Twitter Moments

The internet has completely uprooted the foundations of the printing press. A material company is constrained by how many copies of a certain product it can produce cost effectively. The internet allows for the creation of unlimited copies for no cost at all. With the integration of the internet into people’s lives came the integration of social media into people’s lives. And, brilliantly, Facebook, social-media-gargantuan, has come to incorporate news into their platform, and thus again into people’s lives.
Initially Facebook was much less news based than it currently is. More and more people consult Facebook for their news. The percentage of people who use Facebook for news is up 16% from 2013. Now 63% of Facebook users consume news while on Facebook (http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/news-use-on-facebook-and-twitter-is-on-the-rise/). As Facebook redefines the consumption of news for the average person, other social media groups will likely gain traction as sources of news. When people become more comfortable with the idea of using their social media for news, I suspect Twitter’s “Moments” section will become quite popular. Twitter has a platform that is quick and casual, allowing users to use the mobile app for mere seconds at a time effectively. For better or worse, I see the current direction of news as becoming generally more casual. In order to support that idea, Twitter has a pretty solid news section. Under Moments users can choose between News, Sports, Entertainment, and Fun. Those are some pretty palatable divisions of information, really. Lots of people could probably choose at least three out of four of those sections to just be lumped together under “Fun.” Users can immediately engage in discussion on any topic by tweeting to the hashtag of any event. To open the news section, users touch one button, and then can swipe through different stories.
With such a low barrier of entry and access to immediate interaction and conversation about any given article, I see Twitter’s Moments section as a likely platform/tool to facilitate an ever-more-casual, more prompt news system.

I’m a chemical engineer-turned-science journalist, born and raised in the quiet little college town of Gainesville, Florida. I’m currently a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, on leave from Physics Today magazine, where I’ve written about everything from infant sand dunes to alien stardust. Before that, I was a postdoc at Caltech and studied at Northwestern University and the University of Florida.

I also have this pet project: A friend and I started HBSciU, a science news blog that spotlights work being done by black scientists and by scientists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. We think it’s a vastly underreported beat.

My biggest projects, however, are my three-month-old and two-year-old boys. If I’m not working, watching a movie, playing soccer, or trying out a new recipe in the kitchen, you can probably find me hanging out with them.

Hey all,

I’m Holly Haney, an undergraduate studying Comparative Media Studies. I’m interested in a number of things, but I think that it can largely be broken down into, first, the creation/study of different media and, second, the study of social systems and culture. I am especially interested in popular culture, hip hop culture, internet studies, and celebrities. These institutions tell us a huge amount about a large portion of our society and culture. Celebrities and other successful people involved in popular culture create intelligently sculpted characterizations of themselves that I find fascinating.

I create a lot of digital media (photographs, videos, illustrations, and writings), do journalism for the Boston Hassle, work as a radio engineer for WMBR, and just generally really like making things and talking to people.

I’m a super friendly person and I love to chat. If you ever want to talk with me, I’d love to talk with you.

http://www.coroflot.com/hhaney

https://www.flickr.com/photos/35932361@N06/

I’ve created users based on the sign-up sheet in class, so everyone should have received information about their WordPress accounts by now. You should also have received a welcome note to the email group. If you didn’t receive either of these please let me know after checking your spam folder.

We’re excited to kick off the first class WEDNESDAY FEB 3 at 1pm in E15-341.

See you there!

ICYMI: The Globe caught one of the gang outside the courthouse awaiting the big news.

Emergent.TV is an effort to help newsrooms develop coherent economic and editorial models for Over The Top Internet video news. Rather than simply replicating the live TV Cable news broadcasting structure on the Internet – which is the direction many newsrooms are heading in releasing their own subscription OTT channels – Emergent.TV presents a new way to think about producing, distributing, and selling Internet TV news.

Emergent.TV is a Long Tail Internet TV news model for a Black Swan world.

The Long Tail is both an economic and a cultural argument. It says that Internet distribution provides an “unlimited selection” of goods, which can cater to increasingly specific tastes. Internet aggregation and recommendation technologies – ranging from abstract clustering algorithms to curation over social networks, from Google and Flipboard to Facebook and Twitter – provide valuable connections between an “unlimited” supply and unique audience tastes. Authors like Chris Anderson argue that a more diverse culture will emerge over the Internet when compared to the mass broadcasting era. Rather than aggregating towards the mean, or middle ground demographic, you can reach diverse audiences with distinctive stories. Think of the rise of “time shifted” independent home video stores in the 80’s and 90’s being recreated – but this time add in the power to hold any title and reach any audience instantaneously with near-zero distribution costs.  This is Long Tail 101 – which may or may not be news to you.

However, The Long Tail is also a statistical theory, which may hold special relevance for newsrooms looking to keep up with the increasingly complex events of the 21st century. As  Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in The Black Swan, the most disruptive events exist outside of normal bell curve distributions and in a long “fat tail” power law distribution. A small highly connected event can be more impactful that a large, less connected one. This event could be a disruption in normal world affairs – 9/11, The Arab Spring or the bundling together of climate change effects and complex critical infrastructure systems. It could also mean the rise of new “Superstar” stories and cultural producers.

(Image: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, “Linked: The New Science of Networks”)

The difficulty lies in predicting these unlikely events or hits before the fact rather than after. According to Black Swan theory, the key factor is that the event is unexpected – highly random, difficult to predict, and not easily modeled by experts. It is emergent.

What does this mean for newsrooms looking to develop Internet TV channels?

Newsrooms have the ability to harness the power of long tail Internet economics to keep pace with Black Swan events. Rather than replicating a 24/7 news cycle and a mass broadcasting programing model targeted at reaching the “mean” audience in the middle of the bell curve, Internet TV newsrooms can focus their editorial and economic strategies on reaching a growing tail. This means producing differentiated news, providing a much wider array of stories that meet specialized audiences interests. Instead of spending limited resources reproducing the same mean demographic news story – see your latest Cable TV news swarm – Internet TV newsrooms can increasingly cover the unexpected tail of stories.

These Long Tail stories may then be aggregated and curated into flexible playlists on Internet TV news channels. While live news is immediately irrelevant once the news cycle moves on, Long Tail stories will have a  prolonged economic cycle and cultural relevance. Internet TV provides newsrooms an unparalleled ability to produce unique narrative pieces that will have a much longer archival afterlife, and which may also lead to unexpected hits.

Here is an example of a Long Tail playlist of Internet TV news videos on the subject of immigration, which may become unexpectedly relevent. https://vimeo.com/127974857

The project aims to be a tool that will ultimately democratize the process for any journalist to look into different data layers and generate data-grounded hypotheses.

Check out the preliminary proof of concept: http://web.media.mit.edu/~pernghwa/urban_data_watch/index.html

Audrey Cerdan and I worked on a best practices guide for incorporating animated GIFs in visual journalism. Check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/partnewsgifs