Data Journalism at the Guardian

Data journalism has been around as long as there’s been data - certainly at least since Florance Nightingale's famous graphics and report into the conditions faced by British soldiers of 1858.

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The Foxification of News

The idea that journalists should be impartial in reporting news is a relatively recent one. With the professionalisation of journalism in the early 20th century came a more detached style of reporting. In effect, a deal was struck between advertisers, publishers and journalists, says New York University’s Jay Rosen. Journalists agreed not to alienate anyone so that advertisers could aim their messages at everyone.

One way forward, suggests Mr Rosen, is to abandon the ideology of viewlessness and accept that journalists have a range of views; to be open about them while holding the reporters to a basic standard of accuracy, fairness and intellectual honesty; and to use transparency, rather than objectivity, as the new foundation on which to build trust with the audience. He cites the memorable phrase coined by David Weinberger, a technology commentator, that “transparency is the new objectivity”.

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10 Notable Moments in Student Journalism

Who says traditional journalism is dead? These students are making strides in the field of journalism before they’ve even started their careers. From breaking news to becoming "Internet famous," student journalists are making a difference. Read on to learn about ten notable moments in student journalism history, many of them within the past few years.

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Google Effects on Memory

When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

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TV station Admits to Airing Staged Video

A Rhode Island TV station aired phoney footage of a local golf tournament.

Watch it here.

McClatchy Ad Revenues Tumble 9%

The newspaper business is not getting any relief in 2011, as multiple publishers report continuing declines in print ad revenue. This week the McClatchy Co. joined the New York Times Co., Gannett, and Media General, all of which have seen total revenues fall by single-digit percentages.

McClatchy Co. revealed that total revenues declined 8.1% from $342 million in the second quarter of 2010 to $314.3 million in the second quarter of 2011. Circulation revenues also decreased 3.7% to $65.1 million, reflecting a 3.4% decline in daily circulation.

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Redesigning News Websites

In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise... which they call content.

Instead of working with a handful of redundant, mitigating formats (websites, mobile sites, apps, etc…) for content delivery to popular devices, news organizations should simply deliver it correctly in the first place, one time; using html, css, JavaScript, …oh, and design. The employment of content design would be quite refreshing, actually.

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Educators: Web filters verge on book banning

Online filtering software and school rules designed to keep out violence and pornography are also blocking educational and otherwise useful sites, teachers say, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- not to mention Google and National Geographic.

Read more at USA Today

Mag Ad Banned

Makeup ads featuring Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington won't be part of a U.K. ad campaign after the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority deemed the airbrushing used in post-production to be misleading to the consumer. The ASA made its decision that the ads were indeed misleading, but did so without the help of before and after shots.

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News is becoming a social medium again

Until the early 19th century there was no technology for disseminating news to large numbers of people in a short space of time. It travelled as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with their friends.

In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past.

The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. Social media are certainly not a fad, and their impact is only just beginning to be felt. Successful media organisations will be the ones that accept this new reality. They need to reorient themselves towards serving readers rather than advertisers, embrace social features and collaboration, get off political and moral high horses and stop trying to erect barriers around journalism to protect their position. The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.

Read more at The Economist

The people formerly known as the audience

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available, says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. The result was “the shift of the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience,” he says. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network.

Read more at The Economist

Radio: More Fragmentation Ahead

Alan Burns says that radio can expect more fragmentation to come, mainly due to broadband streaming in cars. There are no signs that music streaming services like Pandora are eroding radio usage. On the other hand, there's less love for radio among younger listeners, and while wireless broadband in cars isn't going to kill radio, it will lower usage somewhat. It will also generate more fragmentation, since broadband will bring more non-local stations into cars.

"It's important to note why these women choose radio over non-radio streams in their cars, and the big reasons are that radio provides energy, excitement, and local information," Burns stated.

Additionally, the Burns study shows that there is significant resistance to paying for Internet music streams.

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Reinventing the newspaper

News providers throughout the rich world are urgently casting around for new models. They are starting to charge for content on the web and mobile devices, as well as pursuing non-traditional sources of revenue such as wine clubs or dating services. Some are being supported by philanthropy. Nobody yet knows which, if any, of these models will work, but it is clear that revenue from online advertising alone will not be enough to cover the costs of running a traditional news organisation.

Read more at The Economist

American newspapers are in trouble, but in emerging markets the news industry is roaring ahead

The internet-driven fall in classified-ad revenue is only one of the reasons for the decline of newspapers in America, which started decades ago. The advent of television news, and then cable television, lured readers and advertisers away.

Newspapers in western Europe are having to manage long-term decline rather than short-term pain.

In Japan, home to the world’s three biggest-selling daily newspapers (the Yomiuri Shimbun alone has a circulation of more than 10m), circulation has held up well, in part because over 94% of newspapers are sold by subscription. But there is trouble on the horizon. Young Japanese do not share their elders’ enthusiasm for newsprint, and advertising revenues are dropping as the population ages.

There is certainly no sign of a news crisis in India, now the world’s fastest-growing newspaper market. Television news is also booming: of more than 500 satellite channels that have been launched in India in the past 20 years. China is another market where news media are growing rapidly.

Read more at The Economist

Back to the coffee house

Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, the New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. At the time of the launch America’s bestselling paper sold just 4,500 copies a day; the Sun, with its steam press, soon reached 15,000. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news from a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media.

Now, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The internet is making news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan, reviving the discursive ethos of the era before mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics.

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Phone Hacking on Long List of Journalism Scandals

There's a shameful history of reportorial misdeeds of which the defunct News of the World and other News International properties are now a part. The mushrooming scandal in Britain involves accusations of bribery and Murdoch's newspapers illegally obtaining confidential information about crime victims and even former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Many previous episodes involving reporters and editors were relatively isolated incidents, with one or two people deviating from accepted professional codes. "Here we have a pattern of scandalous behavior."

Fake news reports reach back even to America's Revolutionary War, when a Philadelphia newspaper reported in 1776 about a ragtag contingent of American colonists beating experienced British forces in battle. It turned out the American force was much bigger than reported, and the British soldiers far less experienced.

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Apple's got its eye on mobile games

"We are 12 to 24 months away from being able to disrupt the living room with experiences that you might be playing on an iPad version four, but projecting … to a TV in your living room," he predicts. It'll be "every bit as good" as the experience of playing a high-end console game today, he adds.

With more than 200 million devices running Apple's mobile operating system — and 100,000 games available — Apple has transformed the traditional mobile-game marketplace. Spending on mobile games is expected to account for 15% of all spending on game software this year, rising to 20% in 2015, research firm Gartner predicts.

IHS/Screen Digest expects the sale of games in Apple's App Store to approach $2 billion worldwide in 2011, up about 75% from 2010. The closest mobile-games rival, Android Market, is forecast at $170 million for 2011, the firm says.

To be sure, console games played on systems such as Microsoft's Xbox 360 remain the dominant force in video games, accounting for about 40% of the projected $74 billion to be spent globally on games in 2011, Gartner says.

Hit video games still sell very well. First-person shooter game Call of Duty: Black Ops has earned Activision Blizzard more than $1 billion in sales since its November release. But sales of console games have plateaued in recent years, with mobile and online games supplying most of the industry growth.

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Data Visualization: Journalism's Voyage West

Stanford has used data from the Library of Congress to illustrate the spread of all kinds of newspapers across the U.S. from 1690 to 2011.

Check it out here

U.S. Cable Network Ad Spending Forecast to Exceed Broadcast Nets for First Time

U.S. advertising spending on cable networks will for the first time trump spending on broadcast networks this year, according to the latest forecast from media buyer ZenithOptimedia. For 2012, Zenith expects broadcast spending to drop 1 percent to $17.2 billion despite the return of the Olympics to NBC amid a projected increase in online and cable viewing for the games in London, compared with an estimated 9 percent gain to $19.6 billion for cable. 


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Microsoft Strikes Search Deal With China's Baidu

Microsoft has inked an agreement to provide its Bing technology to China's leading search engine operator. Google pulled back its official search presence in China last year after a dispute with authorities over Web censorship. Still, it's estimated that Google accounts for as much as 20% of Chinese searches as many Internet users in the People's Republic continue to access Google through proxy servers and other means.

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Watching Cable TV Online

Cable TV executives are constantly talking about "TV Everywhere" - shows and movies available anywhere at any time. With varying degrees of success, the biggest cable operators have tried to develop TV Everywhere offerings on their own. Cable systems typically let subscribers access reruns and movies via websites or mobile apps, but they don't offer first-run shows or live broadcasts such as football games outside the home. And content providers aren't eager to share potential mobile revenues with the cable companies.

Read more at Business Week

Linkedin #2 Social Network

Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.

Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Facebook also reached an all-time high in terms of U.S. traffic in June, according to newly released comScore data.

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Data is Shaping the Future of Journalism

MIT’s recent Civic Media Conference and the latest batch of Knight News Challenge winners made one reality crystal clear: as a new era of technology-fueled transparency, innovation and open government dawns, it won’t depend on any single CIO or federal program. It will be driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates focused on better outcomes, more informed communities and the new news, whatever form it is delivered in.

The themes that unite this class of Knight News Challenge winners were data journalism and platforms for civic connections. Newsrooms, the traditional hosts for information gathering and dissemination, are now part of a flattened environment for news, where news breaks first on social networks, is curated by a combination of professionals and amateurs, and then analyzed and synthesized into contextualized journalism.

As we grapple with the consumption challenges presented by this deluge of data, new publishing platforms are also empowering us to gather, refine, analyze and share data ourselves, turning it into information. In this future of media, as Mathew Ingram wrote at GigaOm, big data meets journalism, in the same way that startups see data as an innovation engine, or civic developers see data as the fuel for applications.

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How to Cope with Data Overload

“Information overload” is one of the biggest irritations in modern life. Commentators have coined a profusion of phrases to describe the anxiety and anomie caused by too much information: “data asphyxiation” (William van Winkle), “data smog” (David Shenk), “information fatigue syndrome” (David Lewis), “cognitive overload” (Eric Schmidt) and “time famine” (Leslie Perlow). Johann Hari, a British journalist, notes that there is a good reason why “wired” means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate”.

These worries are exaggerated. Stick-in-the-muds have always complained about new technologies: the Victorians fussed that the telegraph meant that “the businessman of the present day must be continually on the jump.” Yet clearly there is a problem. It is not merely the dizzying increase in the volume of information (the amount of data being stored doubles every 18 months). It is also the combination of omnipresence and fragmentation. Many professionals are welded to their smartphones.

They raise three big worries. First, information overload can make people feel anxious and powerless: scientists have discovered that multitaskers produce more stress hormones. Second, overload can reduce creativity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School has spent more than a decade studying the work habits of 238 people, collecting a total of 12,000 diary entries between them. She finds that focus and creativity are connected. People are more likely to be creative if they are allowed to focus on something for some time without interruptions. If constantly interrupted or forced to attend meetings, they are less likely to be creative. Third, overload can also make workers less productive. David Meyer, of the University of Michigan, has shown that people who complete certain tasks in parallel take much longer and make many more errors than people who complete the same tasks in sequence.

What can be done about information overload? One answer is technological: rely on the people who created the fog to invent filters that will clean it up. A second answer involves willpower. Ration your intake. Turn off your mobile phone and internet from time to time.

But such ruses are not enough. Smarter filters cannot stop people from obsessively checking their BlackBerrys. Some do so because it makes them feel important; others because they may be addicted to the “dopamine squirt” they get from receiving messages, as Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, two academics, have argued. And self-discipline can be counter-productive if your company doesn’t embrace it. Some bosses get shirty if their underlings are unreachable even for a few minutes.

Most companies are better at giving employees access to the information superhighway than at teaching them how to drive. This is starting to change. Management consultants have spotted an opportunity. Derek Dean and Caroline Webb of McKinsey urge businesses to embrace three principles to deal with data overload: find time to focus, filter out noise and forget about work when you can. Business leaders are chipping in. David Novak of Yum! Brands urges people to ask themselves whether what they are doing is constructive or a mere “activity”. John Doerr, a venture capitalist, urges people to focus on a narrow range of objectives and filter out everything else. Cristobal Conde of SunGard, an IT firm, preserves “thinking time” in his schedule when he cannot be disturbed. This might sound like common sense. But common sense is rare amid the cacophony of corporate life.

Read more at The Economist

Prime time for mobile devices same as TV

Here’s even more proof that mobile devices are television’s “second screen.” MediaMinds found that the peak time people use the mobile web and apps is 7-9 p.m. (graph below), overlapping with television’s prime time period.

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Arbitron: Radio Ups Reach

While advertising revenue is still down from a few years ago, broadcast radio's reach is bigger than ever, according to Arbitron's most recent RADAR report, which tracks the overall audience for national and network radio in the U.S.

Among other things, the Arbitron data shows that radio still reaches a sizable majority of Americans every week. Broadcast radio's total reach among U.S. adults ages 12 and up increased from 189,990,000 in June 2010 to 191,891,000 in June 2011, for an increase of 1% over this period. In proportional terms, radio's reach increased from 73.8% to 74% of the U.S. population 12+. Among U.S. adults ages 18+, radio's total reach increased 0.9% from 172,706,000 to 174,299,000; in proportional terms, reach in this cohort remained stable at 74.3%. Aadults ages 18-39 saw total reach increase from 103,336,000 to 103,841,000, resulting in a proportional increase from 76.5% to 77%. The number of adults ages 25-54 listening to radio in an average week increased from 97,489,000 to 97,992,000, or from 76.9% to 77.2% of this age cohort.

Despite this good news, the fact remains that broadcast radio revenues are still significantly down from just a few years ago. Due in part to the recession, total advertising revenues plummeted from $21.7 billion in 2006 to $17.3 billion in 2010, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. That's a 20% decline in four years.

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Ten ways journalists can use Google+

Since Google+ (plus) was launched a week ago those who have managed to get invites to the latest social network have been testing out circles, streams and trying to work out how it fits alongside Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Here are 10 ways Google+ can be used for building contacts, news gathering and sharing:

4. To create and share in circles

One of the foundations of Google+ and how it differs from Facebook is the circles function. There are suggested circles such as ‘family’, ‘friends’ and ‘acquaintances’ but you can add your own. For example, you could have a ‘journalists’ circle, a ‘contacts’ circle and categorise others by a specialist topic or a geographic area you report on. You can then choose to share updates, photos, videos and documents with particular circles.

8. For carrying out and recording interviews

One option is recording the chat for your notes or for audio and video content for a news site or podcast. One way to record audio is download Audio Hijack Pro (Mac), select the Google Talk plugin (you may find you need your Gmail open to find this as an option) and record. A quick test has proved this provides podcast-quality audio that can be easily edited.

9. For collaborating on Google Docs by circle

This nifty feature which marries Google Docs and Google+ is really handy for those working on a big story or organising spreadsheets with work colleagues. For example, you can create a circle of your work colleagues, go to Google Docs, check the tick box to select the relevant document, go to share in the black Google bar along the top of your window, and share the document with your relevant circle.

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For Film Graduates, an Altered Job Picture

As home-entertainment revenue declined in the last five years, studios reduced spending on scripts from new writers, cut junior staff positions and severely curtailed deals with producers who once provided entry-level positions for film school graduates. Yet applications to university film, television and digital media programs surged in the last few years as students sought refuge from the weak economy in graduate schools and some colleges opened new programs.

“It’s becoming an increasingly flooded marketplace,” said Andrew Dahm, who in May graduated from the Peter Stark producing program at U.S.C. with a master’s degree and an expectation that he would work for two or three years as a low-paid assistant in lieu of the junior executive jobs that were once common.

By and large those established programs have kept enrollments steady. But an expanding number of new film and media programs at other colleges around the country helped feed what appears to be a bumper crop of graduates in the academic year that just ended.

Read more at the New York Times

Gannett Shutters Hyper-Local NJ Sites

After much talk about the future of news relying more on user-generated contributions, Gannett's early experiments in crowd-sourced local news content has fizzled. It shuttered the company's 17 "hyperlocal" news sites in New Jersey, which operated under the umbrella InJersey.com site. The local news sites were scuttled by layoffs among Gannett staffers, who were still contributing the lion's share of the content.

User-generated content rarely exceeded 10%.

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Twitter For Newsrooms!? Twitter *Is* A Newsroom

Earlier this morning Twitter released “Twitter for Newsrooms,” its primer on how to use Twitter to gather and report news in the 21st century. #TfN is Twitter’s official nudge to old school reporters, a heavy handed reminder to get with the program and embrace Twitter as media production and consumption device.

“Twitter for Newsrooms is a bit redundant for me because Twitter is my newsroom,” says Mediagazer founding editor Megan McCarthy. Indeed, I’ve heard many journalists compare watching the news cycle on Twitter to being in a physical newsroom when breaking news would come in on the wire.

Read more at Tech Crunch

Cassettes Return for an Encore

It looked like the end of the reel for cassettes. The last car to ship with a tape deck was the 2010 Lexus SC 430. Sony stopped making the Walkman last October. This can mean only one thing: Cassettes are about to be cool again.

Read more at Wired

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time. Until now, no company has made it so easy to hack into a product as popular as the Kinect, the fastest-selling consumer-tech product of all time. The Kinect racked up 10 million sales in just four months.

Read more at Wired

High Court Strikes Down California Videogame Law

The Supreme Court struck down Monday a California law blocking minors from buying violent videogames, voting 7-2 that it violates the First Amendment. It was the latest ruling by the high court to take a broad view of free-speech rights.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Rises

Americans' confidence in newspapers and television news rebounded slightly in the past year, having been stuck at record lows since 2007 (according to a new Gallup poll). The 28% of Americans who express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and the 27% who say the same about television news still lag significantly behind the levels of trust seen through much of the 1990s and into 2003. Interestingly, considering the highly polarized nature of cable news, all ideological groups increased their trust in television news to about the same degree.

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The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

At its December 2008 peak, Myspace attracted 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). By May of this year that number had dropped to 34.8 million. Over the past two years, Myspace has lost, on average, more than a million U.S. users a month. Because Myspace makes nearly all its money from advertising, the exodus has a direct correlation to its revenue. In 2009 the site brought in $470 million in advertising dollars, according to EMarketer. In 2011, it's projected to generate $184 million.

Read more at Business Week