research

For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, ringmaster David Cohn asked something I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer. But I’ve got a solid track record participating in the resurrected Carnival so far, so I decided not to break my streak.

Cohn asked us to give advice to either the Knight Foundation about its next steps (as the 5-year-old Knight News Challenge ends its run, and a new vice president arrives) or the Reynolds Institute at the University of Missouri about its fellowship program.

Since Knight turned down all three Knight News Challenge submissions from my program at the University of Colorado Boulder (including one I thought was and is damn good and important for the future of journalism credibility and accountability!), I’ll pass on Knight in case any disappointment-inspired bias might spill out in my words. So Reynolds it is!

As Cohn (a Reynolds fellow himself) noted, the program is only four years old. It’s not as big and doesn’t accept as many fellows as, say, Stanford’s renowned Knight Fellowships program. Therefore, the program is still shaping itself. Cohn asked:

1. How would you shape the fellowship to drive innovation?
Because the program is small, I’d narrow the focus significantly. In fact, for each fellowship year, I’d pick a theme and find fellows who all wanted to work on complementary aspects of the theme. Let’s say for the next crew of fellows, select all of them because they want to focus on variations on a theme of “business models for journalism in the digital age.” Next year, I’d pick a different theme. The key would be that the theme is the most important challenge or opportunity facing journalism at the time. Business models for journalism addresses solving a big problem for the news industry and for journalists who want to make a living. A theme that could address an opportunity instead of a problem would be best utilizing emerging mobile technologies in the news realm.

Such an approach is less appropriate for a larger fellowship program, like Stanford’s, which takes on 20 fellows each year.

2. What types of fellows should they be looking for?
If we go with my answer to No. 1, then I’d say find a mix of fellows from multiple disciplines who can work together to address the year’s theme issue or opportunity. If the theme is business models for news, then, of course, bring in a business expert who perhaps is not a journalist but has a strong interest in publishing business models. Or an economist. Or a marketing guru. Don’t invite in as fellows people who don’t know or care about the news industry, but rather individuals who want to engage and can work well with the journalist fellows. One word is key: interdisciplinary.

3. What types of fellows should they avoid?
Pure journalists. I’d much rather see Reynolds recruit journalists who also hold MBAs, or are extremely competent technologists. Avoid one-dimensional journalists. And especially, avoid anyone who doesn’t believe with 100% of their being that in the media of today and the future, digital is at the center of things and is the control hub for any media or news organization.

4. What programs should the fellows go through in order to drive innovation?
Bring in lots of outside experts to get the fellows thinking beyond the confines of journalism. If mobile is the theme, bring in mobile industry leaders and force them to shift gears and think with the fellows about how the news industry can leverage emerging mobile developments that the industry leaders are working on today. Bring in entrepreneurs who may not be focused on news and journalism as a market opportunity, yet who are building digital products or services that have significant potential for news; force them to focus on news applications, and let the fellows lobby the entrepreneurs to put some thinking and resources into addressing news problems and opportunities.

Get the fellows to roam the university, finding partners in other disciplines to assist them in thinking through and developing innovative news-beneficial projects that cannot be done by journalists alone. If any of the journalist fellows come out of the program with any old journalistic dogma still in their heads, the program will have been a failure.

So, it’s Carnival of Journalism time of the month again, and ringmaster David Cohn this time has posed the question, “Considering your unique circumstances, what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?”

OK, that’s an easy one when I apply my “unique circumstances,” which is that I live in Boulder, Colorado, and focus my career on digital media. You see, there’s this project at work that this question is tailored for, exactly. The result so far is the website SlicesofBoulder.com, which is a project that’s part of my Digital Media Test Kitchen program at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication (and utilizing technology and consulting from our Toronto friends at Eqentia).

SlicesofBoulder at this point addresses David’s question by not “increasing” the number of news sources serving Boulder, but rather by “finding” them, since so many exist online. Last summer, we (SJMC instructor Sandra Fish, master’s student researcher Jenny Dean, and I) attempted to find all the credible news and information sources in and around Boulder that send content about Boulder flowing onto the web. (If you want to know more, here’s an old blog post explaining the project.)

Here’s my first point: There’s no great need to increase the number of news sources, at least in our scenic college town of Boulder, nor in most cities. If you expand your definition of “news source” beyond its traditional meaning, Boulder and lots of other communities have hundreds or thousands of “news” sources online.

Where the need exists is not in “creating” more news sources, but rather in developing “online hubs” like SlicesofBoulder.com to track them all, intelligently sort and filter them, and provide a simple-to-use interface and personalization features so online users can find the flow of news and information they want from all the sources that now exist in this digital, everyone’s-a-publisher age.

I used the term “online hub” above because that was Recommendation #15 of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy’s Informing Communities report: “Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.”

Anyway, for Boulder, at least, the first pass at creating a community online hub has been accomplished. But the next step, I believe, is the most important: Developing systems to analyze and rate the many online news and information sources that serve a community like Boulder, so that a local resident who while using our online hub comes upon a never-seen-before website, or blog, or institutional news feed, or whatever is able to determine if this unknown digital-content entity provides credible information or not.

Researcher Robin Donovan and I currently are working on this next phase of the SlicesofBoulder project. The idea is that a user of the site will be able to see credibility, accuracy, bias, popularity, and other ratings of any source that we track on the site.

My dream is that at some point in the near future, I’ll have a web-browser extension (or the functionality will be built into the browser) that will give me a wide range of ratings representing various and multiple parameters for whatever website I find myself on.

I don’t know that the need is so much that we need to create more news and information sources online, but rather that of the unfathomable number of sources that already exist on the web to provide us with news and information, that we have a way to know whether to trust them or not, or have some indication of their quality based on multiple layers of automated and human analysis.

I’ll be interested to read other contributions to this month’s Carnival of Journalism. Perhaps other writers will suggest that we do need more sources. If so, I’ll be especially interested in how they justify that when we already are faced as news/information consumers with major digital information overload.

Unless your personal blog is your livelihood and brings in a decent amount of revenue, it’s sometimes difficult to keep it well fed. That’s my excuse for not having posted here in over a month. (Yikes!) … But I have been working on some fascinating news- and technology-related projects recently, so I share them here as an update.

Nearly all my work time has gone into the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication, a program I founded and direct. (Yes, that journalism school — the one that may be “discontinued.” But no, it’s not the end of journalism education at the University of Colorado, but rather an institutional process that will modernize it as part of an overall restructuring to make journalism and media teaching and research more interdisciplinary and relevant to the digital transformation under way in our society.)

I’ve been pleased that the Test Kitchen program has been raising donor money despite the uncertainness of the university process’ eventual outcome, including two donors coming forward just last week.

So, here are some of the project areas that we’re working on at the Test Kitchen. I welcome partnership and collaboration inquiries in these areas, as well as new research ideas to benefit the news sector.

• Membership models for news. This is a Journalism-Business research project looking into alternative revenue models for news websites (and including mobile components) vs. “paywalls” that some news publishers have put in front of commodity news content. We’re focusing on two areas of news providers where paywalls don’t make much sense: investigative reporting organizations and collegiate media.
• Social gaming to change news behavior. In partnership with the developers of the popular Qrank mobile social news/trivia/history quiz, we’re experimenting with and examining the role of mobile gaming in changing the news-consumption habits of young adults, and increasing news awareness.
• Always-on video as a news tool. In the area of “life-casting” is technology that allows an individual to record everything that happens to them, including video recording of everything that the person sees and hears. We think a more practical use for always-on video is for reporters out working a story.
• Cross-device media viewing. We’re experimenting with ways to allow for better consumption by an individual of long-form journalism across multiple devices (PC, smartphone, tablet, etc.) by allowing an article reader to pick up where he/she left off when picking up a different media device at a later time.
• Mobile augmented reality. This is an area where we’re looking at the potential of smartphone AR technology being put to use for innovative editorial presentation and reporting, and for new forms of local advertising.
• Next-generation news aggregators. We’ve gotten a start on that with our beta SlicesofBoulder.com site, but more is in store, including a refined user interface and aggregator-level source ratings.

There’s more, and I’m excited about the coming year. As I mentioned above, I love to hear from potential partners and collaborators: students, academics, entrepreneurs, etc. E-mail me at steve.outing@colorado.edu or call me at 303-834-7810.

And if the Digital Media Test Kitchen sounds like a program worthy of your financial support, allow me to point you to our Giving page!

While I do occasionally use the Wall Street Journal iPhone app to look specifically at what WSJ.com has available, on the web I rarely visit the website as a destination (and I am not currently a paying subscriber to either the newspaper or the website). Instead, WSJ.com articles tend to come to me.

That is, I see links to recommended WSJ.com articles on news aggregator sites like Google News or Digg, or in blogs, or in Twitter posts from those I follow, or in my Facebook Newsfeed as recommended by my Facebook friends.

My normal behavior is to click through and read the interesting-looking WSJ.com article. With the recent change by Google to its “First Click” program, I can now read up to 5 articles elsewhere on the site if I choose to click around, before getting to the site’s pay wall. But it’s rare that I go surfing around the rest of the site after reading the article I came for.

This week, I indeed clicked through to a WSJ.com story that I saw linked on a Twitter post, and got presented with a pop-up offer to take a survey about my usage of the site. (I think that appeared as I left the site, but can’t recall for sure.) I took the bait, and was shocked as I answered questions that the survey did not allow me to report my method of using WSJ.com; the data the company will get from it is seriously flawed, because the survey excluded tracking behavior like mine that is widespread among experienced Internet users.

If the link above allows you to take the survey, you’ll see that if you identify yourself as a non-subscriber to both the Wall Street Journal print edition and WSJ.com, the line of questioning will assume that you are a regular destination visitor to the site, and asks things like:

• What days do you typically visit WSJ.com?
• What sections do you typically view on the site?
• How often do you visit the site? … And so on.

By the time I reached the end of the survey, I realized that I was not allowed by the survey to indicate my actual behavior and use patterns. While I typically read several WSJ.com articles a week, it’s entirely unpredictable, because I don’t have a habit of going to WSJ.com, but rather I get haphazardly referred to specific articles on the site that others (individuals or aggregators) have recommended. One week I might read 20 of its articles, the next zero.

In the final field was a free-form comment field where I explained my actual usage of WSJ.com, but the data that I added to the survey results — even though I answered every question accurately and truthfully — gave no clue to my actual behavior with the WSJ brand.

It’s as though whoever wrote the survey questions — or approved them — did not want to have the results show how many web users actually behave. That might work against parent News Corp.’s plans to shove much of its other news properties’ website content behind paywalls.

WSJ.com survey = FAIL.

The American Press Institute’s invitation-only “Newsmedia Economic Action Plan Conference” this morning included a presentation by Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive and Greg Swanson of ITZ Publishering, showing the results of a survey of 2,400 U.S. newspaper executives. (You can see the full 80-slide presentation here.)

I find much evidence that newspaper leaders remain delusional about how charging for online content (some or all) is going to become such a big revenue stream that it will save them. Below is the slide that just screamed out at me the main problem: Newspaper executives are out of touch with the online audience to a huge degree.

Click the image below to see an enlarged view.

For the benefit of anyone not able to see the chart in an RSS feed or mobile version of this blog, the graphic shows that 75% of newspaper execs believe that if their content were no longer available on their website, online users would foremost turn to the print edition of the newspaper. Meanwhile, only 30% of online news users said they would turn to the print edition in such a case; the No. 1 choice (at 68% of respondents to a 2009 Belden survey) was to look to “other local media Internet sites.”

Wow. That pretty much says it all. Many newspapers are doomed without management change at the top, moving people into the executive suite who have a better grasp of reality. Or the people already occupying those offices need to get new glasses.