Last year in Israel, I went to a few protests that became quite violent. I filmed and took pictures with my phone – sometimes for reporting, sometime just to post on social media – but was always afraid that the people I was filming (police and right-wing thugs) will see me filming and try to snatch my phone.
That’s why I was very excited to learn about apps that allow journalists and citizen journalists to film with their phone and then send the film to Youtube or to their email automatically.
Some of the tools available are CopWatch by Darren Batista, which allows you to upload the video and sends an alert to Canadian group “Network for the Elimination of Police Violence”, and CA Justice by ACLU which uploads the videos to their website. My life here have been pretty peaceful so I didn’t get a chance to make use of the apps yet, but they are a very important step in allowing reporters and citizen journalists to document violence, from police or other sources.
This is important for two reasons: first, freedom of press has been deteriorating around the world for the past 10 years (according to the freedom of press report) and so tool that enables anyone to report more safely is essential. And as we’ve seen in the last year in the US, documentation of violence – mainly by police and military – is sometimes the only way to prove that problems like police targeting black men, really exists. The tools I mention are not perfect, but they are a start.
I’m a big fan of any tool that allows freelance journalists/citizen journalists to present their content in as polished of a way as you’d find on a mainstream news site.
That’s why I like Medium, which could be described as a blogging platform, but with more class and potential. It’s easy to use (easier than WP by far), allows you to embed photos and videos and aesthetically, it’s pleasing. (Lots of white space. White space is good.)
Medium is attractive if you only have the yen to say something every so often. It’s about individual pieces of content, not a surging sea of items.
The content you find here feels official, serious and credible. The White House posted the text of Obama’s last state of the union address on Medium first. Medium is where important people (Twitter engineer Leslie Miley) go to explain why they quit their job. There is real journalism here.
Medium also gives you just a little bit of metrics – enough to show you where you should promote your content. Here are some metrics on a story I posted a while back.
The site’s sleek look makes the content feel more reliable, so for independent writers who can’t find a home for a story – or just want to share something quickly but in a polished way, Medium is a good fit.
One of the greatest challenges for journalists, especially conflict journalists, is the validation of user-generated content. Was this picture really taken in Homs? Was it taken at the time my source alleges? Google image searches catch some more obvious reposts, but sometimes it’s too hard to tell. As a result, valuable media gets passed over, or it is used and later disproven.
This is a great idea in concept. But in practice is full of problems as even the authors go on to state (emphasis mine): “Unless sources are activists living in a dictatorship who must remain anonymous to protect their lives, people who are genuine witnesses to events are usually eager to talk.” So what are people to do when they are living under an oppressive regime (like Syria), with unreliable cellphone access?
Unfortunately this hardship usually translates to a dearth of publishable content, and, sadly, a dearth of media attention. News organizations fear a backlash if a public-made video or image they publish is later proven to be forged or repurposed. And the more dangerous or unstable an area is, the fewer Western journalists are going to be there. All this leaves areas most in need of attention ignored and left to fend for themselves.
A potential solution was developed in 2008, but in a corner of the Internet no one might expect. Bitcoin, the largely misunderstood cryptocurrency, has a fascinating, and impactful infrastructure, with implications for almost every industry. This supporting technology is the Blockchain.
Go ahead and watch the video, I’ll wait. And the rest of this post will make no sense without an understanding of Blockchain.
Tl;dr: (Too long; didn’t read for those wondering) Blockchain allows for decentralized record-keeping by all users on the blockchain. What’s even better, users do not need to be identified for the system to be effective and ironclad. This is how users on the Silk Road were able to buy and sell illicit goods without anyone knowing who anyone else was.
So now we have a method of community verification that need not be tied to a person’s identity. Next, we combine this method of verification with a way of establishing each user’s presence in the community, through a mesh network. Mesh networks allows Internet-enabled devices within a geographical area to share internet access without passing through a central hub (like traditional networks). Imagine logging on to a social networking app (like FireChat, used for communication during the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong) to communicate with fellow activists or resistance members. Upon logging on, you are verified as being physically present in a location, and your account is provided a certificate of authenticity (of sorts).
As you upload photos or videos to the app, this certificate follows those images and videos thanks to the Blockchain. (A company called Monegraph is doing something similar with copyright and art.) When you leave the mesh network, your certificate is revoked. If, later you tried to change metadata about images or videos, or add other content outside the network, the Blockchain ledgers wouldn’t match, and the changes would be rejected.
Decentralized/Community record-keeping is a game-changer for many areas of life. And it is only a matter of time before we see it shift the balance of power and attention. But where that power and attention shifts to, is largely dependent on the systems we build.
First, a confession: The tool I’m going to talk about doesn’t exist. Not yet. But it seems to have a legitimate shot at becoming a real thing. And if it does, it will almost certainly change the way I and many other science writers do our jobs.
It’s called Science Surveyor, and its developers describe it as “an algorithm-based method to help science journalists rapidly and effectively characterize the rich literature for any topic they might cover.” Basically, you give it a journal article, and it gives you context – whether the ideas presented are old or new, whether they support scientific consensus or challenge it, that kind of thing.
Here’s a prototype screenshot, lifted from Science Surveyor’s github site:
The screengrabs suggest that, at present, the context that Science Surveyor provides is relatively crude, based on the network concept of centrality. Still, that might be enough to help a reporter make a first guess about a paper’s potential impact. Or it might raise red flags on papers that sound impressive but promote discredited ideas. For journalists who cover science, that could mean less time wasted slogging through articles that turn out to be unimportant. (“Context on deadline,” the site’s tagline promises.)
Of course, it’s possible Science Surveyor will never see the light of day. A team of journalists and scientists at Stanford and Columbia University took up the project in 2014, but they haven’t yet announced a rollout date. (The project is funded by a “Magic Grant” from Columbia University’s Brown Institute.) Still, as a science journalist who’s wasted many an afternoon struggling through the thickets and weeds of the scientific literature, I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Recently, I learned that the NPR Visuals Team is building a new tool “for gathering, analyzing and distributing better analytics” about audience engagement. That tool – Carebot – is still in the development stage, with a prototype due out in a couple of months. The implications for creating “affecting stories, not clickbait,” however, make for an intriguing addition to the media landscape.
The Concept
NPR Visuals has been stewing on this issue for awhile now. In the words of their senior editor, Brian Boyer, NPR Visuals exists to “make people care.” But how would a newsroom determine that their audience cares? Carebot stems directly from this question.
Visual content is uniquely positioned to bring people to a difficult topic, or a news story far removed from their own lives. But the “care” concept could apply to any news piece.
Traditional metrics of journalistic success such as pageviews and unique hits have been gamed and exploited (think cat videos vs. a long-form investigative piece).
NPR Visuals has started analog explorations of how their audience engages with their content, and how they think about their user in the content design. Is it a matter of completion rate? Time spent per page? Calls to action?
They hope that Carebot will be a more immediate, comprehensive, and transferrable tool to assess the impact of news storytelling on the audience they want to reach.
Where They’re Going
With the help of a grant from the Knight Foundation, NPR Visuals is hoping to build a new way to count and calculate the numbers.
Carebot will pull data from multiple sources, including Chartbeat, Google Analytics, and social networking sites. It will focus on both engagement – likes, shares, etc. – as well as time spent with a story and stories finished.
The measurement output will rely on a formula – still TBD – that spits out a “care metric” for any given piece.
Potentially, 1,000,000 pageviews could be outpaced by a story with 1,000 views and 100 shares – depending on the calculation and weight of other metrics.
Carebot is likely to be built into a website – and be shared as open source programming – but isn’t likely to be an analytics dashboard. Boyer describes the need to get journalists’ (and their bosses’) attention, perhaps with a simple email or other notification on their stories’ success in making their readers care.
Why It Matters
Carebot will join a small host of other publications and organizations developing new ways to “emphasize caring over clicks.” But this isn’t just a navel-gazing exercise, or a renewed gnashing of the teeth over viral media. Carebot asks important questions about impact and success, financial support, and what we want from journalism.
Of course, NPR (with its sponsorship model) doesn’t have to worry about advertising money as much as the next guy. Yet with some evidence that advertisers want more specific metrics, too, Carebot could help bolster the importance of the less “clickworthy” – but more worthwhile – news stories.
For NPR Visuals, Carebot will “test an idea: that better analytics make for better journalism.”
Measuring audience engagement turns the industry back to the idea of user satisfaction, rather than the satisfaction of other stakeholders.
If caring is celebrated, will journalists be freed to do different work? Will that work be better? More meaningful? Edifying? Representative? Lofty questions, indeed, but Carebot could be a start to answering them.
What is FOLD? FOLD is an open publishing platform where users can find and create modular stories, i.e., articles where text is supported by multimedia and interactive cards. The platform was developed in 2015 in the MIT Center for Civic Media and has been growing organically, with hundreds of users in many countries and languages.
Features
Every story in FOLD can be built using two kind of cards:
The narrative cards are the anchoring narrative, they help you to communicate the message in a traditional way: Just text and hyperlinks. Imagine them like paragraphs.
The context cards are linked to words or sentences in the narrative cards, and display multimedia content (e.g. gifs, videos, audio, photographs) to have a better understanding of the central narrative without losing focus of it.
Users can take any contextual card of any story and use it to build their own articles; I hadn’t seen this interactivity with small multimedia pieces of information in other platforms. “We want to make it really easy to reuse pieces of a story, and also to trace back where they came from, so you can find related content easily,” said to me Alexis Hope, co-founder of FOLD.
As in other publishing sites, you can follow users, filter the stories, and create lists of favorites.
Right now the interactivity between users is pretty much limited. You can’t comment or annotate stories, nor send messages to the authors.
What makes Fold different? I see FOLD as the Ikea of the publishing platforms: It gives you the small pieces of information that you need to build your own object of knowledge. Oh, and as in Ikea, FOLD’s design is beautiful.
FOLD is one of the closest approaches I’ve known to a non-linear narrative. Even though it uses words as a nucleus, the design of the platform and the interactivity with the contextual cards allow a new approach to the text. As Matt Carroll said in a recent article about FOLD: “It’s a really clever idea that lets you add context on the side without impacting the flow of the story.”
The platform is used by students, scholars, journalists and scientists who are willing to share their knowledge with a general public. “Things that tell you how to do something, or how to understand something, that’s the type of content people is using the platform for”, says Alexis Hope, “We’re really trying to create a network of explainers.”
As the content must be in the platform, it can be hard to grow the user base. Should there be a way to embed the modular stories in other websites?
How to monetize the idea? Native advertising? Membership?
The current mobile version works, but not as good as in a desktop browser. Does FOLD need an app?
FOLD and the Future of News
Actual navigation map in FOLD
In this moment FOLD is a great tool for journalists and storytellers who want to add a layer of multimedia context to their work: It makes things easier to understand, and is easy to use. But in this section I want to suggest another possibility of FOLD.
I like the metaphor behind the platform’s name. When you’re using a desktop browser to read a story on FOLD, you can see a content map in the lower right corner of the screen. That map looks just like an unfolded polyhedron, like an origami piece ready to assemble: you just have to organize the cards, fold them, and then you will have a unique body of knowledge, a three-dimensional idea, something that you couldn’t imagine with the alphabet and the printing press.
Modular cards could build three dimensional ideas to explore in VR.
Continuing with the metaphor, you could adapt the unfolded ‘3D ideas’ (that is, the stories that we can publish in the current platform) to VR technologies. Every modular card would become a face of a three dimensional ‘body of information’ with which other users could interact.
We could inhabit an idea made of pieces of information.
FOLD’s concept opens new ways of imagining news and stories, and the story of the platform is just beginning.
Snapchat, the temporary media-sharing app, has quickly become commonplace among news outlets, both through the “Discover” feature and by posting daily stories, much like a typical snapchat user.
The “Discover” feature was released about a year ago, expanding the app beyond sharing photos and videos between personal networks of friends. “Discover” stories allow users to explore daily stories by publication outlets such as Vice, Mashable, National Geographic, Vox and most recently, WSJ. Snapchat Discover stories are structured as a slideshow which the user can swipe through. Usually, each panel is accompanied by a story, which the user can choose to scroll down to read and share with their friends (notably, with the normal drawing / emoji annotations that a user can do with any other snap they send).
What separates Snapchat Discover stories from other web-based posting is that in Snapchat, you can’t link to content anywhere else — the user is forced to consume the story within Snapchat without clicking on external links or enlarging photos. From my personal observations, there seems to be two camps of Snapchat publishing philosophies: one, use each slide for a separate story (like reading the headlines from a newspaper) or two, focus on a particular issue or moment and present different perspectives on that particular story. For example, WSJ tends to present stories in the first format while Vox takes the second approach, using slides to present infographics on a story or quotes from interviewees.
Lately, publishers have been taking to Snapchat to engage with users in a more typical Snapchat fashion by posting daily stories. Users can add publishers by username (for example, “npr”). This particular use of Snapchat lends itself to a more interactive experience — for example, NPR will often explicitly solicit feedback from users viewing a Snapchat story, and users can send photos, videos or text in response. For example, most recently, NPR posted to Snapchat about the Bernie Sanders / Hillary Clinton meme, asking if it was sexist and to reply by “snapping” back. In addition, reporters tend to appear in these stories in a very casual format and basically have conversations (albeit in 10-second segments) about a story that they’re reporting on at the moment.
As for the implications Snapchat has for the future of news and storytelling, it’s clear that Snapchat is a medium which encourages interactivity in a different medium than other forms of social media — not only among friends, but now between users and publications, which previously was a large barrier. Publishing daily “Discover” stories encourages publishers to be deliberate about using only a few slides and tailoring their content to millennials — an issue that is top of mind for publishers today.
Participatory interactive graphics(?) are visualizations that are designed to change around data from individual readers. These graphics use information solicited from the user or the user’s computer as a lens through which complex data or very general data is presented. This kind of interaction is increasingly important in storytelling.
Here are 3 types of stories I have come across that fall into this category.
1. Calculators and searchable interfaces – These searchable or adjustable interfaces allow users to glimpse the larger underlying system by answering each user’s targeted questions. Examples:“How The Internet* Talks” and “Is It Better to Rent or Buy?”
3. Geolocating Users – Using ip addresses to geolocate users and automatically alter the view and accompanying text of the visualization to be centered around a user’s location. This is used in navigating general and comprehensive datasets that cover the whole country but are only of interest to most readers as smaller slices. Example: “The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares”
I think these types of interaction are not only an important tool for storytelling online, but can affect larger patterns for reading online for several reasons.
1. They might be more readily shareable across social media because of how specific they are to the interest of a reader.
2. Commenting is problematic on many online articles. I think using this specific type of interaction can potentially serve as a filter for comment reading, and provide constructive directions for comment writing and discussion among readers.
3. Finally, this kind of interaction could serve as a dynamic filter for customizing out links from the article and effect recommendations.
There are discussions to be had on whether the data gathered from interacting with graphics should be used for purposes of catering content. I’m not sure yet how I feel about editorial decisions that might be increasingly challenged by the metrics of social media and how this addition contributes to the discussion. I would like to know more about how feedback is currently weighted in the newsroom. Ultimately, this interaction may result in more stories being force fit into a data-centric model that is less good than what we have now. There are also definitely issues with the quality of the data being gathered from this type of interaction, which is an interesting area of study once there is a large enough sample size.
I do believe experimenting with this type of input is ultimately worth it and could change the way we look at readers and frame select stories in a positive way. Actively using reader input is a important concept for storytelling. It is not new, but it is adoption within interactive graphics has presented very exciting recent use cases and it is a topic that I would like to explore further.
I do not come from a background of journalism, but rather one where journaling and voicing various realities is an urgency that lead myself and a lot of people I know into various forms of blogging, formal print, citizen-journalism, etc.
While I feel these forms of non-centric ventures of “telling the truth,” are crucial to the overall local/global narrative, their DIY “aesthetic” has opened much leeway to create fake and misleading content that is presented as truth-from-the-ground. I’m prompted by this example of a Vandalism in Brussels video to propose a possible tool for the newsroom. Before I get into that, the video’s story is similar to many videos that surface on online platforms that end up being debunked as inauthentic. There are two versions of the video, one ending with an “Allah Akbar” scream, and one without. It has been said that the “Allah Akbar” has been added to the video to further feed European Islamophobia. On social media platforms, this is hot stuff, and the “Allah Akbar” version has been viewed over 200,000 times.
With the speed of news and contemporary life, opinions are made on first reads/views without further investigation in the world of the mainstream. I speculate that not more than 10% of the above 200,000 views will rectify their impressions of Islam in Europe. Not a lot of people rectify their views on a lot of political issues on their own without the intervention of the media anyways.
In thinking of a potential tool that could change the newsroom, I would start by expanding the newsroom to include social media platforms as venues of uncurated content as well as traditional newsrooms. While there are a lot of differences, both are confronted with content they need to verify. What if there’s a tool that would automatically notify its viewer both in a media outlet office or in a newsfeed if the video they’re watching was edited or not. I’m not a coder, so I’m not sure how this could be done, but (1) I can draw an analogy with TrueCaller‘s spam alert. TrueCaller is a mobile application that crowdsources its users phonebooks to create a mega caller id system. It has an option to mark certain numbers as spam, and the entire TrueCaller community benefits from this information. Following this logic, this proposed tool could be a plug-in that is fed a binary “edited or not edited” tag to videos on the web by a media-watch crowdsource-operational team. This way, viewers do not rely on their contacts “sharing” a debunked video, but benefit from a global community working on that.
(2) In another presumably more complicated format, this tool could be developed by finding a way to scan a video for recorded natures. If there is a way to pin down whether the audio and the video were recorded together, or by the same device, ruling out doctored videos, then this could also be another way of going about it. In both cases, I see this as a plug-in in platforms where people already view videos as opposed to a specialized site that you need to go and verify videos, mainly due to fatigued audiences that won’t go the extra mile.
I’m a Lebanese architect, artist and writer. I am invested in creating a network narrative system where the writing of imagined fiction is coupled with a research and construction process that scripts it into reality — writing as architecture.
My work revolves around a borderless Arab World and has taken various forms as outlets such as film, video, interactive performance, public installation, journalism, erotic and children’s literature. My novel “The Perfumed Garden: An Autobiography of Another Arab World” will hopefully be published soon.
One of my previous projects that is most relevant to journalism is The Outpost, a magazine of possibilities in the Arab World. I co-founded the magazine with Ibrahim Nehme, its editor-in-chief, and was its creative director for the first two years. You can find some info on it here:
Photo courtesy http://istwitterwrong.tumblr.com/
