Month: April 2011

URL manipulation, libel, and Kate Middleton jelly beans

Regular readers here (all 6 of you) will probably already know about Jellybeangate. Yesterday, a URL from the Independent was rewritten to say something rather uncomplimentary about a PR-churned story on their site, revealing that Kate Middleton’s face had been discovered in a jelly bean. The link went viral on Twitter after several fairly well-respected sources assumed it was the work of a disgruntled sub and not a prank. Then the corrections went viral, along with several other versions of the link. This sort of URL behaviour is remarkably common.

According to the Nieman Lab, there are vast numbers of other news organisations whose URLs can be manipulated in this way (Citywire, my employer, is one of them) – and third parties with agendas could easily make it seem at a casual glance as though their URLs are libellous or offensive. But most URLs – if not all – can be manipulated very simply, using parameters. I can add &this=utter-rubbish after almost any link and the link will still resolve, leaving my additions intact. Thus:

There shouldn’t be any fear of being liable for this sort of manipulation, any more than there is in someone copying a newspaper masthead and pasting their own words underneath. For a statement to be libellous it must have been published, and in this case the individual who wrote, manipulated and then distributed the URL is the publisher. This seems clear for manipulated parameters marked by “?” and I have a hard time believing anyone would find otherwise for parameters within the URL itself.

If I were the Indie’s SEO team right now, I’d be more worried that the doctored URL is able to rank above their original. Might just be a good idea to get some rel=canonical tags on their article pages.

Playing – the future

Games are not going away. The gamepocalypse is nigh.

 

One of the biggest changes in the way we live and socialise at the moment is the rise and rise of game structures in everyday life. I’m not just talking points, badges and scores here – I’m talking about all sorts of game mechanics, the sorts of rich, rewarding dynamics that can help make reality better.

Games engage people. They provide the sorts of work that people want to do, using feedback systems and carefully structured designs to make for a fun experience. They provide a sense of satisfaction that’s hard to beat, from completing simple tasks to seeing a narrative through to its end. They let you explore and experiment, providing freedom within limits, and they reward players for developing skills or for learning information.

When it comes to journalism, stories – neat narratives with a beginning/middle/end or an inverted pyramid structure – are simply not sufficient for explaining most complex systems. They can explain a linear series of events, even one with complex factors, but they’re not good at really explaining how things work in a way that gets into the reader’s head. Climate change, or tax allocation, or the financial crisis, for instance.

Game design can be used to help create original reporting, as well as being a medium for its distribution. They can be used as powerful polemic or educational tools. And they can even be used to explore the process of newsgathering itself, illuminating its murky logic through the procedural logic of the game.

It’s not just video games that are important here, though they do have a wider reach than many other forms. Alternate reality games that merge fact and fiction to overlay a game onto the real world, or use real artefacts in a game environment, are growing as marketing tools. Board games have always had the widest reach (chess, anyone?) and are enjoying a niche resurgence. What could we do with them?

Journalists with game design skills are going to be needed, alongside journalists with data skills and journalists who can do video and code and take pictures. I believe that, once the nascent newsgames industry stops dipping its toes into the water and jumps in, newsgames are going to take off. Because a good game makes money. If we assume for a moment that engagement is king, not content, then games will win the war for our attention: doesn’t that look a lot like the situation we’re already in?

I want to see what we could do if we treated a printed paper as a site of play. If we made it fun, and thought about it from the perspective of someone exploring, learning, interacting with a game. It’s possible to be shocked, dismayed, distressed, saddened, touched, moved, and incited to action by good games that don’t dumb down their subjects. It’s possible to treat difficult subjects with respect within a game; there are myriad bad and good examples of this, just as there are of TV and of radio and of print.

And despite some assertions to the contrary, games are not inherently geared towards those who can’t pay attention (seriously, current 50+ hour game lengths of major studio titles obviously contradict this). Instead, games can make news harder, more complex, deeper and richer – and they might just be able to do all that while making money.

But news organisations aren’t there yet, and it’s not hard to understand why – MediaShift has a great analysis of the cultural divide between editorial and games design that’s proving insurmountable at the moment. As indie creators are creating games that explore the news journalistically, we’re in danger of missing the boat again.

So what I want to do, this year, is get some news people and some game people in a room, together, to see what we can do to bridge that gap. If you’re interested in being involved, let me know in the comments here or by emailing newsmary@gmail.com. Let’s build something fun.

This is the third of (I hope) four posts coming out of the Powerful Voices roundtable I attended earlier this month. The first was a resource-dump for concepts we discussed there and the second discussed the digital divide.


Digitally divided

This is the second of (I hope) four posts coming out of the Powerful Voices roundtable I attended earlier this month. The first was a resource-dump for concepts we discussed there; the third and fourth will tackle major issues raised. This one is about the divide between digital haves and have-nots, and what the future looks like for connectivity.

Back in Norwich, the newspapers where I used to work have just launched a campaign to back a bid for better broadband. Areas of rural Norfolk suffer badly from a lack of coverage – businesses relying on connectivity to function, to process payments or to do work, find themselves crippled by slow or unusable broadband access. Mobile coverage can be patchy. 3G is a luxury. There is an ongoing fight for change.

It can be very, very easy to forget that not everyone is online. When everyone around you is eyeballs-deep in social media and those without smartphones are a rarity, the statistics on digital inclusion are startling. According to the ONS [pdf], 27% of UK households have no access to the internet at home, and 9.2m adults have never used the internet.

Those figures are likely to fall. But they’re likely to fall faster in areas where broadband speeds are high, where there is free internet access for those who can’t afford a home connection, and within certain demographics – people who can afford smartphones even if a home broadband connection is out of reach, for instance, or young people in house shares who can split the costs of connection if not of hardware.

For some rural communities, fast broadband is unlikely to come from the telephone companies. Despite promises to the contrary, a fair few Norfolk businesspeople are bitterly aware that telecoms giants go where the profit is – and that means not laying cables and updating infrastructure in areas where the usage wouldn’t pay for the work to be done.

And that profit motive has other unpleasant effects. The fight for net neutrality is being fought much more loudly on the other side of the Atlantic – but it’s a growing issue in the UK too. The introduction of a tiered system in which those who can pay get their websites served faster than those who can’t threatens the free proliferation of information across the net, and threatens to limit access still further for those who can’t pay. The internet has democratised processes of creation and dissemination; any move towards a tiered web will move us away from open access; and the future for net neutrality in the UK remains unclear.

Already there are communities everywhere taking matters into their own hands. The Open Rights Group is one of several organisations fighting to protect net neutrality and working to protect other digital rights. Remote Cumbrian villages are raising money and building their own broadband networks. And it is technically and technologically possible to share your wifi connection with your neighbours – and to drop free wifi networks over wide areas, like the (now sadly defunct) network that blanketed Norwich with free connectivity a few years ago.

But we’re not there yet. Any project tackling social change – like the ones rising out of Powerful Voices – has to consider the implications of the digital divide, whether they’re trying to solve the problems it creates (by replacing lost library services with online access, for instance) or trying to use digital methods to influence issues that also affect those who find it difficult to get online (like volunteer schemes for the unemployed, or community projects looking for professionals).

It was fascinating and eye-opening that the suggestions that struck home with the Powerful Voices crowd were not so much the online ideas – they already knew they needed to be where their communities are, use whichever social networks they already use, and fragment their work across multiple platforms to reach people. It was the offline thoughts that got a big response. One idea, that if your community hangs out in a coffee shop then you should go put some flyers there for your project, prompted a discussion about how difficult it is sometimes to remember that there are offline ways of connecting with people, too.

There are still ways of reaching and empowering people in remote communities who aren’t online. And local newspapers are still one of those ways. The physical, newsprint paper finds its way into houses where the internet does not; its distribution networks, though they are under threat, already work to put it in the hands of physically and socially isolated people. It’s a symbol, a mark of social belonging, and a link to the wider world. Local papers can and do campaign for their communities, using their established clout and power to fight for what’s right for them.

That means, sometimes, a newspaper fighting for something that could threaten its bottom line – when what matters to its readers is something that could indirectly mean the print paper’s circulation falls. Better broadband and connectivity isn’t going to mean an immediate sales drop – but as more and more remote communities come fully online, the need for the newspaper as a wider community champion link will decrease.

Powerful Voices: useful resources

On Friday I was part of Powerful Voices, an event that helped young people create and refine ideas that would use social media to help effect social change.

By the time I got involved the young people – some university students, some graduates – had already put together four very well-thought-out ideas, refined them and pitched them to a panel of experts. My role on Friday was as part of a round table discussion looking at the future of social media and the wider web, and the funding possibilities that could help keep their projects alive and see them have a real impact.

Everyone involved was hugely enthusiastic and brightly hopeful for the future. These were people for whom the idea of running a non-profit and getting elbows-deep in the business side of things seemed a natural step – people with brave ideas who want to use new media to change the world. Here’s what they came up with:

  • The pop-up library project imagines a future where library services are totally mobile and completely adaptable, bringing very specific services to very local communities.
  • Communiteering is aimed at giving people a simple way to volunteer as much or as little as they wish, and to receive recognition for their work – something to go on a CV.
  • Handshake is a service built on the idea of connecting small projects in need of expertise with experts who can provide it.
  • And the final project hopes to help out unemployed graduates by encouraging creative approaches to getting on the career ladder.

The discussion hit on three big areas where the world is changing – the digital divide, open data, and the rise of gaming. I’ll talk more about these in posts over the next few days, I hope – there’s a lot to be said. What I want to do here is provide a resource for some of the concepts I brought into the conversation. So here goes:

 

Facing the future

I spent a very interesting evening at the Frontline Club for the launch of Face The Future on Tuesday. Judith Townend, Kevin Marsh, Laura Oliver (who’s moved to the Guardian recently) and chair Raymond Snoddy discussed a pretty wide-ranging selection of subjects related to the future of journalism and the tools we’re using to create it.

The evening was an interesting reminder, for me, that those of us who tweet constantly and feel on top of new tech are still, overwhelmingly, the minority. It’s easy to forget, if you spend time learning about social media and talking about new tools for the future of journalism and generally being digitally disruptive, that that’s not the reality for most journalists.The fact that I was the only person tweeting for most of the evening was one small reminder; the demographics of the audience was another; Raymond Snoddy admitting he just about felt like he was on top of the technology until someone mentioned Quora was another.

And there was a timely reminder from Kevin Marsh that in the middle East, where so much information is coming via Twitter at the moment, the same holds true. It’s a specialised tool, and journalists in particular do specialised things with it – it’s relevant and timely and a great way to source stories, but it doesn’t open up access the same way that being there in person does.

But that was another major theme of the evening – that despite major news teams being capable of sending journalists around the world, the pressures of filing to half a dozen places can make it impossible for journalists to do their jobs well. Kevin gave examples from his knowledge of the BBC – journalists doing live broadcasts for the rolling news channels, recorded spots for lunchtime and evening news and possibly breakfast too, tweeting, perhaps doing radio, and blogging too. Where’s the time for journalists to leave their hotels and investigate, go out on the streets and find sources?

Closer to home, too, the debate touched on the problems for domestic reporters – Raymond Snoddy spoke of newsrooms where no-one leaves, not even for lunch, and characterised the reporters as working on “computerised treadmills”, churning out copy to feed the ravenous information machine.

The conclusion was – this type of reporting is not lazy journalism. The journalists involved are working harder than they ever have before, producing more copy, more broadcasts, more information. But the trade-off is in time spent in the field, investigating, asking questions, finding sources, doing the hard work behind the scenes that makes for good journalism. And that’s something I can identify with, too – even in my short career I’ve experienced a newsroom merge and a round of redundancies, and I can vouch for the fact that fewer staff, cutting costs and increasing numbers of platforms for your reporting mean more time at the desk or the phone and less time on your patch or with your sources, no matter how good your intentions.

The panel also agreed that what’s important is support, from editors and from news executives, for the core skills and values of journalism. What’s important isn’t just that reporters want to get out and report – what’s needed is a newsroom structure that supports and encourages that, and a business model that puts this core area of journalism at its heart and gives it everything it needs to thrive.

The discussion wove together issues of verifying information when breaking news is breaking faster than ever before, with the tricky problems of regaining readers’ trust in a world where the phone hacking inquiry is ongoing, with questions of how journalism itself is defined. And in the end, though both Laura and Judith made the point that new forms of information management and presentation have value – that aggregation is important and curation and filtering are vital, in a world where the same sources we use are also open to the audience – it was Kevin’s argument that stuck with me. He said that we have forgotten what journalism is, and in so doing we have allowed it to become devalued.

Kevin’s list of what journalism is and how it works was not exhaustive or scientific. He talked of journalistic values – accuracy, balance, ethics – and of reporters’ traits – curiosity, ability to speak truth to power, perseverance. He talked about a sort of journalism stamp – something that would signal strongly to readers that they were reading something professional, something that adhered to the central values of journalism – a hard task, in a world where no one trusts the PCC and we have no better accreditation. His definition of journalism would cheerfully include a huge raft of bloggers, freelancers and, yes, curators, while excluding half the Daily Mail and all of the Daily Star.

But what wasn’t clear was how we pay for that. One audience member asked, in so many words: where’s the money? And though the response was robust – if the BBC and Sky can’t pay for good journalism out of their enormous budgets, the problem is with the management not the journalism – it was not enough to leave me with any real ideas about how we reach this world where Kevin’s “j-stamp” both exists widely and can be trusted.

Newsroom support, rebuilding readers’ trust, and a journalistic practice that prioritises those core ethics before eyeballs or speed of filing is a lofty aim. There are hundreds of bloggers who are beating “professional” journalists at these things, day in, day out, because they believe it matters. Whether it’s a future that mainstream journalism can hope to achieve  is an open question.

Words mean things: no, all journalism is not aggregation

Lots of people today on Twitter have linked to Robert Niles’ post on OJR spanking people for “whining” about aggregation, and reiterating a point he made last month – in essence, along with a lot of other very sensible and useful points, he argues that all journalism is aggregation.

Let’s get one thing clear – I agree with a lot of what Niles says in these two posts, though I’d probably step aside from the aggressive tone of his second piece, on account of how chastising people for being defensive is only going to make them more defensive. He makes some excellent points and I wish more news organisations took them on board.

But claiming that all journalism is aggregation is akin to deciding that Flickr’s homepage list of interesting images is the same thing as taking all the photographs yourself. It’s not. It’s patently obvious that it’s not.

Words mean things. We already have the words “information management and presentation” to encompass the various skills that journalists use, whatever form their journalism takes – that covers both reportage and aggregation nicely. We already have the word “editing” to describe the process of deciding what to put in a newspaper or on a website. And we have the words “curation” and “contextualisation” too, though they’re much more jargon-ish than those others, to describe elements of aggregation that involve editorial decision-making, peripheral research and so on.

Speaking of jargon, though, aggregation has not entirely solidified as a term. The future-of-news field has a terrible habit of taking perfectly good words – like “entrepreneur” – and blurring the definition to include some very different things – like “self-employed freelancer”. Perhaps Niles’ thoughts are symptomatic of this sort of semantic land-grab – is he simply redefining the word “aggregation” to cover all forms of information management and presentation? Because if so, I fail to see much use in the term – it’s too broad to be helpful in understanding the specific challenges journalists and news organisations face.

However we’re defining it, news aggregation is not evil. It’s not the enemy. It’s wonderful that new web-based tools exist now that enable people to do this work faster, better, in new and exciting ways; it’s great that Google and Flipboard and Zite and so on are doing it algorhithmically in such innovative directions. Journalists should welcome the fact that our work reaches more people and that the job of curating content is becoming as valued and valuable a part of the journalistic ecosystem as the job of creating it. @acarvin’s work is just as important in reporting the Middle East uprisings as any single reporter on the ground. At my workplace, the daily newspaper roundups and tips collections and lists of big commodities stories are useful and valuable just as original content is.

But they’re not the same. They don’t serve the same function. And writing a three-line drop intro on a colour piece is not the same thing as deciding to include something in the paper or on the home page is not the same thing as Google News automagically deciding your story deserves to be the first link. Reporting needs different skills, tools and timescales from aggregation. And both terms incorporate multitudes of smaller specialisations.

Aggregation should be valued. I understand and can sympathise with the desire to conflate something that is valuable but not well-regarded with something which is already seen as respectable. But I doubt its wisdom in this case. We need to fight for news organisations to recognise that curation and aggregation are part of a holistic approach to journalism and add enormous value to their work, yes – that I can wholeheartedly and full-throatedly support. But telling them that they’re already doing it is not going to lead to the changes we need, or any greater understanding of the problems we face.