Monthly Archives: July 2011

The new structure of stories: a reading list

Different medium, different story form. It’s clear that each new technology — photography, radio, television — has brought with it different ways of constructing a narrative, and different ways those narratives fit into the audience’s lives. Online media are no different, and the step between analog and digital is in many ways much larger than any that has come before, because the internet connects the audience to each other as well as to the newsroom.

Here’s my attempt at a little reading list of recent work on the structure of stories. Pointers to additional material are welcome!

The Big Picture
What’s wrong with the article, anyway? Jeff Jarvis explores this question in “The article as luxury or by-product.” This essay provoked lots of interesting reaction, such as from Mathew Ingram.

So how do we understand ways to fix this? Vadim Lavrusik takes a shot at this question and comes up with the building blocks of context, social, personalization, mobile, participation. It’s a good taxonomy so I’m going to partially steal it for this post.

At the  NYC Hacks Hackers meetup last week, Trei Brundrett took us through SB Nation’s “story stream” product, and Gideon Lichfield of The Economist gave a really nice run through of the “news thing” concept that was fleshed-out collaboratively last month at Spark Camp by Gideon, Matt Thompson, and a room full of others. Very meaty, detailed, up-to-the-minute discussions, for serious news nerds. Video here.

Context
You just can’t do better than Matt Thompson’s “An antidote for web overload.” I also recommend Matt’s wonderful “The three key parts of news stories that are usually missing.” Another good primer is Jay Rosen’s “Future of Context” talk at SXSW.

See also my “Short doesn’t mean shallow,” about hyperlinks as a contextual storytelling form.

For an example of these ideas in action, consider Mother Jone’s Egypt Explainer page — which Gideon Lichfield critiques in the video linked above.

Social
What does it mean for news to be social anyway? Henry Jenkins argues for the power of “spreadable media” as a new distribution model.

In “What’s the point of social news?” I discuss two areas where social media have a huge impact on news: the use of social networks as a personalized filter, and distributed sourcing of tips and material.

Personalization
News is now personalized by a variety of filters, both social and algorithmic. Eli Pariser argues this puts us in a “filter bubble.” He may be right, but research by Pew and others [1,2] consistently shows that when users are allowed to recommend any URL to one other, the “news agenda” that the audience constructs has only 5%-30% of stories in common with mainstream media.

A comparison of questions asked of the White House by a Twitter audience vs. by journalists shows a remarkable difference in focus.  All of this this suggests to me that whatever else is happening, personalization meets an audience need that traditional broadcast journalism does not.

Besides, maybe not every person needs to see every story, if we view the goal of journalism as empowerment.

Participation
What do we know and what don’t we know about public participation in the journalism project, and what has worked or failed so far? Jay Rosen has an invaluable summary.

I also recommend the work of Amanda Michel as someone who does crowd-based reporting every day, and my own speculations on distributed investigative reporting.

Structured information
Is the product of journalism narratives or (potentially machine-readable) facts? Adrian Holovaty seems to be the first to have explored this in his 2006 essay “A fundamental way newspaper websites need to change.” This mantle has been more recently taken up by Stijn Debrouwere in his “Information Architecture for News Websites” series, and in Reg Chua’s “structured journalism,” and in a wide-ranging series at Xark.

There are close connections here to semantic web efforts, and occasional overlap between the semweb and journalism communities.

Mobile
I haven’t seen any truly good roundup posts on what mobile will mean for news story form, but there are some bits and pieces. Mobile is by-definition location aware, and Mathew Ingram examines how location is well used by Google News (and not by newsrooms.)

Meanwhile, Zach Seward of the Wall Street Journal has done some interesting news-related things with Foursquare.

Real time
Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian and now at Columbia, explains why every news organization needs to be real-time.

For a granular look at how informations spreads in real time, consider Mathew Ingram on “Osama bin Laden and the new ecosystem of news.” For a case study of real-time mobile reporting, we have Brian Stelter’s “What I learned in Joplin.”

 

A job posting that really doesn’t suck

I just got a pile of money to build a piece of state-of-the-art open-source visualization software, to allow journalists and curious people everywhere to make sense of enormous document dumps, leaked or otherwise.

Huzzah!

Now I am looking for a pair of professional developers to make it a reality. It won’t be hard for the calibre of person I’m trying to find to get some job, but I’m going to try to convince you that this is the best job.

The project is called Overview. You can read about it at overview.ap.org. It’s going to be a system for the exploration of large to very large collections of unstructured text documents. We’re building it in New York in the main newsroom of The Associated Press, the original all-formats global news network. The AP has to deal with document dumps constantly. We download them from government sites. We file over 1000 freedom of information requests each year. We look at every single leak from Wikileaks, Anonymous, Lulzsec. We’re drowning in this stuff. We need better tools. So does everyone else.

So we’re going make the killer app for document set analysis. Overview will start with a visual programming language for computational linguistics algorithms. Like Max/MSP for text. The output of that will be connected to some large-scale visualization. All of this will be backed by a distributed file store and computed through map-reduce. Our target document set size is 10 million. The goal is to design a sort of visualization sketching system for large unstructured text document sets. Kinda like Processing, maybe, but data-flow instead of procedural.

We’ve already got a prototype working, which we pointed at the Wikileaks Iraq and Afghanistan data sets and learned some interesting things. Now we have to engineer an industrial-strength open-source product. It’s a challenging project, because it requires production implementation of state-of-the-art, research-level algorithms for distributed computing, statistical natural language processing, and high-throughput visualization. And, oh yeah, a web interface. So people can use it anywhere, to understand their world.

Because that’s what this is about: a step in the direction of applied transparency. Journalists badly need this tool. But everyone else needs it too. Transparency is not an end in itself — it’s what you can do with the data that counts. And right now, we suck at making sense of piles of documents. Have you ever looked at what comes back from a FOIA request? It’s not pretty. Governments have to give you the documents, but they don’t have to organize them. What you typically get is a 10,000 page PDF. Emails mixed in with meeting minutes and financial statements and god-knows what else. It’s like being let into a decrepit warehouse with paper stacked floor to ceiling. No boxes. No files. Good luck, kiddo.

Intelligence agencies have the necessary technology, but you can’t have it. The legal profession has some pretty good “e-discovery” software, but it’s wildly expensive. Law enforcement won’t share either. There are a few cheapish commercial products but they all choke above 10,000 documents because they’re not written with scalable, distributed algorithms. (Ask me how I know.) There simply isn’t an open, extensible tool for making sense of huge quantities of unstructured text. Not searching it, but finding the patterns you didn’t know you were looking for. The big picture. The Overview.

So we’re making one. Here are the buzzwords we are looking for in potential hires:

  • We’re writing this in Java or maybe Scala. Plus JavaScript/WebGL on the client side.
  • Be a genuine computer scientist, or at least be able to act like one. Know the technologies above, and know your math.
  • But it’s not just research. We have to ship production software. So be someone who has done that, on a big project.
  • This stuff is complicated! The UX has to make it simple for the user. Design, design, design!
  • We’re open-source. I know you’re cool with that, but are you good at leading a distributed development community?

And that’s pretty much it. We’re hiring immediately. We need two. It’s a two-year contract to start. We’ve got a pair of desks in the newsroom in New York, with really nice views of the Hudson river. Yeah, you could write high-frequency trading software for a hedge fund. Or you could spend your time analyzing consumer data and trying to get people to click on ads. You could code any of a thousand other sophisticated projects. But I bet you’d rather work on Overview, because what we’re making has never been done before. And it will make the world a better place.

For more information, see :

Thanks for your time. Please contact jstray@ap.org if you’d like to work on this.