Posts tagged innovation

Anthony De Rosa: Why Newsrooms Should Poach Tech and Startup Talent

Anthony De Rosa is Reuters’ Social Media Editor, where he’s also a columnist and host at ReutersTV. We sat down with him to discuss where the tech and news communities meet and, increasingly, overlap.

Being that the news industry has more than a few business problems these days, Anthony suggests hiring outside help. By choosing Craigslist, Groupon and Facebook as examples of places from which to steal employees, De Rosa makes a solid point: go where the success is, and learn from the people that have done smart things in the more turbulent and burgeoning media landscapes.

Anthony also discusses what news life is like at Reuters, which we’ll dive into in more detail over the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

And for more FJP videos, see our new site, theFJP.org.

The Making of ProPublica’s Pipeline Safety Feature Here’s a great example of data and journalism love. The above link will take you to Lena Greoger’s first hand account of how she’s used a dataset to compliment her reporting. Lena made ProPublica’s Pipeline Explainer, which makes sense of 26 years worth of records on pipeline-related accidents — explosions, leaks, fires, and spills. From the data set, which gave her the dates, cost, deaths and locations of the incidents, Lena created an interactive map so readers can find the incidents closest to their homes.

The Making of ProPublica’s Pipeline Safety Feature

Here’s a great example of data and journalism love.

The above link will take you to Lena Greoger’s first hand account of how she’s used a dataset to compliment her reporting. Lena made ProPublica’s Pipeline Explainer, which makes sense of 26 years worth of records on pipeline-related accidents — explosions, leaks, fires, and spills. From the data set, which gave her the dates, cost, deaths and locations of the incidents, Lena created an interactive map so readers can find the incidents closest to their homes.

MOOCs condense and fracture course material and present it in the pithiest, shallowest form. They lack improvisation, serendipity, and familiarity. They pander to the broadest possible audience because in the MOOC economy—such as it is—enrollment is currency and quality is measured by the number of people who have checked in without subtracting the number who check out.

That’s not to say that MOOCs could not improve greatly, as I trust they will. But the unfounded hyperbole surrounding MOOCs ignores the real outstanding work professors in all fields have been doing integrating digital and multimedia tools into their courses and the outstanding work being done with online courses that have reasonable, controlled enrollments.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Cato Unbound. A New Era of Unfound Hyperbole.

By MOOCs he means the massive open online courses like those offered through Coursera, Udacity, University of the People, etc. — courses that could potentially upset the accreditation system of university education. But don’t take the above quote out of context. Vaidhyanathan doesn’t mean to write that MOOCs are bad or harmful. He writes that the excitement surrounding them may limit their scope.

MOOCs, besides cheapening reducing the cost of education, can be used to do what university courses cannot — reach students outside of the traditional academic world.

Take Clay Shirky’s post on MOOCs from last week:

MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.

YouTube Wins News Innovation Award

Via VentureBeat:

YouTube won a News Innovation Award from the International Center for Journalists last night. Ironically, that’s just a day before the Israeli army used the service, along with Twitter and its own blog, to almost livecast the assassination of a Hamas leader.

YouTube has become a massive news destination, YouTube chief executive Salar Kamangar said in his acceptance speech, with 7000 hours of news-related footage uploaded every single day. Fully a third of searches on YouTube are news-related, and after the March earthquake in Japan this year, the top 20 YouTube videos of the disaster were watched almost 100 million times.

Mitchell Stephens - Rethinking Journalism Education

In this video, NYU Professor Mitchell Stephens tells us what’s wrong with journalism education and how his school and others around the country are fixing it.

Historically, J-School has been unimaginative and rote, but it shouldn’t be (and increasingly isn’t) that way anymore, Mitchell says. Like the experiences of people coming up in other professional fields, J-School students today study the tradition of great journalism, work with an emphasis on experimentation and problem solving, and are encouraged to focus on what interests them most.

See more videos with Professor Stephens here and, for those of us who want to think more about j-school — a video from our talk with CUNY Professor Chris Anderson.

Video Store Psychology In hindsight it’s obvious that LPs were better than eight-tracks, and that CDs and their walkmans/discmans/what-have-you-mans wouldn’t survive the iPod age. And don’t forget tapes — tapes had no chance. But what’s more psychologically interesting is the cult of the LP — an obsolete disc, useless without its heavy player. Decades after it was pushed aside by technology and business, there are still people who will buy, say, a Postal Service album on vinyl. Which leads me to my only point today — it’s bloody interesting to see where technologically obsolete, unprofitable items and businesses go after they’ve been swept aside Yesterday, Atlantic Cities covered the strange fate of the humble, quirky movie rental store. One quote, from a store owner named David Hawkins, catches my eye: “We’re the new barbershop,” he says. “There are fewer places these days just to hang out. Cafes are no longer as social, and if you don’t go to bars there are so few new social gatherings popping up. I worry that if we let all of video stores close, our neighborhoods will be a lot less interesting.” Something like this will happen somewhere in journalism, sometime after we’ve moved  further in the direction of tablets and mobile. Maybe we’ll dress like our grandparents, order black coffee in a diner and savor the crackle of an old newspaper. Maybe we will read the news in groups and berate the daily me-ness of our devices. Or we may have to become armchair historians, because the newspapers we will have found by then will be among the last to have ever been printed, sometime around five years from now (my prediction.) - Blake

Video Store Psychology

In hindsight it’s obvious that LPs were better than eight-tracks, and that CDs and their walkmans/discmans/what-have-you-mans wouldn’t survive the iPod age. And don’t forget tapes — tapes had no chance.

But what’s more psychologically interesting is the cult of the LP — an obsolete disc, useless without its heavy player. Decades after it was pushed aside by technology and business, there are still people who will buy, say, a Postal Service album on vinyl. Which leads me to my only point today — it’s bloody interesting to see where technologically obsolete, unprofitable items and businesses go after they’ve been swept aside

Yesterday, Atlantic Cities covered the strange fate of the humble, quirky movie rental store. One quote, from a store owner named David Hawkins, catches my eye:

“We’re the new barbershop,” he says. “There are fewer places these days just to hang out. Cafes are no longer as social, and if you don’t go to bars there are so few new social gatherings popping up. I worry that if we let all of video stores close, our neighborhoods will be a lot less interesting.”

Something like this will happen somewhere in journalism, sometime after we’ve moved  further in the direction of tablets and mobile.

Maybe we’ll dress like our grandparents, order black coffee in a diner and savor the crackle of an old newspaper. Maybe we will read the news in groups and berate the daily me-ness of our devices. Or we may have to become armchair historians, because the newspapers we will have found by then will be among the last to have ever been printed, sometime around five years from now (my prediction.) - Blake

“Info Ladies” Bring Internet to Remote Villages on Bicycle Part entrepreneur, part public service provider, Info Ladies are young women—usually undergraduates from middle-class rural families—who are recruited by local development group D.Net, trained for three months to use a computer, the Internet, a printer, and a camera, and then helped to secure loans to purchase equipment and bikes. They then take their services to rural Indian villages and charge for their services. 200 takas, the equivalent of $2.40, buys an hour of Skype time, for example. via AP: In the neighboring village of Saghata, an Info Lady is 16-year-old Tamanna Islam Dipa’s connection to social media. “I don’t have any computer, but when the Info Lady comes I use her laptop to chat with my Facebook friends,” she said. “We exchange our class notes and sometimes discuss social issues, such as bad effects of child marriage, dowry and sexual abuse of girls.” The Info Ladies also provide a slew of social services — some for a fee and others for free. They sit with teenage girls where they talk about primary health care and taboo subjects like menstrual hygiene, contraception and HIV. They help villagers seeking government services write complaints to authorities under the country’s newly-enacted Right to Information Act. They talk to farmers about the correct use of fertilizer and insecticides. For 10 takas (12 cents) they help students fill college application forms online. They’re even trained to test blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Read more from the AP. Image: via AP

“Info Ladies” Bring Internet to Remote Villages on Bicycle

Part entrepreneur, part public service provider, Info Ladies are young women—usually undergraduates from middle-class rural families—who are recruited by local development group D.Net, trained for three months to use a computer, the Internet, a printer, and a camera, and then helped to secure loans to purchase equipment and bikes. They then take their services to rural Indian villages and charge for their services. 200 takas, the equivalent of $2.40, buys an hour of Skype time, for example.

via AP:

In the neighboring village of Saghata, an Info Lady is 16-year-old Tamanna Islam Dipa’s connection to social media.

“I don’t have any computer, but when the Info Lady comes I use her laptop to chat with my Facebook friends,” she said. “We exchange our class notes and sometimes discuss social issues, such as bad effects of child marriage, dowry and sexual abuse of girls.”

The Info Ladies also provide a slew of social services — some for a fee and others for free.

They sit with teenage girls where they talk about primary health care and taboo subjects like menstrual hygiene, contraception and HIV. They help villagers seeking government services write complaints to authorities under the country’s newly-enacted Right to Information Act.

They talk to farmers about the correct use of fertilizer and insecticides. For 10 takas (12 cents) they help students fill college application forms online. They’re even trained to test blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

Read more from the AP.

Image: via AP

Making the News (more) Mobile

A new mobile news app called Circa has dedicated itself to aggregating content and slimming it down to the facts and nothing but — all to present bits of information from several sources on a mobile screen without exhausting its users. 

Ben Huh of Cheezburger fame has a lot on his mind, news-wise, and he’s a co-founder.  So are Matt Gilligan and Arsenio Santos, and the rest of the team and their investors can be found here.

It’s a fine idea, and the presentation fits mobile’s tiny screens. Some, however, may scratch their heads at it as they did at fellow newcomer Quartz for its reliance on aggregation.

via PandoDaily:

Galligan and Huh believe to save journalism you need to kill the article. Instead, news from Circa is arranged on digital flash cards you page through on your mobile phone. “Stories” are simply facts strung together across these cards, and most of those facts link to a third party original source.

The art of creating a good Circa piece is in finding news and piecing it together, but there is no writing, per se. There is no analysis and there is no reporting either. Galligan’s view is there’s too much of that in the world. It’s original work in that the “stories” are written by Circa’s newsroom of about a dozen people, but the facts are all aggregated from elsewhere. There are no bylines, which isn’t a big surprise since the innovation here is sucking much of the reporting and writing out of journalism.

When I got that journalism degree back in 1974 newspapers were heading toward near-monopoly status and network news divisions thought of themselves as public trusts more than businesses. For the individual editor and reporter, the profession was a calling and finding the scoop was all that mattered. Today’s students seem to be realists. They get that journalism is a business. They understand that the who, what, when, where and why of their careers is as much about an entrepreneurial, innovative spirit as it is about the story. Industry veterans, far too many still stuck in an old mindset, would do well to spend a little time in the classroom.

Lewis Dvorkin, Chief Products Officer at Forbes, visited my class at NYU earlier this week. He told us stories about start-ups and running Forbes online, and we asked him questions about everything. He’s summarized the Q&A here.

Very useful for young journalists. -Blake

It was late last year when we saw the first job posting promising a free iPod just for agreeing to come in for an interview. Even boozy informal “hacker” get-togethers were collecting multiple “sponsors,” driving the hackers to arrange social events practically in secret, to avoid being harassed by desperate would-be employers. A company called DeveloperAuction has actually begun auctioning qualified software developers to the highest bidder.

David Wood, Forbes. An Insider’s View Of Silicon Alley’s Talent Feeding Frenzy.

Silicon Alley, New York City’s version of that other place out in California, has its perks. Woods, CTO of Jun Group, writes that it’s a very good time to be a talented, temporarily unemployed developer in New York. But that was a bit of a given, wasn’t it? Anyway, the numbers are surprising.

More from Wood:

This has been particularly pronounced in New York, where entrepreneurs, enticed by free-flowing VC money and local successes like Tumblr and OMGPOP, have started 500 new technology companies in five years, creating a 29 percent jump in technology-related jobs. To put that number in perspective, it’s eight times the growth rate of the city’s total employment.

Mitchell Stephens on Living in an Amateur Society

NYU Professor Mitchell Stephens is convinced that the steady rise of non-professionals creating journalism content is a very good thing for news. We asked him to explain.

His reasons are several: to begin with, our general public is better educated today than ever before, the cost and expertise required to edit video and publish writing have dropped. And, he says, we online users, being such a large and diverse group, have a good handle on what makes good content and what doesn’t. We don’t need to teach media literacy, Stephens believes, because the competition among those making journalism sorts the good from the bad, and people know good content when they see it.

For more information, see his books A History of News and The Rise of the Image the Fall of the Word. We’ll upload more of what he had to say over the next few weeks.

FJP: See here for more of our interview with Mitchell Stephens.

Imagine if your whole life you’ve looked through one eye, only seeing through one eye and suddenly, scientists can give you the ability to open up a second eye. So what you would see is not just more data but it’s a whole different way of seeing.

Said photojournalist Rick Smolan today, telling the audience at a Human Face of Big Data event the same thing he told his son when, at 2am, the little boy climbed out of bed, snuck into the kitchen and asked him why he stayed up late everynight on the phone talking about “big data.” Smolan continued:

My son, who again wanted to stay up as late as he could before I sent him back to bed, said: could scientists and computers, like, let us open up a third eye and a fourth and a fifth? And I said yes.

See the group’s phone app, its upcoming book and more here.

Turning Photo Booths into Aquariums From Atlantic Cities: These days telephone booths are pretty much obsolete. Instead of letting them slowly decay on the city sidewalks, an artist collaborative called Kingyobu in Osaka is converting them into giant goldfish aquariums. The shimmery orange fish is somewhat of a good luck charm in Japan, so visitors crowd around the awesome tanks and get their luck and happiness fill.

Turning Photo Booths into Aquariums

From Atlantic Cities:

These days telephone booths are pretty much obsolete. Instead of letting them slowly decay on the city sidewalks, an artist collaborative called Kingyobu in Osaka is converting them into giant goldfish aquariums. The shimmery orange fish is somewhat of a good luck charm in Japan, so visitors crowd around the awesome tanks and get their luck and happiness fill.

But editors and professors recognize that the best way to understand the future of journalism lies in learning from and working with students.

And so, Mercer University is starting a $5.6 million project to collaborate with the Macon Newspaper and Georgia Public Radio.

via The New York Times:

Reporters and editors for the 186-year-old paper The Telegraph and the radio station will work out of the campus’s new journalism center, alongside students whom the university expects will do legwork for newspaper and public radio reports, with guidance from their professors and working journalists. 

It’s a plan born in part of desperation. Like many newspapers, The Telegraph has lost circulation and advertising revenue in the last decade, and the public radio station was forced to trim down to one staff member during the recession. 

William D. Underwood, Mercer’s president, expects that by applying what he calls a medical residency model to journalism, all of these players may give the struggling industry a chance to stay alive.

Bonus: This report [PDF] from the New America Foundation entitled “Shaping 21st Century Journalism: Leveraging a ‘Teaching Hospital Model’ in Journalism Education”