It’s early days. But if these changes are rolled out widely, they’ll be the most significant overhaul of some of the important space on the internet in quite awhile. The shift could significantly decrease the traffic that Google sends to publishers’ sites, as more people get what they need right from the Google search page instead. They could also do some damage to the affiliate revenue that publishers derive from product recommendations.

On the bright side, a new search filter aimed at highlighting humans could help highlight individual journalists, columnists, and newsletters — maybe.

“Search Generative Experience”

Google will place AI-generated answers right at the top of some search pages. Here’s how the company describes it:

Let’s take a question like “what’s better for a family with kids under 3 and a dog, bryce canyon or arches.” Normally, you might break this one question down into smaller ones, sort through the vast information available, and start to piece things together yourself. With generative AI, Search can do some of that heavy lifting for you.

You’ll see an AI-powered snapshot of key information to consider, with links to dig deeper.

The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler tested the feature and describes the way that SGE cites its sources:

When Google’s SGE answers a question, it includes corroboration: prominent links to several of its sources along the left side. Tap on an icon in the upper right corner, and the view expands to offer source sites sentence by sentence in the AI’s response.

There are two ways to view this: It could save me a click and having to slog through a site filled with extraneous information. But it could also mean I never go to that other site to discover something new or an important bit of context.

You see the top three sources by default, but can toggle for more.

AI-generated content will also be incorporated heavily into shopping results. Search something like “bluetooth speaker for a pool party under $100,” or “good bike for a 5 mile commute with hills,” and up pops an AI-powered list of recommended products to buy. I haven’t tested this feature, but in addition to keeping users off publishers’ pages altogether, it also seems as though it’s not great news for any publishers that make money from affiliate links.

Google cautions that SGE is still an experiment, and it’s not widely available yet. (If you want to try it and are in the U.S., you can add yourself to the waitlist here from the Chrome browser or Google app.) In addition to that limited access, The Verge’s David Pierce notes that there are supposed to be limits to what Google will use AI to answer

Not all searches will spark an AI answer — the AI only appears when Google’s algorithms think it’s more useful than standard results, and sensitive subjects like health and finances are currently set to avoid AI interference altogether. But in my brief demos and testing, it showed up whether I searched for chocolate chip cookies, Adele, nearby coffee shops, or the best movies of 2022.

For instance, when Wired’s Will Knight asked “if Joe Biden is a good president or for information about different US states’ abortion laws, for example, Google’s generative AI product declined to answer.” But even though Google’s AI is not supposed to have opinions, it seems as if they slip in sometimes. The Verge again:

At one point in our demo, I asked [Liz Reid, Google’s VP of search] to search only the word “Adele.” The AI snapshot contained more or less what you’d expect — some information about her past, her accolades as a singer, a note about her recent weight loss — and then threw in that “her live performances are even better than her recorded albums.” Google’s AI has opinions! Reid quickly clicked the bear claw and sourced that sentence to a music blog but also acknowledged that this was something of a system failure.

so in a world where search goes fully GenAI (which is still a big if), pages of links go away and you get a handful of citations

i would imagine/guess this theoretically destroys small publisher traffic while rewarding the big outlets which may be weighted w/more authority https://t.co/7CyPj2JthQ

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) May 10, 2023

I, for one, look forward to generating IP that helps Google generate more advertising revenue in exchange for less referral traffic. #cjpa https://t.co/6muq3S6KRT

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) May 11, 2023

One thing this definitely kills is the easy-click stories like "what time is the Super Bowl" — which you may hate, but because they do viral traffic every time, pay the bills in many newsrooms. https://t.co/GdNvzUVWAW

— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 10, 2023

This is what Google's answer box with new AI looks like by @geoffreyfowler

Very curious to see how people use this irl and how every website will pivot to get into the new answer box. https://t.co/FxtKANg6Fv

— Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) May 10, 2023

2004: Let’s build our websites to make Yahoo happy!
2008: Let’s build our websites to make Google happy!
2014: Actually let’s focus on Facebook.
2019: Uh, actually let’s go back to Google. Good ol’ Google.
2023: Would you believe me if I said homepages are the new search? No? https://t.co/RPuu3Hre8a

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) May 10, 2023

It’s wild how this only doesn’t constitute plagiarism or copyright violation by mere technicality. Like they can copyright strike you like the day is long on YouTube, but if you write on the internet for a living, your shit is just theirs now https://t.co/FrPNssjagG

— Alex Arrelia (@AlexArrelia) May 11, 2023

“Hidden gems”

Google is also expanding the use of a search filter called “Perspectives” that brings user-created content — think Reddit posts, YouTube videos, and blog posts — into search results. This change is coming at a time when Americans are increasingly seeking out news and information from individuals, not institutions — and TikTok and Instagram are eating into Google’s share of the search market. Here’s Google:

“In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms. We’ll also show more details about the creators of this content, such as their name, profile photo or information about the popularity of their content.

Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.”

“We’re finding that often our users, particularly some of our younger users, want to hear from other people,” Liz Reid, Google’s VP of search, told The Verge. “They don’t just want to hear from institutions or big brands. So how do we make that easy for people to access?”

As Perspectives rolls out, it’ll be interesting to see how Google defines “other people”: Do journalists or opinion columnists who work for newspapers count? Will Substacks be surfaced? The feature could potentially benefit larger news publishers as well as journalists going it alone, but we’ll see.

Kotch, who was an investigative reporter at the Center for Media and Democracy, noticed that just a few news outlets were repeatedly featured in the app, which he’d started using because it was pre-installed on his iPhone.

“I got tired of seeing the same kind of major media outlets’ coverage,” Kotch said. “I didn’t see some outlets that I happened to like more, or that I thought would add nuance.”

So Kotch talked through an idea for a new app with his colleague and friend Walker Bragman. They came up with OptOut News, an aggregation app that shares news, podcasts, and streaming video from “exclusively independent” news publishers.

Kotch and Bragman launched OptOut Media Foundation as a nonprofit in 2020 with a mission to “educate the public about current events and help sustain a diverse media ecosystem by promoting and assisting independent news outlets.” The foundation is funded through individual donations, grants, paid memberships, and events.

The app, which Kotch and Bragman announced as the foundation’s first product in 2020, launched a year ago this month. Besides Kotch and Bragman, there are 25 paid contractors and volunteers who help out with the operation, including three freelance editors who write their own newsletters and an additional four journalists who curate the stories that appear in the app.

OptOut, which is still in beta, has four tabs: Headlines (a curated feed of stories, refreshed by humans three or four times a day), Favorites (for saving stories), Your Feed (where users can select outlets they want to follow), and Livestreams (for watching or listening in real time). When you read stories in the Apple News app, the share links are Apple News links. In OptOut, you share the original link to the outlet.

The app includes 180 news outlets so far, including newspapers, magazines, digital publications, podcasts, video channels, and live streams from Twitch and YouTube. Many of the selections have a decidedly progressive bent; one App Store reviewer noted that “it feels a little like a left wing alternative to what we read about as the right wing media ecosystem.” (2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson loves the app!) National and subject-specific publishers include The Markup, The Appeal, Grist, the Prison Journalism Project, and The Nation. OptOut also includes content from local and regional news publishers like North Carolina Policy Watch, Ohio Capital Journal, Source New Mexico, and Minnesota Reformer.

“Having worked at several good, important newsrooms that were doing great work but didn’t really have the distribution down, I wanted to create a service that would help pull these newsrooms and audiences together,” Kotch said.

OptOut’s two main requirements for a news outlet to join its network is that it be financially independent and that it consistently produce reliable and accurate journalism. Outlets are also supposed to support fair labor practices (no “anti-union activities” allowed) and, if they’re “opinion- or interview-based publication[s]”, they shouldn’t promote or legitimize “conspiracy theories or other false content.”

Here’s what “financially independent” means, according to OptOut:

• Not owned by a commercial corporation or financial institution (ex. Comcast or Alden Global Capital).
• Not primarily funded by one or a handful of corporations or corporate foundations. (An outlet that runs ads is fine, but if it is mostly funded by, say, Google or Facebook grants, it does not qualify.)
• Not publicly traded.
• Free of financial conflicts of interest. (For example, an outlet that covers the energy industry that gets substantial funding from an energy company or its affiliated foundation does not qualify.)

“If there’s a publication that specializes in, let’s say, energy and climate reporting, and they’re sponsored by Chevron, that’s disqualifying for us, because that presents a conflict of interest,” Kotch said, mentioning recent events at Semafor. “Politico’s energy podcast has some good stuff, but they’re also sponsored by big oil and gas, and to us that’s just not trustworthy. Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low. We can’t risk having people not trust the news that we’re pushing out. And frankly, we don’t have faith in news that has financial conflicts of interest.”

On Thursday morning, the top stories on my Apple News included The Washington Post on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the G-20 Summit, USA Today on the Biden administration going after Covid relief scammers, ABC News on snow emergencies in California, CNN on a Pennsylvania man who allegedly tried to bring explosives onto a plane, and Reuters on scientists finding a hidden corridor in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo.

On OptOut News, meanwhile, the top stories were the season three finale episode of the A Matter of Degrees climate podcast, a Tennessee Lookout story on the Supreme Court’s skepticism of student loan forgiveness, a Sludge report on congressional leaders accepting dark money, the Minnesota Reformer on election workers being harassed in the state, and a Documented story about a New York City college that shut down.

“We’re a foundation and we have our own moral ethics, not just in terms of how one does journalism, but in terms of our society,” Kotch said. “We believe in equality for all people, we believe in acknowledging climate science, and trying to make the world a better place. We believe that diversity is incredibly important and that communities of color and other demographics have often been left out of the news and the mainstream news conversation. We want outlets that acknowledge these things, at least somewhat.”

OptOut is free to use and has been downloaded more than 13,000 times in the Apple Store. Users aren’t required to register or give OptOut any personal data, though they’re prompted to sign up for its four weekly newsletters — OptOut News, OptOut Climate, OptOut LGBTQ+, and OptOut New York. All are grounded in promoting relevant stories from the partner network and are also starting to run their own original reporting and analysis. Kotch said the newsletters have more than 6,000 subscribers and each averages an open rate of 40%.

OptOut is also experimenting with paid content for its recurring donors, like a podcast called Gilded Age about present-day inequality and one called OptOutCast that interviews journalists at independent news outlets and features their work. Members also get access to a private Discord to connect with OptOut’s team.

“The hope is that when people are reading, they have a healthier, more diverse diet of news on a daily basis,” Kotch said.

It wasn’t just ill-timed career advice. It was a targeted harassment campaign against media workers that was organized on 4chan by people on the right who hate the mainstream media.

Memes have been used to target marginalized groups for at least a decade now. A new book by researchers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy documents how memes and the online communities that produce them sow disinformation and erode trust in the government and the mainstream media. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America explains how the “Stop the Steal” movement — the false idea that the 2020 election was “stolen” from former president Donald Trump — started online and resulted in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and used examples from Gamergate, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency to develop its playbook.

Meme wars are culture wars, the authors write — “accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flatten the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words.”

In April 2020, co-authors Joan Donovan, the research director at Shorenstein, and Brian Friedberg, a Harvard ethnographer studying online fringe communities, launched a newsletter, “Meme War Weekly,” “that got really grim very quickly,” they told me. It was impossible to write about the political impact of memes on a week-by-week basis without noticing their significant social and political impacts over time. Their Media Manipulation Casebook, a series of case studies published in October 2020, was a precursor to their new book.

I caught up with Donovan, Friedberg, and Emily Dreyfuss, a technology journalist and 2018 Nieman Fellow, to talk about their book and what journalists can learn from the last 10 years of memes to inform their future coverage of American democracy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“Dieter [Bohn, former executive editor of The Verge] and I were routinely frustrated that we weren’t on our own homepage enough. We’re both busy. We were running the site, we’re making podcasts, we were off shooting videos,” Patel explained in an episode of The Vergecast. “The barrier to entry to our own homepage was a 500-word article. It was too high. We weren’t publishing enough and we were driving ourselves crazy — and we found ourselves using Twitter, which is someone else’s platform.”

He added, “I’m looking at the gigantic website we run and saying, ‘Why am I finding it easier to publish on someone else’s platform instead of my own?'”

The Verge was founded in 2011, making the Vox-owned publication something of an elder among tech news sites. The site launched with an adventurous homepage design and has made bold overhauls in the years since, but the redesign debuted on Tuesday “represents the biggest reinvention of The Verge since we started the whole thing,” Patel said.

The most consequential change isn’t the new typefaces or color palette (featuring “Blurple,” “Pernod,” and “Hot Brick”), but transforming The Verge’s homepage into what the site is calling the Storystream. Vox Media has played with the phrase StoryStream — and the idea of giving its journalists an outlet to post short content — in the past, but that was typically to group similar stories together from its own content. This Storystream pulls together full Verge articles with original reporting, tweets, external links (to press releases and other news orgs), YouTube links, quick voicey blurbs, TikToks, and more into one newsy feed.

Mentioned this in the post but @backlon and I really did make one of the first prototypes of our feed in Google Docs last year. We just had fun blogging into a doc for most of an afternoon, to figure out what we needed.

Sometimes you have to just start, somewhere. Anywhere. pic.twitter.com/gKrZdPpW00

— nilay patel (@reckless) September 13, 2022

Six years ago, The Verge had revamped the site to create distinctive design elements — think: neon pink pull quotes and “laser lines” in videos — so that the site’s content would be recognizable even “as the media unbundled itself into article pages individually distributed by social media and search algorithms,” Patel wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

“But,” Patel continued, “publishing across other people’s platforms can only take you so far. And the more we lived with that decision, the more we felt strongly that our own platform should be an antidote to algorithmic news feeds, an editorial product made by actual people with intent and expertise.”

The new site looks a lot more like Twitter than a front page. And that’s kind of the point. Patel has said The Verge’s competition is not Wired or The New York Times but Twitter “and other aggregators of audience.” As other news outlets shift resources toward building communities where readers are already spending lots of time — YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Discord, etc. — The Verge wanted to be sure it was investing closer to home, too. Ultimately, the “big hope” is that The Verge homepage reads like “a better, cooler, funner feed than social media feeds.”

The redesign was built first for mobile — 90% of The Verge’s audience visits on their phones — and the team has acknowledged the desktop version is something of an afterthought. With the addition of several widgets, the reading experience can be a bit chaotic and some are questioning how accessible the new site is. Others really hate the white-on-black text, which many people find hard to read.

The idea, though, is to bring the most important and interesting tech news — including the many conversations, reporting, and bite-sized tidbits found elsewhere on the internet — to one place. As Patel explained in the post:

Our plan is to bring the best of old-school blogging to a modern news feed experience and to have our editors and senior reporters constantly updating the site with the best of tech and science news from around the entire internet. If that means linking out to Wired or Bloomberg or some other news source, that’s great — we’re happy to send people to excellent work elsewhere, and we trust that our feed will be useful enough to have you come back later. If that means we just need to embed the viral TikTok or wacky CEO tweet and move on, so be it — we can do that. We can embed anything, actually: I’m particularly excited that we can directly point people to interesting threads on Reddit and other forums.

The Storystream also appears at the end of article pages, though it’s unclear how often readers will reach it there. (After article text, readers are confronted with a large ad, a link to the comments section, a “featured video” ad, related links section, another large ad, a sponsored content banner, and then the Storystream.) Overall, the redesign is a major investment in The Verge’s homepage, already the single most popular page at Vox Media, said publisher Helen Havlak.

“With the new site, we are making a big bet that we can grow our direct, loyal audience by curating the best tech and science destination on the web,” Havlak said. She also told Axios, “If I can just get people…to refresh our site one more time a day, that is a huge lift to my business.”

The new format will free up editorial bandwidth by eliminating aggregation posts and debates over whether “one dude’s tweets” deserve an entire story, Patel said. He estimated the changes will save the newsroom 20 hours per day and said the extra time will be redirected toward publishing more original reporting and analysis.

About a dozen times a day, the Verge newsroom will vet a story that doesn’t quite hit our bar for a full news post. In the past that was the end of it, but what’s fun with the new site is that we can now cover them in super short Quick Posts (aka “Quipis”) https://t.co/3OM2WGyeWw

— jon.porter (@JonPorty) September 14, 2022

The Verge also announced that it’s moving to the commenting platform Coral, with the intention of fostering more quality conversations on its site. (The Verge was one of many news outlets that turned off comments on some or all articles in recent years.) Under the new protocol, chief of moderation Eric Berggren will oversee community contributions, though any Verge reporter can choose to “feature” a worthwhile comment.

“We also hope to spotlight our best comments in the new Storystream newsfeed on our homepage and create a positive feedback loop that way,” publisher Havlak added.

On the Vergecast episode, Patel also revealed a somewhat unusual goal for a news organization: how much traffic it can send to other outlets. He said he thinks The Verge can “very quickly” send publishers more traffic than Twitter, for example.

“One of my biggest goals — the big number that I’m looking at — is how much traffic we send out. I think we will be a huge success if we are sending a meaningful amount of traffic to other people,” Patel said. “Because that relationship between publishers and platforms has gotten totally out of whack.”

“If we can just get back in the game where we’re like, hey, you can build your own communities, on your own platforms, once again, in a format that feels both very modern — because it’s a news feed — but inherits the best parts of what people loved about blogging, and you’re a good citizen of the internet because you’re sharing the wealth,” Patel added, “I think that lets you reset that whole relationship and then potentially build whatever the next things are, without constantly scrambling against whatever algorithm update, whatever a platform is going to roll out to up- or down-rank content.”

(Some of you will want to listen to the second half of the episode, where editor-at-large David Pierce goes nitty gritty on the site redesign with senior product manager Tara Kalmanson and senior engineer Matt Crider. They discuss why TikTok embeds are so terrible and how they balanced speed, content, and design in the redesign.)

The Verge said the typical number of visitors to its homepage doubled on the day the redesign debuted. Here’s what some of those visitors thought:

My general rule is to be skeptical of tech site redesigns. Most of the time they are born out of a need for better page view and engagement metrics.

The Verge’s redesign is more of a business model shift with an accompanying (rough) redesign. pic.twitter.com/imQiZGrewy

— Neil Cybart (@neilcybart) September 13, 2022

Check out the storystream on this site. This is all after the article and honestly a much more engaging experience than being pulled in another random article. pic.twitter.com/b86NBITgRM

— Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) September 13, 2022

It is doing some interesting things, but it’s a chaotic accessibility mess, half the top nav space is unusable, and the comments in purple is gonna bleed retinas. Over-designing a site people want to read for an extended period is…not great.

— Mark Ziemer (@sylvisual) September 13, 2022

The new verge redesign is very 2019 quartz app complete with 3rd party linkinghttps://t.co/DAIUQ8KgdQ pic.twitter.com/DFPqFClDSM

— Max Lockie (@staphwriter) September 13, 2022

the homepage isn’t coming back :(

— brian feldman (@bafeldman) September 13, 2022

“This creates transparency around the most important tool the West has in the current crisis,” Justus von Daniels, editor-in-chief of Correctiv, told me.

Data for the Sanctions Tracker comes from the Open Sanctions database. Correctiv is filtering it for sanctions against Russian targets from 2014 to the present.

Users can view sanctions by country and date and track how many there are against Russian people, companies, and other individual targets.

The Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center is “tracking moves by major technology companies and governments to limit the flow of misinformation. This includes state sponsored misinformation and content removed at the behest of governments, as people worldwide flock to social media to receive updates of the rapidly unfolding violence.” That project, updated daily, is here.

Before the passage of SB1421, California had some of the strictest laws in the United States to shield police officers’ privacy, according to Capital Public Radio, and police misconduct records were deemed “off-limits”.

Six news outlets — Bay Area News Group, Capital Public Radio, the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, KPCC/LAist, KQED, and the Los Angeles Times — got together to request those documents, forming the California Reporting Project. Now, 40 news outlets are part of the initiative.

They sent public records requests to more than 700 agencies across the state, from police departments and sheriffs’ offices to prisons, schools, and welfare agencies that have police presence on site. if you’ve ever submitted a records request to a government agency, you know it’s not easy or straightforward to extract information from documents, if you can even get them at all.

But to sort through the more than 100,000 records they’ve gotten back since 2018, Lisa Pickoff-White, KQED’s only data reporter and the data lead on the California Reporting Project, enlisted the help of data science students from UC Berkeley to help organize the data.

The Data Science Discovery Program was founded in 2015 and is part of Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Every semester, the program pairs around 200 students with companies and organizations that have data science–related projects they need help completing. Students spend six to 12 hours a week working on their assignments, for which they receive course credit.

The students have worked with media companies on editorial and operational projects, including the San Francisco Chronicle’s air quality map and the Wall Street Journal’s effort to analyze its source and topic diversity using natural processing language. When newsrooms, especially local ones, are strapped for engineering resources, the Berkeley students fill a gap to help journalists complete more ambitious projects.

“It’s a really natural fit. [We want] students to get a deep understanding of the context of the data analysis that they’re doing, and to consider human context and the implications of the insights and conclusions they’re making,” Data Science Discovery program manager Arlo Malmberg said. “All the things we emphasize in the data science program are at the core of what journalists do as well, in bringing forward the context of a problem in a story for readers, and in providing analysis of the causes of those issues.”

Pickoff-White co-selected four students to work with the California Reporting Project to build a police misconduct database from the records received. They all had particular interests in policing because of various connections in their personal lives. Usually in their data science courses, she said, they work individually on assignments and applications, but they were excited to work as a team on something tangible.

“The purpose of the project really resonated with me,” Pruthvi Innamuri, a sophomore computer science major who worked on the project, said. “During 2020, with a lot of police misconduct happening, I noticed a lot of communities feeling severely hurt and oppressed. I wanted to be able to use my computer science background to work on a project that’s able to better inform people in some way regarding this issue.”

Innamuri and his classmates built programs to recognize basic information from the police records, like names, locations, and case numbers. That made it easier to group files together and organize data for the journalists to analyze.

Some of the stories that have come out of the data from the records include a Mercury News story about how Richmond has more police dog bites than other cities and how Bakersfield police officers broke 45 bones in 31 people in the span of four years. The database isn’t complete yet and the students’ work helps make future data collection easier.

“I don’t know if we’d be able to do this without them,” Pickoff-White said. “None of these newsrooms would be able to automate this work on their own.”

In South Dakota, Pigeon 605 — a year-old sister site to SiouxFalls.Business — is delivering personalized local news with a modern-day fleet … minus the feathers. (The “605” refers to the area code that serves the entire state.) In a city that just crested 200,000 residents, more than 4,000 people have picked a virtual pigeon to deliver news based on their interests and neighborhood.

Here’s how it works. Choose (“adopt”) a bird, decide on a name, and tell Pigeon 605 what news stories you’re interested in. (In addition to topic-specific news stories, readers can also opt-in to categories like “Stories that will make me smile, laugh, or maybe cry,” “Stories that are a little quirky,” and “Stories that will make me a more informed citizen.”) You determine how often you want to hear from your virtual bird.

I chose a grumpy-faced gray one and named him after the little birdie who told me about Pigeon 605. In the past week or so, I’ve gotten a text message and a handful of emails, including one that sought to balance tough Covid-19 news with a missing cat story.

Pigeon 605 is profitable, said founder Jodi Schwan. The local news site has taken flight thanks to advertising and, in particular, sponsored stories. (Schwan owns Align Content Studio, the publisher of both Pigeon 605 and SiouxFalls.Business, and the two-person team employs a number of freelancer reporters and photographers for the outlets.) The partner stories sponsored by nonprofits, corporations, and local businesses are labeled and Pigeon 605 promises its readers it will not accept political advertising.

Schwan got her start in broadcast journalism (at the local KELO-TV) and oversaw the digital transformation at the Gannett-owned Sioux Falls Business Journal before striking out on her own with SiouxFalls.Business in 2017. That site focuses on development, entrepreneurship, and local industries including healthcare and manufacturing.

“I became fairly convinced that I wasn’t going to retire at a newspaper. I wanted to be in a place that was in a position for growth — and particularly in a position to add staff and not cut staff,” Schwan said. “And so I started thinking about what that might look like.”

Although neither SiouxFalls.Business nor Pigeon 605 has a reader revenue model, Schwan said she’s considering adding elements of one to help diversify the way she funds the digital news sites.

The pandemic made the launch of Pigeon 605 feel like “a year-long soft launch” at times, Schwan admitted. (“Scheduled and rescheduled: Your guide to 2022 concerts in Sioux Falls” currently sits on the homepage.) Their audience is growing steadily but the site is still experimenting to find the right mix of coverage.

“I didn’t want to come in with something that looked like what everybody else was doing,” Schwan said. “I didn’t start out covering crime and politics and weather. I went a different direction. I went where I thought there would be community interest, but also to places that would allow us to stand out.”

Schwan sees personalization and innovative delivery methods — including texting, where she has seen readers consistently and enthusiastically engage — as the future of local news. The quick survey that readers complete as they “adopt” their pigeon gives her insights into her audience, and provides a road map for moving ahead.

“The big goal is to have more people adopt because the more we grow that database, the more interesting things we can do,” Schwan said. In the future, she hopes to expand stories that help locals be “informed citizens,” add more school-specific coverage — possibly by partnering with students themselves to publish stories — and offer more localized content.

“Sioux Falls is just beginning to develop its metro area communities, what you would typically consider suburbs, and a lot of them are underserved from a news perspective,” Schwan said. “As they grow, I love the idea of being able to send news to specific zip codes or specific communities.”

I have to say: A little personalization goes a long way. I’ve never set foot in South Dakota, but I’m still opening all of my missives from “my” pigeon.

“I think the data is key here when you look at the business case for this, but hopefully, it’s the brand and the user experience that keeps readers coming back,” Schwan said.

Readers,

Longform.org is shutting down its article recommendations service. (The Longform Podcast will continue to publish new episodes weekly.)

We started the site in April 2010 on a whim. Since then, we have recommended more than 10,000 pieces of nonfiction. It has been immensely gratifying to watch millions of readers enjoying the work of our favorite writers.

Thank you to Longform.org’s contributing editors, its supporters, and the publications, writers, and readers who made it all possible. We will miss you.

— Max Linsky & Aaron Lammer, founders

A similar note was also pinned to its Twitter profile:

Longform is shutting down its article recommendations service. (The Longform Podcast will continue to publish new episodes weekly.)

Thank you to our contributing editors, our supporters, and the publications, writers, and readers who made it all possible. We will miss you.

— Longform (@longform) January 5, 2022

Almost immediately, the outpouring of love began — from distraught readers, writers hoping to one day be featured on the website, and everyone in between:

my dream of writing a longform pick crushed! https://t.co/BRZidI9pnh

— bettina (@bettinamak) January 5, 2022

farewell to a site that helped a lot of unknown writers find new audiences and take the first real steps in their careers, even degenerate gamblers who wrote mostly about poker and basketball. Wonderful site; great people behind it. https://t.co/i2rFr9jSch

— kang (@jaycaspiankang) January 5, 2022

https://twitter.com/francescamari/status/1478751899297927172

And as the original message and tweet indicated, Longform still plans to produce its popular podcast, which became a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in August 2021. As we reported back then, the co-founders of Longform, Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky, stayed on as producers of the podcast, but sales, marketing and distribution of the podcast became the responsibility of Vox.

Linsky and Lammer didn’t say much to elaborate on today’s news. Linsky tweeted:

This project lasted so much longer than I ever expected. It also changed my life. Thank you to every single reader, editor, and writer who made Longform possible. A great run. https://t.co/KsE0u4mva8

— max linsky (@maxlinsky) January 5, 2022

Lammer, on the other hand, offered a teeny bit more insight, telling one reader that there were reasons like paywalls that influenced the decision to shutter:

We've had a bunch of contributors from Pitt over recent years!

But there are non-economic reasons that it has become difficult (read: paywalls)

— Lammer (@aaronlammer) January 5, 2022

When asked for further comment, Lammer said, “I think we’ll just let the letter speak for itself. We’ve always tried to highlight the writers, and I don’t think it really makes sense to make the shutdown about us.”

In any case, fans of Longform can take heart knowing that the archive, at least, will live on.

oh btw – the @Longform archive will stay up and its a lifetime of reading (until the links all decay… look entropy is the nature of the universe)

— Lammer (@aaronlammer) January 5, 2022

Crux, a startup built on natural language processing technology, has something that could help. Launched in 2018 by cofounders Barak Ronen and Roie Amir, Crux has developed a widget that calculates a user’s “knowledge score” on a particular news topic and nudges them into bettering that score by reading more articles.

The Crux cofounders, who attended high school together, are based in London and Tel Aviv. (We’re not talking about the Catholic news site, also called Crux.) Amir, who serves as chief technology officer, is a search and natural language processing specialist and — not incidentally — a board game fanatic. Ronen has a journalism background, and has held the top news job at Walla, one of Israel’s largest news sites, and led search visualization at Dow Jones in the past. With the rest of the Crux team, they’ve build a gamification widget they call the Knowledge Tracker.

Here’s how it works

Sifted, the news site backed by The Financial Times that reports on entrepreneurs and the startup scene in Europe, is among the handful of publishers that have signed on to experiment with the technology. You can see the Crux-powered widget at the bottom of any Sifted article, including ones on the Parisian startup growing foie gras in a lab, a smartphone game that monitors users for depression, and how venture capital money finances an unjust “servant economy.”

The Knowledge Tracker, using natural language processing, makes two key determinations: how important an article is relative to the full collection of articles on the topic, and how much novel information the story contains for a specific user. Using those, the widget shows a knowledge score based on a user’s reading history on the site.

If a user clicks on an article about, say, a quantum technology company and they’ve read many articles on Sifted about the topic, they would see a high score and a mostly filled-in bar. They’d also be presented with a selection of articles they haven’t yet read, labeled with the number of points they would gain if they read ’em. Those who have yet to read much on the topic would see a lower score, as well as recommendations that cover a lot of ground, along the lines of “Everything you need to know about quantum technologies.“

“The more an article contains elements that you have never read before, the higher its score,” Ronen said. “What happens there is essentially rewarding the user — and choosing the articles — based on bursting your filter bubble. It’s the opposite of what the old world of engagement and personalization and clickbait did. It’s ‘Oh, Sarah read about robots, so let’s give her robots and robots and more robots.’ It’s, ‘Sarah read about robots so let’s show her, I don’t know, an article about the singularity.” (Yikes.)

The game is never finished, either. The Knowledge Tracker encourages readers to keep up with the latest articles, especially if recent pieces contain information and concepts the reader hasn’t encountered in previous articles.

“It tells you, ‘You used to have 60%, but you’ve been missing out on some key articles,” Ronen explained. “Your relative knowledge has dropped. Here are the two to three best articles for you to catch up.”

Is this what readers want?

“The technology is complex but, if you think about what we’re doing, it’s incredibly simple. People come to a news website to gain knowledge about something,” Ronen told me. “We show them how they’re progressing. We close the feedback loop on reading. They see where they started, and they see how they’re making progress. In many ways, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why this is very beneficial for engagement.”

One of the ways that Crux thinks about its widget is like using GPS or Google Maps, making articles more navigable and giving readers a sense of progress.

“What does a Google Map do for you? Number one, it gives you the optimal route to your destination from where you are. We do the same thing, our recommendations — wherever you are in your reading journey — say read this, and then that, and then this other thing. That’s the best way for you to cover the topic,” Ronen said. “The second thing that the GPS does for you, is that it tells you how far away from a destination you are. That’s, essentially, the knowledge score that you see.”

Crux sees the tracker as a way for news publishers to meet newsroom desires and address business needs in one go. The widget helps to resurface important work — Ronen used the example of a deeply-reported feature that got bumped off the front page after three hours due to breaking news — as can’t-miss pieces on a topic. In theory, the widget also generates clicks and increases reading time as users seek to earn points, up their score, and be deemed well-read on a topic.

So … is it working?

Sifted is the only publication that has fully deployed the Knowledge Tracker widget on its article pages thus far. Engagement from users who saw the widget increased by 55%, Crux told me. In other words, if the control group read an average of 10 articles, the group that saw the Knowledge Tracker read an average of 15 and a half, Ronen explained. That was across all users; the most active users tripled their average weekly article reads, he noted.

That’s good news for Sifted, which launched a membership program only six months ago, putting up a metered paywall for unregistered users and roping off some content as available only to subscribers. The engagement numbers were promising but they were, naturally, interested to learn if the Knowledge Tracker would help them convert readers. That’s unclear, but users in the group that saw the widget were more likely to become a registered user — often seen as a first step in the subscription pipeline — than those who did not. Registrations increased by 16% for Knowledge Tracker users over a two-month period, Ronen said.

It’s not hard to see why Sifted was game to try the technology. The news site caters to entrepreneurs and investors, and one can picture a founder wanting to know everything about their potential competition or a researcher highly motivated to make sure they’re not missing any emerging trends in a particular market. Are general news readers as focused — or exhaustive — in their reading habits? I’m not sure. I’ve definitely clicked on headlines — “Help, I Can’t Stop Watching This Video Of Elon Musk Breaking His Cybertruck Windows” comes to mind — without needing to know a single other thing about the larger topic.

Ronen, though, said users have reported liking the “focus” that the widget prompted in their reading habits. Instead of sitting down to learn about the situation in Afghanistan only to find themselves reading about the acrobatic abilities of squirrels or national politics, again, they told Crux they enjoyed feeling like they “accomplished something” on a news site.

He also said it might not be that complicated. “At the most shallow level, we’ve heard the word ‘fun’ a lot,” Ronen said. “Lots of people just enjoy clicking and engaging with the widget.”

What’s next?

Crux, naturally, is looking for more publishers to work with. Ronen told me they’re looking for “hungry” news product teams willing to experiment with ideas that Crux thinks will help boost reader engagement.

They’re having discussions, for example, with sports-centric news sites that could reframe Knowledge Tracker into something more playful: a widget that asks, in essence, “How big of a fan are you?” instead of “How much do you know?” In that version, a user who reads stories about, say, the Brooklyn Nets will earn points toward being considered a serious fan of the team.

Ronen also showed off an early version of a dashboard that allows readers to see their knowledge score across multiple possible topics, showing them where they’re currently paying their reading attention and how their scores compare to other users. (“It’s a little bit like a FitBit for knowledge,” he said.)

Customized alerts and newsletters are also a possibility and you can see some of these ideas mocked up on the Crux site:

Looking farther ahead, Crux sees an opportunity to connect publishers with businesses. Decision-makers working in law, consulting, or banking, as Ronen sees it, are less likely to be concerned with a subscription price than how to best allocate their reading time.

“These people have nothing blocking them from accessing any site, any publisher, any source of content whatsoever. Their problem is classic information overload. We think that quantified knowledge can be the way to bring publishers’ content into those worlds of enterprise, because it can create exactly that individualized or personalized triage between, essentially, an unlimited amount of information and that professional that needs to make a decision based on a high level of knowledge,” Ronen said. “I think we will be going in that direction in the future. Publishers going on the journey with us can go with us there. It’s a good place for publishers to be, I think.”

What explains the recent flurry of activity? In February, Australia passed a law requiring Facebook and Google to negotiate content deals with media outlets; if negotiations failed, the government would impose fees. Canada then signaled it would adopt a similar approach. Hence the deals.

On its face, it’s a smart strategy for the tech platforms. Why involve the government when they can strike deals on their own? However, they now face an unintended consequence: these secretive, one-off deals have united Canadian publishers new and old in demanding the federal government follow Australia’s lead.

[Read: Facebook got everything it wanted out of Australia by being willing to do what the other guy wouldn’t]

I spoke with a half-dozen prominent news publishers, who run everything from specialty digital outlets to national newspaper chains and who were left out of the Google Showcase money. These are people who normally don’t agree on anything. Yet all said they were furious at Google for cutting side deals with some of their peers, and want the federal government to move ahead with its proposed legislation ensuring tech giants like Google and Facebook pay for the news content they disseminate on their platforms.

While there is some disagreement among them over how such a payment scheme should work, almost all agreed that the Big Tech platforms were applying restrictive and opaque criteria to privilege select publishers and employing a divide-and-conquer approach in a race to get ahead of the threat of legislation. I have agreed not to name these publishers because of their concerns that speaking out could jeopardize their future negotiations — which perfectly encapsulates the problem: publishers large and small are afraid of the power the tech giants wield, and worry that publicly opposing them could endanger their companies.

The debate over whether tech platforms should pay for journalism has usually been framed as a question of who bears responsibility for the newspaper industry’s economic collapse. That debate — which always struck me as a red herring, promoted by a news industry unwilling to be accountable for the role it played in its own demise — is now irrelevant. No matter who was responsible, the precedent has been set: Facebook and Google will pay for journalism. If you don’t believe me, just look at the social media ad campaign Google has unleashed to tell you so.

I get why publishers would take the best deal they can get from a tech company instead of waiting for possible government action. The Liberal Party of Canada failed to introduce any legislation on the file before Parliament wrapped up for the summer, and most observers expect an election call. As The Globe and Mail’s CEO Phillip Crawley told me this week, “I can see the results of the deal already with Google, whereas there’s considerable uncertainty as to what the government would be able to deliver, if they ever do.” And while the deals seem like a win-win-win for readers, publishers, and platforms, they risk excluding journalism outlets with diverse founders and diverse approaches — intentionally or unintentionally privileging the status quo.

Maggie Shiels, head of news public relations for Google, told me that News Showcase is focused on “comprehensive, general interest news.” However, at least three publications I spoke with that seemingly fit this description said the company told them they were ineligible.

“They picked publishers they think are influential, plus a couple of their buddies,” one publisher told me.

“I’m absolutely convinced they’re motivated by neutralizing government regulation,” another said, “so you would think they’d go all out to show the government that they understand the market in Canada, that they value innovation and entrepreneurship and that it isn’t about building monopolies and consolidating power for a few.”

“The program is being built with a focus on print and digital newspapers, emphasizing local news sources,” said Shiels, adding that Google remains in “active conversations” with publishers of all sizes across the country.

“We try to offer a range of programs and partnership opportunities for publishers of all sizes, including digital first and traditional newspapers, from all areas of the country, in both Official Languages. Participation is always voluntary, and we listen to publishers to try and build service offerings that serve their needs,” said Facebook Canada’s Meg Sinclair.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because there were similar debates when the federal government defined what constitutes a “credible” journalism organization eligible for its $595-million government-aid package—a policy that had many detractors speaking out at the time, including me. The independent advisory panel on journalism-tax measures, which was born out of the government package, defines general-interest news quite broadly. You can see all 135 outlets that meet the definition here. Google, instead of following the government classification, has decided to narrow the scope.

These definitions are neither transparent nor clearly defined. That they come down to semantics makes it easy for platforms to bend negotiations to their own will, pitting some news outlets against others in exchange for favorable terms. This behavior will stifle innovation in the media space at a time when it’s needed more than ever. We’ve gone from the government picking winners to Silicon Valley tech giants doing so — and frankly, I’m not sure what’s worse.

The stakes are high. In Australia, it’s estimated that after the government moved to act, Facebook and Google injected more than AUD$200 million into the journalism sector, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp reportedly getting tens of millions of dollars from Google alone. Canadian publishers cashing in on the Facebook and Google deals, like The Globe and Mail, will be able to consolidate industry talent and reach more people through the global audiences the platforms provide, while those on the outside looking in will be competing with one hand tied behind their back.

Big Tech’s sheer wealth, scale, and influence mean these decisions will profoundly shape what you read, distorting the marketplace of ideas. This is not simply private-market players paying fair-market value in exchange for products — it’s private companies using their trillion-dollar market caps and immense bargaining power to steamroll an entire sector in pursuit of their own self-interest.

To state the obvious: I, too, am a self-interested party. While The Logic has held preliminary talks with Google and Facebook, the conversations have so far been unproductive. I suspect this column won’t improve that. I haven’t been part of the efforts publishers old and new have made to lobby Ottawa because I believe The Logic’s success ultimately depends on its relationship with readers, not its relationship with tech platforms. This isn’t a fight I wanted. But now that our competitors are striking deals with these platforms, the playing field has been tilted, and I have no choice but to speak out — not just for the company that I founded, but for a healthy journalism ecosystem made up of new and old voices that, in turn, supports a vibrant democracy.

Those ideals are also why I want to be clear that The Logic remains unaffiliated with any industry-lobby group, and that this column expresses my own views as a publisher. Since last September, when it became apparent that my role as both CEO and editor-in-chief represented a potential journalistic conflict of interest, I have recused myself from all editorial conversations on these matters, and have no say in how our reporters and editors cover this subject. Our newsroom will learn for the first time about The Logic’s discussions with tech platforms in reading this column.

The federal government should follow Australia’s lead in forcing arbitration between platforms and publishers when needed. Even then, there are no guarantees the tech platforms will negotiate in good faith, so any legislation should outline clear and transparent eligibility criteria. Publishers should also be given permission to bargain collectively with the tech platforms, like they are trying to do in Denmark, to ensure negotiations are conducted in good faith, with fair and equitable agreements and clearly outlined criteria that maintain a level playing field for all publishers.

U.S. Congressman David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat who, as chair of the House judiciary committee’s antitrust subcommittee, led an exhaustive investigation into Big Tech last year, called Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google “gatekeepers to the online economy,” adding that “they bury or buy rivals and abuse their monopoly powers — conduct that is harmful to consumers, competition, innovation and our democracy.” They should not be allowed to use that gatekeeper dominance to further erode the journalistic ecosystem and the market for fact-based reporting.

This is an exceptional circumstance that requires government intervention. Platforms acting unilaterally have imperiled elections and democracy itself. Do we really want them deciding what journalism is worth sustaining and amplifying, without any accountability or obligation to the public good?

With an election call seemingly getting closer by the day and with Ottawa essentially shut down for the summer, this isn’t an issue that will be resolved anytime soon. But when things resume next fall, I hope whichever government is in power takes note that it is near impossible to get this country’s media startups and legacy players to agree on anything. That they are for once united is something to which Ottawa should pay attention.

[Return of the RSS reader]

But journalist Will Oremus, recently of Medium’s OneZero, found a way around this, essentially turning the “Forums” tab of his Gmail into a mini Google Reader (RIP) for newsletters. (Oh man, Google Reader has been gone for eight years. For those who don’t remember, it was a way to read and comment on things that was not Twitter and it was the best.)

I trained my Gmail to categorize newsletters—and nothing else—as "Forums," so now I have my own little Google Reader in my inbox. Does anyone else do this? pic.twitter.com/9PG65KPSyJ

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) April 27, 2021

No filters needed. Just take one instance of each newsletter, drag it to Forums, and check the pop-up box to do the same with future emails from that sender. When anything else crops up in Forums, drag it to "Promotions" or "Updates." Gmail learns quick. https://t.co/6CtKpWHxJp

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) April 27, 2021

The tweet replies include other recommendations on how to manage and filter email newsletters, but “for me, the simple drag-and-drop in Gmail’s tabbed inbox works because I’m not the sort of person who’s great at setting up or maintaining detailed manual rules for what Gmail should do with various types of emails,” Oremus told me via DM. “Any time I set up a specific folder or label, I end up completely forgetting about it, so it’s of no use. The Forums trick works for me because that tab is already built into my everyday browsing experience, and it surfaces things in a way that works for me intuitively on both desktop and mobile.”

I have this up and running now, and it works most of the time. Occasionally stray messages make it into the Forums tab and have to be dragged out. Some newsletters still get away, and there’s still the problem of, well, me still not always reading them. But that’s not a problem that technology can fix!

If you have to find things from multiple meetings, repeat the same tedious steps.

But recently, journalists from Michigan Radio, the NPR station in the state, have been using a database they built in-house to better sift through public meetings. The database is called Minutes and it searches, downloads, and transcribes videos of public meetings in a few dozen cities in Michigan. The project is funded by the Google News Initiative’s Innovation Challenge.

Meeting are already public in Michigan because of the Open Meetings Act, but there was no searchable index of meetings from across the state, Dustin Dwyer, a Michigan radio bureau reporter and 2018 Nieman Fellow, said.

Just because information is public doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy gets it. And so does @MichiganRadio. We’ve got an exciting new project launching tomorrow that will help you get at what’s in that locked cabinet. Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/oGBZDwizNc

— dustindwyer (@dustindwyer) March 2, 2021

“It is unbelievably complicated to find out what happens in these meetings, even though all the information is online,” Dwyer said. “We’re trying to make the content of the meetings searchable, so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time scrolling through the agenda finding out when they’re talking about the thing that is important to you. [Instead], you can search for the information and get a meaningful result. It’s overcoming an informational barrier around these meetings.”

The tool is called Minutes. An application code monitors YouTube channels it can pull from, Michigan Radio’s digital tech specialist Brad Gowland explained. When it sees that there’s new videos, it gets the audio of the video, and it transcribes it in 45-second chunks so there’s enough text to transcribe complete sentences. So if a reporter is looking for a certain topic, they can search through the transcripts to find legible sentences about what they’re looking for, and then they can go to YouTube to watch the full video and pull out soundbites.

The database allows reporters to keep tabs on issues across the the state, even in places where there aren’t any Michigan Radio reporters covering them regularly. It’s somewhat inspired by tools like City Scrapers and Documenters, both of which are open-source, collaborative community efforts to make information from and about public meetings in select cities more readily accessible. Minutes doesn’t create an excuse for a newsroom to not cover a city council meeting, Dwyer said, but it helps catch things that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Often, issues become more important for coverage when it’s clear that they exist in multiple places. Minutes helps figure that out.

“I live in Grand Rapids so if something is happening in Grand Rapids, I’m going say it’s kind of important, but I may not know that it’s also happening in other communities on the opposite side of the state that we don’t normally cover,” Dwyer said. “But then there’s people showing up at those meetings every week giving public comments and saying ‘this is important to me.’ If we don’t know that those things are happening in other parts of the state, we may not realize how big or how important something is or how widespread it is. Being able to draw those connections is a big part of what this database is about for our reporters.”

The Minutes database and its transcripts aren’t available to use to the public because they aren’t checked for errors (the program could hear the word “vaccine” and transcribe “Maxine”). It also isn’t a definitive database of every meeting in Michigan because it still takes time to process so many videos and costs money to store those large files. But since the program is already downloading audio from the meetings, it then sends the audio to one of Michigan Radio’s 42 new podcast feeds. That means that anyone can listen to a public meeting in 42 of Michigan’s cities as a podcast. Michigan is a large state with fewer and fewer reporters, Dwyer and Gowland wanted to be able to provide public meetings information to people who are interested in them, but it’s difficult to continue the current model: reporters attending meetings and producing stories about them.

“I see this already available in so many other aspects of local life,” Dwyer said. “If I want to know what the weather is in my city or what the weather was yesterday, I can know that immediately. If I want to know high school prep scores, I can know that immediately. All of these things are already indexed and searchable and if I type it into Google or ask a device I get an immediate, useful result. Why in the heck can’t it be that easy to find out what’s happening within my local government?”

Eight McClatchy publications — The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, The News & Observer, The State, Idaho Statesman, The Wichita Eagle, The Bellingham Herald, Lexington Herald-Leader — will offer an ad-free version of their site to Scroll subscribers. New and active subscribers to these sites can opt in to a discounted Scroll membership. If McClatchy likes what they see with Scroll-using subscribers, the partnership will expand.

“What happens when we make the best possible experience on our own site? What does that do for churn? What does this do for engagement? Will people stay longer and read more?” CEO Tony Haile said. “Those are some of the things that McClatchy is interested in with this partnership.”

We are excited to partner with @tryscroll to test an ad-free experience as a benefit for active subscribers in eight McClatchy markets. Thanks to @tryscroll for celebrating local journalism in this #thread https://t.co/oYP5OzaOzc https://t.co/HHHKAtiumQ

— McClatchy (@mcclatchy) December 7, 2020

How does Scroll work, again? In a nutshell, users pay $5/month for the privilege of an ad-free reading experience on hundreds of news sites. Without ads, pages load faster and there are fewer anonymous trackers. The sites also look nicer — clean and less cluttered.

Scroll then distributes 70 percent of the $5 subscription cost to individual publishers, depending on where users spend the most time. In a post announcing the new partnerships, Haile put the six month paid retention rate at 85 percent and writes that publishers are receiving two to three times more revenue per user with Scroll than they’d receive from advertising. (Scroll declined to give Nieman Lab exact figures.)

Haile originally envisioned Scroll as primarily for casual readers. For publishers, it would be an easy way to receive support from people who enjoy the site but aren’t visiting enough to commit to a membership. About a year after launch — after the introduction of The Matchup and Scroll’s own success with a Business Insider bundle — the team at Scroll started to see additional opportunities. In his post, Haile wrote:

What really excites me is what moves like this do to counteract the zero-sum game that publishers find themselves in. Now, with Scroll, a subscriber to Business Insider can also support the work of journalists at The Verge or USA Today. Each time a publisher adds a new subscriber in this model, they’re not only delivering more value but making journalism at large a little more sustainable, just as they benefit when other publishers do the same. Less zero sum, more rising tide.

So the hope is that McClatchy subscribers will see Scroll’s ad-free reading experience — not just on their local site, but at BuzzFeed, Vox, The Atlantic, and more — as part of the core value that their McClatchy subscription brings. Haile identified one critical point in the publisher-subscriber dynamic where he hopes Scroll can help:

“My dream is that when a publisher is moving you out of the discount period of your subscription, they feel it’s safe to tell you about it,” Haile said. “When a publisher can say, ‘Here’s all the great stuff you’ve got. Now it’s going to be this price.’ When they feel safe to do that without churn exploding, that’s where we’ve gotten to a level of value that we can all be proud of.”

Looking ahead, Scroll hopes to increase the pace of adding new sites and use the McClatchy experiment to show publishers the results of bundling Scroll into their subscriptions.

Haile has witnessed publishers dealing with furloughs and a lack of resources as well as leadership and product teams overwhelmed by the year’s unrelenting news cycle first hand. “There were people who told us, ‘We can’t think about next year, because we don’t know if we’re going to be around in three months.’ Everyone’s timelines got really short,” Haile said. Too often, he saw half the people trying to do twice the amount of work.

But he sees light at the end of the tunnel. “As we start to see a future beyond this pandemic, as we see a new administration coming in, and the future feels more possible for people, you’ve got a pathway to accelerate the pace again.”

A previous version of this story stated that McClatchy subscribers get a free Scroll subscription. That is incorrect.

I’m first-generation Pakistani American and culturally, at least in the Pakistani diaspora, our main topics of conversation are politics, religion, food, and getting married.

I grew up in a household that follows Pakistani news every night. I used to help my grandfather load Dawn.com, the website of Pakistan’s most reputable newspaper, so he could read the news and catch up on cricket scores. My family had always had a satellite package that included PTV (owned by the Pakistan Television Corporation), Geo News, ARY News, and others until streaming made more channels more easily available.

But the Urdu spoken in TV news is much more formal than the Urdu I learned to speak at home, making it difficult to understand quick roundups and impossible to follow discussions, where interruptions and yelling are common. Urdu-language newspapers are available in some neighborhoods in major cities in the United States, but often (and rightfully) cover their local diaspora communities and are inaccessible to me because I can’t read Urdu very well. English-language coverage in Pakistan, a country with a news cycle as busy as the United States’, is widely available, but lacks the context a casual reader would need to understand the full impact of an issue.

So with lots of shame, I’ve had to explain that while being Pakistani is a big part of my identity, I’m not well equipped to talk about Pakistani news. That’s common, I imagine, in lots of diasporas, but hard for me to swallow as a journalist.

More recently, I’ve followed major stories by following journalists and regular people on Twitter who live in the country and are reporting or are outspoken about news events. But opening Twitter to scroll and sift through jokes, memes, and hot takes is an extremely chaotic way to find news.

So, knowing all that, you can imagine how thrilled I was, after years of wanting to stay informed, when I stumbled upon The NewsRun, a daily newsletter that summarizes Pakistan’s major stories of the day.

Anam Khan, the founder and lead writer for the NewsRun, has lived half of her life in Pakistan and the other half in the United States. While her family lives in Pakistan, she lives in San Francisco with her husband. Even though she has deep, personal roots in the country, she felt disconnected from the Pakistani news cycle and didn’t like feeling uninformed. And she, like me, found the current offerings difficult to consume for similar reasons.

Every day, each newsletter covers between one and three major stories from the day before. The top story is broken down into an outline, including a one-sentence summary of the story, a paragraph of details, bullet points of context, an explanation of public response when relevant, and a defined bottom line. The other stories are usually shorter, covered in one or two paragraphs. The newsletter is laced with links to local reporting from both English and Urdu news sources. Khan also creates Instagram slides for the top story with bullet points about the issue, and then directs followers to the newsletter for more information.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The NewsRun (@thenewsrun)

These days, the newsletter also includes a daily coronavirus case and death count in the country. Khan also uses Twitter to see what’s trending when she’s picking stories, to get a better sense of what stories to write about and what people need clarity on. Because news in Pakistan can be negative and draining, Khan tries to include some positive news stories as well.

Khan first had the idea in 2017 while she was still living in Pakistan. When she moved back to the U.S. in 2018, she started writing drafts and sharing them with friends for feedback. She soft-launched it in the middle of 2018, but didn’t start marketing it until 2019, after workshopping it and making sure she could deliver the same quality everyday. The NewsRun has a Patreon for subscribers who wish to support it, but for now Khan mostly funds it herself.

Khan, whose background is in marketing and strategic communications, is all about “smart brevity.” She’s been an avid reader of TheSkimm, Morning Brew, and Axios AM, newsletters that embrace a light, easy-to-read writing style. She said that at first, she started the NewsRun to serve Pakistanis like herself living abroad, operating under the impression that it’s only harder for them to keep up with the news because of the distance. Now, with thousands of newsletter subscribers, thousands of Instagram followers, and a 20 to 30 percent daily open rate, Khan has found that her largest readership is young professional men and women actually in Pakistan.

“I kept asking for feedback from subscribers and the ones in Pakistan voluntarily reached out to me and said ‘This is so much easier to understand. It’s a faster read. The way it’s written is clear and it highlights all the key points I need to know, and helps break through the rest of the noise that I’m surrounded with in Pakistan,'” she told me. “Even though they get a lot of news living in Pakistan, there’s just so much of it and they’ve been bombarded with it every day and it’s also very cluttered, which the NewsRun isn’t. So I started to see that this is something that Pakistanis in the country also need.”

One of the big challenges for Khan is the time difference. Living in San Francisco, she’s usually 12 hours behind Pakistan, and now 13 due to daylight savings time. She starts working on the newsletter around 11 a.m. PST and sends it to her fact-checker/copy editor in Pakistan, who edits when she wakes up. Khan schedules the newsletter to be sent out in the early morning for the reader, so subscribers in Pakistan will get it around 9 a.m. their time, while I get it around 6 a.m. EST.

Another challenges is not repeating and putting out more of the same, jargon-y language that Khan is consuming. That’s where her communications background is particularly helpful.

“In communications or in marketing, you’re telling a brand story,” Khan said. “Whether you’re a journalist or working with clients, either way you’re telling a story is just in a different context. So in working on the NewsRun, I’ve applied the skills I’ve gained over time working communications, by focusing on clarity, by focusing on objectivity, by starting with a strong lead, which is not only something you need to do for journalism, it’s something you need to do in communications as well.”

While English-language coverage from within Pakistan is cluttered, foreign coverage of Pakistan tends to lack nuance and sticks to a specific narrative that Pakistan is “a nuclear armed nation that’s unreliable, unpredictable, unsafe, and vulnerable to militant activity and terrorism,” Khan said. American news outlets do newsletters really well, but flub coverage. Pakistani news outlets cover the country extensively, but don’t necessarily engage news consumers in meaningful ways. Publications have newsletters, but they’re often automated with a photo, a headline, and a one-sentence summary that links back to a long-form story.

Khan sees the NewsRun as a unique product that fills those gaps.

“A lot of publications have websites or other touch points,” she said. “The NewsRun’s main product is the newsletter. I specifically did it that way because I wanted to reduce touch points for people. Rather than logging onto a website or scrolling through a cluttered newsfeed, the NewsRun is a single touch point. People get it in their inbox every morning and everything they need to know is compiled onto one platform and broken down in bite-sized format so that they don’t have to scour the internet to read the news. Everything they need is already right there in front of them.”

While the NewsRun’s newsletter is its main product, Khan also occasionally produces deep dives into major issues. One from September explains what Pakistanis can do to end rape culture, in the context of a particular rape case that sparked national outrage. There’s also an interview section on the website that includes Q&As with Pakistani entrepreneurs. During the pandemic, Khan has started hosting virtual roundtables with Pakistani and Pakistani American students to discuss the issues that most affect them. A recent roundtable discussed the experiences of religious and ethnic minorities in Pakistan:

 

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Currently, the NewsRun’s daily newsletter doesn’t offer too much of its own daily reporting, although Khan often finds herself chasing down sources when other news stories are unclear. And, to be fair, much of the reporting and information already exists in Pakistan’s healthy offerings of digital news outlets. Khan is just helping make sense of it all.

In the next few months, she and her two business partners want to scale up by growing the subscriber base, monetizing the newsletter, hosting more deep-dive events, and talking to readers outside of the newsletter.

“I like highlighting stories that focus on gender issues, minority issues, humanitarian issues, because I want to give people living abroad a sense of what’s happening on the ground,” Khan said. “And then there are also issues in Pakistan that I want to raise more awareness about and highlight for local readers as well.”

What work is required to build public trust in journalism?

Journalism faces a well-documented crisis of trust. This long-running decline in public confidence in the press is part of a broader skepticism that has developed about the trustworthiness of institutions more generally — leading to an overall trust recession that worries observers who speculate about the endgame of this downward spiral.

But might we see these issues of news and trust in a new light if we reconsidered our assumptions about what actually leads people to develop trust in journalism?

Consider, for example, how journalists for decades have sought to establish trust and confidence by focusing on their democratic responsibility to provide objective information — in which case, trust is presumed to be a product of faithfully adhering to standards and neutrality. In that case, reclaiming trust could be a matter of “getting back to basics,” as it were, and reporting facts in a way that more clearly communicates what people need to know, with the independence and distance that people have come to expect from journalists.

But if, in fact, journalists were to switch their mindset and understand their primary role differently as the facilitation of public deliberation, community connection, and democratic participation — of working with civil society as opposed to apart from it — what would that mean for the overall orientation of journalism and how it works?

A new study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly — by Megan L. Zahay, Kelly Jensen, Yiping Xia, and Sue Robinson, all of the University of Wisconsin-Madison — offers some essential insights on this question. The team, led by Robinson and applying Zahay’s training as a rhetorician, interviewed 42 journalists, about half of them designated “engagement-oriented” and the others “traditionally oriented.” Based on a rhetorical analysis of what these journalists said (via the interviews) as well as what they did (via hundreds of pages of website materials and social media conversation threads), the authors developed a picture of two camps of journalists — both deeply concerned about the crisis of trust in journalism, but each with very divergent ideas about what should be done about it.

For traditionally oriented journalists, trust is achieved by transmitting facts and helping people perform their democratic duties, without any particular public participation involved in that process. Fixing the trust problem, in this view, means doubling down on objectivity, transparency, and accuracy — but in a way that helps citizens to more readily recognize the value that such things provide. By contrast, rather than focusing on institutionalized norms as the defining elements of journalism, “engagement-oriented journalists view [journalism] as a set of relationships, prone to complexity and messiness, and they expect this in the contexts in which they work.”

What’s especially striking about the engagement view, Zahay and colleagues argue, is that it implies not just a different mindset about one’s role but also a transformation in one’s work—the stuff of day-to-day labor, or what they call “the labor of building trust.” A focus on building and maintaining relationships thus suggests “entirely new kinds of journalistic labor that reorient reporters’ attention toward collaboration and facilitation.” From this perspective, public trust in news flows out of efforts that emphasize mutual understanding and empathy with communities — and which may be inherently slow, gradual, and long-term by nature. In the words of a cofounder of an engagement organization who was interviewed, “[I]t’s ineffective to double down on ‘Trust me, I’m a journalist’ … If you’re not in a relationship with someone, if you haven’t proved your value to them … then you don’t have trust.”

By now, there is a large and growing body of research about the possibilities and challenges of engaged journalism. These approaches, in fact, have a long history, going back to the public and citizen journalism movements of the 1990s. But what sets this latest study apart is in how it carefully charts what appears to be a key inflection point in the profession — one that even seems, in the authors’ conclusion, “paradigmatic.” Indeed, this piece is the first to be published out of Robinson’s multi-phased, ongoing book project about how journalists trust “regular people” according to their various identities.

To the extent that we’re beginning to see a decisive split in how journalists define and enact their democratic role — and to the degree that news organizations give individual journalists the freedom and encouragement to act this way and engage trust-building experiments — we may be witnessing a meaningful movement away from the institutional model of critical distance and toward an engagement model of facilitating discussion, building community, and partnering with the public.

Research roundup

Here are some other studies that caught our eye this month:

Life in a news desert: The perceived impact of a newspaper closure on community members. By Nick Mathews, in Journalism.

As scores of weekly and small daily newspapers close across the U.S., scholars and journalists have sounded the alarm about the expansion of news deserts — areas without any dedicated news coverage via a local newspaper. We’ve presumed that news deserts are damaging to democracy, that they hamper public oversight of local government and weaken the fabric of community that are essential to the civic life of these areas.

Mathews supports those premises with a vivid and detailed picture of one of those news deserts — Caroline County in rural Virginia. Using the concept of “sense of community,” Mathews interviews residents of the county after their weekly paper has been shut down. He finds that residents of the county not only feel more in the dark about what their local government is doing, but that they feel more disconnected from each other without a common forum to promote and celebrate community events. “Without the Caroline Progress, I am more isolated,” one resident tells Mathews. “I think we all are. I think the paper was the one thing that kept us together.”

Gendered news coverage and women as heads of government. By Melanee Thomas, Allison Harell, Sanne A.M. Rijkhoff, and Tania Gosselin, in Political Communication.

Media coverage of women politicians, and especially the gendered differences with its coverage of men, has long been a subject of great scholarly interest, with some excellent research on the subject coming out lately. This Canadian study adds nuance to our understanding of it with an automated analysis of more than 11,000 news articles of provincial premiers.

Thomas and her colleagues’ findings are mixed and complex: They find that fewer articles are written about women-led governments than men’s, and that coverage of women features more gendered language and more references to clothing. Other findings, though, run counter to our common assumptions. There are fewer references to women’s families and private lives, and more positive references to their character and competence, than there are for men. Women are referred to with more feminine terms, but there are no differences in the proportion of masculine language used. They conclude that gendered news coverage certainly hasn’t gone away, but we need to think of it in more multi-faceted, fully mediated terms.

How to report on elections? The effects of game, issue and negative coverage on reader engagement and incivility. By João Gonçalves, Sara Pereira, and Marisa Torres da Silva, in Journalism.

There are few aspects of journalism that scholars and media observers criticize as frequently as political journalists’ framing of news stories as a game, or with relentless negativity. And there are few things that journalists criticize as frequently as toxic comment sections under their work. This Portuguese study combines those two elements, trying to determine to what degree game frames influence the civility of news comments.

The authors found that stories that are negative as well as those that are positive toward political actors led to more uncivil comments. Game framing by itself didn’t lead to more uncivil comments overall, but it did predict more incivility among more polarized commenters. Perhaps most practically pertinent to many news organizations, both negative and game-framed articles led to more comments overall, suggesting they may be easy to justify as “drivers of engagement.”

Platforms, journalists and their digital selves. By Claudia Mellado & Amaranta Alfaro, in Digital Journalism.

There’s been plenty of research over the past decade that examines how journalists use Twitter, though quite a bit less looking at their use of Instagram. Mellado and Alfaro explore journalists’ use of both platforms in an illuminating way by looking through the prism of journalists’ identities and perception of their professional roles. In interviews with 31 Chilean journalists, they find three approaches by which journalists see their journalistic identities on Twitter and Instagram: The adapted, skeptical, and redefiner approaches.

The adapted approach involves fully incorporating the routines and features of social media into journalists’ work, but without adjusting their traditional roles and identity. The skeptical approach goes further in defending traditional journalistic identity, seeing those tools as an encroachment on it and something that shouldn’t be validated as journalistically legitimate. Only the redefiners are willing to allow social media to reshape their professional identities, focusing less on strict professional/personal boundaries and more on social media as a self-branding and professional development opportunity. These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, they argue, but are divergent ways for journalists to reconcile their professional, organizational, and personal identities online.

Anticipatory news infrastructures: Seeing journalism’s expectations of future publics in its sociotechnical systems. By Mike Ananny and Megan Finn, in New Media & Society.

We often talk about news in terms of trying to represent what has happened, or what is happening, but in this creative and intriguing theoretical paper Ananny and Finn are interested in journalism’s approach to what’s about to happen. “Where do journalists get their authority to report on the future?” they ask, and the place they’re led to as they answer that question and others like it is the concept of anticipatory news infrastructures.

Ananny and Finn characterize anticipatory news infrastructures as sociotechnical systems — that is, they’re made up of both material and technological objects as well as the social relationships that shape them. They use examples like the Los Angeles Times’ Quakebot system, NPR’s automated transcription-driven real-time debate fact-checking, and the analytics dashboards meant to help journalists determine what’s about to become news soon to illustrate how these infrastructures allow journalists to manage uncertainty and limit risk in a work environment tightly bound by immediacy and time.

These infrastructures ultimately create their own “anticipatory publics,” Ananny and Finn argue, by planning for and expecting particular relationships between people, data, and issues. This pushes journalists away from their familiar territory of detached objectivity and toward an arena in which their own efforts to anticipate news envision and create new social relationships.

Mob censorship: Online harassment of US journalists in times of digital hate and populism. By Silvio Waisbord, in Digital Journalism.

Online harassment and its implications for the journalist–audience relationship. By Seth Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Mark Coddington, in Digital Journalism.

Online harassment has become a chillingly regular part of the job for far too many journalists around the world. In an important conceptual article, Silvio Waisbord argues that such harassment — often motivated by populism and directed against women, journalists of color, and LGBTQ journalists — is more than trolling, and doesn’t qualify as press criticism. Instead, he frames it as a “political struggle to control speech,” and specifically as a form of mob censorship.

As mob censorship, he argues, it’s part of collective, violent (verbally and/or physically) action to silence journalists, distinct from censorship efforts by the state, markets, or parastate groups. In its use of violent discourse to control journalistic speech, he says, it complicates the already fraught relationship between hate speech and democratic rights.

And if you’ll permit us a bit of self-promotion at the end of this month’s newsletter, we published a study examining some of the effects of this online harassment. In surveying American journalists, we found that journalists who’ve been harassed by audiences online are less likely to view audiences as rational or like themselves. That’s a significant fracture in the journalist-audience relationship, and one that causes us to rethink the optimism that’s often surrounded scholarship around journalists’ reciprocal relationships with audiences, a concept we’ve espoused ourselves.

So we need to make sense of TV.

Our tool allows anyone to quickly run analyses of how TV news stories develop over days, weeks, or years, and how coverage differs across 3 networks that each have a different target audience and ideological bent. https://t.co/zY7io9Dna5 pic.twitter.com/6VVtMVjGHQ

— Jacob Ritchie (@jwkritchie) August 20, 2020

The tool uses “deep-learning-based image and audio analysis processing techniques” to pull from more than 270,000 hours of programming and commercial segments from Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, dating back to January 1, 2010 and updating daily. “Computer vision is used to detect faces, identify public figures, and estimate characteristics such as gender to examine news coverage patterns. To facilitate topic analysis the transcripts are time-aligned with video content, and compared across dates, times of day and programs,” Geraldine Moriba, a journalist and filmmaker and 2019 JSK journalism fellow, explained on Medium. People can use the tool answer questions like “How much coverage does Trump receive compared to Biden? How did this change when coronavirus and the George Floyd protests came into the picture?” (There’s more on the methodology, and some findings, here.)

The tool helps “increase transparency around daily editorial choices,” Moriba noted. “How long are certain people on the screen? How often are certain words mentioned? What will you find when you compare these measurements across time, channel, and programs?”

.@GeraldineMoriba's new Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer is amazing.

Ever think "I wonder if cable news covers Trump more than Obama" when he was president?

Well. Now you can find out… and about a zillion other possibilities. Just.. WOWhttps://t.co/OcAUpbws8g pic.twitter.com/nlnNc49cRR

— Don Day (@DonLDay) August 20, 2020

The tool was created by the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University in collaboration with the John S. Knight Fellowship Program, with support from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Intel, Google, Amazon, and the National Science Foundation. The video dataset is from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive.

Here are some of the queries people have run so far:

According to this new powerful tool from @BrownInstitute, references to “press freedom” skyrocketed in US cable TV news in late 2018 with Khashoggi’s murder

Other hikes since then: Apr 2019 (Assange arrest) & Jun 2020 (violations at George Floyd protests)https://t.co/flYWTEKY45 pic.twitter.com/zijOBcgPvO

— Ahmed Zidan @ (@zidanism) August 25, 2020

Trying out @BrownInstitute's new TV News Analyzer, which tracks cable news content in a variety of ways

Here's the cable news presence of Biden/Harris/Warren/Sanders/Buttigieg, by month and by day, from Jan 2019 to now:https://t.co/77wOSFnLz3 pic.twitter.com/M0yIu96SH5

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) August 27, 2020

Which cable TV news hosts hog the screen-time on their own shows the most?

Ans: (Chris Cuomo and Tucker Carlson)https://t.co/8SsY543YIE pic.twitter.com/39q1RiPmc4

— Maneesh Agrawala (@magrawala) September 1, 2020

Check out the Cable TV News Analyzer here.

Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign has begun to engage with the idea of “truth over facts” with its campaign website thetruthoverfacts.com, which mocks a series of gaffes by Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Though the website is satirical, it primes the idea of the truth being something more fundamental — and Trumpian — than Biden’s misremembered facts.

At First Draft, we plan to develop techniques for monitoring and analyzing these behaviors in the coming months. We want to speak to others interested in this line of research as we experiment with new techniques. If you are interested in the study of online ways of knowing, or have something to tell us that we can use, we want to hear from you. Please comment below or get in touch on Twitter.

That’s why we are launching a global survey today to track and assess the impacts of the pandemic on journalism worldwide, and to help reimagine its future.

You should click here and take the survey now. Or read on to learn more about what we’re trying to do.

We aim to find out what is needed to keep journalism viable: What does the field require in both short-term and long-term support and training? How are journalists responding creatively to the challenges of reporting during the time of coronavirus? What can be done to help protect journalists and defend media freedom during the pandemic?

An urgently needed survey

The pandemic has rapidly accelerated trends already evident worldwide: the migration and disappearance of advertising; the shrinkage and disappearance of print; the erosion of investigative reporting capability; and the collapse of local news. It is also being used as a cloak by despots, dictators, and autocrats to ramp up attacks on journalists, demonize journalism, and undermine media freedom.

Our independent survey aims to help direct responses to the areas of greatest need. It is the first work of the Journalism and the Pandemic Project — a research partnership between the International Center For Journalists (ICFJ) and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Leading a team of highly experienced journalists and academic researchers, our goal is to understand the scale of the crisis for journalism, so that we can collaboratively inform the recovery. To do that, we need news outlets, reporters, editors and other media workers around the globe to actively participate.

At this transformative moment for journalism, the more we know about the impacts on news organizations, reporters, editors and other media workers, the more we can assess both the net losses and the potential benefits on the road to recovery. There are already a number of initiatives emerging from philanthropic organizations, commercial technology companies and state actors, but we have yet to see how their various agendas will reform the field – during and after the crisis.

What’s at stake?

The UN Secretary General himself recently declared that “no one can take the place of the [news] media during this pandemic in providing the public with information and analysis, and in countering rumors and distortions.” Antonio Gutteres understands that accurate, reliable information about COVID-19 — and robust, independent critique of responses to the crisis — are literally a matter of life and death.

At the same time, the pandemic has delivered some of the most valuable journalism we’ve ever seen — with many journalists around the world risking their lives daily to bring us stories from the frontlines of a global disaster. Stories that move us. Stories that help us sort facts from fiction, and reliable sources from disinformation peddlers. Stories that call the powerful to account. Stories that make a difference.

What do we want to know?

How is coronavirus affecting the viability of the news industry and media workers’ job security?

COVID-19 has already delivered death blows to a growing list of news outlets — particularly crucial local news providers. We are asking participants to detail the impacts of the pandemic on their employment, and the sustainability of their news organizations. We want to know if your organization has been killed off or temporarily shuttered by coronavirus. And we want to learn about the impacts on individual media workers (including freelancers) from job losses to salary cuts.

How is the pandemic transforming journalism research, reporting and storytelling?

Despite the manifold pressures on newsrooms, there are many great examples of innovation and enterprise too. Journalists are developing new techniques for distance reporting, using data and open-source investigative techniques to tell stories with more clarity and precision. We want to hear about these as much as the restrictions and cuts.

What are the new and emerging journalism safety challenges associated with coronavirus?

How many media workers are being sent into the field to report as “essential workers” on a deadly story without appropriate protective equipment? How are vulnerable freelancers impacted? What are the mental health impacts of exposure to human suffering and grief on such a global scale for journalists and those who work with them? What has been their experience of the online violence escalating during the pandemic? Is pandemic-induced burnout becoming a major issue? And, as newsrooms work remotely, through third-party software, how does this affect security practices?

What are the main media freedom threats posed by the pandemic?

Around the world, under the cover of COVID-19, journalists are being attacked, the law is being weaponized against journalism, and governments are cracking down on whistleblowers, inhibiting the essential work of accountability reporting. We want to learn about the extent and costs of these incursions via media workers on the ground — from Western democracies under pressure, to Global South blindspots.

How are journalists experiencing the “disinfodemic” and working to counter it?

Journalism is not just at risk of being swamped in what the World Health Organization (WHO) calls the “infodemic.” It is also a target of, and a bulwark against what UNESCO calls a “disinfodemic.” So, what encounters are journalists, fact-checkers and other media workers having with mis/disinformation? What are the impacts of the disinfodemic on their work? And how are news outlets working to counter the information pollution fueling the pandemic?

How has coronavirus affected content distribution and audience engagement?

A far faster path to digitization, the rising importance of subscriptions, the role of the platforms and algorithmic distribution have all been amplified during the pandemic. Reported audiences for news in many parts of the world have been at a historic high, but how are newsrooms adjusting to the increased interest and decreased revenue many are experiencing simultaneously?

We’re in this together: Here’s what you can do to help

We can hear you asking: “Who has time to fill in a survey in the middle of a pandemic?” We understand that many journalists and news organizations around the world are fully absorbed in the fight for survival in the midst of reporting what is arguably the biggest story of our times. But if journalism is to survive the pandemic, we need quality research to help inform the recovery.

We also think it is vitally important that the voices of those doing the work are heard and counted — in more than labor statistics or bar graphs. In exchange for your time and responses, we will also publish regular updates based on our research that give a fuller picture of what is happening at ground level.

The survey is currently available in English but translations into Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese are underway. Take the survey here.

Fortunately, the new tools designed by the Journal’s product and news strategy teams — which include a clickthrough module to quickly catch readers up on political news, redesigned live update presentations for election nights and debates, and Q&A features — have proven adaptable.

When I spoke to Louise Story, the Journal’s chief news strategist and chief product and technology officer, last week, the paper had already launched a version of the new live Q&A tool — it was just for reporters to answer readers’ coronavirus questions, not their political ones.

This week, after a few more head-spinning news cycles, the election catch-up module on the homepage has been converted to coronavirus information. And the live coverage that’s outside the paywall? That’s where you can find highlights and to-the-minute updates like “Walmart sends corporate staff home” or “Police plan to meet Tesla factory management over compliance with coronavirus health order.”

“All of these things are based on the needs of our audience — they’re all reusable,” Story said. “We’re building things that have really neat uses during the election, but that benefit our products broadly too.”

The election-turned-coronavirus news products are just the latest iteration of the Journal’s longstanding strategy to retain existing subscribers and convert occasional readers of The Wall Street Journal into paying members by encouraging regular engagement. Last month, it announced it had passed 2 million paying subscribers, a number only The New York Times can top among American newspapers. But the fact that its paywall is harder than most of its competitors — not to mention its high sticker price for a digital sub, $39/month — means it has to be more creative than its peers in both attracting and converting new readers.

Last spring, the Journal took a deep dive into user behavior and surfaced with data on actions that boost retention and the likelihood a reader will become a paid subscriber. Then they set out to promote those actions to their member base and occasional readers through what they called “Project Habit.” (We published a breakdown of the process by The Wall Street Journal team that led the effort.)

Data clearly shows that the best way to reduce churn is to increase engagement — but the path to driving product use and building loyalty amongst members has not always been as obvious.

Over the past year, a cross-functional group here at the Journal has worked together to identify retention-driving actions and reinvent the way we promote those habits to our member base. We call it Project Habit.

We’ve known for some time that if a member downloads our mobile app or signs up for an email newsletter, they’re more likely to stay with the Journal.

The key engagement metric was active days, the group concluded. So while the news products like the catch-up module and live Q&As were designed to meet reader needs — Story said their research showed readers wanted to be able to get “caught up” on the news quickly and that some appreciated the opportunity to feel “connected and involved” with the Journal’s political coverage — the team also recognized that the tools could drive retention-friendly habits such as returning to the homepage regularly for updates.

Only paying subscribers — members, in Journal parlance — can submit questions, but anyone can tune in to see them answered. The catch-up module and the live coverage pages can also be viewed without running into the Journal’s paywall.

Each tool had to be optimized and recognizable for both subscribers and nonsubscribers, whether they were reading on their phones, desktop, or through the WSJ app, said Kabir Seth, the Journal’s vice president of product strategy and operations. “We were definitely thinking through the experience as we were building it. How does it feel for a nonmember? How does it feel for a member?” he said. “The graphics team is super important, and there’s a lot of editorial input.”

Live coverage is particularly effective at bringing in new audiences of non-subscribers, Story said. The catch-up module, which can be completed without leaving the homepage, has been performing especially well with occasional readers, a.k.a. the non-news junkies who walk among us.

An example of a catch-up module on the WSJ.com homepage.

The Journal tested the catch-up module at a variety of times (morning, midday, even late Friday afternoons) before settling on weekdays at lunchtime, based on engagement patterns and site traffic. They also found, through testing, that an illustration on the first card drew readers into clicking through the catch-up module better than a photo did — which also helps set it apart from other content on the homepage.

“An interesting thing about making a new story format is that it’s not just the product, technology, and design of it. There’s a different type of content. In this case, it’s short snippets of text that you run through,” Story said. “As we innovate with our products and technology, we also have to innovate with our content and our storytelling.”

In designing the news products, the Journal also hopes to benefit from the relative trust it has across the political spectrum.

A Pew study in January found it was one of only three news outlets (along with PBS and the BBC) that both Democrats and Republicans trust more than distrust. An earlier study found that the Journal’s audience is remarkably evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. (Among conservatives, the Journal’s news reporting benefits from the paper’s hard-right editorial pages.)

“We’ve found that the Journal is in a great place to be a political news source because we’re so highly trusted on the left and the right. It’s a unique position to be in,” Story said. “That’s part of our thinking around the live Q&A and the other things that have to do with being more transparent and open to questions.”

Story said the process for building new news products is ongoing for her and Seth. Research into how readers think about politics and politics in the media is ongoing.

“It’s very iterative,” she said. “We’re already looking for ways to make our election coverage better.”

That was just last week, and they’ve already found ways to adjust.

Even before the coronavirus broke out and the stock market went into free fall, about two-thirds of Americans reported feeling “worn out” by the amount of news, according to recent Pew Research Center research.

Enter Drop Me The Link, a new politics newsletter from The Washington Post that promises to deliver election news in a manageable dose. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, the Post will send a single link to a Post politics story alongside context that will help readers understand the news — and talk about it with friends.

The signup page promises subscribers can “use this newsletter to be the 2020 informer, the plugged-in friend, the Keeper of the Links.”

Three editors — that’s them in the “PostMojis” above — will select the links and unpack the political news:

Three editors at The Post will be sending you good reads: Ric Sanchez, a voice of The Post’s social platforms and Man About Town Internet; Krissah Thompson, an editor in Style with an eye for detail; and Terri Rupar, an editor in politics who was already texting her friends too many Post links anyway.

Drop Me The Link promises to be short and “respectful of the reader’s time,” including just one link per email and a chatty 200-word introduction that the writers hope sounds less like a summary and more like what’d you’d say when texting the article to a friend. There’s a brief section directing readers who want to learn more and a list of important dates (such as upcoming primaries or debates) and the first newsletter — which features a narrative piece selected by Rupar about a Sanders supporter who prefers the term “Bernard Brother” to “Bernie Bro” — also includes a link to live updates for primaries happening the next day.

The thrice-weekly newsletter is targeting younger or first-time voters and people who may have been apathetic in the past but are “newly awakened to their civic responsibility,” said Tanya Sichynsky, newsletter editor at the Washington Post. But it could appeal to anyone feeling besieged by headlines.

“There’s a ton of content out there. People are getting hit from all sides in terms of the news that they can read and where they can get it — and it can really feel overwhelming,” Sichynsky said. “Working at the Post, we see those problems ourselves. We’re constantly trying to read all the news all the time. We wanted to find a solution for those readers who potentially feel overwhelmed or intimidated by just the pace of coverage.”

When the Post team was brainstorming ways to reach readers who weren’t already tuned into their election coverage, two ideas kept coming up. The first was “less is more” — asking readers to read fewer links — and the second was the insight that news that could feel overwhelming in other contexts felt less so in more intimate conversations, including group chats.

“I wanted something that felt like it could be a baby born of both of those strategies,” Sichynsky said. “Something that really serves the core politics coverage goals of the Post, but also had a feeling of accessibility and approachability.”

Drop Me The Link fits with that prioritization of national politics coverage as well as a renewed focus on digital subscriptions.

“The core strategy of the Post has been moving more and more toward the subscriptions base, so obviously newsletters is a massive part of that initiative,” Sichynsky said. But the Post also sees Drop Me The Link as a way to broaden their audience, just as their lifestyle and, especially, food newsletters have found an audience beyond politicos and media types.

Rupar, one of the three newsletter writers who will rotate throughout the week, was most excited about highlighting Post articles that readers seem to have missed on first pass.

“I think all of us have had the experience where there’s a story that you love and you’re asking, ‘Why isn’t everyone reading this story? Don’t they understand that this reporter is great and they found just the right person and just the right tone? And that it really helps you understand things?'” Rupar said. “This is also a chance to show people the one story you really wish that they would read.”

Drop Me The Link will publish its first edition this afternoon and the newsletter writers have been promoting the sign-up page with tweets, memes, and (what else?) a TikTok video.

Today’s @washingtonpost TikTok features @ricsanchez, @Krissah30 and @terri_rupar (their newsletter Drop Me The Link starts Monday) https://t.co/H7wsMoJTdc pic.twitter.com/0QSHNTZBz2

— Dave Jorgenson (@davejorgenson) March 6, 2020

if you’re, like, a normal person w/a job and friends and maybe a pet and you don’t have time to read the avalanche of everything, you should sign up for this newsletter i’m helping with.

we’ll send you ONE (1) link about the election, three days a week. https://t.co/0JJhgoPs8X — ric sanchez (@ricsanchez) March 5, 2020

do you:
wish the election news cycle would slow the heck down
want to tune out the 50-person cable news panels
want to cut through the noise and make sense of the 2020 race
love a good group chat
all of the above

well then this is for you https://t.co/YXepBjeZSS — Tanya Sichynsky (@tanyasic) March 4, 2020

tell your group chat about our new election newsletter https://t.co/PyWJWAtNGT pic.twitter.com/GIXvRbc8aS

— Tanya Sichynsky (@tanyasic) March 3, 2020

Super Tuesday is… a lot. And the campaign is just heating up! Feeling overwhelmed?

Sign up for “Drop Me The Link,” our new newsletter gives you the single most interesting 2020 story that Post editors are sending to their group chats. https://t.co/Jy0UvpRWJ8 — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 3, 2020

The first edition of Drop Me The Link is in inboxes TODAY. We promise: one link, great reporting, an email you’ll be happy to open. Sign up! https://t.co/H0SZWU6Lu2

— Terri Rupar (@terri_rupar) March 9, 2020

This year, the DJAs brought in 607 project contenders (a third of them from Asia) from 62 countries, highlighting work like the investigation of the year, Hurricane Maria’s Dead from the AP, Center for Investigative Journalism and Quartz; the best data journalism team portfolio for a large organization, Argentina’s La Nacion; the best portfolio for a small newsroom, India’s Factchecker.in; and more. Unfortunately, the Data Journalism Awards, along with other assets of GEN, are currently in the liquidation process, with folks expected to bid on taking control of some; DJA project manager Marianne Bouchart is working on HEI-DA, a nonprofit promoting data journalism innovation.

In the meantime, jury members Reginald Chua of Reuters (most recently jury chair) and Aron Pilhofer of Temple University — both leaders in data journalism known for past work at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times/The Guardian, respectively — are working with a few others to develop a new group and recognition process independent of the original awards. The Google News Initiative will be the first sponsor of the new initiative, according to Google data editor Simon Rogers, and Pilhofer and Chua plan to keep the project housed in a nonprofit.

“Our mission is to identify and honor the best data journalism around the globe…to use the awards as a center of gravity for the data journalism community around the globe to build connections, and to elevate and empower others who could learn from the kind of work being done,” Pilhofer said.

“The awards have surfaced really small newsrooms around the world working under incredibly difficult circumstances — it’s not just for the state-of-the-art data ninjas but really how people in small newsrooms with limited resources can do something else,” Chua said. And expect the categories of the as-yet-unnamed project to be in flux: “People are inventing new things every year, coming out with new methods, new presentations, new ways of telling stories,” he added. “If we don’t keep current you’re rewarding best horse and carriage in the motor show.”

I reached out to Bertrand Pecquerie, GEN’s founder and former CEO, for comment; it seems like they’re all on the same page that this new venture will not be part of GEN’s legacy but instead will have no relationship with the organization. “When a programme or a product is successful, platforms want to control it or to manage it and they just have to find third parties playing their game. As the news industry depends more and more on platforms’ money, it is not difficult to find such allies,” he said over an email. “Be sure that all my energy will be dedicated to save the DJA from unfriendly and toxic third parties or platforms. It will be the task of the liquidator of GEN to chose the best organization for managing the 2020 DJA competition.”

The new version will open award submissions later this month — “we want to make sure the world doesn’t skip a year doing this,” Chua said — but until then, he and Pilhofer would appreciate any suggestions for a name.

The posts — which have been running for at least the past eight years across many of what are now its 1,200-plus local sites — all follow a similar formula. They start off with a lede like “Fall is a good time to take inventory of who is living in your neighborhood” (Brick Township, NJ), “Before kids go out trick or treating in Dallas, Hiram or Paulding County, fall is a good time to take an inventory of who is living in your neighborhood” (Dallas-Hiram, GA), before pulling out the numbers for a given county from the state’s sex offender registry. Some sites stop there; others embed Google maps with addresses and more details. “Pins on the map represent addresses of offenders convicted of sex crimes,” notes the article for Brick Township. “Roll your cursor over the pins, and you will see more information pop up, including the address of the offender, and a notation if they are a Tier 3 offender.”

There are plenty of other news organizations, especially in local TV, that use Halloween as a hook for sex-offender-related content, and there are certainly police departments and other agencies that do the same.

But no one seems to be as committed to the idea at this sort of scale more than Patch. A spot check of 30 Patch sites in Massachusetts this morning found that the sex-offender map was the lead story on 21 of them. I used Crowdtangle to come up with a list of more than 1,000 Patch sites across the country and in all 50 states (Patch says it’s in 1,226 communities in total). 303 of those sites published a Halloween sex offender map in October 2019.

Patch’s maps have been a subject of controversy, particularly in recent years as some news outlets have been seriously considering the negative impacts that their reporting on crime can have on individuals — both in heightening community fear beyond what’s reasonable and in how things a handout mugshot can warp someone’s online image for future Google searchers. (Lots of research has shown that people’s perceptions of how safe their communities are are significantly affected by how much and how their local news outlets choose to cover local crime.) Even big tech companies are getting into the game in ways that can balance reporting and fear-mongering in awkward ways.

This seems like an unnecessary way to use the internet to spread fear and hate. (FWIW, as a mom, I am far more worried about people who are too smart to be caught or have not registered their address.) DC 2019 Sex Offender Safety Map For #Halloween | Patch https://t.co/nlVurFe4Ho

— Lisa A. Hayes (@awashingtongirl) October 31, 2019

In Halloweens of old, all we wanted was a map of the best candy handouts.

In 2019? My local patch provides a 'Halloween Sex Offender Safety Map'. Some world we live in.

— Live Long and Prosper. (@dreux) October 22, 2019

Despite ZERO cases of trick or treaters molested or raped by people on the sex offender registry on Halloween, @Patch keeps publishing maps of where registrants live.

Pointless fear-mongering under the guise of sanctimony.https://t.co/Z6wztqSkD4 pic.twitter.com/P4KRMiY7Gx

— Lenore Skenazy (@FreeRangeKids) October 16, 2018

“Our goal is to simplify access to publicly available local registry information for the families who comprise the majority of our readers,” said Dennis Robaugh, Patch’s editor-in-chief, who oversees local reporting teams across the country. In an email, he explained:

We offer guidance to the team for how to draft these posts, providing a template with suggested language, structure and links to the op-ed written by the sex-offender advocates who oppose the practice. We avoid sensationalizing the article with graphic images or headlines. We provide map-making instructions for each local editor. Staffers can localize the articles with quotes from local officials and information about applicable local or state laws.

They’ve been published every fall for the last eight years or so. Every year, when school begins, we receive requests from parents asking if we’re going to update the local maps and when.

Patch uses a similar system for other data-driven reports, like best-schools stories through a partnership with U.S. News. And indeed, this sort of data-driven story is a big factor in how local news gets covered in a more centralized news industry — whether that’s Patch or the network of Gannett newspapers set to grow to 265 markets soon. Public datasets that can be sliced-and-diced by market are a natural fit.

While sex offenders are hardly the most obvious target for sympathy, it’s unclear whether putting them on registries actually improves public safety. Critics say the practice makes it harder for offenders to reenter mainstream society after they’ve done their time and lumps together disparate crimes into a single category. The overwhelming majority of child sex offenders are known to their victims, either as family members or acquaintances. Reoffense rates are lower than commonly thought, and research shows that child sexual abuse rates don’t increase on Halloween; the main risk to kids that night is cars.

Sex offender maps, however, make for better traffic — as Patch’s experience bears out. Many of the map stories I looked at on Crowdtangle were significantly overperforming their sites’ other posts in Facebook engagement. The top story was from the Toms River, New Jersey Patch; it was shared 318 times and got 261 reactions, according to Crowdtangle.

The writer of that story, Karen Wall, covers the communities of Brick, Toms River, Manchester, Howell, Freehold, Wall, and Lakewood for Patch. I asked her why she thought the post did so well. “The two main reasons it gets the attention are that there’s a significant number of sex offenders listed in the area. Also, across the network we publish [these posts] early in October, so that timing seems to work,” she told me. Since the New Jersey sites are some of Patch’s oldest, they’ve also gained more traction over the years.

Wall explained that the editors work from a Patch-provided boilerplate for the Halloween sex offender stories; the text varies slightly by state, since different states handle their registries differently. “I make sure I put a lot of detail into each of those posts,” Wall said. “If you click the pins [on the map], it gives you the names, what the person was convicted of, what tier they are, and if there are details of the crime I put that in there. I don’t put in the physical description of the person.” (Other editors do include photos with their maps.)

Patch is certainly not the only organization to mine sex offender databases for content. Earlier this week, the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote about how local police departments were posting the same databases on their Facebook pages; those posts had been shared more than 1,000 times as of Monday, the Enquirer’s Cameron Knight noted.

One thing that seems clear is that the information about the neighbors is going to keep on coming: Despite the ongoing concerns about whether they work, more types of registries are popping up in states across the country — domestic violence registries, meth and drug offender registries, animal abuse registries, and in Utah, a a white-collar crime registry. And as the registries grow, all of them provide fodder for future stories: This past April, Patch ran, for the first time, a new series: “Is there a meth lab near you? Check this map.” According to Crowdtangle, 263 Patch sites ran a story.

While the Google News Initiative is a rebrand and reimagination of the Google Digital News Innovation Fund x Google News Lab (of which I was a recipient of funding to work here at Nieman Lab two years ago), this is the first time that the initiative is putting significant money directly into North American publishers’ projects — as presidential candidates and lawmakers are eyeing more regulation for the tech giant.

Correlation does not equal causation and all that, but BuzzFeed News analyzed Google’s generosity toward publishers on various continents over the past few years, especially as Europe regulators have taken a harder look at the company. (BuzzFeed News’ reporting was based on a findings from the Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project, which is funded by a Google competitor, among others.) For example: Google’s European publishing spending ballooned after 2015, as the European Union considered taxing Google for displaying copyright content, compared to a modest incline in North America then. Over the next year and a half or so, GNI is doling out $30 million via the innovation challenges with various focuses in each region of the world. (Here are the Asia-Pacific recipients from the first round last year, 23 recipients in 14 countries.)

For this round, 34 projects from 17 states and provinces out of 269 total applicants were selected based on “impact, feasibility, innovation, and inspiration. We were looking for applicants focused on generating revenue and/or increasing audience engagement for local news.” While this batch does deliver revenue-driven ideas for local news, it’s also largely supporting legacy media outlets, from the Salt Lake Tribune (simultaneously working on transitioning to nonprofit status) to GateHouse Media (which is busy with a Gannett merger). Another analysis of Google’s journalism spending found that 70 percent of its European money went to commercial media.

Anyhoo — with those grains of salt, here are the selected projects for local news innovation in the U.S. and Canada. Grants ranged from $32,250 to $300,000.

Digital media/startups

1. Detour Media in Michigan will “create a sustainable funding model for community-focused journalism outlets to amplify the needs and stories of historically underserved populations. Detour Detroit will test and quantify the success of hybrid journalist/engager roles to amplify readership, strengthen relationships with readers and grow revenue. We will track how stories, journalists and their engagement work in the community directly impact membership growth and retention. This creates a virtuous cycle of engagement and is a replicable model to reward attentive and responsive reporting. Google’s grant will fund the tech stack and tools to support this program.”
2. VTDigger.org, Vermont’s main nonprofit news site, will “build an open source toolkit for conversion and audience tracking that allows news organizations to quickly build an email subscriber base and an effective year-round membership program.”
3. With the creation of BackerTap, MuckRock will give “news organizations’ most passionate readers the inside story by letting them sign up for exclusive documents, analysis, and other bonus materials that go beyond the headlines. It will also harness the enthusiasm for journalism that makes a difference, making it a more rewarding experience to donate, subscribe, or help share the stories that matter knowing that support is going directly towards original reporting.”
4. Regular Nieman Lab readers may recognize a familiar name here: Ken Doctor, our longtime Newsonomics analyst, will lead Lookout Local focusing on group sales for memberships. He explains his approach in a companion piece here.
5. Earbank in Ontario “is developing a platform that makes it easier for broadcasters and journalists to archive their news audio clips and soundbites, make the content searchable on the Internet, and earn money by selling licenses for these clips to audio buyers such as documentary producers, podcasters, and educational publishers.”
6. Village Media, the Ontario-based company working with the Google-funded/McClatchy-owned local news experiment “will create a platform for social interaction between community members within our local news environment. The presence of local businesses within that environment ensures that any growth in user activity will directly impact the local economic base.”
7. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and its news org, Wisconsin Watch, are working with Outlier Media and Marquette University’s Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service “to engage residents of underserved Milwaukee neighborhoods in interactive public service journalism. It will equip residents with information they need to advocate for a better quality of life from their government and elected officials, and to better navigate the existing system. The information — both “news you can use” and in-depth pieces exploring the causes of problems plaguing these neighborhoods — will be texted directly to residents’ cell phones for free. Subscribers to the texting service will become crucial sources of news tips and on-the-ground information.”
8. The Beacon, a forthcoming Kansas nonprofit newsroom, “will focus on the necessary steps to define and engage our unique audience for long-term sustainability, identify and build relationships with other civic engagement players, and create a forum for discussion of news and engagement with our audience.”

Universities

1. Northwestern University will use its funding for the Medill Spiegel Research Center’s Subscriber Engagement Index, “a new tool that would give local news organizations timely, unique, actionable insights about the online behaviors of their digital subscribers. The Index would show participating news organizations what digital subscribers are consuming on local news sites, and what’s leading some to churn. This anonymized data would be shared and benchmarked in a wide array of categories so news outlets can measure their performance against their peers.”
2. Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism will build out an “Interactive Story Wall… [for local broadcasters] to visualize and explain data-driven stories on broadcast and digital platforms using a touch-screen that helps audiences better understand complex issues.”
3. Crosstown, a data journalism project at the University of Southern California, “will create a specialized news product — such as a newsletter — targeted to each neighborhood in Los Angeles.”

Local TV stations

1. ABC Owned TV stations “aim to expand data journalism from a primarily project-based and text-based activity to a mainstream, daily core of our newsrooms. To do so, we will pilot a systematic and holistic orientation around public data starting with the state of California.”
2. Graham Media Group, in partnership with Frank Mungeam at the Cronkite School, will focus on “‘Freemium-to-paid’ membership programs for our local TV stations to diversify revenue and deepen audience engagement. Membership programs will move to the center of television’s strategy and become the driving force to build revenue and grow audiences everywhere.”
3. ITVS (the Independent Television Service) “will help local public media stations use a new feedback platform to better serve, engage, and gain support from communities of color. Starting with five stations that are collaborating with ITVS on local content and civic participation strategies centered on criminal justice issues. ITVS will test and develop a model with the potential for national scale, serving public media’s diversity mission and local stations’ need to expand their revenue bases through increased membership.”

Public media

1. WBUR “will embark on a project aimed at enabling public radio listeners to interact and transact with live local news content, using their voice, while driving their car. By partnering with emerging tech mobile developers, WBUR’s BizLab – an innovation lab developing and testing new models of support for public radio – will extend the listening experience of its existing WBUR Listen app to enable donations, transactions, and paid sponsorship within the context of listening to the station’s live broadcast.”
2. WFAE in North Carolina introduces Community News Connect, “a collaborative local news platform that allows residents to partner with newsrooms to strengthen news coverage and amplify diverse voices. Community members would request coverage. Participating newsrooms would accept those requests, choosing to report on them individually or collaborate with other newsrooms. If newsrooms have interest in a topic but not the capacity to cover it, they could request micro-funding assistance from residents or community organizations.”
3. Taking a page out of City Bureau’s documenting habits, Michigan Radio is building a public meeting tracker: “We’ll pull audio from meetings and make it available on podcast feeds and smart speakers, and we’ll use speech-to-text transcription to create a new database of meeting transcripts that newsrooms can use to track issues across communities.”

Other

1. Okayplayer in New York: “For two decades, we’ve been a publication serving the needs and interests of that community. Okayplayer’s Investigative Reporting Platform is the next step in that tradition, a new way of funding quality reporting in places underserved by traditional media. Our model will empower local communities to direct their limited resources at journalism designed to shine light on opaque issues and bring accountability to local institutions.”
2. The Local Media Association’s Accelerate Local program “will design and build a technology platform, with related services, that effectively matches the right journalism-funding entity with the right news organization and project, and ensure successful program execution. Accelerate Local will become the premier source and enabler of journalism funding in North America, and possibly the world in the longer term.”
3. The Lenfest Institute’s Local Lab and the Philadelphia Inquirer “will create partially-automated newsletters serving targeted Philadelphia-area neighborhoods. The newsletters will include a mix of editorial content, public data, and other automated information that will empower residents to stay informed and connect with their neighbors.”
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/audio-archiving-public-meeting-tracking-and-more-local-boosts-here-are-the-34-news-projects-google-is-funding-in-north-america/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/we-repeatedly-observed-the-same-needs-in-our-various-circles-of-journalists-of-color-this-guide-starts-to-address-those-needs-in-one-place/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/we-repeatedly-observed-the-same-needs-in-our-various-circles-of-journalists-of-color-this-guide-starts-to-address-those-needs-in-one-place/#respond Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:13:46 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175879 “We pass on information person-to-person in a fashion that sometimes can feel like an elaborate game of telephone,” Lam Thuy Vo, Disha Raychaudhuri, and Moiz Syed write in the introduction to their Journalists of Color Resource Guide, which was released this week by the News Integrity Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. They built the guide based on discussion, research, and more than 260 survey responses.

The 2019 ASNE Newsroom Diversity Survey, released last month, found that journalists of color made up 21.9 percent of the salaried workforce in U.S. newsrooms…that bothered to respond to the survey (428 responded out of 1,883 that were asked). Because of the low response rate, ASNE cautions that “these figures cannot be generalized to interpret the landscape of the U.S. journalism industry as a whole because the survey relies on information collected from a convenience sample of organizations that volunteer to participate”; it’s safe to assume, however, that the total percentage of journalists of color working in U.S. newsrooms is lower because news outlets with particularly abysmal stats may just not respond.

“We repeatedly observed the same needs in our various circles of journalists of color,” Vo (a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News), Raychaudhuri (data and investigations reporter at NJ Advance Media), and Syed (news apps developer at ProPublica) write. One of the goals of this guide is to offer something that’s more efficient and widely available than the “kind of invisible labor done in the background that a lot of underrepresented groups in newsrooms do to improve both their newsrooms and the careers of their peers.”

The guide, which consists of lots of links to outside sources, includes sections on career growth, salary and benefits, accountability, and training. The section on salary, for instance, points to a spreadsheet on salary data from the Journalists of Color Slack and information on negotiating salary and benefits.

But most importantly, thanks to all the journalists of color and allies who quietly do the work — those who write resources like these, who pass them along, who support their peers on a day-to-day. We see you and thank you. https://t.co/7rkINazGGi

— Lam Thuy Vo (@lamthuyvo) October 14, 2019

And of course this project and efforts like these are all just stop-gaps to the wider problem with the lack of diversity in newsrooms around the country.

The real solutions will come from folks who are in positions of power within our industry and usually don't look like us.

— Moiz Syed (@MoizSyed) October 14, 2019

We acknowledge and applaud the invisible, unpaid labor many of you put in at your workplaces and hope this helps you address at least some of those issues. If you have concerns/questions about anything on the resource guide, please reach out to me/@lamthuyvo/@MoizSyed. (3/n)

— Disha Raychaudhuri (@Disha_RC) October 14, 2019

This is honestly an amazing resource for journalists of color. Congratulations to @Disha_RC, @lamthuyvo and @MoizSyed for handling this project with such care.

Make sure to amplify it! https://t.co/1e7RBrCKGT

— Andrea González-Ramírez (@andreagonram) October 14, 2019

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/we-repeatedly-observed-the-same-needs-in-our-various-circles-of-journalists-of-color-this-guide-starts-to-address-those-needs-in-one-place/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/good-stuff-first-google-moves-to-prioritize-original-reporting-in-search/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/good-stuff-first-google-moves-to-prioritize-original-reporting-in-search/#respond Thu, 12 Sep 2019 17:00:07 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175002 In an effort to put original reporting in front of users, Google’s VP of news Richard Gingras announced Thursday that the company has changed its global search algorithm to “highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting,” and to keep such articles in top positions for longer.

After weeks of reporting, a journalist breaks a story. Moments later, aggregators scoop it up and get as much (or more traffic) than the original. Google is changing this by highlighting original reporting. YES! https://t.co/rel5cgWryF

— ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (@PranavDixit) September 12, 2019

About time. I remember meeting with Google 15 years ago on the late Time Inc.'s behalf to complain about how Google search could not distinguish copycat reporting from original work. Google Says a Change in Its Algorithm Will Highlight ‘Original Reporting’ https://t.co/xaVSV2U30N

— Ned Desmond (@neddesmond) September 12, 2019

A suggestion given to them about 6 years ago and then every year since at Newsgeist. Who knew journalists could be right about such things…? https://t.co/cZGmsidvCW

— emily bell (@emilybell) September 12, 2019

The change is available in Google search now and will roll out to Google News and Google Discover shortly, Search Engine Land reported.

Google doesn’t venture to define exactly what original reporting is, saying vaguely, “There is no absolute definition of original reporting, nor is there an absolute standard for establishing how original a given article is. It can mean different things to different newsrooms and publishers at different times, so our efforts will constantly evolve as we work to understand the life cycle of a story.”

These “efforts” do include actual humans making judgments: The company noted that it has “more than 10,000 raters around the world” evaluating the Google algorithm:

Their feedback doesn’t change the ranking of the specific results they’re reviewing; instead it is used to evaluate and improve algorithms in a way that applies to all results. The principles that guide how they operate are mapped out in our search rater guidelines, a public document that allows raters to better understand and assess the unique characteristics of content that appears in search results….

We’ve just introduced a change to help us gather new feedback so that our automated ranking systems can better surface original content. To illustrate the update, in section 5.1 of the guidelines, we instruct raters to use the highest rating, “very high quality,” for original news reporting “that provides information that would not otherwise have been known had the article not revealed it. Original, in-depth, and investigative reporting requires a high degree of skill, time, and effort.

In addition to recognizing individual instances of original reporting at the page level, we also ask raters to consider the publisher’s overall reputation for original reporting. That update in section 2.6.1 reads: “Many other kinds of websites have reputations as well. For example, you might find that a newspaper (with an associated website) has won journalistic awards. Prestigious awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize award, or a history of high quality original reporting are strong evidence of positive reputation.”





This is welcome, but I wonder if it could backfire. It naturally favors the biggest outlets with investigative and large news teams. Might it worsen the economic imbalance between national and local/community/specialist media? https://t.co/qgHO03y8TD

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) September 12, 2019

Google to local news outlets: "You'll be fine as long as catastrophic weather decimates your cities and states." https://t.co/tYJtDE93Mc pic.twitter.com/AIqd4nnvUv

— Brian Barrett (@brbarrett) September 12, 2019

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/good-stuff-first-google-moves-to-prioritize-original-reporting-in-search/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/researchers-analyzed-more-than-300000-local-news-stories-on-facebook-heres-what-they-found/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/researchers-analyzed-more-than-300000-local-news-stories-on-facebook-heres-what-they-found/#respond Thu, 12 Sep 2019 16:13:45 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175004 It is important to note that our data are from February of 2019, when the Today In feature was available in about 400 communities, and when the criteria Facebook employed for categorizing a story as local were a bit more geographically stringent than those now being employed to expand the availability of the feature. As Facebook noted at this earlier stage, “about one in three users in the U.S. live in places where we cannot find enough local news on Facebook to launch Today In.”

More information about the data and our methodological approach can be found in our full report. Here, we briefly summarize some of the key findings.

We were particularly interested in the extent to which the local news available on Facebook served a “critical information need,” a concept that we have used in previous research to get a sense of the extent to which local news stories are facilitating an informed citizenry. We found that the local news aggregated by Facebook often covers critical information needs, although our interaction data show there may be demand for more content of this type.

Using an automated content analysis approach we were able to categorize 149,283 of 313,787 stories in the data set. We found that 59 percent of the stories we were able to categorize served a critical information need. Emergencies (28 percent) was the most common critical information need served by local news stories in the categorized group. Aside from critical information needs, 31 percent of stories categorized covered sports and 9 percent were obituaries. These findings on their own show the potential of Facebook’s local aggregation to discover and feature content that serves critical information needs, but also highlight the challenges given the amount of stories devoted to sports and memorials. The mix of local news stories available on Today In is limited, to some extent, by the types of stories that local news sources choose to post, and then is also a function of how the selection algorithm chooses from amongst these available stories.

What we found particularly interesting was how user engagement (Facebook likes, shares, and reactions) on local news stories differed across different story types. We did not have data on how many clicks individual posts received. Users engaged most frequently with stories on emergencies, transportation and health.

Layering the story data with interaction data shows a clear appetite on the part of consumers for stories serving critical information needs; despite their prevalence in the story count, stories on sports and death are clicked on with less frequency. Surprisingly, we found that not only were local political stories the least common type of critical information need story in our data set, but political stories also generated the lowest levels of engagement of any story type. If we interpret engagement as an indicator of demand, then this finding is a bit discouraging.

In sum, the data show that while the supply of local news on Facebook may be lacking in many communities, a substantial proportion of what is available addresses critical information needs, and the stories that address critical information needs generally perform better in terms of user engagement than the stories that do not.

Matthew Weber is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Cowles Fellow of Media Management. He is the co-principal investigator of Duke’s News Measures Research Project. Peter Andringa is a Robertson Scholar at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies journalism and computer science. He is a student researcher in Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy and a fellow in the UNC School of Media and Journalism’s Emerging Technologies Lab. Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he is also a faculty affiliate with the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He is the co-principal investigator of the News Measures Research Project.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/researchers-analyzed-more-than-300000-local-news-stories-on-facebook-heres-what-they-found/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/we-realized-spotify-for-news-was-exactly-the-wrong-thing-to-do-heres-what-kinzen-is-doing-instead/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/we-realized-spotify-for-news-was-exactly-the-wrong-thing-to-do-heres-what-kinzen-is-doing-instead/#respond Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:30:11 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=174418 When Mark Little and Áine Kerr first began thinking about developing a news product, they started going where many people had gone before: A news app, one that would connect content from multiple publishers with readers.

But then — unlike most news app developers before them — they had a realization. After two years of testing, “we suddenly realized Spotify for news was exactly the wrong thing to do,” said Little, who was a foreign correspondent and anchor for Irish public broadcaster RTÉ for more than 20 years before founding social news agency Storyful in 2010 (News Corp bought it in 2013). “News publishers should not be giving away their content to third-party platforms, or relying on social platforms. They should develop these personalized and curated experiences themselves.” Little and Kerr (who had been managing editor at Storyful and headed Facebook journalism partnerships before cofounding Kinzen with Little), decided to switch their focus to helping publishers provide personalized news experiences on their own platforms, their own newsletters and websites, powered by Kinzen’s underlying technology. (Previous iterations of the company were called Neva Labs, but that name is being phased out in favor of Kinzen.) The hope is that the personalization will help those publisher clients convert readers to subscribers — and keep up with very large news organizations like The New York Times that are developing personalization tech in-house. (Kinzen hasn’t entirely abandoned the app it spent a lot of time on — the people who originally signed up to test it can continue to use it to provide feedback on various concepts Kinzen is testing — but it’s not going to be the consumer-facing app that was promised.)

“Publishers recognize that they have to rebuild trust,” Kerr said. “In the years of move fast and break things and building for clicks and scale and advertisers, what really happened was the connection between publishers and people got lost. Personalization is a critical path back, to ensure quality, deeper engagement.”

“We can give more power to the user to tell the publisher what they really want,” Little said. “[Our software] provides stronger signals for the publisher than the very shallow behavioral data that used to power personalization.” The company, based in Dublin, has 13 employees and has raised around $1.8 million in funding, and also received a “significant” grant from Google’s Digital News Initiative last year.

Kinzen’s first product is personalized newsletter technology for publishers. Readers can customize the newsletters based not just on topics but on the amount of time they have to read and when they’ll be reading (on their commute, at lunch, in the evening when they get home from work). “We’re trying to get very specific with suggestions around your profession, location, interest, and hobbies,” Kerr said. The company’s first publicly announced newsletter partnership is with the Belfast Telegraph; more partners are in the pipeline. Though Little and Kerr had originally envisioned working primarily with regional publishers, they’ve received interest from international, national, and local publishers, too, along with broadcasters and brands. (So far, about 50 percent of the companies that have expressed interest are Irish, 40 percent are from the rest of Europe, and 10 percent are from the U.S.)

“The opportunity for this personalization of a service has gone way beyond the expectations that we had to begin with,” Kerr said. “There are a lot of partners for that newsletter product, that front-end experience. But there are other publishers that don’t have the capacity to do personalization and just need to do discovery.” In those cases, Kinzen can work with them to sort out their content databases, making sure that they’re getting long-tail stories in front of readers who’d be interested in them.

The company also has local and regional publisher clients who are interested in sending daily newsletters to their readers, but need help bulking up their offerings. “We’re helping them build that everyday experience where maybe the first five articles are from them, and others are from whitelisted sources — either competitive or non-competitive sources,” Kerr explained. Local publishers can, for instance, give readers the ability to add traffic and weather content that’s pulled in from other outlets, or to pull in stories from national and international outlets.

“If publishers are really to respond to this Netflix generation, they have to get used to the idea of having other brands and entities in there alongside them to give readers one destination, one experience,” Kerr said. “If someone says they have 20 minutes [for news], publishers have the responsibility to give them a quality 20 minutes, even if that means pulling in other sources.”

Kinzen’s technology at work at the Belfast Telegraph.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/we-realized-spotify-for-news-was-exactly-the-wrong-thing-to-do-heres-what-kinzen-is-doing-instead/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/every-crime-map-needs-context-this-usc-data-journalism-project-aims-to-scale-it/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/every-crime-map-needs-context-this-usc-data-journalism-project-aims-to-scale-it/#respond Mon, 26 Aug 2019 13:56:23 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=174468 A bunch of money — check. A bunch of local data — check. Brains galore — check. Future of local news? TBD.

When University of Southern California professor and Wall Street Journal alum Gabriel Kahn was given part of a grant made to USC’s journalism school, he sat down with a professor in the computer science department. He wanted to know what that department was seeing and learning and how it could be retooled with journalism — specifically, local news.

The CS folks had been contracted with LA’s traffic department for five years to analyze its data, and a giant load of data (for instance, all the signals from road directors that can be used to calculate traffic density and speed) had been stockpiled. The data just kept on coming, but could also be broken down into smaller sets for different areas and — the magic word! — localized. “Could we make these large datasets into hundreds of locally relevant datasets and then turn that into something like a local news feed?” Kahn wondered.

It was a big ask, but Kahn — along with computer science department chair Cyrus Shahabi — had big resources to work on it: The grant provides around $120,000 per year for five years, and the team now includes part-time data scientists to crunch the numbers, designers to visualize the trends, and journalists to put it all into context. This is Crosstown LA, a nonprofit news project based at USC, but it has the potential to expand to other regions.

Crosstown uses publicly available data on LA’s traffic, air quality, and crime to analyze trends and report local — really local — stories from that. Kahn compared it to the police commissioner sharing updates on the city’s yearly crime statistics. How are the numbers impacting each neighborhood? That’s the wedge Crosstown is trying to get at, though it’s still in the developmental phase (with a plan for future monetization). Some recent stories:

1. So far, LA crime in 2019 is dipping: “Sharp increases in housing prices in neighborhoods like West Adams have led to changes in both demographics and public safety. The neighborhood saw a 13 percent increase in crime during the first half of 2019. However, it is unclear whether this increase was due to actual higher crime or more vigilant crime monitoring by residents.”
2. Recent quakes trigger alarm for retrofitting: “Almost four years after the ordinance passed…only 18 percent of the buildings are earthquake ready. Nearly 9,700 building owners have filed at least the initial permits to begin work. About 2,200 have hired contractors and have projects underway. And 269 owners, according to Building and Safety, haven’t done anything at all.”
3. Suspect wore a hoodie: “In the City of Los Angeles, the hoodie appears in Los Angeles Police Department crime data to describe what suspect or suspects were wearing at the time of a reported crime: ‘Suspect wore hood/hoodie.’ The department has been cataloging this clothing descriptor for suspects since at least 2010, when it started making its data publicly available. But in the year following Martin’s death, the number of crimes reported with ‘Suspect wore hood/hoodie’ skyrocketed. In 2013, there were 1,243 reports, a 92 percent increase from 2012.”

Kahn hopes that as the team develops its system for analyzing and formulating the data (it’s automated at a minor level at this point, with, for instance, a slackbot that tracks reports of hate crimes), it can be scaled to more datasets and more locations. “When we do a story looking at 18 different commuting routes, we’ve created 18 different stories, in a way — we’ve created a story with 18 distinct audiences,” he said.

One wrinkle: The data isn’t always completely comparable; reporting differs across police departments, and certain types of theft might be broken down differently in different areas, for instance. And officers don’t always record the time of a crime, in which case it’s automatically filled in as midnight. How do you scale nuance? “We learned a lot of the idiosyncrasies of police data. You need to get close to the data and understand its flaws and limitations,” said Kahn. With practice, “we feel much more confident about what we can report on.”

So far, Crosstown has focused primarily on crime because data on it is widely available. But “we don’t want to be in the crime [news] business, we want to be in the data business,” Kahn said. (See Ring and its system for invoking fear into potential customers through journalism.) Stories on traffic and air quality are waiting in the wings.

In the case of the health and air quality stories, Crosstown consults with public health experts on how to responsibly interpret and share the data. Readers email Kahn for advice about the environmental safety of certain areas, he says, and the team wants to make sure people can draw the right conclusions from the work. It’s one reason they include a “How we did it” section at the end of each article explaining the data sources and interpretations:





KPCC and LAist have worked with Crosstown to publish reporting on traffic delays, and a Facebook Community Network grant of $25,000 will help Crosstown envision more ways to share its data and collaborate with more local news outlets in southern California. The team has also compiled its findings in one-pagers and brought them to neighborhood council meetings. In the future, Khan is thinking about developing hyperlocal newsletters and creating a membership program.

“If we can take regularly occurring data about crime, real estate, and public education and package it into a weekly newsletter,” he said, “that would be 110 different newsletters” across the city.

Screenshot of Crosstown’s safety map.
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/every-crime-map-needs-context-this-usc-data-journalism-project-aims-to-scale-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/google-search-will-now-show-you-podcast-episodes-but-it-wont-have-to-link-back-to-google-podcasts/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/google-search-will-now-show-you-podcast-episodes-but-it-wont-have-to-link-back-to-google-podcasts/#respond Thu, 08 Aug 2019 14:38:55 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=174212 As Nicholas Quah wrote in May, Google Search is now officially surfacing podcast episodes (helping with the eternal visibility/discoverability woes of a growing industry).

Google is surfacing podcast episodes in Search based on what’s talked about in the show, as well as its title and description. The links take you to Google Podcasts, of course (for now). This works for English content and United States searches.

“We’ll soon add the ability for publishers to specify a playback destination, such as a third-party website or app. This means people can discover podcasts that may be exclusively available by purchase or subscription on third-party podcast providers,” according to the release.







Quah broke down the potentials of Google stepping into the podcast platform war, so it’s interesting that podcasters will be able to choose to not have the Google Podcasts’ link show up. From May:

For what it’s worth, I’m still hesitant to invoke the “platform war” framework at this juncture, and that’s mostly because I think the Apple-Podcasts-link-appending business feels possibly unintentional on Google’s part; my sense is that the in-search Google Podcasts feature generally seeks to attach itself to the most relevant response, and it happens to be the case that Apple Podcast listings tend to be the most relevant response to podcast-related queries. For this to be a “podcast platform war,” I think, there should be overt intentionality. Then again…I don’t fault doomsday preppers for building underground shelters.

Anyway, the introduction of this feature also yields other potential complexities, mostly associated with the everyday doldrums of SEO management. In particular, this is probably going to change how people think about naming their shows, as they now operate within a universe that contains a powerful search engine with robust rules.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/google-search-will-now-show-you-podcast-episodes-but-it-wont-have-to-link-back-to-google-podcasts/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/how-to-cover-11250-elections-at-once-heres-how-the-washington-posts-new-computational-journalism-lab-will-tackle-2020/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/how-to-cover-11250-elections-at-once-heres-how-the-washington-posts-new-computational-journalism-lab-will-tackle-2020/#respond Thu, 25 Jul 2019 17:17:42 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=173746 Hold onto your robots: The future of journalism is exceedingly computational. (At least part of it.) And the 2020 U.S. election is a great place to start.

Newsrooms worldwide are trying to infuse their reporting with more data and computational analysis (see: The New York Times’ data training). The engineering-heavy Washington Post newsroom has used bots, automation, and large-scale data in its reporting before, perhaps notably with its Heliograf tool to automatically write stories from data.

But now The Washington Post is going a step further, creating a computational political journalism lab — we’ll unpack what that term means in a sec — just in time for the 2020 political campaigns. The R&D lab, orchestrated by director of engineering Jeremy Bowers, will work with Northwestern assistant professor and algorithmic reporting expert Nick Diakopoulos and have between three to six contributors.

The lab’s main outputs will be reporting tools for the newsroom to cover all the 2020 U.S. elections, new storytelling experiences and projects (“what would an election sound like?”), and semi-frequent blog posts sharing what they’re working on and learning. And yes, Bowers knows the scope of the lab is large.

“We have these problems that could use engineering rigor applied to them. In previous years, it’s been hard to embed an engineer in the newsroom,” said Bowers, who returned to the Post this spring after five years working on news apps at The New York Times.

“We’re looking at 11,250 races for 2020, including state legislatures and dog catchers and mosquito commissioners. A lot of these races are important, but we don’t have enough reporters to cover all 11,250 of them the same way we cover the presidential. We need to figure out ways to augment what we’re doing and help readers find things that are most important, then go ahead and throw real human resources at it. What are ways we can algorithmically provide analysis of these areas so we’re making sure we’re getting the broadest coverage available?”

This story is a great example of how machine learning can be used in the newsroom to support journalists: https://t.co/Z9Yp9WNcLh pic.twitter.com/0TXrYFtqux

— Lenny Bronner (@lbronner) June 21, 2019

Diakopoulos will be working with Post data scientist Lenny Bronner and a soon-to-be-determined intern, along with other engineering or graphics team members cycling in and out over the fall. (His stint is just for the fall while he’s on sabbatical from Northwestern; the lab may reprise itself in the future as needed.) He and Bowers dreamed up some ideas about what computational political journalism might look like in the lab:

1. Breaking down the data before the election wave comes: “We have a much broader span of data than just results,” Bowers said. “The lab is going to be working on fingerprinting every county, congressional district, and — if we can get around to it — precinct in America with info that gives us a descriptive understanding of who the voters are, how they’ve previously voted, and how they might vote in the future. One way we might do that is through large-scale analysis of a voter file, but we also have BLS data that helps us get a good understanding of who the folks there are. That’s one level, we could write a story or build a graphic about that.”
2. Figuring out which counties need extra attention: “The next level is using that to get insights about changes in the voter population and get that closer to our reporters and editors making decisions about where they’d like to go in the run-up to 2020. We’re not super-interested in telling a story about one Iowa county using this infrastructure. But we’re making sure our reporters know which county in Iowa to go if they’re looking for one that has particular characteristics.”
3. “Then we have fun, silly but serious things: How would we do election results in a physical space? Election results as an audio experience? High-fidelity and low-fidelity election experiences?…If we tend to write a lot of a certain kind of story that follows the narrative of who a candidate is and how they like to talk to voters, it’d be fun for us to dig up every time we’ve written a story that’s shaped like that. One of the ways we can do that is by comparing similarity scores of two stories to each other over time.”

“We’re already kicking around a bunch of innovative ideas that would capitalize on automated and algorithmic news production to augment the capacities of journalists and provide unique experiences and information for readers,” Diakopoulos said over email. “We’re also thinking about how computational techniques are changing politics more broadly, and how that in turn may change the way reporters and editors need to cover the elections.”

The looming specter of subpar 2016 mainstream media coverage helped encourage rethinking the coverage process, from story choices to technical tools to the way interviews are conducted. By being removed from the newsroom’s daily deadlines, Bowers said he hopes the team can think more efficiently about what to give up on and what to push along to full product development.

“I’ve done a lot of elections stuff — it’s a sprint that’s the length of a marathon. You have to run fast for a really long time,” Bowers said. “Primary season lasts forever, and in the general election, you don’t want to do anything that you haven’t tried at least once. It’s a nice pressure-release valve for people who are on the team, to rotate through the lab and do some thinking that isn’t just so focused on what we need to get done today or for the next primary.”

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