The axis of Corleone-Bluth
Graphic mashup via @stevaker.
On Chattarati's third birthday
In many ways, I’ve wanted to write elements of this piece for a while. Here are two excerpts that stood out to my friend and colleague, Daniel Ryan:
Media is changing, because the tools to produce it and distribute it are changing. More importantly, the way it’s being consumed is bringing about that change at a very rapid rate. Three years ago, the landscape looked much different than it does now. And three years later, it will be something else entirely. The lines between production and consumption will continue to blur. Websites will behave more like applications than publications. News, information and entertainment will be tailored to the individual rather than a broad audience. This has already happened on a meta level. Twitter has turned every consumer into a publisher for his or her circle of influence. “What do you want right now?” is the question preceding every Google search.
And:
… Chattanooga needs more media voices. Not because the current ones are insufficient, but because the challenges we face as a city, as a county, and as a region are so great. We need more participation in the civic process, in planning, in economic development, and in education. We need the collective brainpower of our citizens to help address and solve these challenges.
Saturday
Blogging. It’s serious business.
Jarvis on Jarvis
Once again, I’m not getting rid of the story, not replacing it or the storyteller. I’m arguing that articles are precious, more precious than ever, and need to add value or we can’t afford to waste our time on them. I’m saying that the journalist takes on new roles and more tasks. But, yes, if as a journalist you see yourself only as a storyteller, a maker of articles, your horizon just got closer.
[…]
When people say they like newspapers and books they aren’t just talking about the physical form of them: the feel and smell, the portability and tangibility. They are talking about the finiteness of them. Articles and books have beginnings and ends; they have boundaries and limits; they are packaged neatly in boxes with bows on top; they are a product of scarcity. Abundance is unsettling. That is precisely why the internet is disruptive not only to business and government but to culture and cognition. Threatening the dominion of the article is to threaten our very worldview.
Using Twitter as an editor
When you tweet a story with #muckreads, it goes into a queue that ProPublica editors weed through to find (and link out to) good investigative journalism. Clever.
Community, the business model
This isn’t a brilliant new insight. We have long known communities are powerful and that local media thrive when they bring together and serve their community. Somehow though when it comes to the challenge of online media, we forget this. We search for new business models that involve paywalls, more video, the iPad, and wealthy donors, while the most powerful emerging business driver in the new economy is community.
One of many great reads in the Nieman Foundation’s summer 2011 edition.
Using Twitter as a database
Fascinating.
A way forward for RSS
The software’s job is to bring people articles that they’d like, or need, to read. Think of the app as a reader, not as an RSS reader strictly. (How the articles come in is not important. RSS will still play a major role, but it should be invisible to everyone except those geeks who get it.)
The user interface has to evolve to be much less email-like, and everything has to get way easier than it is now.
I know I’m in the minority, but I still use RSS more than anything else to get news.
Fleet Foxes: 'Helplessness Blues'
I can’t help but think of Bookends every time this comes on the radio. Such a great song.
First person view of mountain biker in urban Chile
In a suit, no less.
Jason Fried on making money
I did a double take when I first saw the SEO-friendly headline. Regardless, great read by one of the founders of 37signals.
What if?
The Scoop:
The simple answer is that APIs are an extension of what reporters do every day: ask questions. The difference is that instead of forcing reporters to gather data from multiple sources, format it to fit your local database needs and then update that database when new releases are available, APIs allow reporters to query live data from all over the Web. If you have experience working with, say, Microsoft Access and setting up an ODBC connection to a remote database, APIs are kind of like that – except that you have near-instant access to more sources of data, more useful tools (like geocoders) and more timely information than ever before.
With legal notices, maintenance of public trust is shifting
I don’t think I’ve ever received more e-mails or private messages about a story in Chattanooga’s newspaper as I have this week regarding a recent column by J. Todd Foster, executive editor of the Times Free Press, on the subject of legal notices.
Much of the correspondence was negative toward the newspaper editor’s somewhat scathing stance on why local governments should continue to pay to have their legal notices printed as opposed to posting them online for free.
Though none of the news coverage around this issue or one of several commentary pieces that have run in the newspaper’s editorial pages have said as much, I think the Times Free Press is concerned about its bottom line, first, and some of the issues it has raised about transparency, second.
And I don’t think its representatives should shy away from that point. The local newspaper is a business, and according to many in the industry, a quite successful one, which is no small feat when you look at the broad decline of print readership nationwide. The revenue it brings in from legal notices — $75,000 from Chattanooga last year, and though the numbers from Hamilton County haven’t been released, it’s safe to assume they’re much higher — goes toward overhead, reporters’ salaries, other operating expenses and, yes, profit.
Whether or not the state legislation passes, and the city and county stop paying for their legal notices to be printed is of little practical concern to me. I suspect that it will happen. At best, I hope some of my friends in the newsroom remain employed regardless of the outcome.
However, I do believe local governments should begin posting the notices on their websites in clean, machine-readable HTML. And I find some of the newspaper’s assertions regarding transparency around online legal notices irrational and counter-productive.
In Chattanooga, the notices are currently located in the classified section of the newspaper. Some announce an issue that will be discussed at an upcoming public meeting, a courtroom or other government function. Based on my cursory reading, however, the majority announce RFPs, bidding for government contracts, and property sales and foreclosures.
The audience for legal notices is small and targeted. The vast majority of citizens never think twice about them, let alone read them. And most newspapers end up in the waste bin before the end of the day.
By contrast, information posted in HTML can be accessed through search, RSS, e-mail, social media, you name it. Once data is published online, it can be archived. Copies can be placed on servers all over the world at minimal expense. The Internet is structured in a way that information can exist for a very, very long time — much longer than ink printed on a piece of paper — and the public can do interesting things with it once it’s in that format.
During a discussion Tuesday, Chattanooga City Councilman Peter Murphy briefly alluded to a project I am working on along with local developers to create an archive of the legal notices once they are posted online. The project is part of a broader initiative to improve the accessibility and quality of public data in the Chattanooga area.
In regard to online legal notices, we are taking some of the newspaper’s concerns to heart. Namely, there should be an automated, baseline accountability system in place to ensure the public trust is never violated. The difference now is that that responsibility is shifting away from the newspaper and toward the public itself.
The real crux of this debate is whether or not local governments adopt good standards for posting notices online. Without a proper framework in place, the newspaper’s warnings could come true: The notices would be difficult to locate and track, and any semblance of transparency would be buried deep within an inaccessible website.
I’m optimistic that won’t happen. The General Assembly legislation outlining how the process will work specifically states that the legal notices be published in HTML, or an equivalent language format, on an official government website. Presumably, that takes PDFs out of the picture, as it should.
The solutions the governments of Chattanooga and Hamilton County adopt with legal notices will say quite a bit about the direction their online communications will take in the future. Increasingly, more and more citizens will be using the Web to access the public information they host. So it’s important to get this one right. The future of that framework, in my view, is a much better conversation to have.
Nieman highlights Chattarati education project
Nieman Journalism Lab recently ran a story on a Chattarati project being headed up by Aaron Collier and DJ Trischler. The project, tentatively dubbed Visual Report Card, dives into the data that Tennessee uses to measure local school performance and, through infographics and analysis, puts an easy-to-understand spin on how Hamilton County schools are really performing.
From Nieman Journalism Lab:
That easy-to-understand aspect is key: Often, challenges in the education system — or, for that matter, problems in any huge, complex bureaucracy — can be amplified by their intimidation factor alone: When we can’t wrap our head around the problems in the first place, how can we hope to try to solve them? Complexity fatigue can be one of the biggest, broadest impediments to finding solutions to common problems. The charts Chattarati is building, like its dataviz counterparts at The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere, offers a micro solution to the macro problem: They try to take the “data” out of “dataset,” making sense out of the information they contain. And making that information, overall, less cognitively intimidating.
Most everyone involved with Chattarati is a big fan of Nieman Journalism Lab, and getting featured on the blog definitely put a spring in our collective step. In case you missed it, here’s the first story in the education series. The latest installment dropped today.
Go long and take your time
Reporters of all stripes are insanely competitive: It’s what makes them good, it’s fun (or at least supplies the adrenaline we all crave, which isn’t always the same thing), and of course it’s the way news organizations keep score. But those news organizations need to realize the game has changed. Being first with commodity news no longer registers with readers — and readers, ultimately, are the ones who pay the bills, to the extent bills are paid at all in our era. The more energy wasted pursuing obsolete bragging rights, the less energy available for what really does still register with readers.
So what’s that? Stories that require you to slow down and invest more time in fewer efforts.
Though I’m just a lowly blogger, I’m finding increasingly that my best work doesn’t come from beating someone else to a story. My best work comes when I focus my energy on the story that only I can write.
