OJR front page archive for May 2010
Learning by doing: Seeking best practices for immersive journalism
May 28, 2010
Ernest Wilson, the dean of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right into the section and visit a garden? This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we are calling at Annenberg “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilizes gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. As a senior research fellow, I am prototyping immersive journalism stories, hoping to discover and create best practices for a burgeoning filed that can capture audiences increasingly accustomed to experiencing digital worlds.The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the audience to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The pieces can be built in online virtual worlds, such as Second Life, or produced using a head-tracked head-mounted display system, or HMD. An HMD is a lightweight helmet that has screens covering the eyes and tracks head movement so ensure digital imagery on the screens stays in perspective to create a sensation of having a virtual body in a virtual location. Immersive journalism can also be constructed in a Cave, which uses full body-tracking technologies in a small room so that individuals can move their bodies around the space.
Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative. For example, video triggers at key points in the virtual landscape to remind a participant that the computer generated environment is grounded in the physical world. Scripted events that create a first person interaction with the reportage can also help create a feeling of “being there.” Also, participants can query or interact with the elements around them to learn more about the details or context of the news story.
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The Washington Post bets its brand on Circus Maximus II
May 26, 2010
Washingtonpost.com's new Post Politics section looked like a smart move. Create a special section that rides deep in the curl of the wave of Washington politics. But is Post Politics actually hurting rather than helping its brand?The Post's formidable brand isn't politics alone, but, to resort to an overused phrase that once had real meaning – the "intersection of policy and politics."
The Post brand was created in the mid-1960s, when its new managing editor (and later executive editor), Ben Bradlee, transformed the Post's pokey, provincial Washington staff into an agile, probing team of correspondents that effortlessly toggled between policy and politics, often in the same article. Propelling this transformation were the big ideas of the 1960s: Cold-War strategizing, the civil rights revolution, the persistence of poverty in postwar America, renewing hollowed-out cities, landing a man on the Moon – just for starters.
It didn't last forever. As big ideas shrank in size after the 1960s, the Post's politics/policy brand lost some of its momentum and relevance. The vacuum in ideas in Washington was gradually but relentlessly filled by politics. The capital became Circus Maximus II, whose broad oval extended from Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street NW. The increasingly electronic, short-attention-span media was delighted by the circus, because it was less expensive to cover and most of it could be presented as heart-pumping horse races, with a sprinkling of sassy asides from the regulars in the grandstand and clubhouse.
On cable TV, whose growing popularity paralleled the triumph of politics, deep reporting was replaced by sound-bitten punditry, most of it supplied by consultants to the money-oiled Democratic and Republican campaign machines. (Two honorable exceptions to the cable circus are The Rachel Maddow Show and The Joe Scarborough Show, both of which try to negotiate that intersection of policy and politics.) To its credit, the Post clung at least to the spirit of the Bradlee policy/politics manual, and in sometimes path-breaking ways. The Post brand was diminished, but it still had value that could be weighed on a scale.
Now, sadly, Post Politics looks like a move to de-emphasize the Post's honorable legacy and restructure its Washington coverage according to Circus Maximus II.
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How Facebook's (flawed) privacy settings can help your reporting
May 20, 2010
Get past the awkward and dark predetermined searches like "I hate my boss," "I lost my virginity" and "I'm not a racist but" … and look at what youropenbook.org presents to us as journalists.While the 105 million+ people on Twitter know their tweets are default set to public, they are still a fraction of Facebook's 400 million+ users that post T.M.I. they'd only share with their closest 300 friends.
Facebook gives you a false sense of private… but by now you should know better.
The walls around the Facebook garden have crumbled because of the company's seriously flawed privacy settings.
And while as a user you should be freaked out and proactive about your personal settings (and more conscious of what you are posting!), as a journalist this is presents an incredible, unfiltered opportunity to access your community on a diversity of topics.
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Mapping technology provides journalists a new medium for storytelling online
May 18, 2010
[Editor's note: For the latest on this week's KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, visit knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog.]Cartography is undergoing a renaissance that is opening new opportunities for journalists. For example, the Los Angeles Times' successfully updates and moves the police blotter onto the Web by using Google maps to pinpoint homicides. However, mapping technologies offer even more robust data mining possibilities.
Hypercities, a mapping project out of UCLA, connects time and geographical spaces. The site allows users to put historical layers on to maps, such as overlaying John Snow's nineteenth century work tracing the cholera epidemic on to a map of present-day London. A much more impressive undertaking on Hypercities was created by Xarene Eskandar, a graduate student at UCLA. She consolidated content on the Iranian election to create a geo-located reportage of more than 800 YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Flickr photographs, and other forms of documentation. Hypercities says that, "The result is the largest, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and sometimes even minute-by-minute web documentation of the election protests in Iran."
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Second KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp begins this weekend
May 14, 2010
This weekend, 20 aspiring journalist/entrepreneurs will arrive in Los Angeles for the second News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. OJR is a co-sponsor of the event, which is presented by the Knight Digital Media Center (publisher of OJR) in cooperation with the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC Marshall School of Business.The camp starts Sunday afternoon and runs through Friday morning. I'd like to invite you to follow the action through Twitter - we'll again be using the hash tag #uscnewsbiz. The events themselves will not be webcast, as the participants will be discussing their business ideas and concepts and we'd like to afford them a bit of privacy as they develop those. But summaries of the various talks and discussions will appear over the next week or two here on OJR, as well as on the KDMC website. I hope that you'll follow along.
Even though the physical event begins this Sunday, participants have been working up the camp for the past several weeks. Tom O'Malia, Director Emeritus of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School, has put together an online instructional course for the participants, to help them begin to learn some of the business concepts behind what they'll be doing as the develop their online news initiatives.
Changing attitudes is key. Too many journalists fail as publishers because they can't stop thinking and acting solely as reporters or editors - to stop thinking as employees and start thinking as business owners. Once you make that mental change, though, the next step is to cultivate a habit of lifelong learning and training, to develop the full range of skills that you will need to build a community of readers and customers, to cover that community, and to secure the income that you will need to make your business sustainable over a long term.
Those are the topics that we'll be covering, in person, at the camp next week. We've brought some great speakers and instructors to the event, including Susan Mernit, Lisa Williams, Tracy Record, Ben Ilfeld, Tom Davidson and more. We're also bringing back two of our alumni, Rita Hibbard and Bargain Babe Julia Scott, who will share their journey from last year's camp to their current work.
As I said in my introduction to last year's camp, we need to pry journalists from the culture of failure that's evolved around the news business. Opportunities abound in the information business. So, please, follow us on Twitter during the event and on the websites after... and join us on this journey.
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The next step in advertising: Local media as merchants?
May 11, 2010
If there's one thing we've learned from the Internet it is that if middlemen don't add enough value, their days are numbered.Local media companies may not have thought of themselves as middlemen—but that's what they have been for advertisers. When I used to buy advertising a decade or so ago, I felt it was my job to do what I could to get the media provider out of the middle between my brand and the customers we desired. For example, we did a lot to drive a direct relationship, including encouraging them to register with us so we could communicate with them directly later through e-mail. If we were doing it today, we'd add Facebook and Twitter into the mix.
Back then, there was more than enough ad revenue for the local media company to sustain their business—so much profit, in fact, that some companies got complacent. Just as railroad companies should have realized they were in the transportation business rather than the railroad business (and thus they missed the opportunity to get into the auto or air transportation business), media companies should recognize their business purpose is to connect their audience with products and services the audience desires. Without that business purpose, they can't fulfill their editorial mission.
The traditional mission of a media business is to collect a loyal audience with high-quality information, and let the advertisers worry about how to sell stuff. The media companies sold the audience, not product or services.
Retailers historically aggregated consumers for product makers—for example, giving Proctor & Gamble a way to sell to people in Poughkeepsie. But many retailers didn't add a lot of value beyond offering consumers product selection and price. Retailers such as Best Buy have realized that and have started to add other value to the experience (e.g., the Geek Squad). Meanwhile, one of the retailers' biggest costs has been advertising—circulars, broadcast advertising or something else.
Today, media companies on the Web aggregate consumers around specific interests and product niches (technology, cooking, travel, music, movies, sports, finance) much more efficiently. I believe today's media companies will need to get directly involved in commerce to ensure a sustainable business model. The Times (UK) and Burda (Germany) are both reported to be realizing a substantial portion of their profits from direct commerce enabled from their websites, selling third-party travel packages and other goods and services. Local media companies such as the Washington Post are either partnering with group-buying sites such as LivingSocial or rolling out their private label competition to Groupon and LivingSocial.
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Is it time for news websites to stop using Flash?
May 7, 2010
Like many tech-geek online journalists, I've been spending more time with my iPhone in recent months. I use the phone's Web browser to update my various sites from wherever I am on the road, or even around the house.And I'm not the only person using Apple's mobile devices who's reading my various websites. The percentage of iPhone, iPod and iPad users reading my sites now stands just a hair under five percent, but it's growing swiftly - up from just over one percent at the beginning of 2010.
So it's as both a consumer and a publisher that I've been following the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe over the latter's Flash technology. Journalism educators should be watching this conflict, too, as they need to be making decisions today about what technology their students will need to be able to use in 2011 and years ahead. Today, I'm offering a collection of links for OJR readers who want to get up to speed on this controversy.
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The 4 parts of an optimized online news site
May 4, 2010
The Internet provided journalists a fresh opportunity to create new publishing tools and systems to better serve their audience and communities than what traditional print and broadcast methods had provided. But most news organizations failed to make substantial changes in their production process to take advantage of this opportunity.Sure, many newspapers and a few broadcast stations played around at the edges of innovation. But over the years most of those innovators have left the newspaper and broadcast industries, and are now at work at start-ups or other online firms. That's why I've pretty much given up trying to persuade current newspaper managers how better to publish online. So many of the ones I've met are more concerned with forcing their old pricing models and publishing practices onto the online market than serving the market as it now exists.
So, instead, I will direct my comments today at those who are leaving the newspaper industry, in the hope that they won't make all the same mistakes their former colleagues did.
Don't mistake the current practices of your publishing medium for the best practices of journalism. Don't limit what you can do to what you have done. Ultimately, those are the reasons why I urged journalists and educators two weeks ago to shift their focus from AP Style to search engine optimization. It's not that AP Style's a bad thing for aspiring journalists to learn. Far from it, AP Style continues to offer some excellent advice on writing, as well as a connection with the rich heritage of print journalism. But learning SEO is essential to building an audience in today's competitive online publishing market, more necessary for students than learning AP Style.
But on-page SEO is just a small part of what online publishers must do to fully optimize their websites to attract, retain and expand an audience. Site-wide online optimization prepares your website to offer the information potential audience members seek, within the context of a community in which they'll feel welcomed, empowered and rewarded for participating.
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