Posts tagged innovation

In mid-April, we went live with a half dozen articles which we call “stubs.” The idea here is to plant a flag in a story right away with a short post—a “stub”—and then build the article as the story develops over time, rather than just cranking out short, discrete posts every time something new breaks. One of our writers refers to this aptly as a “slow live blog.

This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code community

The results of Fast Company’s experiment with “stubs” — which allowed them to gradually create long-form journalism — pleasantly surprised the team when it brought a lot of traffic. Learn more about their strategy and check out snapshots of their site analytics from Chris Dannen. (via onaissues)

FJP: SBNation, the network of sports blog, rolled out a feature similar to this when Vox Media redesigned the entire ecosystem. This is how Jeff Clark of SBNation’s CelticsBlog described “Storystreams” when the redesign launched: 

This is a kind of post that has several updates within that post. It is a smarter way of handling big stories that have many updates (like trade deadline day and media day) rather than editing a single post or breaking it into several smaller posts.

And yes, I’m a Celtics junkie. — Michael

Chris Sopher, Media Innovation Project Manager at the Knight Foundation, discusses the current Open Gov challenge. Two days left to get your application in.

I caught up with Chris at SXSW. The Knight Foundation booth was right next door to ours. -- Peter

Books on the Train

Here’s an interesting library tech concept by students from the Miami Ad School. Lend library books to people who are riding the subway. Or, at least, the first 10 pages of them.

The idea is to use a technology called Near Field Communication that’s embedded in contemporary phones to swipe a bar code in a subway car to download a book sample. NFC is a low powered wireless communication system that allows devices to talk to and share information with each other.

Again, the idea is conceptual, but a fascinating innovation to introduce people to new books — and their local libraries — during the daily commute. When a person leaves the subway, they’re alerted to the nearest library branch that has the book so they can continue reading.

And it’s not as far-fetched as it might seem. The technology exists, and people are already shopping by cell phones and QR codes in South Korean subways.

A little fact checking moment on the above video though: public library use is increasing, not decreasing, according to a recent report from the Center for an Urban Future (PDF). Matter of fact, as the New York Times reports:

Over 40 million visits were paid to the New York, Brooklyn and Queens systems in the 2011 fiscal year, the center said, or more than the combined attendance at all the city’s professional sports games or major cultural institutions. The libraries circulated 69 million books and other materials and responded to 14.5 million reference questions.

But we’ll let that error slide. They are, after all, advertising — and not journalism — students.

Video: The Underground Subway, by Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez.

Innovation and Creativity in Large Companies

Mark Golin, Editorial Director of Digital for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment and Lifestyle Groups, discusses the culture of creativity in large companies and what can be done to better foster innovation.

In a tumultuous publishing climate, innovation often holds the key to success, he explains. But fostering innovation in a company as large as Time is difficult, especially due to its structure; essentially, it’s a family of brands in which the communication of ideas is tricky to facilitate across divisions. For this reason, one of Golin’s biggest focuses is to come up with best practices for fostering creativity.

But not all creativity is created equal. Golan’s a believer in practical creativity rather than creativity for creativity’s sake and is not alone.

Clark Strategic Communications CEO Dorie Clark, for example, highlights the difference between conceptual and theoretical creativity and how to foster each in an organization. Similarly, Jonah Lehrer (plagiarism scandal aside), explores different innovating techniques in the workplace in this interview with NPR.

In this video, Golin shares his thoughts on the culture of brainstorming in a large company, and how to efficiently navigate the boundary between testing out new ideas and coming up with ideal solutions.

Bonus: This TED Talk playlist on where good ideas come from.

Visit the theFJP.org to see more videos with Mark.

Calling all SF Lady Journos: Meet Lady Media Innovators Her Girl Friday, a Brooklyn based group dedicated to empowering and fostering community among women in journalism and nonfiction storytelling, is hosting a free event in SF on March 7. We like their mission and their work and have posted about it before.  The gap of women in media is big and according to today’s Al Jazeera op-ed, it’s critical to the planet. Some facts from the piece: Between January and November 2012, in a study of 37 newspapers from the New York Times to the Traverse City Record Eagle in Michigan, women were quoted in 20 percent of all stories about the election. According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 2012 Newsroom Census, 34 percent of employees in supervising positions in newsrooms were women, the same percentage as in 1999. In TV news, 39.8 percent of the workforce at all stations is women, compared to 32.7 percent of those working at all radio stations.  On a list leaked last week of 44 journalists who sit on the Pulitzer Prize nominating committee, 28 are men and 16 are women.  So, in an era of continued disparity combined with digital disruption and incredible amounts of innovation, HGF’s event features four inspiring woman innovators and the incredible work they’ve been doing. Details here.

Calling all SF Lady Journos: Meet Lady Media Innovators

Her Girl Friday, a Brooklyn based group dedicated to empowering and fostering community among women in journalism and nonfiction storytelling, is hosting a free event in SF on March 7. We like their mission and their work and have posted about it before. 

The gap of women in media is big and according to today’s Al Jazeera op-ed, it’s critical to the planet. Some facts from the piece:

  • Between January and November 2012, in a study of 37 newspapers from the New York Times to the Traverse City Record Eagle in Michigan, women were quoted in 20 percent of all stories about the election.
  • According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 2012 Newsroom Census, 34 percent of employees in supervising positions in newsrooms were women, the same percentage as in 1999.
  • In TV news, 39.8 percent of the workforce at all stations is women, compared to 32.7 percent of those working at all radio stations. 
  • On a list leaked last week of 44 journalists who sit on the Pulitzer Prize nominating committee, 28 are men and 16 are women. 

So, in an era of continued disparity combined with digital disruption and incredible amounts of innovation, HGF’s event features four inspiring woman innovators and the incredible work they’ve been doing. Details here.

There is no other exciting time to be in journalism, from a technology standpoint, than now. (Although the fear of layoffs does not sit well.). To witness newsrooms transition to mobile, social media and digital-first platforms, and be there on the frontlines of it all, is exactly where agents of change need to be. We are part of history. Not looking in from the outside. Not being critical of the news media 24-7, although I do this quite regularly. But in it. Making decisions that stick or fail. I get goose bumps just thinking about this.

Amy Zerba, amyzerba.com. Difference Between Tenure-Track Professor and a Journalist.

She just left her job teaching to join the Times. Sounds like she can justify that decision.

For people who’ve followed me on Twitter, they’ve gotten to know many of the people I tweet about as characters in a broader Arab Spring narrative. You see their ups and downs, the hopes fulfilled and their dreams dashed. But because it’s happening over twitter, you’re not experiencing these stories in the past tense. You’re experiencing them in the present – as present as you can get. And my characters are real people, whether they use their real names or are forced to use pseudonyms for their own safety.

Andy Carvin, interviewed by Jesse Hicks. The Verge. Tweeting the news: Andy Carvin test pilots Twitter journalism.

For those who don’t know much about NPR’s Andy Carvin, this is a good primer. For those who know who he is, you probably know that he has a book coming out too — about his time reporting the Arab Spring on Twitter.

Anthony De Rosa on API Virtue

In this video, we take advantage of Anthony De Rosa’s experience at Reuters to examine how larger news organizations struggle and hope to adapt to major shifts in the media industry.

Near the center of it at Reuters is De Rosa as Social Media Editor (and host at ReutersTV), where he helped figure out how API’s can be best used to distribute Reuters content. Here, he explains what APIs are and why they will play a more integral part of the News industry.

By consolidating content from both multiple sources and among differing mediums, APIs let organizations do more than just publish written pieces and slideshows. They allow them to make a more full use of the Internet.

For more of our videos with Anthony and others in the media industry, see TheFJP.org.

AP to Publish News on Restaurant Receipts Interesting, no? From now on, whenever you dine at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C., your receipt will contain the news you’ve missed over the course of the meal. From their press release: The printed updates have several advantages in this venue over the smartphone, providing access to the news without people becoming absorbed in their devices at the same time contributing to table conversation and interaction. Image: Press Release.

AP to Publish News on Restaurant Receipts

Interesting, no? From now on, whenever you dine at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C., your receipt will contain the news you’ve missed over the course of the meal.

From their press release:

The printed updates have several advantages in this venue over the smartphone, providing access to the news without people becoming absorbed in their devices at the same time contributing to table conversation and interaction.

Image: Press Release.

Anthony De Rosa on Social Curation

New at TheFJP.org:

In this video, Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa describes the new position of social curation in digital newsrooms. Citing examples like Andy Carvin’s work retweeting and verifying citizen uploaded information across the Arab Spring, De Rosa describes the job of covering social networks as a vital way to keep up with breaking events when you’re sitting halfway across the world.

Breaking news, for the most part, breaks on social media. But it’s not as easy as reading a wire — there have to be people to fact check, double check, and compile the best information from the millions of other uploads that may be misleading, incorrect, or otherwise irrelevant.

See other FJP videos with Anthony here, and be sure to explore TheFJP.org — our new home for video and other (awesome) things.

Even robots have biases.

Any decision process, whether human or algorithm, about what to include, exclude, or emphasize — processes of which Google News has many — has the potential to introduce bias. What’s interesting in terms of algorithms though is that the decision criteria available to the algorithm may appear innocuous while at the same time resulting in output that is perceived as biased.

Nick Diakopoulos, Nieman Lab. Understanding bias in computational news media.

Whether the cause is ideological or systematic, the outcome is, for now, the same: algorithms appear to be as biased as editors in their sorting of news. Click the link to read on, and see more about its author here.

For Students: a New Multimedia Storytelling Competition From the multimedia magazine the Atavist. Beginning January 1, 2013, students are invited to participate in the above competition by submitting a long-form, nonfiction story that isn’t just writing — the judges want to see photography, video, narration and illustrations. Whatever’s appropriate and fits into the Atavist’s editorial platform. There are openings for high school, college and grad students. Enter here, and good luck.

For Students: a New Multimedia Storytelling Competition

From the multimedia magazine the Atavist. Beginning January 1, 2013, students are invited to participate in the above competition by submitting a long-form, nonfiction story that isn’t just writing — the judges want to see photography, video, narration and illustrations. Whatever’s appropriate and fits into the Atavist’s editorial platform.

There are openings for high school, college and grad students. Enter here, and good luck.

New Journalism Startup Combines News, Comics Symbolia’s a new magazine that tells the news through illustrations. Sources are drawn, and quotes get their own speech balloons. Their first issue is available for free download now, covering the Zambian Psychadelic Rock, Iraqi Kurds, zoology in the Congo and California’s Salton Sea. They feel, in most cases, like longform reads. It’s really meant for iPads, though you can download a PDF version. Future issues will be priced at $1.99, and Symbolia plans to publish six a year. Android fans will have to wait, Symbolia people said today, but they’ll begin publishing Ebooks in the Android Marketplace.

New Journalism Startup Combines News, Comics

Symbolia’s a new magazine that tells the news through illustrations. Sources are drawn, and quotes get their own speech balloons.

Their first issue is available for free download now, covering the Zambian Psychadelic Rock, Iraqi Kurds, zoology in the Congo and California’s Salton Sea. They feel, in most cases, like longform reads.

It’s really meant for iPads, though you can download a PDF version. Future issues will be priced at $1.99, and Symbolia plans to publish six a year. Android fans will have to wait, Symbolia people said today, but they’ll begin publishing Ebooks in the Android Marketplace.

Syria Deeply, Beat Page of the Future It’s an incredible idea: one site, one beat. No front page. No sports, no business or finance, anywhere. It’s called Syria Deeply. It’s about 25% original content, written by veteran Middle East correspondent Lara Setrakian and friends. The rest is aggregated and includes interactives, maps, and contextual material aimed to catch people up on the story without pointing them off site. From FastCompany: From a taxonomy perspective, Syria Deeply is the opposite of most news sites. In a traditional news taxonomy, information is divided by broad topics, like World News. Each topic is divided into subsections, like the Middle East. Each subsection is then often divided into even smaller subsections, like Syria. Each section gets smaller and smaller. Topic pages live in obscure ghettos on many news websites: auto-aggregated and ugly dumping grounds for content that happens to be tagged with particular keywords. On Syria Deeply (designed by Brock Petrie and developed by Soumyadeep Paul and Arindam Biswas, who runs Collective Zen) the topic page is the homepage. Setrakian’s hope is that this site-wide focus on a single beat will allow for deeper, more thoughtful reporting. FJP: Looks extremely promising.

Syria Deeply, Beat Page of the Future

It’s an incredible idea: one site, one beat. No front page. No sports, no business or finance, anywhere. It’s called Syria Deeply.

It’s about 25% original content, written by veteran Middle East correspondent Lara Setrakian and friends. The rest is aggregated and includes interactives, maps, and contextual material aimed to catch people up on the story without pointing them off site.

From FastCompany:

From a taxonomy perspective, Syria Deeply is the opposite of most news sites. In a traditional news taxonomy, information is divided by broad topics, like World News. Each topic is divided into subsections, like the Middle East. Each subsection is then often divided into even smaller subsections, like Syria. Each section gets smaller and smaller. Topic pages live in obscure ghettos on many news websites: auto-aggregated and ugly dumping grounds for content that happens to be tagged with particular keywords.

On Syria Deeply (designed by Brock Petrie and developed by Soumyadeep Paul and Arindam Biswas, who runs Collective Zen) the topic page is the homepage. Setrakian’s hope is that this site-wide focus on a single beat will allow for deeper, more thoughtful reporting.

FJP: Looks extremely promising.