What’s the right hyperlocal news model for journalism education?

  1. Hyperlocal many not be what the big city newspaper’s business is, but it’s one important site where beginning reporters first learn their craft. How can the academy and industry work together to improve hyperlocal reporting and journalism education? Some questions for discussion below.


    What does the New York Times’ retreat say for student-professional partnerships?

    Nieman Reports identified five key lessons from the Times’ hyperlocal project, which teamed newspaper staffers with community contributors including New York University students working under the guidance of faculty mentors. The East Village Local is old-school shoe-leather reporting with a multimedia flourish. It’s labor-intensive stuff all the way around, and not very profitable.According to the article, the Times’ brass concluded that: while professional journalists’ involvement is important for quality control,  “It doesn’t pay big media companies to pay their staffs to go hyperlocal.” 

  2. “What we have been trying to figure out at the Times — and I think what lots of people in this space have been trying to figure out — is how do you prompt communities, and can you prompt communities into the act of covering themselves in a meaningful way?”  – Adrienne LaFrance, “Five Things the New York TImes Learned…

  3. Lisha Arino
    Sad to hear this. I learned a lot from my internship there last summer. 🙁
    Tue, Jun 26 2012 13:49:15
  4. What I’m hoping we’ll see soon are articles from the journalism professors and students involved in the East Village Local and other pro-am hyperlocal partnerships.  Technology makes new models of news reporting possible, even necessary. The question is, which models provide the best journalism, the most sustainable business mode
  5. Journatic: Bringing economies of scale to the newsroom at the expense of journalism, ethics

  6. Understandably, news organizations are like any business in that they want to produce as much salable content as possible at minimal cost – and that means minimal personnel expenditures. But that logic has led to the gutting of newsrooms and a retrenchment from the kind of reporting that relies on getting to know the members of a community and its issues.

    Enter Journatic, a company that bills itself as a “provider of extensive hyperlocal content.” According to its website, Journatic has an “efficient,”  “data-driven content creation model” that relies a distributed network of Filipino freelancers and low-paid American editors.  In an April, 2012 article,  Journatic CEO Brian Timpone reportedly told Chicago Reader reporter Mike Miner that the Filipino contributors are mostly data researchers, not reporters, but Miner cites a Journatic Philippine newspaper ad calling for writers who could turn out 250 events “stories” weekly for $.35 to $.40 each.   According to This American Life’s interview with Journatic staffer Ryan Smith, he spends much of his time editing the Filipino contributors’ stories based on information extracted from databases such as legacy.com.
    The Filipino writers’ work work is often published under fake English bylines. The Tribune Company, which is a major Journatic partner, now says it will investigate the use of fake bylines in content that Journatic produced for the Chicago Tribune. It’s also alleged that Journatic reporters tell sources that they are part of their clients’ news staffs, giving the false impression that they are local journalists.

    Smith says his pay is $10/hour without benefits. (According to Poynter.org, the company started paying benefits to full-time employees June 1 of this year.)

  7. Anna Tarkov pursued the story in more detail in this June 30 story for Poynter.org.
  8. Not surprisingly, readers and listeners were disturbed by Journatic’ outsourced news model:
  9. DDpan
    “The foreign freelancers make as little as 35 cents per story item” http://journ.us/Ne84oU via @Poynter
    Mon, Jul 02 2012 08:00:36
  10. Mandy Jenkins
    The Journatic story really fired me up, and I hope it’ll fire up local newsrooms who might someday have to compete with this sort of outsourced news operation. We need to show our readers that we live here, too.
    Mon, Jul 02 2012 10:18:25
  11. Eloise Davis
    Listening to “This American Life” and just amazed about one of the stories. It seems there’s a company called Journatics which handles outsourcing of hyper-local stories for some newspapers, like Newsday. They hire people to write local stories–people in the Philippines and elsewhere, (including some Americans who will work cheaply). So the local news is being written using cheap labor, while the local journalists are being fired. I guess even newspapers are exporting jobs! I wonder if that’s going to happen with the Tiimes-Picayune?
    Sun, Jul 01 2012 15:45:19
  12. The Chicago Tribune reacted as well:
  13. Medill Watchdog
    The Tribune is NOT amused by This American Life report on Journatic, that revealed fake bylines appearing in Tribune local edition:http://jimromenesko.com/2012/07/02/chicago-tribune-to-investigate-journatics-use-of-fake-bylines/
    Mon, Jul 02 2012 09:52:01
  14. Cast down your buckets where you are, Journatic

    Journatic CEO Brian Timpone defends his business model by saying it’s cost effective. The Chicago Reader’s Mike Miner quotes Timpone making his case to This American Life:

    “We have a solution that helps solve the problem. Cutting staff is not the way to growth, but empowering a reporter with people in the Philippines—that’s a really smart thing to do. The criticism’s fine, but at the end of the day, what’s a better solution? Do you have one? Tell me if you have a better idea. I’m all ears.” 


    Here’s one for you, Mr. Timpone.

    It strikes me that Journatic would not have had to resort to anonymous or pseudonymous bylines if it had brought college journalism classes in on tasks like obituary writing, where the reporting is usually done over the phone.  From a journalism education perspective, there is a good conversation to be had about the economics of reporting, and the trade-off that occurs when you have a distributed news force.
    While I’m no fan of having students work for professional news sites for paltry sums – or worse, yet, for free, I understand the reality of the contemporary news economy, and course credit would at least be some compensation. Journatic would get reporters who can write in standard English. Students could get exposure to their content management system, and research could be done on more efficient ways to mine and organize their data.
    Of course, all of this is assuming that Journatic comes clean and stope with the stupid fake bylines. Now that the cat is out of the bag, com why can’t they identify themselves in the same way that a wire service might.  Also,  requiring student reporters to lie about who they are is a non-starter – why not just say, “I’m a contractor for the Houston Chronicle” or whatever the paper is?)
  15. DiligenceEngine
    @richards1000 re: Journatic, you heard of Narrative Science (algorithms write news articles)? Here’s a post on them http://ow.ly/bWSmY
    Sun, Jul 01 2012 19:19:41
  16. Narrative science: The product of a journalism and computer science classroom collaboration

    One model of hyperlocal journalism seems to be prospering – and that scares a lot of journalists. Narrative Science is a company that uses artificial intelligence to program robots that generate news stories from spreadsheet data. The AI is based on input from journalists.  Their hyperlocal content draws on information such as parents’ youtube videos of their kids’ Little League games. They also produce basic financial stories for outlets such and Forbes. What is most interesting about this from my perspective is that it came about as a result of a class project by graduate journalism and computer science students at Northwestern University’s Medill school.
    Like anyone else, I have my qualms about the prospect of a robot one day cranking out Pulitzer-worthy scoops. But rather than shrink in horror, I think we need to examine these kinds of models more closely and think about ways of improving upon it and building upon it. For example, here are some areas of human and tech collaboration that would be helpful in meeting the information needs of underserved communities:
    1. Making environmental data intelligible and accessible to local communities
    2. Improving science and health reporting.
    3. Using robotics to realize the potential of news gaming
  17. DD: Narrative Science Creates Automated News Stories
    Thu, Apr 19 2012 17:26:22
  18. StartupsFormD
    $3M raised by Narrative Science Inc http://goo.gl/fb/rC4cR #vc #startup
    Mon, Jul 02 2012 13:51:24
  19. StylianosIordan
    Your Tweets Are Why The Next Walter Cronkite Will Be A Robot http://www.fastcompany.com/1840644/narrative-science-robot-journalism-stuart-frankel-moxie-awards via @FastCompany
    Thu, Jun 28 2012 08:58:06
  20. Previews Narrative Science
    Thu, Feb 02 2012 10:52:23
  21. There are other interesting models for hyperlocal reporting – Philadelphia’s Newsworks is a great example. Spearheaded by public radio station WHYY and supported by foundations, Newsworks relies on contributions from the University of Pennsylvania and LaSalle College, among others. But that is another conversation.

When two or three are gathered in the name of journalism and user experience design….

I was pleased to see that my post on user experience design in journalism education attracted the attention of a blogger who is pursuing graduate studies in Interactive Media with a focus in precisely this area. (Can’t find the blogger’s name, I’m afraid, but the blog is called UX+JX, which is catchy and cute in a geeky way.) I’ll be looking forward to the progress of this new colleague’s dissertation research. I’m also grateful for the pointer to Cindy Royal’s fascinating 2010 ethnography  (.pdf) of the New York Times Interactive desk. Perusing her site, I also came across this May, 2009 Online Journalism Review article on News as User Experience, which serves as a decent general introduction to the concept for news organizations.

Could journalists clear new Labor Department reporting roadblock by filing in html?

The Poynter Institute reports that the US Labor Department is imposing new rules on reporting on new employment data that could make it harder for reporters to file timely stories that are so critical to the financial markets. All credentialed news organizations will be forced to try to file their stories at the same time on department of labor computers only equipped with IE 9 and MS Word. In the past, the news organizations could bring their own equipment. The Labor Department says they are instituting the rules because in the past, some news organizations have violated their embargo – a requirement that the a news item be withheld until a certain time.

First, with everyone trying to file their stories at the same time, you know there will be more network congestion than you’d find in the arteries of a quintuple-bypass candidate. Second, some news orgs are complaining that the Word docs will require substantial reformatting to work with their content management systems. According to the Poynter story, the DOL officials were committed to implementing the new rules, despite the journalists’ expressed concerns.

Now I am wondering whether there would be an advantage for reporters who can insert the simple html formatting in the story and save the word document as plain text? If so, that’s another argument for why journalists need at least html and css. Nah, it can’t be that simple.

(h/t to M. Edward Borasky, whose Computational and Data Journalism curation site led me to the Poynter.org story.)

Bringing user experience design to journalism education

Jonathan Stray is a computer scientist and journalist who heads up a team at the Associated Press that creates interactive news stories. He has great ideas about how computer science can be used to make journalism more credible, sustainable and responsive to citizens’ needs.

He also asks really good questions that challenge treasured shibboleths in our profession. For example, Stray challenges the simplistic notion that our job is simply to deliver news. In the era before computational media, there was a logic to this – we reported; our readers, listeners and viewers decided. When done well and fairly, democracy was served. At least that was the hope, or as political science Jay Rosen might say, that’s our creed. But the computer scientist in Stray doesn’t abide such fluffy abstractions. In an excellent essay that is well worth considering in its entirety, he asserts,

Democracy is fine, but a real civic culture is far more participatory and empowering than elections. This requires not just information, but information tools.

What are information tools? What are they used for? By whom? How? How do we know when they work? These are the questions Stray tries to get us to think about by starting with the needs of our news users, instead of starting where we usually do, which is with the stories we are trying to report and disseminate. It’s hard to argue with him in principle, but what does it mean in practice? As he points out, it’s more than experimenting with story forms and distribution platforms.

To create tools, understand the customer

Stray’s line of reasoning took me back to lessons I learned from Bell Labs quality engineers in the 1980s about quality by design: quality is fitness for use by a customer. Product or service design requirements should flow from an understanding of customers’ needs. Customers are both internal (other members of an organization’s supply chain) and external (end users). Quality by design is a process of continual improvement, based on continual communications with internal and external stakeholders. Methodologies such as Total Quality Management and Quality Function Deployment were developed to operationalize those principles and generalize them as approaches to product and service development and marketing.

News Design=User Experience Design

Now comes the field of user experience design as a way of focusing an organization on ways of understanding and staying responsive to user needs. Most recently, I’ve been wrapping my mind around the literature on user experience design, especially, Whitney Quesenberry and Kevin Brook’s book, Storytelling for User Experience. Stray’s post is helping me think more concretely about how user experience design applies to journalism practice, and by extension, journalism education.

Smashing magazine has a concise introduction to user experience design that includes this definition of user experience:

User experience (abbreviated as UX) is how a person feels when interfacing with a system. The system could be a website, a web application or desktop software and, in modern contexts, is generally denoted by some form of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Fields of User Experience (from the blog A Nod to Nothing)
From the blog A Nod to Nothing: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/

For journalists, the challenge is to think about how our readers, viewers and users feel when interacting with our news products. According to our civic mission, we want them to feel invested in their communities, engaged in civic life, and empowered to act on the issues that matter to them.

Ethnography is one of the interesting techniques that the AP is using to understand user needs. In 2008, the Associated Press commissioned an ethnographic study of young news consumers. Nathanael Boehm neatly summarizes the role of ethnographic research in improving user experience:

Where usability is about how people directly interact with a technology in the more traditional sense, ethnography is about how people interact with each other. As UX designers, we’re primarily concerned with how we can use such research to solve a problem through the introduction or revision of technology.

What AP learned from its study of upscale “digital natives” in the US, UK and India is that the news consumers they’d most like to attract are often so overwhelmed by facts that they don’t seek the depth and context. Yet Stray notes that Wikipedia draws millions of users who invest significant time and energy on the site, suggesting that news organizations take a lesson.

From principle to practice

There is a great deal more that can be explored here, even as we think about journalism’s mission. For example, one of Stray’s pet projects is the development of an infographic tool that maps pundits’ sources of information. The ability to visually represent this kind of information can be helpful in assessing the credibility of claims. For my part, I’ve been thinking about tools that make complex data more intelligible to the people who need it. For example, this semester, my students and I are thinking about social media tools that will make it easier to make sense of environmental data that affects their lives. We want to improve the accessibility of such tools as the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJView and the state of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protechon’s Data Miner sites. More about this work in a future post.

On the Grid: Teaching and Research in the Digital Age

Archived U-Stream live feed:


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Fellow Panelists: Alison Clarke, Simone Browne, Howard Ramsby. Moderator: Thomas DeFrantz.

I love, Thomas’ poetic articulations of issues, the more I listen to them. I think I will spend much time watching videos of his performances. I so appreciate Alison Clark’s practical wisdom. I will be sitting at her feet, you can be sure. Howard Ramsby’s description of childen’s excitement at receiving physical letters and his linking of social media profiles to the tradition of persona poems. Simone’s linking of contemporary biometric technologies to historical traditions of slave branding was one of many insights that has my wheels turning.

How to bring it all together, how to mine this and all of the wisdom in the service of my various roles – developing an inclusive pedagogy for journalism/IMM, functioning as an African American Studies Department Chair, participating in the public sphere? Much to continue to contemplate here. So grateful to my fellow panelists, all the panelists, Mark Anthony Neal, all of the folks and the John Hope Franklin Center.