The other day the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University tweeted a link to Steve Doig’s list of 13 free tools to analyze and display data. I read through it and wanted to give it a try. Below is my first attempt. I used the free online tool, ManyEyes. Doig’s description of ManyEyes is as follows:
This site lets you upload data and visualize it using a wide variety of interesting displays: maps, word trees, tag clouds, tree maps, bubble charts, matrix charts, network diagrams, etc. Check out the more than 84,000 such visualizations that people have created for ideas of what to do with your own data.
I figured it would be easy for a first try. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have actually messed around with, but Nieman Journalism Lab came through again by posting a story and google doc dataset about media ownership. Specifically, the dataset contained the major investors of the large, publicly traded newspaper companies (Belo, Gannett, Journal Communications, Lee, Media General, McClatchy, NYTimes, Scripps, WaPo, NewsCorp A & B stock).
I am going to mess with this more tomorrow, but here is what I could get ManyEyes to do in about an 45 minutes of messing around (after I got the data formatted). My problem is not at all the technical side of it. ManyEyes is incredibly simple. I just don’t really know how I can display this data so it is at all understandable.
******UPDATE*******
I messed around a bit more and here is what I came up with:
What this graphic shows is all the organizations that (1) own more than a combined 1 percent of nine media companies and (2) have ownership in more than one of the media companies. The dots aren’t weighed. They are all the same size and just show any ownership. This is because when I chose to size the dots by amount of ownership a lot of the dots were very small (e.g., a company owning 0.41% of the media org had just a little speck). I wanted to make all the dots bigger, but it doesn’t seem to have that option.
Overall, that seems to be the problem with ManyEyes, it doesn’t really allow you to mess with much. In short, I can choose what data I wanted it to display but I can choose how to display the data. I think I am going to have to move on to one of the other software packages.
Here is a visualization posted by someone else. This displays the top 100 newspapers by circulation in the world.
I have been working on learning and using agent-based modeling (ABM) to look at the fundamental assumptions of communication theories. In my dissertation, I will be using ABM to demonstrate that voluntary groups can emerge from an autonomous, heterogenous population based on the principles of Perceived Voluntary Group Cohesion (PVGC). I am still working on the exact design of the model, but so far I have following workflow:
The simulation space is defined by one public area (the default space) and two group areas. In the model, it is assumed that (1) when recruiting for a group agents choose to recruit agents like themselves, (2) PVGC is the sole motivator of group involvement, and (3) PVGC degrades over time without further participation.
PVGC will be calculated by allowing the individual agent to calculate its profits and losses associated with group, keep track of the similarity of the other group members it interacts with while in the group, and keep track of its ability to communicate within the group. These are oversimplified, abstract versions of PVGC in the real world.
By modeling PVGC in an abstract manner, we can see if it is at all possible for individual-level PVGC to lead to the macro-level structure of interest (i.e., stable voluntary groups). This will give some support to PVGC as currently conceptualized, but it is very weak support (i.e., a proof of concept). Because of that a national survey will also be employed which looks at PVGC and future commitment to the organization.
Photos from the Ohio Statehouse protest of Senate Bill 5, which limits collective bargaining for state employees. Statehouse sources said 4000-5000 people attended the peaceful, yet boisterous rally.
On Monday I am heading out to an interview for an assistant professorship in journalism. As part of this interview, I will be doing both a research talk and a teaching talk. For the teaching talk, I will be guest lecturing in an introduction to journalism class. I decided with my allotted 45 minutes I would discuss the changing economic models, which are being used to subsidize news production. I think this is an important for multiple reasons, but primarily students currently enrolled in journalism programs are going to have to work within these different models. This makes it imperative that these students understand the strengths and weaknesses of these different models.
In my lecture, I will be covering 5 different economic models of journalism. These are: (1) Niche Journalism, (2) Prospective Funding Journalism, (3) Non-profit Journalism, (4) Collaborative Journalism, and (5) Paywalls. None of these represent completely unique or new forms of journalism, but the influence of these different models has been growing over the last 10 to 15 years. Also important to note, these are not the only new models of journalism. There are literally hundreds of ideas out there. I choose these 5 examples, because pragmatically I have limited time and these seem to be the ones garnering the most attention, discussion, and experimentation.
1) Niche Journalism – Refers to media outlets that are made not for a mass audience, but made for specific subsets of the population. There are primarily two versions of niche journalism, hyperlocal journalism and topic-specific journalism.
These types of sites are using the same model as current mainstream media, the dual product model, but they are amazing for a different type of audience. Mainstream media seeks to gain a large, diverse audience. This general audience can then be sold to nearly anyone looking to advertise. Niche journalism, on the other hand, seeks to gain a very specific demographic group. The media organization can sell this specific audience to advertises whose products are specifically targeted for that demographic.
2) Prospective Funding Journalism – This refers to journalistic stories that are reported on as a result of funding from an outside source. MediaStorm.com and Spot.us represent two forms of prospective funding journalism. MediaStorm, created by award-winning journalism Brian Storm, has created a wide variety of editorial work for clients. For example, MediaStorm created “Crisis Guide: Pakistan” for the Council on Foreign Relations. Spot.us respresent a very different form of prospective funding journalism. Through the Spot.us community journalist can pitch stories. For example, Eric Ruthford, a journalist, pitched a story about the involvement of gangs in child sex trade. He pitched this story on the Spot.us website on September 20, 2010. Between then and now, he has received $1,100 from 72 sources to cover this story. Spot.us has thousands of story pitches on their site at anytime. In most cases, Spot.us works with local media to distribute the story to a wider audience. Spot.us is a non-profit organization, and the infrastructure is primarily funded through grants.
3) Non-profit Journalism – This refers to journalism created by not-for-profit organizations. Spot.us also partially falls in to this category. I included it above, because the actual journalism (the stories) are funded on a strictly prospective basis. There are many better examples of non-profit journalism. Generally, non-profit journalism is funded just like any other not-for-profit organization (e.g., grants and donations).
4) Collaborative Journalism – This refers to journalism systems that brings numerous people or sources together to create stories or broader coverage of an issue. One of the newest examples of this is Storify. Storify allows users to easily pull information together from a number of social media sources to show readers how a story develops over time. Here is the demo video from Storify:
WikiNews is another example of collaborative journalism. Like its more famous cousin Wikipedia, WikiNews is based off the popular WikiMedia collaborative editing software. Using this system, anyone can edit or create a news story on the wikinews site. Stories constantly change as new information comes to light.
5) Paywalls – This refers to media organizations charging for access to online content. There are primarily three types of paywalls – full, partial, and metered.
Full paywalls are when no content is accessible by the user unless he or she pays an access fee. Although used on some business journalism websites, full paywalls are not being seriously considered by many mainstream media organizations. Partial paywalls are when some content is accessible for free and other content is only accessible for a fee. New York Times Select followed this model.
Finally, in the metered model individuals can view a certain amount of count over a period of time, then they are charged for access. For example, a reader might be able to see 40 articles a month. Beyond that, the individual would have to pay for access.
It has been an incredibly busy summer. I have presented 4 academic papers (three at ICA and one at AEJMC), logged over 29,000 frequent flyer miles, independently taught a new class (Media and Terrorism), and most importantly got married. I am currently getting ready to go back to Columbus and get in the swing of thing. I hope to be defending my dissertation proposal in the next month or so and will be applying for a number of teaching jobs for Fall 2011. As I work on my dissertation, I will be using this place for brainstorming and general notes.
Here is the poster I presented at ICA. I will hopefully post the presentations in the next couple days. Regardless, this poster presents the findings from my work on Perceived Voluntary Group Cohesion. This is a concept I have been kicking around for the last couple years. It is basically an extension of Festinger et al.’s (1951) original definition of cohesion or all the forces which keep members in a group. Hopefully, I will be editing and submitting this paper for possible publication soon.
I got back from Singapore on Sunday. It was a short, yet incredibly long and exhausting trip. The city/country of Singapore is incredibly interesting. It is very Westernized and English speaking yet has vibrant Indian and Chinese sections of town. As some point, I will try to write more about my trip, but for now here are the pics.
These are the photos I had on my laptop from when I was in Europe during the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Most of the pictures are from the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, Italy, which is where I watched the final. There is also one picture from the Frankfurt soccer stadium, where I watched the Germany-Italy semifinal with my friend Tomas.
UPDATE: I recently received word that my paper was a top three student paper in CT&M.
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A paper I wrote was accepted for presentation in the Communication Theory and Methodology division at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference. The conference is in August this summer. Here is the abstract:
The spiral of silence is one of the primary social explanations of public opinion formation currently employed in social science research. In short, Noelle-Neumann (1974; 1993) argues that individual-level opinion expression is a function of the opinion climate of the society. This paper adds a macro-level boundary condition to by the theory by examining how group involvement can affect the spiraling process. Using agent-based modeling, a simulation, replicating the assumptions in the spiral of silence, was created. Two other models, which added groups to the simulated society, were also created. Through running and comparing the results of these simulations, it was found that the addition of groups allowed for the survival of the societal-level minority opinions in certain cases. Further research should enhance the models used in this paper and should use agent-based modeling to examine other social communication theories.
The paper is titled “Group Involvement and the Spiral of Silence: Using Agent-Based Modeling to Understand Opinion Expression” and hopefully will sent out for potential publication soon.
2) Prospective Funding Journalism – This refers to journalistic stories that are reported on as a result of funding from an outside source. 
Thursday – 14:30-15:45 – Room 303
