Innovative journalism in a digital world

One of the wonders of digital media is its potential to change the way we share information.  For journalists and educators, it's opening up a whole range of interesting possibilities.

A good example is The Guardian newspaper's interactive timeline of the Arab Spring uprisings. The Guardian's detailed graphic tracks events in seventeen North African and Middle Eastern countries, from Algeria to Yemen, along a timeline that began on January 9, 2011, with the first protests in Tunisia. Each country is listed on the bottom of the graph, with a a path moving forward toward the horizon. The "map" has roll-over icons of different colours representing different types of events: protests,  political moves, regime change, and international or external responses.  A  slider device allows you to move forward and backward in time by clicking on it and moving your mouse up or down. Links are supplied to newspaper articles. It's an ingenious, comprehensive tool that has attracted the attention of web surfers.  You can see it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline


Another innovative site is the online home of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan group that uses the internet to push for government transparency. It does so by bringing together some impressive data-management tools.  One example is "Poligraft," which scours an article or a web site for information related to points of influence connecting key people featured in a story.  The article is presented on the left side of the page, while the data filter presents a report in a companion column to the right. It shows, for example, aggregated financial contributions by associations to a particular cause or their support for particular politicians.  I tested it by pasting the web address of a Globe and Mail newspaper article about two Toyota plants in Canada. In seconds the right hand column produced a report that highlighted references to General Motors and Chrysler and outlined their relative contributions to the American Democratic and Republican parties in pie chart form.

The Sunlight Foundation shows you how the tool works here:

http://poligraft.com/vyJf

Another innovator is Common Craft, a company founded by a Seattle-area couple.  Common Craft presents complex ideas in easy-to-understand cartoon videos.  Here's an example that explains how the U.S. presidential elections work:

http://www.commoncraft.com/election

Designer Jonathan Jarvis shows another fine use of internet video in explaining the U.S. credit crisis. It was part of his thesis for the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

http://vimeo.com/3261363

These innovators show us the great possibilities for digital media and global networks to provide a better understanding of complex issues and the easy dissemination of public information. What a wonderful time it is to be journalist or an educator...

Journalism at the crossroads

Much has been written and said lately about the financial difficulty of news organizations and the role of journalism.

The digital era has brought two things which are great for the consumer and terrible for the news field as a business: first, the Internet has reduced printing and distribution costs down to almost zero. This means that newspapers, individuals, companies, non-profit organizations, government and anyone, really, can easily distribute their content to anyone who's interested in finding it. This is great for consumers because they can access whatever they want, whenever they want, almost always for free. As part of this process, consumers have also become creators of information, collectors of information and sharers of information through blogs, forums and through popular applications like Facebook and Twitter. Access to experts, opinion and basic facts is not exclusive anymore. Who needs to buy a newspaper to read classified advertising when one can find products and services anytime on the world wide web?

Second, this ubiquity of on-line information and the proliferation of hundreds of specialty television channels through cable and satellite distribution, has diminished the importance of news organizations. People today have thousands of choices for content and thousands of choices for how they spend their "media time." For the news business this has become a problem. In the early 1980s, when channels were few, many news programs on television, especially local news, could capture as much as a twenty percent (20%) share of the available audience. This meant something to advertisers, who knew they could reach a significant portion of the population by advertising on these programs. Now, with hundreds of channels and the Internet, local news shows do well when they reach a two percent (2%) share of the viewing audience. This means less revenue from advertising and big financial challenges for news organizations.

Experts in the business of media, like Robert G. Picard, point the way forward. The challenge for news organizations is to find new economic value. They must discover ways to offer unique and different information such that people will see this service as valuable in a media universe of sameness and plenty. In a recent presentation by Picard to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, he pointed this out:

" Journalism must innovate and create new means of gathering, processing and distributing information so it provides content and services that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. And these must provide sufficient value so audiences and users are willing to pay a reasonable price.

"If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report news that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value."

This presents a real challenge.

Developing a better web experience

No one can predict how the Internet will change in the foreseeable future, but we do know it must, and will.

While the Web has brought us many wonderful tools and applications, the possibility of anonymity online has resulted in a form of anarchy and general rudeness in the way some people interact with each other on the Internet. Comments on newspaper sites and in user groups sometimes seem to spiral downward in a vicious circle of petty nastiness that seems to move in the opposite direction of civil dialogue. Users are increasingly frustrated with their Internet experiences, for this and other reasons.

One area of the web that seems somewhat insulated is the special place reserved for social networking sites. Some argue that social networking sites don't really offer a rich experience, and that may be true, depending on how people choose to use their time there. However, one thing seems apparent: users of sites like Facebook, for example, find it much more difficult to hide behind a veil of anonymity. Users generally present themselves with their real names . They tend to accept a higher stand of responsibility for their actions. One reason for this is that a news feed updates friends and contacts on recent activity, making it much harder to hide.

In a recent column in Time magazine, Lev Grossman argued that the social networking sites may point the way for future web developments. Does Facebook hold the key to a better web experience? More here.