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How can technology help journalists make sense of complex issues and explain them to the public in a clear, understandable manner?
Last year, Jay Rosen's journalism students spent an entire semester researching and making explanations in partnership with ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom which focuses on investigative journalism. The class did amazing work to highlight notable examples and develop their own "explainers," essential background knowledge to help people follow events and trends in the news. One of my favorite examples is this project from 2011, where students redesigned the same ProPublica background article as a video, a podcast, and an FAQ.
NYU's Explainer class focused especially on two things: presentation and conversation. They talked to cognitive psychologists like George Lakoff to learn how audiences take in what we read. They highlighted numerous presentation examples -- videos, timelines, infographics, mini-sites, aggregators, podcasts, interactive guides, flowcharts, and even a picture book by Google! The class at NYU also pointed out that explaining is often a conversation. In their journalist's guide to developing FAQs, the class suggests techniques for discovering what people need to know. I loved their advice on listening to readers.
This term, I'm taking Ethan Zuckerman's Participatory News class from the point of view of a technology designer who wants to build tools to support great journalism. As we write stories and review other people's work, we're keeping our eyes open for parts of the process which technology can improve. As a startup guy, I also keep an eye open for alternative business models. Here are my top tech recommendations for supporting better explainers:
Jay points out in his "National Explainer" essay that it's OK to start with the clueless journalist. When learning how to explain something, our initial ignorance helps us appreciate where our audiences are coming from. This approach assumes that a professional journalist is doing the work; where else might we find uninformed, capable people to develop explainers?
I think we should take inspiration from Wikipedia to develop strategies for peer production of explanatory journalism, especially for issues that journalists can't or don't cover. Online communities like Metafilter have proven their ability to cooperate on investigations on occasion. How can we extend that to explanations? We could also draw inspiration from Instructables and CommonCraft, online communities of people who share video instructions and explanations.
Building online communities is hard. Instead of developing an "explainer" community, I would build a toolkit which existing communities can use when they feel the need to investigate and explain an issue.
Many of the explainers in Jay's class involve narrative. "The Giant Pool of Money" succeeded because This American Life found the right cast of characters to illustrate a complex issue. But finding the right people is really hard, especially if you're not a mainstream media organization. Source databases such as The Public Insight Network can help, but it's a closed system unavailable outside of newsrooms. Social media networks through groups like Global Voices get us part of the way, but only as far as the people who might know those we're looking for.
I'm not sure the crowd can help here. In many cases, the people you want to interview might not be outspoken online. Instead, I would develop tools and research practices for individuals or small teams to find representative voices. Perhaps the tool could offer encouragement and ideas for following the trail from an effect to an individual.
We could support one workflow in particular. Given a set of articles which are already about a topic, we could automatically extract the names of the organizations and individuals who are quoted and referred to, creating a quick map of the issue in the media. A canny storyteller might be able to spot gaps in the story or simply remix existing material into an explainer.
Explainers are by definition hard to organize and research. They're the messy, complicated issues that don't appear to make much sense. Often the story arc isn't apparent until partway through the project. It can become easy to get lost in the forest of information. As the pile of research grows, it can be difficult to follow the structure of a complex system or pull together the information you need for that next interview.
The most widely used writing tools are terrible at helping people organize and understand their information. I have written elsewhere about my use of software like Eastgate's Tinderbox to organize research around a complex issue. I think we need more of that kind of software (James Fallows' article on "Mac Programs that Come with Thinking Caps On" is a great place to start).
All storytelling on computers is in its early stages; we haven't agreed on very many common literary forms. Beyond the FAQ, the Timeline, and the illustrated lecture, most explainers require a custom rhetorical form. That's bad for anyone who wants to put a deadline on a project.
That's why I love The Explainer Awards that Jay and his students held. Awards are a great way to create norms and highlight innovation -- they have been an effective model as far back as 5th century Athens. But we need to take this further. An effective awards program would bring together finalists in each category to discuss common challenges and build technologies to solve those problems.
Why not re-imagine explaining as a social movement rather than content production? Some of the best explaining comes from a two-way conversation, not a piece of content. We could start a service called Meet the News, a geolocated service which invites anyone to have coffee with someone affected by a news story. Participants could pay for the coffee and might be expected to contribute back to the community with a few paragraphs about the conversation, just like couch-surfing reviews. It could be a human library for the news.
Do you have more tech ideas for explanatory journalism? Let us know in the comments!
A version of this post first appeared on MIT Civic Media Center's blog.
I learned how to be a journalist at my college paper. I didn't go to journalism school. But I teach at one, and from the time that I became an adjunct at New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) in 2002, I would periodically think about how to recreate the experience of working at a college paper for a small group of graduate students learning how to do specialized journalism.
More and more outlets are looking for reporters and editors with expertise, whether it's so they can hit the ground running when they're hired, or curate more effectively. That's certainly true at the magazines, websites, and broadcast outlets where SHERP graduates want to work, and at my own, a specialized health wire service.
So when SHERP Director Dan Fagin, who also learned how to be a journalist at his college paper, and I realized in 2005 that we were thinking along the same lines, we did some brainstorming. How could we create a site that gave students the opportunity to run a specialized news organization? We wanted a versatile, adaptable platform that would let students jump in and enjoy the rewards -- and headaches -- of online publishing.
We settled on WordPress, and hired a great designer. We included students from the beginning, letting them decide everything from content categories to color palette. And they came up with the name, too: Scienceline.
Since 2006, Scienceline has been the online magazine of science that's written, edited and produced entirely by SHERP students, who call themselves "SHERPies." They have published hard-hitting news, features, blogs, videos and podcasts, and encouraged interactivity through comments and polls. Students typically post new stories three times per week, in addition to blogs. Here's a recent video on Scienceline about e-cigarettes:
E-Cigarettes in New York City from Scienceline on Vimeo.
The site's content is divided into four categories. In Physical Science, visitors find stories on everything from the fates of universes to how scientists helped resolve a dispute over a massive telescope. In Health, they'll read about whether a walk in the park can replace a psychiatrist, and about research into using parasites to treat diseases.
In Environment, visitors can learn how a proposed road in the Serengeti is dividing people as it divides land, and about a scientist who, somewhat reluctantly, dropped everything to study the BP oil spill. And Life Science pieces explore what language says about the way we think, and how the state of Hawai'i used a natural predator to fight an invasive species, among other subjects.
All of those categories offer a rich selection of blogs, as well as audio, video and graphics.
The Scienceline staff -- which is made up of SHERP students, usually 15 per year -- plans every piece of content on the site, from pitching to editing to copyediting and posting. (I'm the faculty adviser, and Fagin is the publisher, but it's the SHERPies who run Scienceline.) Some stories are written for class, while others go directly to Scienceline. They have rigorous standards for copy, including multiple layers of editing and a transparent corrections policy. They hold weekly meetings, and publish throughout the year, even during the summer.
Scienceline content is highly regarded, and is frequently republished in leading science journalism outlets including Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science and LiveScience. It's on Scienceline itself, however, that students do what many news organizations are hoping to do: orchestrate a conversation around their content, whether it's text, audio or video. Visitors can even ask questions that the staff answers with reporting, in the Ever Wondered column. Readers apparently like what they find on Scienceline, since on a typical day about 3,000 of them stop by for a visit. There have been 4 million visits since the site launched in mid-2006.
The pros like it too: Scienceline is a three-time Region 1 finalist in the Society of Professional Journalists' Mark of Excellence Awards. Perhaps more importantly, students have tons of clips, which are attractively archived on the site, with each current and former student with his or her own author URL. Employers are impressed.
And so are Fagin and I. The site has been everything we imagined and more, allowing students to create rich, specialized content that shines. We learn something with every new Scienceline experiment, as the site changes with each class of SHERPies. It has recently been redesigned to improve the user experience and add various content types. And the students are even creating an iPad app.
We never know what's next for Scienceline, but we do know it's making SHERPies better prepared for an evolving job market -- and that's a big task.
Ivan Oransky, MD, is the executive editor of Reuters Health. He teaches medical journalism at New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program, is the treasurer of the Association of Health Care Journalists, and blogs at Embargo Watch and Retraction Watch. He has also served as managing editor, online, of Scientific American, deputy editor of The Scientist, and editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Praxis Post. For three years, he taught in the health and medicine track at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. Ivan earned his bachelor's at Harvard, where he was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson, and his MD at the New York University of School of Medicine, where he holds an appointment as clinical assistant professor of medicine.
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NYU media guru Jay Rosen is announcing a new partnership between his Studio 20 graduate students and ProPublica. Their goal is to research the most effective ways to unravel complex problems for an online audience, and then build new kinds of explainers to illuminate ProPublica's research into issues like the foreclosure crisis, finance, healthcare, and the BP oil spill.
It's an ambitious project, and one that fits Rosen's goal of transforming journalism schools into the R&D labs of the media industry. As part of the project, the students have launched a website, Explainer.net, that will grow into a database of the best and worst "explainer" techniques from within the news business and beyond. (One of their research projects, for example, was to analyze which media outlets explained the WikiLeaks cable story in the most helpful and compelling ways.)
I sat in on a Studio 20 class on Monday and talked with several of the 16 first-semester graduate students involved in the project. The metaphor they all used, drawn from Rosen's SXSW panel speech on "the future of context," was that reading daily news articles can often feel like receiving updates to software that you haven't actually downloaded to your computer. Without some basic understanding of the larger, ongoing story, the "news" doesn't actually make much sense. As NYU and ProPublica put it in today's press release:
Bringing clarity to complex systems so that non-specialists can understand them is the "art" of the explainer. For instance, an explainer for the Irish debt crisis would make clear why a weakness in one country's banks could threaten the European financial system and possibly the global recovery. A different kind of explainer might show how Medicare billing is designed to work and where the opportunities for fraud lie.
Rosen has been calling for a rigorous rethinking of how media outlets provide context since 2008, and, as Megan has noted previously here at the Lab, ProPublica has put itself at the forefront of explanatory, public-interest reporting. This summer, they redesigned their website with the goal of making it easier for users with different amounts of knowledge about a subject area to teach themselves more about a topic. (They've also created a broadway song about complex financial instruments.) Rosen, who brought several students to pitch the project to ProPublica in late September, said the investigative outfit was immediately enthusiastic about the partnership, which will run through the rest of this academic year.
The Explainer project will approach the problem of understanding complex systems both from the perspective of users trying to gain context on an issue, and that of journalists who need new mediums for telling background stories and sharing data that might not fit into an article format.
For that, the students will divide into three groups tasked with exploring different elements of explanation. One group is interviewing the members of ProPublica's news team, from reporters to news app builders to the managing editor, in order to understand the organization's workflow, what it does with the data it collects, and how its reporters explain what they're learning to themselves as they report a story.
Journalists "love starting from zero and gaining mastery," Rosen said. "What they disgorge by way of story is quite inadequate to what they learned. Creating containers, formats, genres, tricks, tools to make that knowledge available is part of the project."
Another group is building Explainer.net's WordPress website, which sometimes means teaching themselves and each other skills on an ad hoc basis. (Studio 20 is designed to be a learn-as-you-go program, in which a group of students with different specialties share their skills and pick up new ones.)
A third group is researching the different "explainer" genres. They're starting with examples of good and bad explanatory journalism, from maps and timelines to more specific visualizations like The National Post's chilling illustration of how a stoning is carried out in Iran. But they'll also be reaching far outside the media world to research techniques used in many different fields. Rosen suggested that they focus on situations where people "can't afford to fail," like people fixing combat aircraft, or NFL teams explaining complicated plays. The students are also looking at the "For Dummies" book franchise and the language-learning software Rosetta Stone.
When I spoke with Rachel Slaff, who's leading the research group, she said they have found many more examples of failed explainers than background reporting that's actually working well. It's not just that some videos are boring, or that a timeline is clunky or a graphic too text-heavy. "The overwhelming theme is: This isn't actually explaining anything to me. I watched this video or I looked at this chart and I left more confused than I came in," she said. The major exception has been the BBC, which she said produces consistently effective explainers. The other group favorite has been the RSA Animate video series, in which a hand cheekily illustrates a topic as it's being explained.
Part of the reason the project is going public so early is to connect with journalists interested in explainer or "future of context" issues. The Studio 20 group will be producing a periodic newsletter with updates on their progress, as well as building a Twitter feed — all ways to broaden the reach of the project, as well as give the graduate students practice in using social media tools.
The "build a better explainer" project is just a first step in figuring out how context-focused reporting will evolve online, Rosen said. Google's Living Stories and newspaper topic pages are all aimed at a larger, more complicated problem: "Where does the news accumulate as understanding?"
You can think about the accumulation of understanding in terms of a body of text, a URL where different stories are gathered together, or the way that knowledge builds in a single user, Rosen told me. Whatever the potential model, the next question is, "how do we join to the stream-of-updates part of the news system, a second part of the news system, which gives people a sense of mastery over a big story?"
In other words: Once you've built a better explainer, the next challenge is building it a place to live.
Early this morning, Jay Rosen rolled out a new version of his website, PressThink.org — the first redesign the blog has undergone since it was born seven years ago. The new interface is cleaner than it used to be, with more spaced-out text, sharper colors, tabbed navigation, and even visual branding (check out those spectacles!). For someone like the NYU journalism professor, though, whose thinking falls under the broad categories of "engagement," "participation," and the like, a redesign isn't merely about aesthetics. It's also about conceiving of a website as an invitation to engagement: a mechanism, to be only momentarily McLuhan-y about it, whose power as a portal into discourse lives and dies with its design.
With that in mind, here are some particular changes brought to PressThink, via the designer Rosen worked with, Lauren Rabaino:
* Jay's glasses in the header image. It's very signature "Jay." (We're also throwing his glasses at the end of each post to signify that *this* marks the end of Jay's thoughts).
* Paragraph-level permalinks — which are a necessity for such long posts
* "Talks" page, which is a chronological documentation of Jay's talks, interviews, etc.
* The "bio" page which allows anyone to grab the HTML version of Jay's biography for republishing!
* The blog is now on WordPress! Open source FTW!
I talked with Rosen this afternoon, on Gchat, to learn more about the thinking behind, and the goals for, those changes. The following transcript is lightly edited from the original Gchat-ese.
Megan Garber: I liked, in particular, that the new format allows users to link to individual grafs in the posts. What was the thinking behind that? Did Dave Winer and the design of Scripting News have anything to do with the inspiration? [Winer, one of the earliest innovators in web publishing, is currently a visiting journalism scholar at NYU.]
Jay Rosen: Yes, I stole that idea directly from Scripting News. I had been using a hand-coded version of that for a while on my old site, but that was something I knew I wanted to build in.
But links to paragraphs was part of something bigger. I had one site and one design from the start of PressThink in 2003 to 2010. In that interval, I had learned a lot about the web, the web itself had moved and developed, and I had gained an acute sense of my own blogging style and online presence. So the goal of the redesign was to incorporate that movement, and all that learning into a new PressThink.
Thus, I know that sometimes I want to be able to link to a specific argument I have made in the past. I know this from doing it on Twitter. Like here, for example: http://archive.pressthink.org/2010/02/21/innocence.html#innocence. So I took what I have learned about "doing ideas online" and brought them to Lauren as requests. (That's Lauren Rabaino, a young designer and journalist who was is a very serious PressThink reader, and also one of the first people I put on my Young Smart Newsies list. In fact, when I said I wanted to borrow something from Scripting News, she guessed what it was in three seconds.)
MG: Yeah, you'd want to have someone who could really, to use your term, grok the site (and, more broadly, your way of thinking). How did you two connect beyond the blogger/reader relationship — how did she come to get the job of doing the site's redesign?
JR: I asked her and she said yes. I wanted someone young to do it, and I admired what she had done with Spot.us.
MG: Why someone young?
JR: Because her generation of digital journalists is a substantial part of my online constituency, and because I felt that the meeting ground between my sensibility and hers would put the design right where it needed to be, and because I like to give opportunities to young people when I can, as with David Cohn and Pat Thornton.
MG: And if we can go back to the learning-from-the-web idea: I'm curious, first of all, what those general lessons have been. I know you could probably write a book, or several, about them, but, briefly, what are the broad takeaways that informed the redesign?
JR: Here are a few:
— Make it easy to use and intuitive to interact with. I wanted Lauren to use everything she knew about what makes long form readable, and I think she did. Cleaner is better as people spend more time online. I wanted the new PressThink to clear a space, not just be a space online.
— Open source and technology with a community of developers around it is winning, so that informed the choice of WordPress [from the previous CMS: Movable Type].
— Certain lessons about personal branding for writers and journalists also went into it, such as you see here. I try to maintain a single identity, voice and intellectual style across everything I do, and to never lose the tight focus on a few things that define what I do, so the site had to help me keep doing that.
— I have never bought the idea that long-form writing and depth of reflection don't work online. I think there is plenty of web wisdom that says they do, so that got incorporated, too.
MG: Speaking of that, and of branding/web identity: How do you imagine the new PressThink will interact with your other sites — your Twitter feed, Posterous, FriendFeed, etc.?
JR: FriendFeed has basically died, so that is past tense. Posterous: my idea was to use it for less finished, more notebook-style stuff, but I sort of used it as a second PressThink for a while, so I may get back to that original idea. Twitter, that's more complex. I would say that PressThink is where you go to understand why I say what I say on Twitter.
One of the ways I used Twitter to go into depth — even though everyone says, "How can you go into depth in 140 characters?" — is by seizing on certain themes, branding them with my own terms, and then displaying those terms on an endless series of provocations — as with the church of the savvy, the view from nowhere, the museum of the curmudgeons, etc. And all those themes have their counterparts in PressThink posts, where they are explained and grounded.
So that's the relationship. But if you follow the savvy as it appears and reappears in my Twitter feed, over time I feel you are getting a sensibility in-depth, despite the character limit.
And I have to add something, not directly on your question. Someone just tweeted this; take a look:
Now that makes me smile — because this was another thing I wanted the design to accomplish. Blogs actually suck at displaying a body of work that has unfolded over time, right? The posts roll on and disappear from the cover, unless you take specific measures to counter this. So one thing I wanted in the new design was to make an entire body of work accessible to the visitor with one or two clicks. That's why I have not only recent posts but highlights, and why I explain what those highlights are. And not only a blogroll, but a recommended list, which explains why my site is in conversation with those sites. So the hope is that someone really interested can lose a weekend, and if one person a week does that, this works for my purposes.
MG: Interesting. So, to some extent: the future of context, in action?
JR: Yes. Or to put it another way: not the river of news but a landscape of thoughts. But this is all part of my determination to have a very tight focus on a few things and almost never stray from them.
MG: So the centralization comes not as much through the platforms, but through the ideas…
JR: Right. Because…well, you're familiar with the biologists' hunch that every human being has one common ancestor. Everything at PressThink is a child of a single idea: that if people participate in it the press will be better, stronger and smarter. [This, by the way, is an extension-by-way-of-inversion of a nice idea Rosen recently articulated to The Economist: "Journalists should describe the world in a way that helps us participate in political life."] And journalists should understand and appreciate this fact.
Also, there's a related idea in the site's header and logo, the old one and the new one:
The press we have is to some extent a reflection of certain key ideas that lie "behind" it. And this is what I call PressThink. So the logo tries to suggest that. And I am trying to smuggle into the press certain key ideas that in my view should lie "behind" it…my pressthink. And the logo is about that. PressThink has always gestured back in time; that is why it's not called MediaThink. So make of that what you will.
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
Entrepreneurship and old-school skills in j-school: We found out in February that New York University and the New York Times would be collaborating on a news site focused on Manhattan's East Village, and this week the site went live. Journalism.co.uk has some of the details of the project: Most of its content will be produced by NYU students in a hyperlocal journalism class, though their goal is to have half of it eventually produced by community members. NYU professor Jay Rosen, an adviser on the project, got into a few more of the site's particulars, describing its Virtual Assignment Desk, which allows local residents to pitch stories via a new WordPress editing plugin.
Rosen's caution that "it is going to take a while for The Local East Village to find any kind of stride" notwithstanding, the site got a few early reviews. The Village Voice's Foster Kamer started by calling the site the Times' "hyperlocal slave labor experiment" and concluded by officially "declaring war" on it. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, on the other hand, was encouraged by NYU's effort to give students serious entrepreneurial skills, as opposed to just churning out "typists and videographers."
NYU's project was part of the discussion about the role of journalism schools this week, though. PBS' MediaShift wrapped up an 11-post series on j-school, which included an interview with Rosen about the journalism as R&D lab and a post comparing and contrasting the tacks being taken by NYU, Jeff Jarvis' program at the City University of New York and Columbia University. (Unlike the other two, Columbia is taking a decidedly research-oriented route.) Meanwhile, Tony Rogers, a Philadelphia-area j-prof, wrote two articles (one of them a couple of weeks ago) at About.com quoting several professors wondering whether journalism schools have moved too far toward technological skills at the expense of meat-and-potatoes journalism skills.
They weren't the only ones: Both Teresa Schmedding of the American Copy Editors Society and Iowa State j-school director Michael Bugeja also criticized what they called a move away from the core of journalism in the country's j-schools. "I expect to teach new hires InDesign, Quark or Twitter, MySpace, FB and how to use whatever the app of the week is, but I don't expect to teach you what who, what, where, when, why and how means," Schmedding wrote. TBD's Steve Buttry countered those arguments with a post asserting that journalists need to know more about disruptive technology and what it's doing to their future industry. "Far too many journalists and journalism school graduates know next to nothing about the business of journalism and that status quo is indefensible," said Buttry.
A turning point in news consumption: Like most every Pew survey, the biennial study released this week by the Pew Center for the People & the Press is a veritable cornucopia of information on how people are consuming news. Tom Rosenstiel of Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism has some fascinating musings of the study's headline finding: People aren't necessarily ditching old platforms for news, but are augmenting them with new uses of emerging technology. Rosenstiel sees this as a turning point in news consumption, brought about by more tech-savvy news orgs, faster Internet connections, and increasing new media literacy. Several others — Mathew Ingram of GigaOM, Joe Pompeo of Business Insider, Chas Edwards of Digg — agreed that this development is a welcome one.
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz and paidContent's Staci Kramer have quick summaries of the study's key statistics, and DailyFinance's Jeff Bercovici pointed out one particularly portentous milestone: For the first time, the web has eclipsed newspapers as a news source. (But, as Collective Talent noted, we still love our TV news.) Lost Remote's Cory Bergman took a closer look at news consumption via social media, and j-prof W. Joseph Campbell examined the other side of the coin — the people who are going without news.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project also released an interesting study this week looking at "apps culture," which essentially didn't exist two years ago. Beyond the Book interviewed the project's director, Lee Rainie, about the study, and the Lab gave us five applications for news orgs from the study: Turns out news apps are popular, people will pay for apps, and they consume apps in small doses.
Did social media kill RSS and press releases?: Ask.com announced last Friday that it would shut down Bloglines, the RSS reader it bought in 2005, citing a slowdown in RSS usage as Twitter and Facebook increase their domination of real-time information flow. "The writing is on the wall," wrote Ask's president, Doug Leeds. PaidContent's Joseph Tarkatoff used the news as a peg for the assertion that the RSS reader is dead, noting that traffic is down for Bloglines and Google Reader, and that Google Reader, the web's most popular RSS reader, is being positioned as more of a social sharing site.
Tech writer Jeff Nolan agreed, arguing that RSS has value as a back-end application but not as a primary news-consumption tool: "RSS has diminishing importance because of what it doesn't enable for the people who create content… any monetization of content, brand control, traffic funneling, and audience acquisition," he wrote. Business Insider Henry Blodget joined in declaring RSS readers toast, blaming Twitter and Facebook for their demise. Numerous people jumped in to defend RSS, led by Dave Winer, who helped invent the tool about a decade ago. Winer argued that RSS "forms the pipes through which news flows" and suggested reinventing the technology as a real-time feed with a centralized, non-commercial subscription service.
Tech writer Robert Scoble responded that while the RSS technology might be central to the web, RSS reading behavior is dying. The future is in Twitter and Facebook, he said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and media consultant Terry Heaton also defended RSS, with Ingram articulating its place alongside Twitter's real-time flow and Heaton arguing that media companies just need to realize its value as its utility spreads across the web.
RSS wasn't the only media element declared dead this week; Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco also announced the expiration of the press release, replaced by the "real-time spin of Facebook and Twitter. PR blogger Jeremy Pepper and j-prof Kathy Gill pushed back with cases for the press release's continued use.
Twitter's media-company move: Lots of interesting social media stuff this week; I'll start with Twitter. The company began rolling out its new main-page design, which gives it a lot of the functions that its independently developed clients have. Twitter execs said the move indicated Twitter's status as a more consumptive platform, where the bulk of the value comes from reading, rather than writing — something All Things Digital's Peter Kafka tagged as a fundamental shift for the company: "Twitter is a media company: It gives you cool stuff to look at, you pay attention to what it shows you, and it rents out some of your attention to advertisers."
GigaOM's Mathew Ingram and venture capitalist David Pakman agreed, with Pakman noting that while Google, Facebook and Twitter all operate platform, users deal overwhelmingly with the company itself — something that's very valuable for advertisers. The Lab's Megan Garber also wrote a smart post on the effect of Twitter's makeover on journalism and information. The new Twitter, Garber writes, moves tweets closer to news articles and inches its own status from news platform closer to a broadcast news platform. Ex-Twitter employee Alex Payne and Ingram (who must have had a busy week) took the opportunity to argue that Twitter as a platform needs to decentralize.
On to Facebook: The New Yorker released a lengthy profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and while not everyone was crazy about it (The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal thought it was boring and unrevealing), it gave the opportunity for one of the people quoted in it — Expert Labs director Anil Dash — to deliver his own thoughtful take on the whole Facebook/privacy debate. Dash isn't that interested in privacy; what he is worried about is "this company advocating for a pretty radical social change to be inflicted on half a billion people without those people's engagement, and often, effectively, without their consent."
Elsewhere around social media and news: Mashable's Vadim Lavrusik wrote a fantastic overview of what news organizations are beginning to do with social media, and we got closer looks at PBS NewsHour, DCist and TBD in particular.
Reading roundup: Plenty of stuff worth reading this week. Let's get to it.
— Last week's discussion on online traffic and metrics spilled over into this week, as the Lab's Nikki Usher and C.W. Anderson discussed the effects of journalists' use of web metrics and the American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi looked at the same issue (from a more skeptical perspective). The Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman had the read of the week on the topic (or any topic, really), talking about what the constant churn of news in search of new eyeballs is doing to journalism. All of these pieces are really worth your time.
— The San Jose Mercury News reported that Apple is developing a plan for newspaper subscriptions through its App Store that would allow the company to take a 30 percent cut of all the newspaper subscriptions it sells and 40 percent of their advertising revenue. The Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum was skeptical of the report, but Ken Doctor had nine good questions on the issue while we find out whether there's anything to it.
— Another British Rupert Murdoch paper, News of the World, is going behind a paywall in October. PaidContent was skeptical, but Paul Bradshaw said it'll do better than Murdoch's other newly paywalled British paper, The Times.
— The Atlantic published a very cool excerpt from a book on video games as journalism by three Georgia Tech academics. I'm guessing you'll be hearing a lot more about this in the next couple of years.
— Rafat Ali, who founded paidContent gave a kind of depressing interview to Poynter on his exit from the news-about-the-news industry. "I think there's just too much talk about it, and to some extent it is just an echo chamber, people talking to each other. There's more talk about the talk than actual action." Well, shoot, I'd better find a different hobby. (Seriously, though, he's right — demos, not memos.)
— Finally, a wonderful web literacy tool from Scott Rosenberg: A step-by-step guide to gauge the credibility of anything on the web. Read it, save it, use it.
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.
Universities around the country have had to shift the approach of their journalism programs to accommodate a quickly changing media landscape. New York City's journalism schools, in particular, are working to rethink their offerings and adapt to the new world.
"The challenge inherent to journalism programs today is like taking a bowling ball and trying to hit a fast-moving target," said Adam Penenberg, NYU faculty member and longtime online journalist. Penenberg is teaching a new undergraduate course for NYU this fall about the essentials of entrepreneurial journalism, with topics like managing analytics and using a Twitter account. "It's very difficult for curriculum to change quickly," he said.
As Jay Rosen told MediaShift editor Mark Glaser in the latest 4 Minute Roundup podcast, journalism schools had traditionally been very platform-specific, with students majoring in "broadcast" or "print."
Schools are trying though. The hacker-journalist and journo-entrepreneur are finding homes in programs like Columbia's Master of Science Program in Computer Science and Journalism or in CUNY's forthcoming entrepreneurial journalism graduate program. These cross-disciplinary degrees equip journalists with more than a background in a particular medium.
"Every student needs to grasp the entire puzzle of innovation," said Rosen. "Everything from business models and the nature of the web to involving the community and using multimedia."
Increasingly, universities are looking to project-based curriculum to teach students not only how journalism works now, but how it might survive in the future.
This year both the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute launched collaborations with the New York Times on two of its "The Local" hyper-local sites to explore the questions our news media must answer as it seeks to reboot itself and as journalism schools struggle to expose their students to the full puzzle of innovation. CUNY took over operation of The Local - Fort Greene in January and NYU's start-up The Local - East Village (LEV) goes live today.
"What I want students to do is look at the web as an opportunity to learn about journalism today by participating in it," said Rosen, who heads the Studio 20 program at NYU that has been planning the LEV for the last year. The model for the LEV site focuses on giving the community opportunities to contribute content to the site. Called the Virtual Assignment Desk, the site will have a feature that allows community members, such as NYU students and local residents, to pitch and contribute to story assignments.
"The idea is that anyone can cover the community," said Assignment Desk plug-in developer Daniel Bachhuber, a digital media manager at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
One of the challenges these types of partnerships in journalism face is ensuring that the student-produced media remains consistent with the standards of the participating news organization. That's where Rich Jones, editor of the LEV, comes in. "We'll obviously bring professional level standards to the treatment of those issues, being under the Times banner brings certain responsibilities," said Jones, a former New York Times writer. "We just want to give students the skills they were need to have a really successful career."
Another challenge NYU faces is making sure that the site remains consistent over the entire year, not just the school year. During the school year, NYU students in the Reporting New York graduate subject concentration will be responsible for the day-to-day content; during the summer the site will be run by a combination of undergraduate summer students and graduate interns in editorial leadership roles as part of the NYU Hyperlocal Newsroom Summer Academy.
"We wanted to make it available to students across the country," said Brooke Kroeger, director of the NYU Journalism Institute.
Undergraduates will be able to enroll in either of two six-week sessions; graduate students are eligible for paid editorial internships assisting with the professional staff of the LEV. "The summer program is integral to the ecosystem that supports the project," she said.
NYU also must deal with inherent conflicts in coverage of the East Village, given that the university is the neighborhood's largest land-owner. Community liaison Kim Davis will be coordinating outreach to the East Village blogosphere and will arrange any coverage pertaining to NYU itself.
"We're willing to work with anybody," said Jones. "We want to promote a real neighborhood-wide conversation, a forum for folks to write stories about themselves."
The CUNY collaboration on The Local: Fort Greene is different from its NYU counterpart for a number of reasons. NYU is the largest land-owner in the area that the LEV is covering; CUNY is in a different borough than Fort Greene altogether. CUNY's graduate school of journalism is also relatively small, with approximately 100 students in its ranks. For these reasons, it makes sense that CUNY has taken a different tack with the overall direction for its Local.
"Our goal is to move beyond the idea that we create all the content for The Local," said Jarvis. "What we are concentrating heavily on is the encouragement of the ecosystem itself."
CUNY is taking its partnership with the NYT on The Local as an opportunity to let faculty leadership and student journalists experiment with not only different ways of telling stories, but different ways to pay for those stories, too. Through partnerships with companies like GrowthSpur Jarvis hopes that the site will encourage citizen salespeople to monetize their own start-ups.
CUNY's Jarvis is also leading the creation of a four-semester entrepreneurial journalism graduate program that he hopes will see its students invent the future of journalism.
Through a focused entrepreneurial curriculum, research into alternative business models for news, and an incubator/investment fund for new business models for news, the program hopes to give students an option to start their own media company, according to Stephen Shepard, dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. "We feel we have to take some responsibility for the future of quality journalism," said Shepard.
"Students' most important job in journalism school is to learn journalism," said Jarvis, "but the benefit here is that they can test out their idea and get advice and help."
Not everyone agrees with CUNY's approach, though. "There's a pretty clear finding on where universities can best contribute in a sector that is or should be going through an innovative period," said Nicolas Lemann, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Research is where universities can really add value, said Lemann.
Last fall, the Graduate School of Journalism released a report titled the The Reconstruction of American Journalism. Watchdog publication The Columbia Journalism Review is also run by, though editorially separate from, the school.
"We're not best positioned to be a business incubator, and though we could do that, it's not where we we can make our best contribution," said Lemann.
Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism has partly responded to the changing media environment by launching its Master of Science Program in Computer Science and Journalism, and it also offers courses like a social media seminar taught by an all-star class of professional new media journalists, such as Vadim Lavrusik of Mashable, Zach Seward of the Wall Street Journal, and Jennifer Preston of the New York Times.
Columbia also encourages journalism students to contribute to class websites. "These sites don't last very long though, and therefore don't build very significant audiences," said Lemann. "One of the things I'd like to do next is build a site that lasts year-round."
Leman's number one goal is to have a contextual curriculum that prepares students to go out and do a story. "There's endless stuff going on at the school," he said. "The aggregate is that this has been a time of real opportunity for journalism schools in general and ours in particular."
Davis Shaver is MediaShift's editorial intern. He is also the founder and publisher of Onward State, an online news organization at Penn State. He studies history and the intersection of science, technology, and society.
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.
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The New York Times and New York University have jointly launched a new hyperlocal blog today covering the East Village neighbourhood of Manhattan.
According to a release from NYU's Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism, the site is aiming for 50 per cent of its content to be produced by members of the East Village community. Readers will be able to submit content to the site through its Virtual Assignment Desk, which allows readers to send in stories, photographs, multimedia, and news tips.
Some content will be paid for, says NYU professor Jay Rosen, who is acting as an advisor to the project, but the site will also rely on voluntary contributions.
Most of the site's content will be provided by students on The Hyperlocal Newsroom, a new course in NYU's Reporting New York program.
Editor of The Local:East Village is Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute professor and former Times reporter Richard G. Jones, who calls the site "a significant step forward in pro-am journalism collaborations". He will work alongside Times deputy metro editor Mary Ann Giordano.
The Times launched 'The Local' project last year with two New York hyperlocal blogs covering Brooklyn and New Jersey, both run in conjunction with City University of New York (CUNY). In July this year the newspaper passed control of the New Jersey site to Barstanet.com.
More from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at this link.
More on the The Local: East Village and NYU's Hyperlocal Newsroom Summer School in the video below.
The Local East Village from NYU Journalism on Vimeo.
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4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.
In this week's 4MR podcast I do another special report for our "Beyond J-School" series, this time an in-depth discussion with NYU's Jay Rosen, who has been taking a new approach to journalism education. Rosen told me more about his Studio20 program, using an arts metaphor, and its work in helping to launch the new hyper-local site for the East Village in conjunction with the New York Times.
Check it out:
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Listen to my entire interview with Jay Rosen, touching on student expectations, and the mistake of news organizations in not using J-schools as R&D labs in the past:
Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.
Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:
Special Series - Beyond J-School at MediaShift
The New York Times' Latest Hyperlocal Site Will Launch On Sept. 13 at the Business Insider
Times Comes to Town, Sweating in Its Gown at Capital New York
The New York Times, NYU's Carter Journalism Institute to Launch News Site to Cover East Village at NYU
After helping ruin the East Village, NYU turns its attention to covering it at EV Grieve
Also, be sure to vote in our poll about what you think about the new Ping social network:
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Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.
4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.
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Journalism schools are ripe for experimentation. They've got students excited about the future of the industry, professors free from the profit pressures of a newsroom, and all the resources of a university.
But at the same time, there are two obvious problems with running an online news project out of a j-school: the cost (nothing's free, even if you don't need to turn a profit) and the doldrums of summer (universities might go dark, but the Internet doesn't.) A few journalism programs are taking on these problems with a surprising semi-solution: high school students.
New York University's new hyperlocal news site, The Local East Village, run in partnership with The New York Times, is starting a summer 2011 program that will both shore up content and generate income for the young project. The students will pay tuition — around $4,000 a course when you look at cost-per-unit — to participate. If their work is good enough, it'll appear on the site and help the void that comes from summertime on the academic calendar. Publication isn't guaranteed.
"We have a lot of ambition for the site and it's not free," Brooke Kroeger, the director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, told me. "It's not costless…What I find exciting about [the East Village site], rather than creating a center or a separate little institute, or something that is apart from what we do, this has been fully integrated into our curriculum — even the summer, which isn't always the case," Kroeger said.
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University is also experimenting with a summer high school program. This summer they launched a two-week program for high schoolers interested in learning the craft of investigative reporting.
"It certainly fit our mission," said Joe Bergantino, the director of the center, explaining that they are expected to not only produce investigative work for news outlets, but train the next generation of investigative journalists. "It's an obvious thing to do and an important thing to do."
This year 39 high school students participated, paying $900 per weeklong session. In the first week, students learned database reporting and other investigative techniques. In the optional second week, most students continued working on a story they selected, or did research work for the reporters at the Center. "That tuition is used to fund our work at the Center," Bergantino said.
High school journalism programs aren't new, although using profits from them to support news outlets is a twist. At Northwestern, Medill has long had a program called the National High School Institute that attracts top-tier high schoolers likely to pursue journalism in college. But the money raised from the program goes back to supporting it, rather than other Medill projects, according to Roger Boye, director of the program. The return comes in recruitment: Last year, 22 of the 83 participants, known as "Cherubs," went on to enroll at Northwestern University after graduating high school.
"If the school benefits, that's how they're benefiting," Boye said.
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
The online news landscape defined: Much of the discussion about journalism this week revolved around two survey-based studies. I'll give you an overview on both and the conversation that surrounded them.
The first was a behemoth of a study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Here's Pew's overview and the full report.) The report, called "Understanding the Participatory News Consumer," is a treasure trove of fascinating statistics and thought-provoking nuggets on a variety of aspects of the world of online news. It breaks down into five basic parts: 1) The news environment in America; 2) How people use and feel about news; 3) news and the Internet; 4) Wireless news access; and 5) Personal, social and participatory news.
I'd suggest taking some time to browse a few of those sections to see what tidbits interest you, but to whet your appetite, the Lab's Laura McGann has a few that jumped out at her — few people exclusively rely on the Internet for news, only half prefer "objective" news, and so on.
Several of the sections spurred their own discussions, led by the one focusing on the social nature of online news. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram has a good summary of the study's social-news findings, and Micah Sifry of techPresident highlights the sociological angle of news participation. Tech startup guy Dave Pell calls us "Curation Nation" and notes that for all our sharing, we don't do much of the things going on in our own backyards. And Steve Yelvington has a short but smart take, noting that the sociality of news online is actually a return to normalcy, and the broadcast age was the weird intermission: "The one-way flow that is characteristic of print and electronic broadcasting is at odds with our nature. The Internet ends that directional tyranny."
The other section of the study to get significant attention was the one on mobile news. PBS' Idea Lab has the summary, and Poynter's Mobile Media blog notes that an FCC study found similar results not long ago. Finally, Jason Fry has some hints for news organizations based on the study (people love weather news, and curation and social media have some value), and Ed Cafasso has some implications for marketing and PR folks.
A web-first philosophy for magazine sites: The Columbia Journalism Review also released another comprehensive, if not quite so sprawling, study on magazines and the web. (Here's the full report and the CJR feature based on it.) The feature is a great overview of the study's findings on such subjects on magazines' missions on the web, their decision-making, their business models, editing, and use of social media and blogs. It's a long read, but quite engaging for an article on an academic survey.
One of the more surprising (and encouraging) findings of the study is that magazine execs have a truly web-centric view of their online operation. Instead of just using the Internet as an extension of their print product, many execs are seeing the web as a valuable arena in itself. As one respondent put it, "We migrated from a print publication supplemented with online articles to an online publication supplemented with print editions." That's a seriously seismic shift in philosophy.
CJR also put up another brief post highlighting the finding that magazine websites on which the print editor makes most of the decisions tend to be less profitable. The New York Times' report on the study centers on the far lower editing standards that magazines exercise online, and the editing-and-corrections guru Craig Silverman gives a few thoughts on the study's editing and fact-checking findings.
Facebook patents the news feed: One significant story left over from last week: Facebook was granted a patent for its news feed. All Facebook broke the news, and included the key parts of Facebook's description of what about the feed it's patenting. As the tech blog ReadWriteWeb notes, this news could be huge — the news feed is a central concept within the social web and particularly Twitter, which is a news feed. But both blogs came to the tentative conclusion that the patent covers a stream of user activity updates within a social network, not status updates, leaving Twitter unaffected. (ReadWriteWeb's summary is the best description of the situation.)
The patent still wasn't popular. NYU news entrepreneur Cody Brown cautioned that patents like this could move innovation overseas, and New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson called the patent "lunacy," making the case that software patents almost always reward derivative work. Facebook, Wilson says, dominates the world of social news feeds "because they out executed everyone else. But not because they invented the idea." Meanwhile, The Big Money's Caitlin McDevitt points out an interesting fact: When Facebook rolled out its news feed in 2006, it was ripped by its users. Now, the feed is a big part of the foundation of the social web.
What's j-schools' role in local news?: Last week's conversation about the newly announced local news partnership between The New York Times and New York University spilled over into a broader discussion about j-schools' role in preserving local journalism. NYU professor Jay Rosen chatted with the Lab's Seth Lewis about what the project might mean for other j-schools, and made an interesting connection between journalism education and pragmatism, arguing that "our knowledge develops not when we have the most magnificent theory or the best data but when we have a really, really good problem," which is where j-schools should start.
An Inside Higher Ed article outlines several of the issues in play in j-school local news partnerships like this one, and Memphis j-prof Carrie Brown-Smith pushes back against the idea that j-schools are exploiting students by keeping enrollment high while the industry contracts. She argues that the skills picked up in a journalism education — thinking critically about information, checking its accuracy, communicating ideas clearly, and so on — are applicable to a wide variety of fields, as well as good old active citizenship itself. News business expert Alan Mutter comes from a similar perspective on the exploitation question, saying that hands-on experience through projects like NYU's new one is the best thing j-schools can do for their students.
This week in iPad tidbits: Not a heck of a lot happened in the world of the iPad this week, but there'll be enough regular developments and opinions that I should probably include a short update every week to keep you up to speed. This week, the Associated Press announced plans to create a paid service on the iPad, and the book publisher Penguin gave us a sneak peek at their iPad app and strategy.
Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and tech writer James Kendrick both opined on whether the iPad will save magazines: Anderson said yes, and Kendrick said no. John Battelle, one of Wired's founders, told us why he doesn't like the iPad: "It's an old school, locked in distribution channel that doesn't want to play by the new rules of search+social."
Reading roundup: I've got an abnormally large amount of miscellaneous journalism reading for you this week. Let's start with two conversations to keep an eye on: First, in the last month or so, we've been seeing a lot of discussion on science journalism, sparked in part by a couple of major science conferences. This is a robust conversation that's been ongoing, and it's worth diving into for anyone at the intersection of those two issues. NYU professor Ivan Oransky made his own splash last week by launching a blog about embargoes in science journalism.
Second, the Lab's resident nonprofit guru Jim Barnett published a set of criteria for determining whether a nonprofit journalism outfit is legitimate. Jay Rosen objected to the professionalism requirement and created his own list. Some great nuts-and-bolts-of-journalism talk here.
Also at the Lab, Martin Langeveld came out with the second part of his analysis on newspapers' quarterly filings, with info on the Washington Post Co., Scripps, Belo, and Journal Communications. The Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum drills a bit deeper into the question of how much of online advertising comes from print "upsells."
The Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles has a provocative post contending that the distinction between creation and aggregation of news content is a false one — all journalism is aggregation, he says. I don't necessarily agree with the assertion, but it's a valid challenge to the anti-aggregation mentality of many newspaper execs. And I can certainly get behind Niles' larger point, that news organization can learn a lot from online news aggregation.
Finally, two great guides to Twitter: One, a comprehensive list of Twitter resources for journalists from former newspaper exec Steve Buttry, and two, some great tips on using Twitter effectively even if you have nothing to say, courtesy of The New York Times. Enjoy.
Starting this week, the editor's blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America's journalistic goings on.
NYT explore new avenues with another hyperlocal blog
Starting off small today, with news that the New York Times is launching another hyperlocal blog. this time in conjunction with students from New York University (NYU).
The new blog, which will report on New York's East Village, will come under the Times' URL but be developed and launched by students from the NYU Studio 20 Journalism Masters programme.
Two NY hyperlocals were launched by the paper last year under a channel called 'The Local'. One covers Clinton Hill and Fort Greene in Brooklyn, the other Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange in New Jersey. Those blogs featured student contributions from the start, but were helmed by Times staff (although the former was recently turned over to students from CUNY). The new East Village blog is edited by a Times staffer but will be largely overseen, from inception to launch, by NYU students.
Jessica Roy, blogger at NYULocal and member of the East Village project said:
While the site will function in a similar way to the hyperlocal sites the Times already has running in Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill and Maplewood, this will be the first time journalism students will be heavily involved in the site's content and design process before the launch.
It will be interesting to see how this ties in with the reported NYT plans to hide their blogs away behind a paywall. Can the Freakonomics blog, Paul Krugman, and other NYT blog big-hitters tempt readers to pay? Can a bunch of students from NYU?
Arianna Huffington admits spending "a lot of time" on college campuses
The NYT are not the only ones hanging around campuses and jumping in bed with students, "I've spent a lot of time on campuses lately" admits Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post.
But Arianna is not, apparently, just trying to recapture a youth she threw away on "promise, passion, intellectual curiosity, and vitality". She is referring to the launch of HuffPost College, a new section of the Huffington Post devoted to the promising, passionate, intellectually curious, and vital students out there, and presumably to the billions of normal students too.
Edited by Jose Antonio Vargas, our Tech and Innovations editor, with the help of Leah Finnegan, a recent graduate of the University of Texas and the former editor of the Daily Texan, HuffPost College is designed to be a virtual hub for college life, bringing you original and cross-posted material from a growing list of college newspapers.
"Announcing HuffPost College: No SAT scores or admission essays needed" reads Arianna's headline.
Just an internet connection then, which everyone in America must have by now, right? Hmmm…. Published yesterday, the results of an FCC study into internet use in America show that a third of the population don't have broadband internet access – some 93 million – and the majority of those don't have any access whatsoever.
Here is John Horrigan, who oversaw the survey for the FCC, making the findings sound impressively grotesque:
Overall internet penetration has been steady in the mid-70 to upper 70 per cent range over the last five years. Now we're at a point where, if you want broadband adoption to go up by any significant measure, you really have to start to eat into the segment of non-internet-users.
Fortunately for Arianna Huffington, those remaining blissfully un-penetrated (albeit in danger of being eaten into by hungry internet providers) are "disproportionately older and more likely to live in rural areas", and not the vigourous youth, who are probably desperate to spend their time out of college at home reading about college.
Shatner to play Twitterer
One elderly American well in tune with all things online is Justin Halpern's dad. Even if he doesn't quite get why. Justin Halpern's dad is the man behind Justin Halpern's Twitter account, "Shit My Dad Says." Although this is slightly old story already, news that William Shatner will be playing an curmudgeonly, 74 year-old man whose live-in 29 year-old son tweets "shit that he says" is too ridiculous to pass up. If CBS are in luck, the account's 1,187,371 followers, and many more, will tune in to hear William Shatner say this:
A parent's only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize but the other gets robbed by a hooker, you failed.
And many, many other 140-character pearls of wisdom far to rude for the very mild-mannered Journalism.co.uk. I for one prefer Justin Halpern's dad's personal choice of James Earl Jones, and appalud his straight talking response to suggestions that colour is an issue.
He wanted James Earl Jones to play him. I was like, 'But you're white.' He was like, 'Well, we don't have to be! Who gives a [censored]? You asked me who I thought, and that's who I think.'
Who could possibly resist the powerful combination of Halpern Snr's coarse tweets and Darth Vader's husky voice?
Largest YouTube content provider reaches 1 billion views
One million followers is an impressive landmark in the Twitterverse, it puts you up there in the Twittersphere with such luminaries as Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher. It's about 28,000 times as many as I have. Demand Media went a thousand times better than that though in YouTube terms yesterday, with its billionth view.
According to its site, the company, which has about 500 staff and is based in Santa Monica, provides "social media solutions that consumers really want". Demand is the largest content supplier to YouTube, owning around 170,000 videos available on the site.
Co-founder of Demand Shawn Colo discusses the YouTube platform and the company's media strategy, courtesy of Beet.TV.
Rampant cutbacks trumped by loaded shotgun
Finally, from Editor & Publisher, the happy news that redundancy is no longer the most frightening thing in the newsroom.
Employees at the Grand Forks Herald, Chicago, were more than a little surprised to find a loaded shotgun in a closet at the paper's head offices.
"No notes, no threats, no nothing – just a loaded shotgun in a case in a closet in a common area, five rounds in it," Grand Forks Police Lt. Grant Schiller said.
For those staffers who may not have already jumped to this conclusion, Herald editor Mike Jacobs made it clear that: "Carrying a loaded gun into the building is a dismissible offense."
Newspaper journalists, in an age when your profession is almost a dismissable offence in itself, please, leave your loaded shotguns at home.
Image of East Village by Joe Madonna
Image of weapons ban sign by Dan4th
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Researchers have developed a trap (PDF) for luring in the destructive and much-feared asian longhorned beetle (ALB), which has no natural enemies as it cuts a path through neighborhoods and forests. The secret? Bug pheromones. Hat tip to "bug ladies" Suzanne Wainwright-Evans and Robin Rosetta for passing this information along.
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Kenseth overcomes delays, Busch at Geico 400
JOLIET, Ill. — Matt Kenseth restored order to a chaotic week for NASCAR with a steely victory over teammate Kyle Busch in the opening race for the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.
Kenseth went into Sunday's Geico 400 at Chicagoland Speedway as the top seed in the field. But he flew under the radar while last week's attempts by at least three teams to manipulate the results at Richmond took center stage this weekend.
He had to wait out two rain delays that totaled six hours, 30 minutes and passed Busch on a restart with 27 laps remaining.
Busch gave Joe Gibbs Racing and Toyota a 1-2 finish.
Kevin Harvick was third as Chase drivers grabbed the top six spots.
Bad luck for Logano: Joey Logano went from the front to the back of the pack in Sunday's race.
The pole-sitter was forced to drop out when his engine quit with 91 laps remaining. About 50 laps later, Dale Earnhardt Jr., another Chase qualifier, wound up following him onto pit road with a race-ending problem of his own.
Logano finished 37th, a tough start to NASCAR's 10-race, season-ending playoff series.
"I am pretty angry," Logano said. "That was such a fast race car we had."


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A ROMSEY men's group held their own fishing competition.
Twelve members from the Romsey Men's Shed took part in a fishing competition that they hosted at Bramshaw Lakes.
There were winning vouchers for the person who caught the biggest fish and the person who caught the most fish.
Malcolm Kaill, 68, from the men's shed said the event was "lovely" and "very peaceful."
The members attended the trip as part of a social event run by the men's shed.
The Romsey Mens Shed will be hosting its drop in repair shed on June 1 from 10am until 12 noon.
Residents can bring in small items that they need repairing.
For more information about the Romsey Men''s Shed call 07707 484251 or email email@example.com.
For anyone interested in becoming a member, the group meet most Thursdays at 10:30am n the Community Lounge at the Romsey School, Greatbridge Road.
As part of the group, older men can meet, socialise and work on practical projects that benefit the community.


text:
Please visit our support page for answers to frequently asked questions and to solve technical support related issues. If you need further assistance, contact a Technical Support Representative by submitting a support ticket. You will receive a response in a timely fashion.
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
(Normal business hours: Monday - Friday 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM CST)
Email: email@example.com
(Normal business hours: Monday - Friday 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM CST)
PDFC Office:
501 Congress Ave, Ste. 150
Austin, TX 78701
December 24th - 25th :
CLOSED in observance of the Christmas holiday.
December 26, 29-31st :
Phone assistance will not be available on these days. Please Submit a support ticket or email email@example.com with any inquiries.
January 1st 2015 :
CLOSED in observance of the New Year holiday.
Thank you,


text:
This idea has been archived, contributions have been disabled
Good to see the latest version info, not only version no. documents.
Hi Jürgen,
Thanks for your feedback. What version info would you like to have? All information is available if you click on the version number.
Best regards,
an anonymous posted a new comment
Simon posted a new idea


text: I'm kickin' it old school with this card. I pulled out my Lizzie Ann Designs stamps that I picked up quite some time ago and used this little cutie! I was inspired to pull out my LAD stamps because my lovely secret sister sent me some awesome papers from this same company-- while I didn't cut into her paper yet I did whip up this little guy! I hope you enjoy!


text:
In the News
Egnyte in the News…Again!
By Victoria Barret
February 10, 2011
Egnyte co-founder CEO Vineet Jain read my story about how Box.net and others are gaining traction in the business software market by giving away chunks of their offerings, free. He disagreed with the idea that selling software "freemium" style is the road to riches, and was bold enough to spell it out for us in a guest blog post titled, "Why Freemium Isn't Free".
I applaud Jain for detailing an opposing view, and doing it elegantly. His main point is that the costs of supporting "free" customers is anything but free, and a potentially damaging drain on the real paying ones.
That makes sense, and yet, I dare say it: this time around it might be different.
Box.net and others do have to spend to support free customers, but they also save on getting to them in the first place. There's less upfront marketing and sales expense than if they'd have to convince IT departments to adopt their technologies from the start.
I reached out to Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net with Jain's piece and had this to say: "Our marketing and acquisition costs are substantially lower than traditional enterprise software or hardware companies. This is because the product spreads virally, something you can't get with the friction of a pay-only service." Levie also points out that while he does have to spend on every new customer in the form of data storage costs, those costs are dropping dramatically.
Freemium has failed in the past, as Jain points out. Again, could this time be different? There's more willingness than every on the part of all of us (workers) to try out new technology related to our jobs without the blessing of our IT departments. We load apps onto our iPhones, and now we're doing this on our work computers too. This is a massive mindset shift.
Then it is up to these freemium players to convince the upgrade is worth paying for. (Xobni will eventually get me, when it suggests an email address I desperately want to see, but doesn't show me the middle letters…)
Marc Benioff is making a bet on freemium with the newly-launched version of his collaboration software, called Chatter. Then again, he's also running Super Bowl ads to increase Chatter's reach – thereby reducing that freemium benefit I mentioned earlier.
I bet we'll see many more larger business software vendors doing some versions of freemium offerings. Meanwhile, time will tell whether the little guys can rise above the burdens Jain describes.
Comments are closed.


text:
Deep Scale-spaces: Equivariance Over Scale
Part of: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (NIPS 2019)[PDF] [BibTeX] [Supplemental] [Reviews] [Author Feedback] [Meta Review] [Sourcecode]
Conference Event Type: Poster
We introduce deep scale-spaces, a generalization of convolutional neural networks, exploiting the scale symmetry structure of conventional image recognition tasks. Put plainly, the class of an image is invariant to the scale at which it is viewed. We construct scale equivariant cross-correlations based on a principled extension of convolutions, grounded in the theory of scale-spaces and semigroups. As a very basic operation, these cross-correlations can be used in almost any modern deep learning architecture in a plug-and-play manner. We demonstrate our networks on the Patch Camelyon and Cityscapes datasets, to prove their utility and perform introspective studies to further understand their properties.


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This is a charity close to Complete Hire Equipment's heart, we have been supporting The Bali Street Dog Fund since 2014. This charity was established to address the welfare problems associated with the overwhelming number of dogs and cats on an island where Balinese people do not have the resources or knowledge to provide even the most basic care.
The Bali Street Dog Fund was founded in 1999 and is a Registered Charity. Everyone involved is an unpaid volunteer.
Their mission is to enhance the welfare of dogs and cats in Bali by reducing the population through de-sexing; to provide veterinary care to alleviate their suffering; and to empower the Balinese people to care about their animals.
They are dedicated to animal welfare and we believe we can make a difference.
They believe de-sexing dogs and cats is the solution to overpopulation and its flow-on detrimental effects to the Balinese people.
They do not support animal shelters as Bali dogs live community lives and we can best help them by on the spot medical care.
They believe education is vital to empower the Balinese people to improve the lives of animals into the future.
They are committed to supporting efficient, grass roots organ
isations run by respected local people to help their communities.
They strive to ensure that any group we support shares our goal to operate at the highest standard to achieve the best outcome.


text:
Kirk Tisher
Minneapolis, Minnesota
952-232-5991 (Local)
866-291-4854 (Toll Free)
866-291-4854 (Toll Free)
Prior to joining Burns & Hansen, P.A., Kirk served as a judicial law clerk in Minnesota's Tenth Judicial District. Kirk diligently represents his clients in both litigation and transactional matters.
Kirk's practice focuses on helping small and medium size business owners with their legal needs.
In his spare time, Kirk enjoys spending time with family and friends, reading, exercising, and fishing.
Areas of Practice
- Business Law
- Real Estate
- Civil Litigation
Bar Admissions
- Minnesota, 2015
- U.S. District Court District of Minnesota, 2017
- University of Minnesota Law School, Minneapolis, Minnesota
- J.D. cum laude - 2015
- South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
- Major: Geological Engineering


text:
We now officially live in the Amazon era
As we bid adieu to 2017, we're caught up in the year-end ritual of reflections, assessments, predictions and highlights. But this year, we're not focusing on WHAT defined 2017, we're taking a slightly unconventional route to look at WHO defined 2017. The answer? It's the one company we can't seem to get enough of i.e. Amazon.
Every decade has its defining factor, from business and politics to economic shake-ups and natural phenomenon, there's always that ONE thing that will come to overshadow everything else that's happened. In my opinion, this decade belongs to Amazon. While the company has been touted as the next big thing for several reasons, what's particularly interesting to me is the fact it's not just pushing the limits of its own ambitions, it's also pushing everyone else to innovate to keep up the pace. What Amazon has done in the last decade has quite simply introduced a new wave of doing business and is still influencing how businesses will be run in the future.
The myriad of reasons for Amazon's dominant market position I mentioned earlier, let's take a closer look at them now.
Going against the tide
At a time when retailers struggle to keep afloat, Amazon acquired retailer Whole Foods for US$13.7 billion. At a time when businesses are pulling back, Amazon has expanded into new markets such as India, South East Asia, Australia and the Middle East and hired over 150,000 employees this year. Today, the company has a staggering workforce of 541,900 people, according to estimates by Statista on Business Insider. So, how exactly did an online book-selling platform become one of the world's most valued businesses with an estimated valuation of US$458 billion? And where exactly along the way did other businesses lose sight? All evidence points to the company's CEO (and master planner) Jeff Bezos. His unique management style of betting on big risks underpins Amazon's success (and maybe some failures). His vision to lead the company towards new horizons can be traced back to as early as 1997 when he said to his investors: "We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions when we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case."
Strategy of reinventing, not replacing
With retail, Jeff Bezos has a strategy of rethinking how stores of the future will be rather than completely replacing them with digital stores. That's exactly why when everyone's shutting doors on brick and mortar, Amazon is willing to open new ones.
Jack of all trades, master of none?
Whether its physical retail, e-commerce, cloud or even artificial intelligence, it's hard to ignore the progress Amazon is making. On the surface, it may seem like Amazon has its hands full with its many ventures. And, with the success it's enjoying across all its verticals, it can do no wrong. But what Amazon has succeeded in doing is 'getting there first'. By always staying one step ahead of the competition, it forces other companies to play catch-up, ultimately gaining the first-mover advantage.
Focusing on the future
For those that believe Amazon's core focus is retail, they're mistaken. Amazon's core focus is – and has been for quite some time now – disruption. And, the company does disruption well. Bearing this in mind, the influence that the giant will continue to have on the way business is done will be significant, but that doesn't necessarily define the future of all businesses. Amazon has set the tone through its disruptive ways and has taught us one lesson: the future is what we make of it. And it is up to you, not Amazon, to define that future for your business.


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Bidding a fond farewell to Visalia fire captain who died at age 57
Scott Smith was on vacation in the Central Coast on Nov. 19, just days after finishing his shift with the Visalia Fire Department.
A stroke prevented him from ever returning to his job.
|Visalia Fire Capt. Scott Smith, second from left, talks in July 2008 to witnesses about a kitchen fire in the 800 block of North West Street. GERALD CARROLL
"It's been tough. He was a great guy in perfect health with no bad habits," Visalia Fire Department Battalion Chief Charlie Norman said. "A family man, great husband and father. Just a great guy."
Smith, who worked at Fire Station 52 and was set to retire at the end of 2012, was hired by the Visalia department on Jan. 20, 1992, the same day Norman and four others were hired as lateral firefighters.
Norman said more than half of his time working for Visalia was spent at the same station or company as Smith.
Of the five men hired with Smith in 1992, one is retired, one is an engineer, two are captains and one is a battalion chief in Visalia.
Smith was born in Fresno and had previously worked at the North Central Fire District as a firefighter.
Norman spoke to Smith a day before his stroke. He said that everything was fine and that there were no signs of any problem.
"He was in better health now than I was in my 20s," Norman said. "He worked out religiously. He played golf, skied, rode bicycles and dirt bikes."
A visitation was held Sunday and funeral services were held Monday, attended by more than 800.
CAL FIRE, the Tulare Fire Department, the Tulare County Fire Department and the Kings County Fire Department covered the city of Visalia during the funeral services so all employees of the Visalia department could attend.
Representatives from the Kern Fire Department, Fresno Fire Department and fire departments from as far as the Bay Area attended.
More than 110 firefighters were at the services.
"The funeral was somber and sad. But as you heard testimonials from friends and family, you realized he lived every day to the fullest," Norman said. "How he did things with kids and firefighters on- and off-duty showed he lived to the fullest. He was well-liked, popular, knowledgeable and a natural leader. People just flocked to him."
Visalia Fire Chief Mark Nelson, Engineer Allen Wilkinson and Norman spoke at the memorial service.
"He was a long-term veteran of nearly 20 years, a very positive person, good leader and very respected by the department," Nelson said. "He was a real asset to the department; it's a tragic loss."
Smith's casket was taken by a reserve engine driven by Adam Arakelian to the cemetery after the memorial service. The casket was watched by two members of the color guard.
Arakelian was hired with Smith in 1992.
Norman said the department has mentioned setting up a memorial tournament and being there for the family whenever needed.
He said the family now has 70 Johnny's on the spot to take care of them.
Funeral services concluded with the ringing of the bell. The three rings, three times, signify the end of the emergency and the return to quarters.
"It's taught us to live each day as if it's the last. Make a selfless contribution each day and spend time with your family," Norman said. "Like I said at the services, to leave a legacy, you have to live a legacy and Scott lived a legacy."
Source: Visalia Times - Link


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1403-F Flying Live End Pulley
Dual wheeled pulley (with 1 idler) used to route the operating cords/cables 180 degrees, above and in line with track system allowing them to align with a Flying Type Curtain Machine located above and attached to the track system. The carrier body is constructed of formed powder coated steel and is equipped with 2 oil-impregnated sleeve-bearing nylon main wheels riding on a individual axles and 1 ball-bearing steel wheel serving as an idler pulley. The pulley can be anchored to any point along the track, no drilling required.
Pulley width: 2-1/4".
Weight: 1 - 2 lbs.


text:
Perhaps not obviously so, the nonprofit and freelance economies are interconnected. When policies are enacted that mean less government support for nonprofit organizations, that means the pressure on these organizations to fill gaps in human services, such as providing support for education, health, and to fight poverty increases. And that means already strained nonprofits need a larger workforce to help address these big needs — leading to half of surveyed nonprofits reporting plans to increase their staff size in 2017. At the same time, more than half of all employers across the sectors are seeking contract workers.
Many folks are currently gravitating towards meaningful work in the nonprofit sector, and yet many others are drawn to the flexibility and creative challenges of a freelancing lifestyle. Throw the two together, and you get a subculture of employees itching to do good through their work without wanting to sacrifice the freedom freelancing might afford them.
As the Nonprofit sector's workplace style changes, those looking to freelance in the sector will feel it, too. Here are a few ways how:
#1: Greater demand for workers means more salary transparency


text:
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FunLink it in Singapore
Fancy going on a date with a flat belly for women and so-called 'six-pack abs' for men? Everyone wants to impress the opposite gender in one way or another. If you are in late 30 to 40s and you indulge in too much food with no exercise, you will have spare tyre. How to banish belly fat to stay attractive then?


text:
- ammibalustradesAsked on June 12, 2011 at 04:52 AM
This is my form, please see it: http://ammibalustrades.com.au/FREE-Online-Quote.php
For instance, if you choose 'balustrades' in the products feild, you will also need to fill in another feild: 'balustrades length'. I put a hint example for this text box. The example appears grey. All that is right. BUT when you click that text box and begin to type, the data entered is grey and you have to type it all over again.
What is this about????
Any help would be much appreciated.
- allanftdAnswered on June 12, 2011 at 06:05 AM
Hi ammibalustrades,
May we ask which browser you're using? We have tested 4 different web browsers but did not experience the issue you reported. Kindly try again and let us know if it works this time or not so that we can further assist you.
Thank you for using JotForm!
- JotForm SupportNeilVicenteAnswered on June 12, 2011 at 06:09 AM
First off, I'd like to say sorry for this inconvenience. I can confirm the existence of such bug when using Internet Explorer. I see that you're using IE9, and I've tested your form under IE8 with the same results.
With that in mind, I have submitted a report ticket to notify our developers about this issue. Please bear with us. Thank you for your patience.
EDIT: @allan, please view this form using IE8 or IE9 to see the bug described by the user.
- DemAnswered on June 12, 2011 at 07:43 AM
Could you please let me know when you have fixed this issue.
This is our balustrades website: www.ammibalustrades.com.au that we are trying to use your forms on.
- serkanAnswered on August 05, 2011 at 04:13 AM
This problem should be fixed now. Please clean your browser cache and try again.
Thank you for reporting.
- rgasysAnswered on July 05, 2012 at 04:02 PM
Im still having the same bug in IE 9 version 9.0.8112.16421, my form is this one: http://form.jotform.co/form/21856367395870, and the fields where im having the problem are the e-mail ones from Participante 2 to Participante 5, in order to show a new Participante you must choose "si" in the last question.
Is there a way to solve this?
- jeanettebmzAnswered on July 05, 2012 at 09:24 PM
Open a new thread and we will be happy to assist you


text:
WT Explores Taxi Fare Solutions
March 30, 2018
Martha's Vineyard – Long the subject of debate and confusion among customers, fares for taxi services may be standardized by the use of new taxi meter software being considered by selectmen in West Tisbury. The Martha's Vineyard Taxi company has been testing the Taximeter in their cabs. Run from a tablet mounted inside the taxi […]See More


text: Description of best Digital Agency - Big Drop Inc. Located in New York, New York, Big Drop Inc. provides a wide-range of design and developmental services through a personal connection with clients. The team of professionals at Big Drop Inc. work closely with clients to ensure they understand their clients goals. A User Interface Specialist (UIX) is assigned to new clients to work on functionality and analyze competitor sites to help clients gain an advantage over their competitors. The company has a highly-skilled team of designers who use fonts, icons, and animations that are customized to their clients specific industries. The company can effectively provide clients more traffic to their websites from a variety of search engine referrals, brand building, and keyword targeting. The team at Big Drop Inc. produces content that visitors will value and provides a connection that will generate leads. The team at Big Drop Inc. has the experience and knowledge that makes the company one of the best in the industry.


text:
https://www.doylewilson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Debt-Recovery.png 398 596 edm-access https://www.doylewilson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Doyle-Wilson-Solicitors-300x104.png edm-access2018-01-29 01:30:302019-01-16 04:46:59Recovering a Debt
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Debt recovery should be simple and straight forward, but it takes experience to achieve a positive result. Our debt recovery solicitors have practiced extensively in this area and have developed specialised skill sets to increase your recoveries - often without the need for drawn out costly litigation.
https://www.doylewilson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Litigation-Contractual-disputes.jpg 738 1200 Angela Tracey https://www.doylewilson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Doyle-Wilson-Solicitors-300x104.png Angela Tracey2018-01-29 01:25:392018-10-28 22:22:01Contractual Disputes
Contractual Disputes
A contractual dispute occurs when parties have conflicting interpretations over the terms of a contract and one party seeks specific performance or damages or both from the other party. It is preferable to resolve the dispute without court action wherever possible.