Michael Michael » journalism

How the Guardian Does DataJournalism

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:37:24 +0000

The Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs are a fantastic victory for investigative data basedjournalism, not only here at the Guardian but at the New York Times and Der Spiegel too.

It’s also datajournalism in action. What we wanted to do was enable our team of specialist reporters to get great human stories from the information – and we wanted to analyse it to get the big picture, to show how the war really is going.

It’s been a busy month for those of us who work with data at the Guardian; this is how we got here.

Wikileaks Afghanistan: What the NYT Says

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:25:28 +0000

Via the NY Times:

Over all these documents amount to a real-time history of the war reported from one important vantage point — that of the soldiers and officers actually doing the fighting and reconstruction…

…The documents — some 92,000 individual reports in all — were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds, on the condition that the papers not report on the data until July 25, when WikiLeaks said it intended to post the material on the Internet. WikiLeaks did not reveal where it obtained the material. WikiLeaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing. The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today. The three news organizations agreed to publish their articles simultaneously, but each prepared its own articles.

Leakage: Wikileaks Has a Plan

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:23:40 +0000

Via Computer World:

Wikileaks.org, the online clearinghouse for leaked documents, is working on a plan to make the Web leakier by enabling newspapers, human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed an "upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks" form onto their Web sites.

The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy…

…Once Wikileaks confirms the uploaded material is real, it will be handed over to the Web site that encouraged the submission for a period of time. This embargo period gives the journalist or rights group time to write a news story or report based on the material.

San Francisco Postcard from the FJP

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:37:38 +0000

I was in San Francisco earlier this month working on the Future Journalism Project. This is a multiplatform documentary we recently announced.

Follow the FJP

For news and updates join me on Twitter.

Funny though, as I begin shooting interviews and talking to people, opportunities begin to expand. Or at least ideas of what’s possible do.

Before heading to San Francisco, the idea behind the Future Journalism Project was to create a feature length documentary and a Web site that holds all the source footage so that those interested can watch interviews with those we film in their entirety.

Now that I’m back and have discussed the project with ScribeLabs and producers here at ScribeMedia, we’re beginning to recognize that the opportunities are so much more.

Here’s what we’re now thinking. In addition to producing a traditional documentary, we want to explore the possible. This includes:

Dedicated Web Site: the Future Journalism Project Web site will hold video of all interviews conducted. Each interview will be edited down to a series of 4-6 minute segments organized by subject matter and presented in an interface similar to video-centric sites such as YouTube, Hulu and TED. The goal is to let site visitors explore the ideas of individuals and also dive deeply into specific topics as discussed from a variety of perspectives. Mechanisms for community interactions and content submissions will be in place so that these interviews seed an ongoing conversation.
Podcast Series: Each Future Journalism Project interview conducted by the producers will be made available and presented in its entirety as an audio podcast. Listeners can subscribe to the entire series or download podcasts with the interviewees they are most interested in hearing from.
The Book: A book of essays written by leading thinkers is planned to accompany the project. The subjects and themes explored will echo and expand upon the video content, with authors focusing on Journalism Education, Journalism Business Models, Changing Journalism Practices and Journalism and Democracy.
The book will appear in both print and digital versions.

This may sound obnoxiously aspirational but the truth of the matter is that in this day and age there’s really no reason that the above shouldn’t be seen as starting points with pretty much any enterprise reporting activity, documentaries most definitely included.

With the technologies and services available to us it’s really just a matter of opening our minds to the possible and seizing opportunities as they present themselves.

Gear & Gadgets

Our San Francisco Gear Included:
• Camera: Sony EX1
• Lights: Lowel Tota-Lights
• Editing: Final Cut
• Filters: Red Giant
• Audio: Soundtrack Pro
• Sound Design: Reason

What I’m doing may be near and dear to my heart but in the end it’s simply content. Open source platforms such as WordPress and Drupal will let me organize it, video service providers like Vimeo and Blip will let me present it, on demand publishers like Lulu will let me create books about it, iTunes lets me podcast it, Creative Commons lets me license it. Really, what more could a producer ask for?

These are the conversations we’re having back at the Labs, conversations guided by the opportunity of digital possibility.

That said, I hope you follow this project for two distinct reasons: one, journalism in the United States is at a crossroads and we hope to provide fodder for discussion and, two, our very open business model is something we believe in and think is applicable across most subject matter.

The video above include a fraction of the ideas we captured in San Francisco. Stay tuned as we continue our explorations.

About the Interviewees

While not everyone we talked to appear in the above video, in order of appearance those that do are:

Dave Cohn: Founder, Spot.us.
Dan Gillmor: Director, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Ted Glasser: Professor of Communication, Stanford University. Co-author, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue.
Richard Gingras: CEO, Salon Media Group.
Gabriel Sama: 2010 Knight Journalism Fellow, Stanford University.
Mark Luckie: Multimedia Producer, Center for Investigative Reporting. Creator, 10,000 Words.

Links go to a their Web sites and/or biographies.

Cover image: San Francisco Spectator by VancityAllie via Creative Commons/Flickr.

About San Francisco Postcard from the FJP

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

The Future of Web Video Journalism

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:51:31 +0000

video platform video management video solutions video player

Time once was that video was a bit player in the online journalism experience. As traditional print publications moved online they didn’t have the human resources or technical infrastructure to create great video storytelling. Add a lack of bandwidth for viewers to actually enjoy video if it did exist and you see why the medium was slow to take hold.

Sponsored by

Watch all interviews from Streaming Media East.

Register now for

With today’s explosion of online video storytelling it’s hard to believe that reality existed until only a few years ago.

Craig Duff, Director of Multimedia at Time.com, is and has been a Web video proponent now for years. His goal is true storytelling adapted to the realities of the Web and mobile as a medium.

His strategy, he says, can be found in Pat Benatar lyrics: Hit me with your best shot.

In other words, tell us upfront what the story is about and show us what it’s really like to live with the facts and figures that underlie the news.

Craig and I spoke at Streaming Media East 2010. In the interview above he discusses Time.com’s video journalism strategy, producing content for new platforms such as the iPad and what the future of Web video journalism holds.

An archive of all interviews from that event can be found here.

Magazine iPad Apps? We’ve Played this Game Before

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:41:21 +0000

GQ iPad sales figures came out the other day. They’re a bit confused. Initial reports read that 365 December “Men of the Year” iPad issue were sold. Later, VentureBeat clarified and wrote that 52,000 GQ Apple apps sold since December.

It’s a long way from 365 to 52,000 and as VentureBeat points out, GQ publisher Condé Nast doesn’t have a breakdown of which apps sold on which device. Meaning, Apple doesn’t provide analytics for anyone — let alone the publisher — to know whether they’re having success on the iPad or iPhone/Touch. This is a problem of course, and one that mobile analytics provider Flurry tries to reconcile.

But while 365 might be low, the iPad as magazine delivery system isn’t going to be the publishing savior hyped by hopeful insiders over the past few months. It’s been said before and is worth saying again: thinking a device saves an industry is a losing proposition.

Outside the novelty factor, few consumers who’ve left print for the Web are going to start paying for a magazine just because it’s on a new form factor. Once the novelty wears off, readers will settle back in where the content is free.

And while novelty can add incremental income, incremental income isn’t significant income. Listen to what GQ VP/Publisher Pete Hunsinger told the magazine trade publication min, “This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage. Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.”

Hunsinger’s general point stands: digital product distribution is a great thing, but there are development and marketing costs with an iPad app so production isn’t a freebie. Besides, who among us expects him to come out, scratch his head and complain, “365? WTF?”

But compared to the hype of the iPad as a potential publishing bonanza, the implication of GQ’s sales numbers — be they 365 or 1,365 — are disappointing although I hedge with the caveat that it’s very early in the iPad’s lifecycle (productivity applications like Apple’s iWork suite. This leads me to wonder if trying to recreate the magazine experience on a digital device is a bit of a fool’s errand. If it’s content people want, a Web browser sits about anywhere these days for people to get it.

Besides, we’ve played this game before.

The holy grail for Web designers has been the pixel perfect layout afforded in print design. A number of years ago some publications jumped to Flash in order to replicate print layouts but that experiment went nowhere. Publishing services like Issuu and Zinio are still trying to make that model successful today by giving content developers the means to replicate their print design in a Flash interface.

The results? Novel and interesting, but clunky from a usability standpoint. Don’t believe me? Try Sporting News Today.

There’s no doubt that magazine iPad apps do make content visually beautiful, but publishers are essentially asking readers to pay for a design iteration. Are there really enough people with such nuanced design sensibilities to make that a business model?

Of course, design and photo heavy magazines have a leg up in this regard. While Steve Jobs might be offering a world originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

OMFG, Another iPad Story

Michael Cervieri — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:29:38 +0000

The wired and wireless future of media and infotainment. tsevis via Creative Commons/Flickr.

The Internet became a blanket of white noise as we hit Saturday’s D-Day for the official iPad release.

Articles about people standing in line, videos of people opening the packaging, photos of smiley, happy people with their Jesus-ware safely in hand. And then half baked reviews of just about any app a writer could get his or her hands on. Forget it, people didn’t even need to have the iPad in hand, or have used the application, any string of words that won a few extra page views would do.

Live blogging the first day of sales? Really? The New York Times and Reuters joined by the likes Gizmodo, CNET, paidContent, Tech Crunch and TUAW.

8:59 — man pressed against Apple store door.
9:00 — doors open
9:02 — man holds Jesus pad in hands, squeals like a little boy getting cupcakes for breakfast

“I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff,” writes Cory Doctorow. We’ll get back to him in a minute.

Suffice to say though, the reporting’s mostly monotonous — and embarrassing for journalists who should know better — but lurking around the edges are a few thoughtful ideas about what the device actually means, and what the iPad and future products like it might signify for the computing and media world of the near future.

Copyright

Marc Aronson writes in the New York Times that the promise of truly multimedia, immersive nonfiction won’t make its way to devices such as these unless the copyright regime changes.

In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Unless we nonfiction writers are lucky and hit a public-domain mother lode, we have to pay for the right to use just about anything — from a single line of a song to any part of a poem; from the vast archives of the world’s art (now managed by gimlet-eyed venture capitalists) to the historical images that serve as profit centers for museums and academic libraries.

The amount we pay depends on where and how the material is used. In fact, the very first question a rights holder asks is “What are you going to do with my baby?” Which countries do you plan to sell in? What languages? Over what period of time? How large will the image be in your book?

As the publishing world latches onto the iPad as a possible industry savior — or at least a final bit of light in an otherwise gloomy economic reality — the urge will be to further restrict copyright.

Doing so will put most content out of reach of most multimedia authors.

“Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print, it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books,” writes Aronson. “After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated.”

Aronson’s solution is somewhat of a radio model. Pay the copyright holder some royalty per play.

Better would be to readdress our fair use laws and how best to shape them for a truly digital, multimedia age. Our current regime is not built for 21st century mashup culture. Instead, its built to protect 19th and 20th century business models.

Computer as Appliance

As I mentioned above, we’d get back to Doctorow. He wrote Friday about why he wouldn’t buy an iPad. More importantly, he wrote about why you shouldn’t either.

The crux of the matter — as many have pointed out — is that the iPad is for consuming rather than creating. The history of the open Internet, and the reason it’s been so disruptive is because anyone could create anything, stick it online and potentially shape an industry or create entirely new ones. Think YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Amazon, Blogs, eBay, Netflix and any other online service or application that’s upended the status quo over the last 10-15 years.

The iPad flips all this on its head and creates a walled garden appliance. Apple, not the iPad owner, has the final say about what applications can be created for and therefore used on it.

Imagine where the Web — or personal computing as whole — might be if anyone who wanted to create new content, try a new business model, create a new application or do anything of creative interest to him or her had to apply to some governing body in order to do so.

That is the digital dynamic the Apple has created with the iPad.

As Doctorow writes:

I’ve spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn’t come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it’s come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public’s eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology…

…As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don’t want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.

Jonathan Zittrain wrote a book a few years ago called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it. In it he dealt specifically with turning the open Internet into closed, proprietary systems. Appliances like the iPad would lead that way. Pick it up and give it a read when you have the chance.

So those are the two important stories that our journalists should be talking about.

Unfortunately, they’re getting drowned out in OMG fanboy squealing about yet another app.

About OMFG, Another iPad Story

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Things Journo Grads Should Do

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:51:00 +0000

Earlier this week Mark S. Luckie from 10,000 Words gave advice to graduating journalism students and suggested 30 things they could do this summer.

The list started like this:

Start a blog and post at least twice a week
If you already have a blog, write a post that gets retweeted 20 times
Shoot 100 amazing photos and post them on Flickr
Friend at least 50 journalists on Twitter who in turn follow you back
Become a part of a crowdsourcing project

and ran up to number 30.

I liked his suggestions — a few are ones I’ve told my journalism students to pursue — and shared his post with one of the journalism listservs I’m on.

“You can quibble with the details,” I wrote, “but I generally think this is spot on and will pass it along to my students.”

The first response was positive:

That is spot on and some points we should probably all learn! Thanks for the to-do list!

The next response, not so much.

Before I get into it though I think I can safely say that our mainstream brethren aren’t quite the shining stars we might hope them to be. Off the top of my head I can think of today’s Washington Post pay to play snafu (Charles Kaiser sums up its repercussions nicely); NPR’s banning the word “torture” from its coverage of Bush era interrogations; and Fox’s Glenn Beck continued journey to looneyville when he apparently agreed with a guest that “the only chance we have as a country right now is” for bin Laden to “detonate a major weapon” in the US.

Really?

So, yes, I agree with Luckie that our graduating journalists have some independent training to do. Hopefully they’ll apply it to new, independent news operations that start to show what real journalism can look like.

Slate’s Jack Schafer is right when he writes that digital disruption will improve journalism. We — and our graduates — just need to practice and take advantage of what this technology is providing.

Without further ado, here’s the back and forth.

Wow. Is this what journalism has sunk to? “Start a blog and post at least twice a week.” Is the author taking it on faith that all these new journalism grads just automatically have something to say that is so pressing and relevant they have to broadcast their thoughts twice a week?

Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t. I know a 2008 grad that got his current “mainstream” gig because he did have something to say, and said it well. Without the blog, the hiring editor never would have come across him.

However, think of a blog simply as a platform. It doesn’t necessarily have to include opinion or “thoughts” as you imply above. I’ve told my students in the past, if you graduate and want to cover City Hall but haven’t been hired to do so, start a blog and start reporting. Get your ass down to City Hall and break news.

You don’t have to wait until Newsday comes calling. Better, do it with a partner and report as fiercely as you can so you make a name for yourself. You’ll eventually get noticed.

That’s what i think of when someone says, start a blog. The blog, as a public platform, lets us pursue what truly interests us if we haven’t been fortunate enough to be hired for the beat we really want. Use it.

And that they’re all such skilled photographers that every one of them can post “100 amazing photos” that other people besides their friends will actually care about?

If you’re not skilled enough to begin with the only way you’re going to get there is to practice. So i tweak the “take a 100 photographs directive” and say, take thousands, but you can only have 100 up on Flickr/your site at any one time. That way, you learn to edit yourself. You learn to develop and eye, you learn a variety of skills, including editorial judgment, that will come in handy.

Or is he/she assuming that it’s OK to produce content for the sake of producing content?

Well, is it not ok? Athletes practice. So too artists and musicians. Should journalists not lift a finger and perfect their writing, shooting, editing, etc. unless they have an actual, honest to goodness signed, sealed and delivered assignment from an editorial desk? I’d rather have that budding journalist do it publicly where he or she can get actual feedback from those who see, hear or read their work.

How else do you propose people get better?

Nowhere in this post is there any mention of actually, say, reporting. Why not instruct new grads to spend time in underrepresented communities and find the stories that mainstream media is missing?

Well, I agree with you there and hopefully my tweaking shows that reporting is part of the process in the recommendations. And yes, go take those pictures and write pieces that aren’t covered in the mainstream media.

We don’t need thousands of new journalists who know how to use Photoshop and Twitter. Any child can do that. We need journalists who actually know how to report and write, and who pay attention.

We do need journalists who know how to report and write, and who pay attention. And we need them to be able to produce that content in and for a medium that most people are now using to get their news. That’s the web. Photoshopping required. Which, apologies to any of my former students on this list, is not something any child can do.

Final thought. The author who posted the original list recommends following 50 journalists on Twitter. I disagree.

Leave the echo chamber and follow 50 people in the beat and subject matter you want to report in and on. Immerse yourselves in the links and knowledge they’re sharing. It will do you well.

Now, she did conclude her rant with, “We need journalists who actually know how to report and write, and who pay attention.”

And this, of course, is absolutely true.

Saving the News: A Headache That Won’t Go Away

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:39:21 +0000

The endless chatter about saving journalism is a growing headache that won’t go away. Day after day there’s another article, talk, email thread, tweet or general missive about the impending death of an industry and by extension democracy as we know it.

However, in a rare instance where the newsroom and the boardroom actually agree, both journalists and their corporate drivers seem to have settled on the source of our continued misery.

It’s you, dear reader. It’s you.

If only you’d pay for the content we produce, all would be good. Newspapers would have their well-deserved profits, our investigations would uproot corruption and the Union would be saved because a largely 20th century historical anomaly had been saved.

Country and newspapers, we’re told, share the same fate. Although — truth be told — no one’s yet copped to who’s responsible for the incessant trivialization of our most important debates except to point fingers at the cable bloviators who tick off market researched talking points between market researched commercial breaks.

But, that’s not point. You are.

Even though you never really paid for the news back when you actually bought a physical newspaper, your Internet freeloading these past few years has brought an industry to its knees.

And where profitable newspapers equals democracy equals a country back on its feet, it’s well high time you pay.

This is what the newsroom and the boardroom now agree on.

The solution du jour is to get news readers to abandon their free access culture and instead pay for content via some clever, yet-to-be-created solution that involves micro-payments or subscriptions.

This latest round of teeth gnashing seems to have started with an Atlantic Monthly article by Michael Hirschorn about the inevitable collapse of the New York Times. What made the piece so explosive wasn’t so much the idea that the Times would cease to exist somewhere and sometime in a theoretical future.

Instead, Hirschorn predicts the Times will go down in the next few months.

The howling that followed was a world of journalists — and those who love the news — telling anyone who’d listen that we must save our beloved institutions, New York Times included. And with good reason. Layoffs and bankruptcies abound. Papers and magazines that seemed so secure just the other day will not be here tomorrow.

The race is on to come up with a sustainable business model that allows for deep news gathering and a typical, unimaginative solution runs thus: readers must pay for content.

The New York Times’ David Carr took a stab. He equated the hard and soft news we read in our dailies with the music we listen to on our iPods. He wrote about how Steve Jobs and Apple revolutionized and revitalized the music industry by creating iTunes.

In Carr’s view, iTunes stopped people from pirating music by offering an easy-to-use interface to purchase music. This software solution changed a budding “pirate” culture, got people used to paying for content (i.e., music) and pulled the record labels back from the brink of ruin.

Despite ignoring the fact the labels still struggle and coming dangerously close to saying that you, dear reader, are basically a pirate, he’d like someone with Jobs’ sense of innovation to create an iTunes for the news. It would be an application that allows news organizations to sell content in the same way that record labels currently can:

Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like [Jobs] comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.

Over at Vanity Fair, they even created a mock-up of how this might look. “Mock” is important here. VF seems to get that equating music and news is absurd from the get go.

It’s great that people understand the concept of digital media as manipulable content objects that can be bought, sold, mashed and mixed be it a video, an image, an article, a slide show or an audio file.

But to think that because each can be digitally transmitted as zeros and ones, and therefore economically bundled in the same way demonstrates a fundamental lack of imagination and understanding.

Just because I can buy or sell a music file for $.99 doesn’t mean that I can then sell a news story for $.05. It’s not a price point issue. We’re dealing with apples and robots here, content objects of radically different types. Or another way: not all bits are created equal.

Think music. You buy a song because you want to listen to the song. You want to have the song. And the reason you want to have the song is because there’s an emotional connectivity to it that makes you want to listen to it again and again.

It’s absurd to think that a news article — or even a brilliant essay — holds this same sort of connection. We listen to music in our showers, our cars, on our iPods and in our bars, lounges and clubs. That’s why we pay our $.99. We want it to play it over and over again until we’re sick of it.

That doesn’t happen with our news. The vast majority of people doesn’t have the need or desire to build up a news library like they do music libraries. Music forms an aesthetic palette we live and groove to. Because of this, Jimi Hendrix continues to live side by side with Radiohead and the two together are queued up on a daily basis.

Great essays and hard news articles by Hendrix’s and Radiohead’s contemporaries? Not so much outside the occasional anthology.

The $.05 that the micro-payment advocates are asking I pay to read about yesterday’s plane crash is payment for access to information I can get just about anywhere. It’s payment for something disposable which I’m sorry to tell my journalism colleagues is the type of “product” we create. That’s why we call it news and save for the hoarders among us, why newspapers are discarded almost as soon as they’re purchased.

This isn’t to belittle the hard work, dedication, expense and uncelebrated toil of news gatherers and publishers. Instead it’s to try to understand that the ambiguously defined news industry — or journalism — is trying to sell the wrong thing.

The article written about the plane crash should not be sold to dear reader, be it for $.05 or any other price point. Trying to do so is missing the forest for the trees.

Instead, publishers need to rethink what the news organization actually is. If we step back and take the time to rethink we can reformulate it as the potential services and overall intellectual capital of the organization itself, not the discrete content objects that masquerade as articles, videos and stunning photographic and illustrative visuals.

Yes, articles, images and videos can be somewhat supported by ad revenue but as been beaten to a pulp, online ad support does not sustain a full-blown news operation.

There needs to be another model and it’s not micro-payments or subscriptions save for the most up-to-date, of-the-moment, we-must-have-this-now-and-can’t-get-it-anywhere-else content.

So what are these potential “services”? I’ll soon start digging into them to offer ideas but they revolve around what the Internet actually is and not what some would like it to be. That is, it’s a mostly open system built upon ever more sophisticated application layers that allows for two way communication and conversation. It’s not a “closed” system where our every move is toll-gated by another incremental payment.

Taking openness, communication and conversation as starting points, there are software services news consumers would pay for. These include different design views and interactivity than is found on traditional news sites. For example, the New York Times created a prototype that changes the way we scan the news. I could see more immersive environments developed that subscribers have access to. Non-subscribers see traditional layouts

I can also see multiple news organizations coming together and offering “3D gateways” so that related articles lined up with one another and subscribers can see where they’re different and where they’re the same. For example, a view of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal among others that shows each organization’s stimulus package coverage lined up against one another with internal algorithms highlighting similarities and differences.

The second model I mentioned revolves around the overall intellectual capital of the news organization and the communication possible between reader, writer, producer and publisher. Numerous newspapers take readers’ questions on different subjects throughout the week but what about simple steps like live Webcasts where subscribers can ask questions, non-subscribers cannot.

Or taken more broadly, why are we not evolving customer (i.e., subscriber) outreach?

In an age and on a platform where instantaneous communication is possible, news organizations aren’t doing much about it. There’s much more interactivity that could happen between journalists and their readers that that not only adds to the bottom line but builds brand loyalty as well.

While these are initial ideas, they follow in part Chris Anderson and the price of free; Clay Shirky’s now 6-year-old understanding on the futility of micro-payments; and Fred Wilson’s thoughts about price elasticity in the digital age among others.

And if my imagination is no more creative than what I’ve criticized in current proposals, there’s always the non-profit foundation model.

That though, will be explored another day.

Plumbers, Foreign Correspondents and the New York Times

Michael Cervieri — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:29:23 +0000

Lost in the snickering that Pajamas Media is sending Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher to Gaza as its “War Correspondent” is the fact that conservative PJTV.com is sending Wurzelbacher to Gaza as its War Correspondent.

Serious. Think about that for a moment. As The Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn speculates about the end of a debt-ridden New York Times, news continues that the mainstream media is cutting jobs, closing bureaus and generally trying to right their sinking ships, a blog network is sending people overseas to gather stories.

So while we doubt seasoned foreign correspondents are trembling in their boots that they’ll be out scooped, the anxiety continues with the penny counters upstairs as the blogosphere shows new and different ways to operate news (or “news”) organizations.