Posts about News

Metadata for news

July 11, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust (never heard of them) have proposed a new standard for metadata for news.

Depending on its use and intent, I think it’s a good idea to add more data to news. We all should add into the standard, though, or else it will come from the perspective of big news organizations (whose motive, as is obvious from their “standard,” as as much protection as it is enhancement).

I’ve long argued that we need to operate under an ethic of linking to journalism at its source, for in the link economy, value comes with links, the recipient of the links is the one to take advantage of that value, so to support reporting, we must link to reporting (over rewrites, whether those are from blogs or the Associated Press). So that’s one thing I’d like to add to the standard: “original reporting here.” Yes, that could be gamed, but in a limited population of news sources – at the aggregators of GoogleNews, Daylife, The New York Times, or HuffingtonPost – it would not be hard to police against the gamers.

More: We at CUNY are working with Nokia on assignment software that will wrap metadata around a story from the inception (‘there’s a fire on Main Street, who wants to cover it?’) through to its reporting (this text, photo, audio, or video was captured by this person at this place at this time on this data). Many elements of a story can come together (imagine the collaborative, real-time news produced using Google Wave), each element with data about its provenance. When you think beyond the article as the atomic element of journalism, then you’ll want to incorporate metadata into the heart of reporting as it comes out in an article, a blog, a wiki, a topic page, a whatever.

I would like there to be a standard for adding corrections to work, which could, in turn, enable readers (and linkers) to subscribe to updates.

I’d like to see metadata include links to source material – footnotes – that continues the notion of the provenance of the information within. This could also include footnotes about the author: links to her page, her feed, her identity, how to communicate with her.

Would we want to add traffic data to news (show me the most popular version of this story?).

Tags would be wonderful, of course.

Geo data about the gathering, creation, use, subject, and authorship of the news would be valuable in so many ways.

What else? What other metadata, when it’s offered, would enhance search, would add value to the content, would enhance information about its source and thus its credibility? If a standard is to be a standard, both the creators and users of content (and by users, I mean not just the people formerly known as the readers but also technologists and their algorithms) must add to it and it must be a living beast. Whether it’s this effort (here’s its Google Group) or another effort, join in.

The new news

May 23, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Josh Young writes a fascinating and nicely written essay about the shape of news and competition around it in the Google (read: internet) age, but I think it badly needs a clear lede summarizing his point to prove his point.

So I’ll summarize: He’s saying that Google is causing news to be reshaped so it can be found, now that it has been unbundled from the products we used to have no choice but to buy: our newspapers. He says that news is an “experience good” we can’t really know until we taste it. He says we need a new experience of news and it ain’t Google. I will argue, though, that this very post, the one you are reading now, is the antidote to what he sees, for I experienced his essay and I recommend it to you without Google while also giving you the search-engine-and-browsing-friendly summary – a reason to read – that we now expect before investing in content online. And there’s my point.

Young argues that Google causes the structure of news to change. We agree about the change but we disagree about the cause. Even I don’t think that the all-powerful Oz Google is behind everything that happens on and because of the internet.

In fact, news is one of the areas where Google has little influence – despite the wails and whining of newspaper people – for Google is bad at current content, at the live web, at news. It needs content to ferment with links and clicks and context before it can figure out what it is. There’s no time for that in news. And GoogleNews itself isn’t an answer for it only makes the vastness of news vaster. We don’t find the latest news through search. We find it through recommendations, still, either from editors (going to a packaged site, a [cough] newspaper.com) or from peers (in blogs and RSS for years now and more lately in Twitter; this is why Twitter matters and why Google recognizes that it complementary).

So I’ll argue that we already have the beginnings of the news experience Young wants. Through this quote (which comes at the end of Young’s essay but would have been better as his lede, I think… I often find that to be the case when I write a post), please replace the word “search” with news, for “search” has become synonymous with Google and that’s not what we’re talking about. Young writes:

“We need a What we need is a search [news] experience that let’s us discover the news in ways that fit why we actually care about it. We need a search [news] experience built around concretely identifiable sources and writers. We need a search [news] experience built around our friends and, lest we dwell too snugly in our own comfort zones, other expert readers we trust…. We need a search [news] experience built around beats and topics that are concrete—not hierarchical, but miscellaneous and semantically well defined. We need a search [news] experience built around dates, events, and locations. We need a search [news] experience that’s multi-faceted and persistent. Ultimately, we need a powerful, flexible search [news] experience that merges [automation] and human judgment—that is sensitive to the very particular and personal reasons we care about news in the first place.

I think we’re seeing the beginning of what Young wants in blogs, Twitter, aggregation, better automated targeting, geotagging, and the move to human curation and I hope we’ll see people build other pieces of it in the ecosystems of news that will replace the papers that die (or don’t). I’m working with folks who are trying to build that now – with beats and organization and social recommendation – associated with the New Business Models for News Project. It’s just starting to come together, I think, and Young will be glad to know it’s not from Google; Google’s only a part.

Something like that, Young and I agree, will be the structure of the experience of finding – searching, broadly defined – and using and spreading news. As I said, we also agree that the structure of news will also change – but not just because of Google.

I argue in this post and in slides 6-11 here that the basic building block of news will no longer be the article – a creation and necessity of the means of production of newspapers – but instead the topic or the flow with many elements: process (think: blog), updates (feed), snapshot of current knowledge (wiki), perspective (comments, links), curation (links), and narration (the article still has its place). Yes, it is SEO-friendly. And, yes, Marissa Mayer gave a similar vision to John Kerry’s Senate hearings – of a “living story” that is updated at a permalink – but that doesn’t mean she decreed it. The greater functionality of the internet is shifting news to this structure because it is also link-friendly, blog-friendly, Twitter-friendly, feed-friendly, conversation-friendly, distribution-friendly….

If we invented news today – and we are – this is how it will look, not because Google replaces paper as the medium but because we are not limited to either.

(By the way, I’m probably wrong about Young’s lede. Even without it, because his essay was so deftly written, I read through to the end and took the trouble of reacting to it and recommending it to you here. I’ll also confess that I found it through Google search but only because Young kindly linked to me and mentioned my book. So the link was human, conversational, contextual, targeted, everything Young wants. Google just helped.)

: LATER: Another neat essay today, this one by Kim Pearson, on bringing computational thinking to journalism. I think it stretches the point just a bit (I don’t see how slideshows are particularly compuational) but the larger point is intriguing.

Not my fault

March 18, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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“Criticism of CNBC is way out of line,” NBC head Jeff Zucker said at the BusinessWeek media summit at McGraw-Hill’s headquarters just now. “Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn’t make it so.” He argued that “you’re already seeing a backlash” against the backlash against news media “in terms of people saying, ‘let’s stop beating the press.'” The press didn’t cause us to go to war in Iraq, he said; a general did. The press missing the financial crisis didn’t cause it. “Both are absurd,” he said.

Really? I think that says that the press has no importance and no role in public policy. Doesn’t matter if we miss the story, he’s saying. It’s not our fault. Will he take no responsibility?

Over to you, CNBC bashers.

Later: Asked whether MSNBC is tainting NBC News, Zucker says, “I’m not worried about it.”

He does kind of look like Alfred E. Newman. Without the hair.

He says the answer is that NBC News is “probably in a more dominant position against its competition than it has ever been.” It’s also smaller than it has ever been.

He says David Gregory “frankly has done a fantastic job, something we’re very proud of, and reasserted his dominance on Sunday Morning.” (Over to you, Jay Rosen.)

On media facing the internet: “Newspapers didn’t face those questions fast enough. And they weren’t honest…. We can wish this were 1987 but it’s not…. Advertising is not what it was… We have to think about the model.” He acknowledges that NBC prime time has not had a good three or four years. “Sometimes you see the world more clearly when you’re flat on your back.” That is making them question the model, “question everything.” There, we agree. “Too many media organizations, especially newspapers, weren’t willing to question the model…. including the local TV news model.”

Zucker acknowledges that he will never be No. 1 in prime time (in response to a question about the Jay Leno strategy). He’s right about the changing role of live, prime-time TV. But there again, isn’t he surrendering?

“We’re in show business and the show is important and the business is important. It was easier to be in the show when the business was easier. The business is much harder today.” Has he been drinking out of Paula Abdul’s Coke glass?

Zucker says if they don’t adapt to changing media habits of young people, “we will become the Rocky Mountain News.” The Rocky in the coal mine, it is.

Asked about his comments about analog dollars and digital pennies, he says, “I think we’re at dimes now. We’ve made some progress.”

: Later: In addition to lots of juicy comments, see the LA Times Patrick Goldstein skewer Zucker.

After the industry association (and the industry)

January 9, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Following my bum’s rush from a industry association meeting yesterday – not a big deal on any scale; just personally aggravating, insulting, and embarrassing – I got to thinking (now there’s the danger) about the future of the industry association … and of industries. I wonder whether there is much of one.

By being ejected yesterday, the group decreed that I was an outsider. By one definition, that’s clear: I’m not a member; I don’t pay dues. But by a more sensible definition – we’re in this together, we people who care about the future of news – I’d say they’re defining insider way too narrowly, dangerously so. As I harrumphed out, I said this is the problem with the industry: It is too closed, still. It is not hearing enough new voices and perspectives and ideas. And this trade association is only exacerbating that insularity. Instead of calling it an echo chamber, perhaps my aural reference should have been to a crypt.

And as I walked out, I started to wonder why the people in that room need a trade association anymore. Isn’t Meetup the new trade association? If people in the industry want to get together to talk about their problems and search for solutions together, can’t they just arrange a meeting at a Starbucks? And wouldn’t it be better to open the tent wider – to expand the definition of inside – and get new people with new ideas to those meetings?

I will volunteer to play host to such meetings here at CUNY. Helping news transform is part of our mission, so we should. I’ll bet other universities would agree. Indeed, as budgets are cut back and trade association dues are lopped off, there’ll be a need for such ad hoc meetings – more need than ever. (Note, by the way, that the outsiders are getting together on their own at News Barcamp and we’re playing host to part of it at CUNY.)

And the wheels kept spinning. If there’s less need for trade associations – if they could even be dangerous because of the very limitations that define them – then doesn’t that indicate a diminution of the role of the trade (or industry or guild or craft or union, for that matter) in the future, when the tools get democratized and anybody can pick them up, when you don’t win through control of scarcity anymore but through supporting abundance? The idea of a closed industry and its closed association controlling a closed segment of media or the economy becomes absurd. In short: Who made you publishers and not you?

: BTW: There was a report that it was the WSJ that had me bounced. I didn’t think that was the case and Jay Rosen tweeted some reporting: It’s not.

: LATER: A rather lengthy addendum, in response to a Jay Rosen comment, here.

Guardian column: Witnesses take over the news

December 1, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Here’s my Guardian column this week: reaction to witnesses’ growing role in the news in Mumbai.

The last mass-news story was 9/11, packaged from a distance. The 7/7 attacks on London and the 2004 tsunami then brought the perspective of witnesses via their cameras. The Sichuan earthquake and the Mumbai attacks brought the urgency of Twitter. The next news story will be seen live and at eye level. . . . Such will be our new view of news: urgent, live, direct, emotional, personal.

Out of the cacaphony of people sharing what they know – on the ground, in the area, then around the world – comes a greater need to make sense of it all. Thus, I conclude, organizing news will be the most important role of news organizations.

: After sending the column in, I got email from GroundReport’s Rachel Sterne telling us that:

* GroundReport.com had a full-length Mumbai attacks story on our homepage before any mainstream western outlet.
* We have published over 70 full-length articles, videos and op-eds from people on the ground there since the start of the crisis.
* GroundReport consistently published updates on terrorist whereabouts and casualty counts hours before mainstream media.
* During the attacks I used Twitter and to recruit people on the ground in Mumbai to report, significantly adding to our coverage….