Greg Linch takes a wide-angle look at how we measure our journalism and asks how we could quantify impact.
01.16.2012 | aside | Journalism | analytics, future of news | Feedback (0) Posted from: Rosslyn, Va.
This is a beautiful and interactive explainer piece from The Times, addressing an increasingly complex area of campaign finance law. Bravo.
But the $64,000 question is if they can, on a regular basis, keep it in front of the people that need to see it. Few people are going to find it on their own — inserting it as a contextual element on relevant stories will be crucial.
10.18.2011 | aside | Journalism, Politics | context, future of news, The New York Times | Feedback (0) Posted from: Arlington, Va.
Homicide Watch (run by 2011 ONA MJ Bear fellow Laura Amico) got written up this week for some crafty analytics work. Sure, using search queries to track down a murder victim’s identity is probably easier when you’re a one-woman shop, but local news outfits should use this tactic too.
— via Poynter
10.12.2011 | aside | D.C., Journalism | future of news, Homicide watch | Feedback (0) Posted from: Arlington, Va.
“There’s missing support for the middle-class of news developers. This is a particularly glaring gap, because it’s the most difficult part of the incubation of the adolescent coder.”
That’s Jeremy Bowers, as quoted here and here. And I totally buy it. As someone who’s learned enough PHP/WordPress to understand and poke around at what could be, I’m utterly lost on how to go from tinkerer to real-deal maker. Especially in other languages.
— via Matt Waite & Michelle Minkoff
Bundles and blobs
Stijn Debrouwere has an excellently simple way of describing what the news story consists of — and how neither the status quo nor the newer practices emerging are quite what we need:
We bundle information over time: instead of reporting everything as we find it out live, we gather up all kinds of related information and bundle it into a story. Bundles come in different sizes: we can churn out a quick news report in half an hour, or we can save up months of work for an enterprise story. They also come in different colors: most often we bundle topically related information (a story), but sometimes we bundle by type of information (a rumors section) or time (today’s linkblog).
We also bundle — weave — information into narratives. Stories are not concatenated facts, they’re not bullet-point lists. Stories combine related information and glue it together in paragraphs. Let’s call these narratives blobs.
The middle ground, I comment, has to be providing improving the way we contextualize those bundles of facts that are getting smaller and smaller as our news cycles quicken:
Well said, as usual, Stijn.
The fact that unbundling has become sort of a default setting for fast-paced news organizations these days is all the more reason that we should be focusing on a better contextualization. Important news tends to come in storylines — but besides simple tagging (lame), we don’t really organize these episodic events into order. And we certainly don’t indicate to readers which episodes were more important than others. Coupling our quick-hit stories with big-picture analysis on regular basis would be a huge public service.