I understand CEO’s speak in broad generalities. I also understand CEO’s are acting in their companies best interests. Therefore, I am not taking Flipboard CEO Mike McCue’s words as much more than an advertisement for his company, but I know it is an advertisement a lot of people will be talking about over the next few hours or days.
“The web will feel a lot different in 5 years,” McCue said in a speech at TechCrunch Disrupt conference as reported by The Next Web. “It will feel a lot like print and be monetized differently than it is currently.”
I don’t want to come off as naive. I know he is saying this because his company makes a product that makes the web look more like print. With that said, his comments are still too narrow. The value and power of the Web (and specifically HTML 5) is in the user’s ability to play a crucial role in shaping their media landscape.
For example, I love using the magazine format of the Atlantic on my iPad. The long stories and large images work well for me. I can sit down and casually “thumb” through the magazine. In this case, I agree with McCue’s view: web browsing is changing.
The flaw in McCue’s argument comes when we think of other types of media use. For example, in the morning I want to crank through a lot of news quickly. So I use Google Reader. It is by no means pretty, but it is effective for what I need. I can scroll through the 50 or so stories in my local paper and quickly see where crime is occurring or what measures the county council are debating. In this case, I don’t want a magazine format. I am willing to sacrifice style for efficiency.
I am not saying either of these are going to be the future of the web. I am saying the future of the web is based in the user having more control to choose a format to match his or her need.
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.
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.
If you are looking at this you are probably one of my news writing students. Below you should find just about everything you need to write a two-page profile on Travonna Coffee House and its owner Travis Hardy. Below you should find 2 interviews (one with the owner of Travonna, Travis Hardy, and one with a regular at Travonna). Also there are a quick set of pictures. They aren’t great, but they should give you an idea of what the coffeeshop is like. I made sure to take pictures of things Travis referenced. The only thing I forgot is I didn’t take a picture of Travis or the other interview subject. I will try to stop by Travonna sometime this weekend and get a portrait of Travis.
Update: I forgot Travonna is located in the north end of the Short North arts district. Its address is 1195 N. High Street. Google Map.
I recently ran some data for my HLM class looking at student newspaper availability and political enthusiasm and participation. I had null findings everywhere. Here are more specifics:
Hypotheses
H1: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact individual-level enthusiasm towards the 2008 presidential campaign.
H2: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact an individual’s likelihood to attend a campaign event.
H3: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact an individual’s likelihood to volunteer for a campaign.
Sample estimates
Level 1: Survey of 25,000 college students at 50 colleges and universities in 4 battleground states during October 2008.
Level 2: Newspaper data, enrollment, public/private, and aggregate candidate contact data derived for 32 of the above schools.
Controls
Level 1: Sex, Age, Race, Candidate contact, Political ideology, Political party, news media use, and political discussion
Level 2: Enrollment, Public vs. private, and aggregate campaign contact.
IV
“Student newspaper availability” was created by multiplying the average print run for the paper by the number of times is pass printed per week and then dividing by undergraduate enrollment. This gave a value which was equivalent to the number of newspapers printed per undergrad per week.
DV’s
Enthusiasm: 4 point scale (ran as ordinal logit model)
Attend campaign event: Dichotomous
Volunteer for a campaign: Dichotomous
Findings
In none of the models did student newspaper availability have a significant effect on the outcome variable (p=.165 to p=.865).
Below is an idea for a content analysis I started kicking around about 2 years ago. It is based around the idea is that local media creates and reinforces community, so why don’t newspapers become cognizant of it and start designing their websites around this principle. If they do they will create all kinds of positives. First, it has been shown that newspapers can create increased civic participation and social capital in a community. It then stands to reason that if a newspaper explicitly tries to increase civic participation and social capital they will be able to do it more effectively. The more people care about their community the more likely they are to read news about their community. Hence this is a reinforcing spiral. Community reinforcing media creates people who care more about the community. People who care more about the community use more local news media.
But how do we do this. I think there are three important concepts that we need to think about. First, the reader/user must be engaged in the content. Once they are engaged in the content feelings of connection to the community and the news organization must be cultivated. News source must also provide the mobilizing information to allow people to get involved in the community. This is my modest idea.
2) Prospective Funding Journalism – This refers to journalistic stories that are reported on as a result of funding from an outside source. 
