A while ago, I borrowed The San Francisco Panorama from the Olympia Library. The San Francisco Panorama is McSweeney’s “attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do.” Really, it’s succesful. Honestly, it’s one of the most awesome things I’ve read in my life. Some of the features in it are wonderful (like the part about what it is like to live with a yellow dwarf star) and some are aggravating in that I really can’t believe no one else I’ve seen has done that (like their profiles of soldiers coming back from Iraq and soldiers going into Iraq).
However, in the introduction Dave Eggers (the founder of McSweeney’s) makes the claim that (I’m paraphrasing) the internet is better suited for shorter pieces and blurbs. While Dave Eggers has been aggravating Seth and I for a long time (READ: he does stuff we want to do. And he does it better than we probably would) it was annoying echoed what a lot of people use to dismiss the online publications in the face of print.
We have the technology now to decide how long people are staying on a website, how long their browser is on a specific article. How do we tell how long someone read a 5,000 word New Yorker magazine article before quitting?
Apparently it involves glasses with eyetracking equipment on it. Basically they put the eye tracking glasses on a bunch of demographically different people people and had them read different news items on different mediums as they normally would.
Online participants read an average of 77 percent of story text they chose to read. This is substantially higher than the amount of story text participants read in broadsheets and tabloids. Broadsheet participants read an average of 62 percent of stories they selected. Tabloid participants read an average of 57 percent.
I was a second away from writing pamphlets urging everyone to embrace the online journalism master-race after reading this.
Screw reporting and aggregating news, I just want to make a website that’s about how awesome the internet is.
So I went to this blog to do a post saw the title of the previous post. It hurt. I was so confident when I did that last post. It’s been just about a month since “Look how often we are updating this blog.” I was so confident that we would keep the weekly schedule of ideas.newsnw.org! Rargh! The “What we’ve been up to” part of this post is going to be difficult since we’ve accomplished a bit since then and I don’t really know off the top of my head when certain milestones happened. I might be leaving stuff out.
1. We’ve slowed down when it comes to content for olympia.newsnw.org. We should acknowledge that. I should point out that there isn’t a huge cohesive reason for Julie, Seth, and I have slowed down. I (Brian) can’t speak for Seth and Julie. It is fair to say, though, the reasons are filed under “LIFE REASONS” and “PERSONAL REASONS.”
2. Check out reader.newsnw.org. Look how cool it is! It’s a list of RSS feeds of Olympia news sources and Olympia related blogs. YOU CAN USE IT TOO!
3. This is probably boring to everyone except for Seth and I (we worked very hard on it!) but here’s News Northwest’s content policy. The video above is from a digital media company called Newsbound who is “exploring how best to contain and explain complex news narratives.” It’s an attempt o explain how filibusters work. Explanitory journalism doesn’t happen a lot. When it does, though, it’s great for putting complex news Here’s a neat quote about putting news in context from Matt Thompson, who spoke at South by South West last year about context in news.
“Say you’re walking into the Metropolitan museum of New York on a sunny afternoon in May. You walk inside and stroll down a hallway of 17th century paintings from Italy. If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know much about the paintings that line the halls, or why a certain piece is particularly notable or revolutionary. You just sort of go along with it. You’re obeying an implicit social contract you have to the museum during that half an hour– “I’m in a prestigious art museum in NY and society says the paintings here are important, so I might as well pay attention for a little while.” But the reality is, you don’t really know or care much about the paintings on the walls. While you might glean bits and pieces from the tiny yellow notecards appearing next to each piece – year, author, type of paint used – the whole experience is relatively flat. The paintings haven’t given you any reason to care about them. Put another way, if you peered into your brain during this experience, you’d probably see it light up pretty simple, low-order sensory areas: “look, there’s a black brush stroke on a giant white canvas.” Compare that experience to this one: Suppose you walk into the Met and an NYU Professor of Art History suddenly appears saying she wants to tell you everything about art in the museum. She grabs you by the hand and leads you through the hallways, enthusiastically explaining the different artistic periods, pointing out the significance of each flourish used by the painter, describing the life and economic status of the artist during the time they painted, and so on. Equipped with this framework to understand the painting, instead of just seeing colors and lines on top of canvases, you now appreciate detailed information about each piece that you couldn’t have before… it’s almost as if you’re perceiving a different painting than the one before the Art History teacher showed up. This is how I think of the word context. Context is information that informs your understanding of the world, literally allowing you to derive more meaning from an experience. In the case of the painting above, it deepens the meaning of your experience in the Met by increasing the # of features, patterns and ideas you’re aware of in each painting. Even though the rectangle of colored brush strokes is the same as the one you saw before the NYU professor told you all about it, you actually see the painting in a different way after you have context.”
Seth, Julie, and I are doing a pretty good job with this putting in set hours stuff. Today, along with normal content related things, we are going to go over state and local licensing things.
Sometime next week, expecting to see informational fliers and stuff around Olympia.
We’re in the starting phases of advertising and having an income. LOOK OUT LOCAL BUSINESSES. WE ARE AFTER YOUR MONEY.
Like everyone else that uses the internet, I like The Onion. The video above is one of my favorites and I thought about it after we started watching Olympia City Council Videos.
It’s like what these people are saying is incredibly important but it’s hidden behind a layer of almost incomprehensible jargon, lack of context, and a kind of boringness that doesn’t invite a lot of engagement.
News Northwest is chugging along slowly and surely. There’s a new design up. That’s cool. We have a twitter account. That’s social media savvy!
With our twitter and Facebook page we started this Tumblr blog which, apparently, we haven’t updated since October 26. Other than having a bigger presence in different online and social media hemispheres, this blog would be our place to:
Draw attention to other people and organizations that are doing similar things as us.
Write about issues surrounding local/hyper-local journalism
What we’re up to.
Or: This is where we write about what we’re doing and thinking. Expect this to update every Monday and Wednesday (at least!) from now on.
So. What are we up to?
To make things chug along faster Julie and Brian (me) are doing scheduled forty hour work weeks with weekly agendas and stuff. Seth (as he is the only person that actually has a job!!!) has shorter hours.
This week we’re going over a business plan so the organization will be sustainable and, excitedly, we are getting business licences and stuff sometime this week. AND! Some “First generation content” (READ: things we’ve done. Not just drawing attention to things other people have done.)
As further proof we’re getting legitimate, we have two spam accounts on the website!
The video is Max Ogden at Cyborg Camp 2010 in Portland. The talk is basically about different civic type things you can do with open data and, in the broader sense, using the internet to do things that isn’t just on the internet.
It’s worth watching alone for his idea about mapping the cats of Portland so, with the right smart phone app, you can map the “path of most cat” when you’re going for a walk.
The News Northwest website has been reduced to a landing page with a newsletter signup/site registration form in anticipation of some cool new features that will be pushed to the live site over the next few weeks.
For example: A blog for every registered user. Hyperlocal wikis. Registered users will be able to create project blogs about a specific place or community. The Interview Database. Data repository filled with info from all the public information requests we’ve been filing.
Situation: A news organization publishes an article about a complex zoning ordinance that the city council has just passed.
Problem: The article doesn’t explain the zoning ordinance clearly, and what’s worse, some readers don’t understand what an ordinance is or how it works.
Solution: Wikis. News organizations need to employ topic pages. Wikis that explain common topics so that timely news updates can refer to them instead of either explaining the same basic information over and over, or just leaving it out. People that need to learn what an ordinance is will be able to click a link to the topic page for ordinances, and learn the basics. They should also be able to browse ordinances descriptions, to learn more about what has been passed recently in their area. A news organization should be tracking city ordinances, too. Watching for trends concerning who is pushing ordinances forward, who the ordinances affect, and evaluating new and existing ordinances to determine if any conflict with other ordinances or other applicable laws.
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A panel at the 2010 SXSW called The Future of Context really captured this problem and possible solutions.
You can listen to the panel discussion at the SXSW website, and follow some of the discussion that happened online during and after the panel at futureofcontext.com.
Journalism based on a foundation of data analysis and visualization gets me as excited as Lego did when I was 10.
Here’s some data work and blog posts from the last few years from people that have inspired the newsnw.org project:
Adrian Holovaty, creator of the web framework Django and the news website Everyblock, wrote a seminal blog post in 2006 outlining the fundamental ways news websites need to change to better structure and share the huge amounts of valuable data that a news organization gathers.
OpenStreetMap is a free editable mapping project that uses a wiki-style editing process that gathers data that anyone can use.
The city of Portland, OR recently launched civicapps.org, a program that encourages developers to create applications based on the open data Portland has released. Most notably, developer Max Ogden created pdxapi.com, an API that anyone can use to access Portland’s open datasets, add their own datasets, and create apps that mashup all that data. So if someone wanted to create an app that say, finds all italian restaurants in their area, and also show the bike racks that are close to your chosen restaurant, they’ll know where to park their wheels. Ogden’s PDX API makes it easy.
These are only a few of the examples of data journalism that have sparked the development of newsnw.org. Expect more posts soon, with more examples, and descriptions of some of the projects we’ll be working on at newsnw.org.
