the journalist could enter the entire text of her story, and the website could return all the appropriate related social content and contact information (ie., Twitter handles, Facebook pages, hashtags, etc.) so that the journalist could save time searching. I think this kind of resource would help journalists and editors better match their content with eager readers who are likely to care about and act upon a given story.

I learned a little Javascript and made a slider of possible actions. Here’s the demo.