What do we do instead of reading the paper?

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For news organisations, especially ones rooted in print, stories have totally changed since the advent of the internet. I don’t just mean our stories, I mean the ones our readers put together internally without noticing it, about what they do and see, constructing the assorted stuff and fluff of the day into a nice neat narrative which contains a sensible answer to the question: What did you do today?

It used to be that “reading the paper” was a single activity, physically and mentally, bounded by the single physical experience of picking up a newspaper and then, well, reading it. Not all of it, probably. Not even necessarily very much of it. Not everyone starts in the same place or cares about the same articles. But even if you read completely different bits of completely different newspapers to everyone else in your office, or even if you just looked at page 3 and the punny headlines and then called it a day, you still called it “reading the paper”. And that’s how it turns up in the story of your day. (What have you done at work so far? Not much, just read the paper and answered some calls.)

It also used to be bounded by the covers of the paper, not by the subjects you pick within it. Which paper do you read? Your identity is to some extent bound up in that brand choice, in the UK at least – people have made good satire about this, and there’s a wider point. Your newspaper said something about you. It featured in the story you told yourself about yourself, as well as the one you told other people. Reading the paper isn’t just learning about the news or the sport or the arts coverage; it’s also an element of your identity, a piece of your personal puzzle. A Guardian reader is not the same thing as a Daily Mail reader. Most people only get one.

Except that’s all gone out the window, now. The Mail Online has god-knows-how-many million readers; the Guardian has a smaller but still reasonably mind-bending number. Both numbers are too big to imagine and you have to resort to comparisons like the population of London. And of course those audiences overlap. They’re both much bigger online than in print, and they both require much smaller commitments in terms of reading – a single article, not a whole paper (whatever a whole paper used to mean, anyway). But also, and this is important, because reading one or two or twenty articles from a single news source doesn’t make me a “reader” in the way that it would if I “read” the paper. Not in the story I tell myself about myself, and not in the story I tell other people.

Which wouldn’t be so hard to manage, if it wasn’t for the first problem. Because actually it’s really easy to miss that you read an article from a newspaper, if what you’re doing is browsing the net or chatting on Facebook or catching up on Twitter. You click a link from the thing you’re doing, you read the link, you click “back”, you carry on. You can do that dozens of times, clicking all over the place, and still it doesn’t turn up in your story of the day as “reading the news”. What are you doing? Just checking Facebook. Or wherever.

Apps take you back to that activity of reading the paper, reading the news, within the nice neat cozy boundaries of a virtual cover even if not a real one. They require certain physical activity, too. It took a while for that to click with me, but I think I get now why print people are comfortable in app space.

But people that actually go to the front pages of news sites online are pretty few and far between, compared to the numbers that just turn up on article pages when they’re in the middle of doing other stuff. So obviously that raises huge issues about making sure that every article page is a good front page, a good gateway into your site, good enough to maybe persuade a couple of those people not to click “back” but to stick around and change what they’re doing. But also it raises issues about the visibility of what news organisations are doing. Because if your readers don’t consciously realise they’re your readers, that has to change the way your brand works.

#jcarn: Dear Santa, please bring us all more time

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Given the recent dearth of posts on here, my request in response to this month’s Carnival of Journalism prompt is probably not surprising, though it may be impossible.

Dear Santa, for journo-Christmas I would like more time. Not just for me, but for everyone.

I was lucky enough, recently, to be part of a Guardian hack day. As a result, some awesome tools got built, including three that I started using inmediately. They’re still very much in beta, being improved and worked on occasionally, but I use them constantly. They’ve changed my job. Not by giving me new things to do, but by automating some repetitive, tricky, admin bits of the job and therefore making them require less time and attention – so I can spend more time and energy focussing on the bits that really need it.

That’s wonderful. It’s a gift of time. It means I can work smarter, not just harder. I wish, if I have to be limited to one Christmas wish, that every journalist and everyone involved in making journalism – including developers – could have at least one tool, in 2012, that makes the tedious admin bits of their jobs faster. I hope that every tricky CMS for journalists that contains unnecessary time-consuming admin processes releases an update that makes it no longer so.

And, because this isn’t a one-way process, I hope that every journalist takes the initiative to go find out where their techies live and actually talks to them, in person, about the problems they have. There’s no point griping only to each other about the difficult bits, or in keeping quiet and carrying on doing things that don’t make sense: tell developers what’s wrong, because otherwise they won’t know it needs fixing. Sometimes what looks like a tech problem is actually a communication issue, because the people who need to know that something’s broken haven’t been told.

These fixes often aren’t the big, sexy, exciting projects for devs. They’re the sort of thing that, if it exists, you very quickly take for granted. Things like, say, a spellchecker that also flags up common house style violations, or a geolocation module that understands when you type “Norwich” that you want the geographical area defined by the boundaries of the city of Norwich, not a point at the centre of its postcode area. They’re often small niggles that you’d only notice if you’re doing these processes day in, day out, many times a day.

In an age of cutting costs, one of the most precious resources we have left is our time. Anything that saves it, that means it can be spent doing journalism or making tools that journalists can use, instead of busywork, is a wonderful thing.

Oh, and if you work in a place that has admin staff, go say thank you to them. They deserve it.

Citizen liveblogging

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Pretty sure this Reddit comment thread, from the night of the Zuccotti Park Occupy evictions, is the first time I’ve seen citizen liveblogging in the wild. It’s impressive work; short, timely posts, mostly reports from the video livestream, interspersed with links to videos, Twitter and other news coverage. There’s an attempt to verify whether one video shows tear gas being used or not. And it’s all done by someone who works at a hospital in a different state to the events themselves.

We’re rapidly creating a world in which the wide web of connections between people are functionally replacing the vertical connections between news outlets and people. Everyone is better informed, not necessarily because they know more but because the information is readily available, should they wish to discover something. The ambient information that anchor journalists and live reporters use to fuel their work is readily available to everyone with an interest; the new ease of publishing isn’t limited to finished stories or to eyewitness accounts, but extends to curation, information filtering and all that other juicy stuff we journos pride ourselves on.

This is fascinating.

On silence

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This week, Helen Lewis-Hasteley posted at the New Statesman the words of seven women speaking about the abuse they’ve received online. That’s spawned a huge conversation, a #feministwishlist hashtag and a lot of other posts, much of which Helen’s rounded up here.

I think I was 12 years old the first time someone on IRC told me explicitly what they’d like to do to me, sexually, then swore at me when I told them I wasn’t interested. I learned, fast, that if I wanted to be taken seriously or heard at all – if I wanted to ensure that random, entirely unsolicited, often threatening sexual advances wouldn’t happen – I’d best pick a male name, online. Or at least be gender neutral. Being female meant I was fair game. It sometimes seems that in 15 years not all that much has changed.

I have maybe half a dozen online pseudonyms I’ve used at various times. There’s one in particular I’ve been writing, commenting, talking under since I was 12. Nowadays I don’t use it much, now I speak under my own name here and on Twitter, but when I’m not pseudonymous I speak about different things. I’m mindful of what I’m saying, not just for what it is but also for the reaction it might provoke. If someone wanted to track me down, it would no longer be particularly hard, with this open identity.

I am lucky, and often thankful, that the pseudonyms I use have never – as far as I know – been linked to me. I won’t repeat the abuse I’ve gotten under those other names, because I barely had the spoons to deal with it the first time round and I’m damned if it matters what the exact words were, anyway, and because it could open floodgates or let people link those identities to this one.

And in deciding that, I know in my bones that I’m setting myself up to be dismissed, to have my experiences belittled because I choose not to share them explicitly, to be called a liar or worse; that’s the kicker, you see, that eventually you know in your bones what could be coming, so you self-censor.

Some women speak and continue speaking, whether they are abused for it or not. For some women, who speak and are abused, the price for speaking is too high and silence is the only choice that lets them protect and care for themselves. For others, the existence and the experiences of those women is enough for them to decide, consciously or otherwise, that the risks of speaking will always outweigh the rewards.

And for some, like me, a partial silence descends.

I weigh words. What’s safe, given how easy I would be to find in real life, and given what I can cope with on a given day. How much of myself to reveal while pseudonymous, which details to fake and which to hide. It is laughable to suggest that identity online is uncomplicated in such circumstances. Either I can be myself, or I can speak without fear. I am uncomfortably constrained in both skins.

This is how bullying works. It’s how hate speech works. The abuse doesn’t even have to be directed at you personally – just so long as people are being torn apart for having a characteristic that you share, you may welll be worried about being torn apart for the same reason. Not just women, either – the mental health blogging community is 99.9% pseudonymous, for instance, with very good reason.

I’ve seen people argue that women should be stronger, should just suck it up and deal with it, as though silence about abuse is not a form of partial silence. I’ve seen people say women aren’t being silenced, because of all these women who are not silent, as though all women speak about the same things and measure risk and reward the same way, and as though there’s no gradient between silent and outspoken. I’ve seen suggestions that women should only write on moderated sites – presumably sites they don’t moderate themselves – as though restricting the venues of our speech doesn’t amount to silencing. And I’ve seen people say pseudonymous environments are bad for women because of harassment, when some of us find them the only places we can speak without worry.

All these arguments are bollocks. And I’m bored of hearing them. And maybe saying so will put me in danger, maybe it’ll mean a threat or a few abusive tweets or maybe just an argument I’d rather not have to have. But I’m fed up of being told how we ought to moderate our behaviour. All these options just end up with us being a different sort of silent. I’d like us to be free to speak.

Maybe it’s just me. But somehow, after this week, I doubt it.

#playful11: you don’t need a flying car

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Last Friday was Playful 2011, an awesome conference about games and toys and, well, being playful. It was at Conway Hall. It was lovely in that way that you don’t always agree with, but that makes you think and gives you a different slant on the world. I enjoyed it immensely.

Running through the day were several threads that I want to come back to at some point – most notably for me the blurrings of boundaries between art and technology, between physical and digital things, and between creation and consumption. But the dominating theme was nostalgia – nostalgia for a vision of the future that was born in the 1970s with big-budget sci-fi epics, and that simply doesn’t exist now.

To put it another way: where’s my fucking jetpack?

It’ll come as no surprise, if you saw me live tweeting, that this future-past nostalgia doesn’t resonate with me. I think there are a couple of reasons for this, one personal and one much more general and more interesting.

First up: the personal. The touchstones of the nostalgic middle-aged man don’t reflect me. This isn’t just an age thing – I watched Logan’s Run and Star Wars, albeit a few years late – it’s a gender and a sexuality thing too. My present, as a not-entirely-straight woman, is a hell of a lot more interesting and self-controlled and autonomous than any 1970s sci-fi vision of that life (Alien dutifully excepted). I could be an astronaut, or a prime minister. I can control my fertility (isn’t it weird how few people who talk about humans as cyborgs ever mention that?) and I don’t have to sleep with everyone I meet as a result. I am the star of my own movie, not a sidekick. It’s not perfect, and others have it worse – this future like all others is unevenly distributed – but it’s getting better.

So I like this future, where I don’t have a jetpack but also I don’t have to wear a silver breastplate or high-legged leotard or gold bikini. Nostalgia for those images makes no sense to me.

The other thing – and this is the less personal one – is that trends in technology aren’t actually about the tech. Trends in anything aren’t about what’s technically possible so much as they’re about what matters to people. Trends are about us, about humans and what we want and need from our world. This is true for toys and games and news and jetpacks and flying cars. So one big reason we don’t have flying cars is that the desire for flying cars was never actually a need for flying cars. It was a problem (get places fast, avoiding congestion) that could be solved by flying cars, but also in other ways. Like telecommuting.

It’s the internet’s fault that you don’t have a flying car.

We don’t always think of the web as bridging physical space problems, but it does – so smoothly that we don’t notice. I have my work colleagues in my pocket and a window to my work space in my bag. Now, why do I need a flying car?

(Yes, there are also technological and logistical reasons why flying cars are difficult. The internet isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. But it’s not bad, for an unevenly distributed future. And if it didn’t solve the problem pretty well, I reckon we’d find a way to make flying cars work. We’re clever little monkeys, and we’re good at solving problems.)

What else is in my pocket? I have the biggest encyclopaedia there has ever been, and a satellite view of the entire globe, and a personally curated collection of interesting writing by clever people that expands every day beyond my ability to read and absorb it. I have a direct, fast, simple line out to millions of people, and tools I can use to collaborate with them on any number of exciting projects or toys or games. Oh, and the news, too. All of it.

Something else that ran through many of the Playful talks was a focus on play as an event that happens between an individual and a machine. It struck a peculiar note for me, operating in a space with Zombie where all play is collaborative between humans, and a space at the Guardian where news gathering and consumption are going the same way.

The risk here is that by focusing on the toy at the expense of the needs of the player – the shiny tech, the jetpack, the iPad (it’s the future of news, you know) – we lose sight of what’s actually happening. New toys are solving old problems. We are collaborating more and more, in incredible ways. We are capable of incredible endeavours, playful and serious, because we are connected. The key vision of the next generation isn’t a baby playing with a magazine as though it’s an iPad. It’s social networking on Moshi Monsters and multi-player collaborative world-building in Minecraft.

Sci-fi has always been good at identifying problems and imagining solutions – but usually it’s much better at predicting the needs than the resolutions. Jetpacks, incidentally, have been around since about the 1940s. They didn’t really solve much.

Nostalgia for the promise of a different future doesn’t make sense to me in a world where I can already see the solutions to those problems in the flesh. Why get misty-eyed over the promise of a flying car or newspapers with moving pictures, when we can see the whole world from the sky on Google Earth and join in with news happening at the tips of our fingers on Twitter and live blogs and YouTube?

I would rather get on with playing.

If you don’t want to talk to people, turn your comments off

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Advance warning: long post is long, and opinionated. Please, if you disagree, help me improve my thinking on this subject. And if you have more good examples or resources to share, please do.

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News websites have a problem.

Well, OK, they have a lot of problems. The one I want to talk about is the comments. Generally, the standard of discourse on news websites is pretty low. It’s become almost an industry standard to have all manner of unpleasantness below the line on news stories.

Really, this isn’t limited to news comments. All over the web, people are discovering a new ability to speak without constraints, with far fewer consequences than speech acts offline, and to explore and colonise new spaces in which to converse.

Continue reading →

The pointsification of news comments

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Nieman Lab has a post up on “the newsonomics of gamification and civilisation“. It talks about using points and badges, earned by reading, sharing and commenting on stories, to mark people out as “being a valued member of our local news community”, and then discusses some other activities that could be “incentivised” (there’s a word that should be hunted down and destroyed by the @guardianstyle team) with the application of points and badges.

Honestly, articles like this make me tremendously sad. Points and badges are not the same thing as long-term engagement or monetisation, as Foursquare has already amply demonstrated. Gamified activities are not the same thing as play. And if all we have to offer our readers in return for their actions are empty, meaningless “rewards” instead of genuine value, they will – long term – leave. I’ve talked before about the overjustification effect – it applies particularly to news organisations, where we want people to value the activities they do on our websites because they are genuinely enjoyable, useful, interesting, engaging, in their own rights. Blogging, commenting, discussing, sharing, reading, viewing – these things should not be chores. (And “paying contributors with points” is not paying contributors at all, and is intellectually dishonest as well as potentially exploitative.) As Kathy Sierra says in the comments:

I say “may” because the potential demotivating side effects of extrinsic rewards do not apply to areas that have no intrinsically rewarding aspect. In other words, using extrinsic rewards to help me get through something tedious, rote, mundane, painful, etc. — things I would never ordinarily find pleasurable *without* the rewards — is an excellent use of gamification with mostly all upside. But to use gamification in areas like education, civic engagement, or even just participating on a website or forum, we should proceed with extreme caution and thought. Because after the short-term spike in engagement, we may create a permanent motivation deficit. We may end up worse than we were before.

I always feel like articles like this miss the point somewhat. By focussing on gamification and assuming that’s all there is to game dynamics, news organisations are genuinely missing out on real opportunities to innovatively use games for journalism. Indie games companies are already doing this sort of thing. Things like Sweatshop, the many Wikileaks games, the Osama bin Laden Counter Strike map, and innovative data journalism experiments in Minecraft (this year’s Young Rewired State best in show winners) – they all have problems, but they all exist, and this field will get larger as game design tools are simplified and as more people have greater access to the tools for digital game creation. News organisations risk missing the boat.

But the most depressing thing is that by taking to automated systems to assign value, news organisations miss out on opportunities to actually talk to people, to build genuine community. Some gamification systems can work, especially for getting people to do things they don’t already want to do, but automating away reader interaction seems a little like an admission that a news organisation sees little intrinsic value in its readers comments, and expects its readers to comment out of duty or out of competitiveness rather than desire.

If people appreciate the community, feel they belong and want to contribute, why do you need to give them points? If people like your content and want to share it, why would points make a difference? Conversely, if they don’t, aren’t you just incentivising spam? If people feel their news tips are valued and appreciated, why would points make a difference to that? If you want your users to do something, why is gamification the answer? Surely, changing the activity into something they actually want to do would be a better, more effective option?

#hhldn: sex, lies, and digital disruption

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Fantastic couple of talks at last night’s Hacks & Hackers London meetup. Unfortunately today I’m off to make a newspaper in a field (again) so don’t have time for a full writeup – but I was live tweeting throughout the talks and I’ve Storified them here:

Sex, lies and instant messenger – Alec Muffett

How digital journalism destroyed the news cycle, and what we can do about it – Martin Belam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google News: doing gamification wrong

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OK, I know I’m late to this. I’ve been busy. But it’s still irritating me, more than a fortnight after it was announced, so here we are.

Google News US has launched collectable badges for reading news stories.

This is stupid. There are several reasons why it’s stupid, and I’m sure you can come up with your own – leave some in the comments if I’ve missed them. Here are my main problems with the idea.

These badges don’t represent anything. You don’t have to learn anything or complete anything or even finish reading the news articles in order to get the shiny reward. There’s no sense of achievement, no mastery involved here. So what’s it rewarding?

They encourage clickspam. Look, most of the people who seriously care about collecting these badges are going to be hardcore completionists. The easiest way to collect them is to CTRL+click your way down the entire Google News homepage a couple of times a day for a couple of weeks. Done. Does anyone benefit from that? Anyone at all?

They’re counterproductive. It’s relatively well established that extrinsic rewards (eg digital badges) reduce intrinsic motivation (eg the desire to be informed about the news). It’s called the overjustification effect. You might get some short-term results in terms of improved participation – but once I’ve gotten all the badges, what then? If the only reason I’m reading the news is to collect the shiny things, what happens when all the shiny things are gone?

They make it about Google, not about the news. This isn’t an attempt to serve me better as a user. We’re heading perilously close to the Foursquare badgification realisation (slide 12 here) – when it becomes clear that certain user actions are in fact of very little benefit to the user, but of great benefit to the company. I’m not going to choose Google News over any other aggregator unless it’s genuinely better. Badges might shift that balance very briefly – but shiny things and Google+ integration are no substitute for fantastic experiences. There’s still no real reason to stop using Flipboard or Zite or Twitter.

They make digital news consumption self-conscious. If I want to make my badges public, they become part of my publicly constructed identity. So if I have a guilty penchant for celebrity facelift gossip, I’m not indulging it through Google News any more, because I want the world to see me in a certain way – for similar reasons, certain classic novels are far more often purchased than read. Making personal consumption data public distorts behaviour.

They’re getting in the way of better ideas. As @betterthemask pointed out when I was getting narked about this on Twitter: this is Google, you’d expect them to iterate. But if this is their prototype, I can’t help but feel they’ve got the whole thing ass-backwards. What if they’d started with the desire to encourage more people to actually seek out news, and then built something that would appeal to folks teetering on the edge?

What if they’d made something that genuinely helped make news consumption more fun?

Junk data: why we still have no idea what the DfT’s most popular websites are

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A couple of stories in the Telegraph and Daily Mail this week have hailed data released by the Department for Transport about the websites visited most often by workers at their department.

But if you look a little more closely at the raw data, it quickly becomes clear that these figures are being badly misrepresented by the newspapers involved. There’s a very important note on the last page of the data PDF (fascinatingly, missing from the Mail’s repost). It says:

Note : “number of hits” includes multiple components (e.g. text, images, videos), each of which are counted.

The difference between page views, visits and hits in web analytics is fairly important. Page views is the number of individual pages on a site that have been viewed; visits is the number of separate browsing sessions that have occurred. And hits is the number of individual files that are requested by the browser.

An individual page view can include dozens, or even hundreds, of hits. A single page view of the Telegraph front page, for instance, includes at least 18 hits just in the header of the page alone. That’s before we get to any images or ads. There are about another 40 image files called. It’s fair to suggest you could rack up the hits very quickly on most news websites – whereas very simple, single-purpose sites might register 10 or fewer per pageview.

Also important to note – if a website serves files from different sites – such as advertisements, or tracking codes – those sites will register a hit despite not never actually being seen by the person doing the browsing.

That explains why the second “most popular” site on the list is www.google-analytics.com – a domain that is impossible to visit, but which serves incredibly popular tracking code on millions of other websites. It’s probably safe to conjecture that it also explains the presence of other abnormalities – for instance, stats.bbc.co.uk, static.bbc.co.uk, news.bbcimg.co.uk, and cdnedge.bbc.co.uk, all in the top 10 and all impossible to actually visit. There are two IP addresses in the top 11 “most popular” sites, too.

As David Higgerson points out (in comments), there are some interesting patterns in the data.  But unless you know the number of hits per page, at the time the pages were viewed, as well as which ads were served from which other sites at the time, any straight comparison of the figures is meaningless. And the data itself is so noisy that any conclusions are dubious at best.

We can say that the BBC website is certainly popular, that the Bears Faction Lorien Trust LARP site probably got more visits than you might expect, and that civil servants do seem to like their news. Beyond that, the Mail’s claims of “cyberslacking”, of gambling sites (common advertisers) being popular and of there being six separate BBC sites in the top 10 are at best unsupported and at worst downright misleading.